Peddie EXP Summer 2018

Summer is over :( This week, after analyzing my conclusions and graphs, I gathered some of the videos, photos and analysis to produce a presentation for my experience. For Wednesday’s lab meeting, along with David, I presented myself, the EXP program as well as what I had worked on and learned over the last four weeks. For the rest of the week, I started on my poster. David showed me some examples of posters he had presented in the past made using Adobe Illustrator and helped me get started with it. I decided to try and do the poster completely on Illustrator than PowerPoint to customize whatever I wanted. The presentation I had done helped to structure my poster and I could pull information from my earlier analysis and other papers I had read. This summer, I worked on analyzing body rotations of the bat as it approaches landing as well as hypothesized and tested for factors that affected impact forces like hovering/non-hovering and distance between approach and landing. ...

Behind the scenes of the AMNH. This week, I got through digitizing all the trials from 17 to 71 on the shoulders and lumbar for three important frames. In that digitizing, I calibrated two more trials, which took up to Wednesday to finish. I calibrated only three frames for the exact frame of tuck, land and settle to be extracted for other analysis. Wednesday afternoon, I was able to graph boxplots with the new data taken from digitizing to compare Ftot (total impact force) with velocities (distance between xyz points divided by the time in frames – 600 frames per second). On Thursday, Dr. Swartz, David, Melissa (an undergrad) and I went to New York City to visit the American Museum of Natural History. We went to loan for good bat specimens for future experiments. I had a great time even though I had been to the museum numerous times because we went to the secret collections area above the museum itself. I didn’t take too many photos as there were strict social media rul...

Swarm Lab weeks 9 and 10 This is it. This is the end. My time working for the Swarm Lab has come to an end. I cannot believe 10 weeks have passed by so quickly. Where has the summer gone?! I'm moving straight from the lab on Friday to school on Monday, without so much as a break, so I am reasonably stressed out at the prospect of returning to the rigor of Peddie. At the lab, I work individually and go at my own pace, which is a very nice way to work. However, Peddie is the opposite, which is not a bad thing per se, it will just be a bit of an adjustment when I begin. The past two weeks in the lab have been wonderful, and the 10 vs. 1 experiments have progressed nicely. As I predicted, I will not be able to finish the 10 vs. 1 set, but I have set a good foundation for whoever will complete it. As I mentioned last time, there is a new girl in the lab, Shayna. At first, it took a little bit to get used to having another person in the lab with me. We would always bump into another,...

My last week was actually one of my most fun. I had pretty much finished with my research and was working on a presentation that I had to do for the Provost Program. This gave me a lot more free time, and I spent it hanging out with friends and generally enjoying my last days in Newark. I went out to lunch with Jaqueline, one of my friends who was also working at NJIT, pretty much every day, and our cuisine ranged from the food truck right outside the building to a place that served exclusively meatballs. I actually became really fond of Newark in my stay there. It’s definitely not as bad as people make it out to be, and there are a lot of parts about it that are good, or just funny. Since I went on daily walks for pretty much my entire stay, I knew the layout of the city very well, and had explored a lot (but only in the not-sketchy areas). I, of course, had my favorite walking path, which had many of the nicest views in the city. I also really liked some of the quirkier things a...

This final week at Columbia University was a week of data collection and interpretation. I was given the data from the two mice with my electrodes implanted in them. In a nutshell – the results were hideous but results nonetheless. My PI will be inserting ore electrodes that I made during my five weeks in the lab. He will be sending the results over. In the end, I made 11 electrodes. My goal was 4. I believe that I made a lasting impression in the lab. I took initiative in my work and taught another person who will be taking over my next for the following two months. In the end, my experience at Columbia was just wonderful, and a completely diverse one than the experience I had in the flora of UC San Diego.