Research Experience for Community College Students in Critical Zone Science

June 6^th, 2016

Today was a relatively painless and enjoyable day for me, though I confess I did have an awkward new-intern moment! My mentor, Tess, emailed me that I could come in for my first day whenever I wanted and that she’d be in the lab at around 8:30 AM. Naturally, being the night owl that I am, I slept in until 8:00 AM or so and didn’t get to the CIRES building until about 10:00 AM. I quickly discovered that it was not particularly intuitive to navigate around the building so it took me awhile to find the lab and offices. Once I finally located it, I couldn’t find my mentors. I found someone in a nearby office and he kindly let me utilize his laptop to check my email. Tess had emailed me last second that there was a lab meeting at 10:00 AM on the third floor. I quickly found the room and grabbed a seat to view the presentation. I was a little embarrassed that I was late, but I managed to only be 10 minutes late and determined I could have done much worse than I did. Tess introduced me to the team after the presentation and they were all understanding. I found it amusing that this circumstance happened to me on my first day, being that just this morning I Googled, “How to make the most out of your internship” and read about being timely. I’m certainly going to make sure that doesn’t happen again.

Tess showed me around the lab which reminded me of a glorified chemistry lab. There was a lot of machinery I wasn’t familiar with and I was excited at the prospect of eventually knowing my way around and bettering my laboratory technique skills. Tess went over the project with me, which I was especially grateful for. The previous week we had simply speculated about the project topic, so I was glad that this time she had a clear idea of how our experiment would play out. I made sure to ask for clarification on any concept or procedure I didn’t understand. I found that I was learning useful scientific content as well as the applications of such. Our goal for the day was to make phosphate buffer saline (PBS), a buffer that will be used to dilute soil samples we’ll be collecting later in the week. I really enjoyed this process. It took me back to my chemistry lab courses I’ve taken in college. We searched a recipe for PBS and obtained the necessary compounds. I weighed out the compounds using a digital scale, mixed them in a beaker, dissolved the compounds in deionized water using a magnetic stirrer, adjusted the pH of the solution using a pH measuring device and probe, diluted the solution to 1L, and then ran it through a cycle on the autoclave machine. Tess was fantastic about providing me with the necessary information I needed to complete each of these steps and she let me perform all of them by myself or with only some assistance. I can tell this is a great way to learn some of these techniques.

Tomorrow we will be making a 1/100 LB medium. I’m definitely looking forward to it. I had a lot of fun making the PBS and I imagine making the medium will be just as interesting and enjoyable!