I started work this past Monday, June 11th. On the first day, I arrived at Hayden Hall, where the lab is located, a little bit earlier than Dr. Plante (My PI) did. I got into the building when he arrived, and we started working right away. He told me about a change in my project. My project is a based on the research of Liz Coward, one of Dr. Plante’s former PhD students. We planned to extract mineralized-carbon in soil samples, and then conduct thermal analysis on the residues to figure out the soil composition. However, as Dr. Plante was emailing Liz to settle on my project, Liz told him that she kept the residue samples of her extractions in the lab so that I did not have to conduct the extractions again. Dr. Plante decided that I could conduct a different kind of extraction, hot water extraction (HWE), and yield a new set of data. After everyone arrived, he introduced me to other people in the lab. Gabe is an undergrad from the University of Minnesota, and he works with Liz (not Liz Coward), a postdoc, on biochar. Kyle is an undergrad from UPenn working on black soils. I will be collaborating with Kyle for the first part of my project because we both need to conduct HWE. After that, Dr. Plante gave me some more papers to read. He encouraged me to read every day in order to have a good understanding of the field and my own project. In the afternoon, we spent some time going through the questions I had for the readings, and I wrapped up my day at around 4:30 p.m.
On Tuesday, I started going through the soil residue samples that Liz left behind. My job was to record the amount of residue left in each sample so that I could pick some samples for my project. It was tedious work. My head hurt after going through the 160 vials when I finished work that day. From this, I learned that science is fun, but there are tedious processes, too. The key to getting good results is to do every step meticulously, even the tedious ones.
On Wednesday, I attended the lunch meeting for undergrads doing research in Hayden over the summer. We introduced what we did in the past week, and talked about ways to approach readings and access to the databases in UPenn libraries. In the afternoon, Kyle and I went to the Biochemistry Library to find articles on HWE. Our task was to figure out the ratios of soil and water that other people used in their projects and create a protocol for our own HWE.
We spent Thursday reading papers and working on our protocol. On Friday, we started preparing the trash soil samples for HWE.
Next week, Kyle and I will each conduct HWE twice on the trash soil samples to make sure that the protocol we made is feasible. Then we will conduct HWE on our own soil samples.
My first week in the lab is fun. I learned so many things about doing research, not only weighing samples and pipetting solutions. I look forward to the following weeks.
Sounds like an awesome first week! And yes, as you are learning, research can be monotonous and repetitive at times but it pays to be meticulous! Very cool that you are helping develop the protocol for the HWE - can't wait to hear about it tomorrow!
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