Blogs

i read treaties from the 4 tribes. i spent time trying to figure out the agreements. i had a hard time with outlines and rough drafts with treaties and the 4 tribes.

On Thursday all of the high school interns at CMOP were able to attend the Writer's Workshop that Sandra Oster prepared for us. We learned about English for Science and Technology and the different styles of writing that scientists use (scientific and technical). Sandra said that if you want to be a scientist you have to know how to write, that's true because scientists have to write grants and write about their experiments and their findings. The workshop was interesting and it helped me fresh my mind.

Wow, I can't believe how fast this summer is going! This week I really got into my application. Charles created an account for me in the CMOP database that included quality control columns. This allowed me to connect my application to the database and alter and update the values in the database. The dataset component of my program list the stations and variables associated. There is also an input area to choose the time range. When the graph button is clicked, the data is graphed and ready to be flagged.

Yesterday morning, we attended a writer's workshop about writing with a scientific style. Sandra addressed clarity, conciseness, preciseness, consistency, tone, and readability. I thought that it was very interesting. One of the most helpful parts, in my opinion, was the blueprint for making a definition: provide the term, it's class, and distinguishing features.

This week marked the half way point of the internship! I can't believe 5 weeks have gone by so quickly. In order to stay on track for our final presentation, all the interns gave a brief presentation about what we have accomplished so far and what we hope to accomplish in the next five weeks. I thought everyone did a great job and I enjoyed seeing the variety of projects interns are working on and how some of them fit together. I have attached my powerpoint slides from my presentation.

 Week 6 was highlighted by the tuesday project presentations. I had been pretty nervous since I had only recently started my individual project but overall I feel that things went well. As for working on my project I had a busy week running various PCR reactions trying to get primers to work. Early on I had trouble doing so and had begun to worry that the primers were no good but from reactions run thursday at a lower temperature of 48 degrees I was successfully able to amplify. I also ran a reaction with Amoa primers and will run a gel for those products on monday.

This week has been busy, however i was able to find the correct primers to use in the PCR reaction mixture.  The colonies that i had from my  transformation are not working, so i have been busy repeating the transformations along with my left over A+B ligation mixture.  Hopefully, this experiment works by this weekend so i can move to the next step.  At the moment, my goal is to get my strain sequenced by next week and pratice other lab techniques.

This week I have spent most of my time just watching lines. As exciting as that sounds, it was actually quite frustrating, because the lines were not being shown as I was expecting them to. They seemed too spikey at some parts, and sometimes they would go to who knows where, and then back to where they were at. I managed to eliminate a large amount of points which made the lines to look somewhat decent.  Having done this, it allowed me to  put more work into my Python to actually get a tour to follow the line which represents the trail of a glider mission.

Yesterday, we were again looking at the RDFS data. This time, however, we were making more specific observations. I was focused on the CORIE Development forecast system. We were instructed to write a report about how well the model predicts actual data during spring tides, neap tides, high river flow, and low river flow. After making these observations, we compated notes, and noticed that certain systems made more accurate predictions under different conditions, likely having to do with effects of mixing.

The dominant theme of this week was looking at the big picture.  I find that I am more task-oriented and often lose sight of the big picture.  I still had to complete many short-term tasks, yet now I have learned that I must also understand the reason for doing each task.