Blogs

This week was short for me here at CMOP because I was finishing my finals at Portland State. However, I was able to come and get familiar with my project and mentor. I am so excited to begin this fantastic opportunity. I am looking forward to gaining resources and experiences that can prepare me for future career opportunities. I am very excited to begin Bill Lamber's class today, and to visit the Quinault Indian Nation next week with both Bill and Vanessa. I am ready for an awesome summer here at CMOP!

Thank you for this opportunity!

I say the first week, but really it was only my first two days.

My first day was Thursday.  I was nervous to begin because I have never had a "real" job other than babysitting. However, I was also excited to begin this new experience, especially since there would be no homework!  Even though that's not entirely true, I know the stress associated with this internship will be far different (and hopefully far less) than that with my first year of college.  So, this was my introduction to the working world.

This is the beginning of the next chapter in my life. I just graduated high school and got this great opprotunity to do this internship with Wendy Smythe. Well, At first i got a chance to go with wendy to a river nine miles out of my home town Hydaburg, Alaska called Soda Bay. I really had no i dea what we were doing but it was something to do in the small Village of Hydaburg. So we drove out to the trail, hiked down to the mouth of the river and collected samples. Then she went and did her thing with the samples and i went on with my regular high school life.

This was my first week in Oregon. This week, I have been working on doing DNA extraction on pratice samples, as well as collecting samples from places as far away as the state of Washington. I had a crash course in learning some things about Oregon and in the lab. I have to say that I find the experience very interesting and I am glad to be working among such skilled people that work within my lab.

The ballast waters in ships are the primary culprit for distributing exotic (non-native) species between harbors, including both micro- and macro-organisms. Though regulations currently require offshore ballast water exchange and screen filters to mitigate the issue, longterm prevention requires some disinfection of the water carried between ports. Seeing this need is the direct inspiration for my project.

This week has been a lot of reading, reading, re-working PCR, and more reading.  I feel somewhat accomplished as I can say I have a grasp on the project I am involved in, and my individual role.  I am involved in designing more efficient and cheaper real-time sensor array platforms that do not require flourescence labeling.  These sensory arrays will hopefully be applicable to environmental sampling.  In order to test the quality and efficiency of these sensors, target DNA (both double and single-stranded) samples need to be made. 

This is my first week of a new phase in my life. I have no words to describe what I feel, I hope to be successful in this internship, to take things to the fullest and learn a lot. This week will be coupled with my mentor and with another way of life. It will be a challenge to continue with my dreams and my goals. It will be difficult, but is not impossible.

Thanks for the opportunity!

This week I built two versions of a single webpage, the Station Image Entry Page, in addition to my Station Image Display Page last week. These two pages basically display all the graphs for each variable for each station, and allow a user to submit information into the database (such as a date/time and a status update and comment) for each image if he or she so chooses. Below is one version of the Entry Page, needs to have php extension to work.

Before I start writing what I have been researching, here is some background info on reason why I am trying to "detect nanoscale Zero Valent Iron (nZVI)"

Background info:

On Monday I participated in the orientation for CMOP interns. This was a familiar process, as this is my second summer in the CMOP program. Once again, Dr. Baptista gave a wonderful introductory speech followed by Vanessa providing us with plenty of interesting and useful information.