Blog Challenge #2

Post a complete summary of your research to date. Include experiments you performed, training you've received, and the future direction of your project. Spelling and grammar count. The most thorough and error free wins the swag.

First Presentation!

Today, Tristan, Sydney, & I presented at the group meeting. I'd say we all did pretty good, considering we haven't touched this stuff in a year. (Maybe we should have...) I hope the new kids got a good idea of what to do when they present. Everyone is going to ask questions, it's just a matter of knowing your stuff. :) I suppose us SEED II kids should get used to presenting, because we're going to be doing it in Boston in 2 months! I can't wait!

Meeting Time!

Tomorrow is our first Project Seed meeting and the veterans are presenting first. Me, Amanda and Sydney will be showing the others what to expect in our meetings. Last year, I was pretty nervous about presenting in front of everyone but this year I don't have the same nerves. That being said, I still prefer watching instead of presenting. That's why I plan on going first.

First Week...

So, at first for awhile I was pretty nervous and I thought I would be left to figure a lot out on my own, but my grad student was really nice and on the second day I met another girl who was going to be working on the same lab as me. So it's nice to know I can sort of work together with someone else and some of the lab work we do works out nicely when done together. Most of the other kids here I met are a lot nicer than I expected and they're all pretty cool. I'm really looking forward to the rest of the summer.
The big machine on the left is the GC and the smaller on the right is the plotter. Basically we put in 0.2 microliters of our solution into the machine and set the parameters accordingly(most of it is just guesswork) and wait for the plotter to print out scans of what was in the solution. For the last two days we've been looking for the peak of octene-1 and couldn't figure out why it wasn't showing up and assumed we just weren't zoomed in close enough to see it.

Learning the Ropes

Today, I started to learn how to use Assisted Model Building with Energy Refinement, or AMBER for short. It's the program I will use to build my salt box for my project. It's amazing how you can do research like this entirely on the computer. I'm all set up now on Visual Molecular Dynamics. This program was once like reading a foreign language but is now second nature to me. Most of all, I can't wait to see what is for lunch today (:

Greenthumb

Hi, This is my first post so bare with me. Today I got to learn many new things. I learned where to eat, how to use this blogger site, and I got to start my project after yesterday's safety training. I got to meet many new people... mainly becuase I didn't know any of them. I like all of them and can't wait to learn more about them as the summer continues. So far I have worked in the lab for only a few hours but I already really enjoy it. Ben(the student that I am working with) is really nice and definitely knows what he is doing (which is more than I can say about me so far). Hopefully I can learn a lot more about my project as we get further into the summer.
-Ian Carroll

Beginning Project Seed

During the first week of Project Seed I was both excited and nervous. I was excited because I was going to be doing something that interests me. Another reason I was excited is because I would be meeting new people and doing things that are new to me, but that is also why I was nervous. After, meeting everyone and starting my lab the nervousness is gone, and I'm just happy to be here:)