Blogs

 My last week was all about perfecting my presentation and working on my paper.  I can't believe how fast the summer went by! It feels like just yesterday when I first arrived. I had so much fun here at CMOP learning and working in the lab! Thie internship was definitely a learning experience and I'm so glad I was able to participate.  This experience definitely helped me grow as a scientist and student while exposing me to different career options.  It's definitely sad to leave, but I will be taking everything I learned here with me in the future!

 This week was all about finally starting to run experiments on the streptavidin beads. Since we were done with all our temperature experiments and had GREAT results, we moved on to see what we could find with project 2.  Unfortunately, our days at Sharp were unsuccessful because the streptavidin-biotin experiments did not work out great. We found no trend in any of the sensor array responses we gathered but we definitely kept trying. The rest of the week at CMOP was focused on writing my paper and working on my final presentation. One week left!

This week, I am working on presentations and my final paper before I leave. I had such an amazing time at CMOP. I am so pleased to be apart of thins program once again.. 

Presentation complete, blog entry finished, paper turned in (almost), badge and apartment keys surrendered, car packed. Everybody's happy. I had a great time and benefitted immensely. See ya later CMOP. Cynthia over and out!

The week is not quite done, but I've caught a bit of a break, so here I am. This marks the end of my 8th week here. This week, I had a bit of an epiphany as to why the data came out strange on the T. weissflogii calibration. Our scale factor turned out to be almost exactly double the scale factor from the WET Labs calibration ten years ago. These instruments don't drift more than 5% or so in that amount of time -- they're built very well. There are two ranges for these sensors: 0.03-75.0 ppm and 0.10-150 ppm. The normal range covers only half of what the high range covers.

This week was nothing exciting, but I did finish up most of the experiments I needed to do this summer, in order to write my final presentation for next week. 

So there goes the summer!  Time here at CMOP went too fast; it seems like just yesterday I was moving into the apartments down the road from campus and feeling anxious for day one of this internship.  My time here has been packed with science, mathematics, and nonstop fun.

This past week was spent analyzing filtered habitat criteria. The filtration produced is very interesting and at first thought, I had no idea on where to begin or what would be the best way to analyze, but began with the approach of finding significant details throughout the images. 

The end of the internship is near, and with presentations coming up next week the pressure is on to get the results we need to progress.