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Code for Days: A CMOP Experience

06/11/2015 Day 6

So today I did some work and then I went to a talk about Native American science at Pacific University. I really enjoyed the talk and had a great experience. Unfortunatly I wan't able to get much done.  

Code for Days: A CMOP Experience

06/12/2015 Day 5

Goals: So I want to look a lot more into the different salinity levels in water. I don’t know very much about partially mixed, and time dependent salt wedge. These seem to be the most common stratifications in the Columbia River Estuary.  

Code for Days: A CMOP Experience

06/11/2015 Day 4

Goals: so I really what to try plotting certain days in oxygen and comparing them to the same days in the cmop data explorer. I also want to look at the Geyer-MacCready plots and try to decipher them a little more.

News: I can now access the Geyer MacCready plots. I’m not sure why they were not working a while ago but all well. Thing seem fine now. Also, I am officially done with my online ECON class! I know it doesn’t really matter in this setting but I did spend half of the morning taking my final when I could have been working. Whatever. 

Code for Days: A CMOP Experience

06/10/2015 Day 3

This day we went to the Columbia River Estuary. We saw station Saturn 03 and saw a few sensors get deployed into the water. It was really neat to see where the data comes from and what the people do that collect the data and work on the sensors. It was a really cool experience. 

Weeks 9 and 10: Writing

I spent the last two weeks of my internship finishing up some final experiments, writing my summary report, and working on my poster. The intern poster symposium was at the end of my ninth week, so I had to have most of my research done by that point so I could present it.The bulk of these two weeks has been spent organizing and polishing my data sheets so they are understandable by other people, writing up procedures, cleaning up my glassware and lab bench, and working on my report.It has been a great summer and I am very thankful for the opportunity I got to do research here.

Week 10: When One Door Shuts, Another Opens

Week ten got lonely at times, with most of the other interns gone. With my poster finished and my final paper mostly complete, I had nothing to do but dive back into my experiments. Then again, I never really stopped experimenting in the first place. Mostly I worked with magnetite, the fourth and final iron oxide suspension for my project. I also worked on background tests to prove that the probes are actually doing what we claim they are doing. By eliminating certain components from my reactions, I could show specific roles of certain variables (such as pH or syringe filters).

Week 9: When It Rains, It Pours

If going to class is like Oregon's weather, then research is not. Classes have set times for exams, routine homework, and predictable (albeit unending) project deadlines - just like Oregon has a set times for it to rain, routine drizzle, and predictable (albeit unending) dreary weather forecasts. Research on the other hand is less reliable. Sometimes days will pass with nothing exciting to work on, while other days you'll be in the lab into the evening, frantically trying to fix machines, run experiments, and update lab notebooks all at the same time.

Finally Finished: Sad to Leave

The last two weeks of the program I mainly spent working on my poster and paper. There was not much I could do in the lab since my part in the experiment was already finished. However, my mentor Rachel tested me on my knowledge that I learned over the summer. To accomplish this she purposefully made it so the pHstat system would not work and I had to discover where the problem was located and fix the system.

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