June 14th, 2016 I am so exhausted after today! Since I live close by to campus I don’t typically drive so I can avoid parking fees. This week I’ve been trying a new practice: biking to the lab. I discovered that it has shaved off a lot of time in comparison to walking to campus.… Read More

June 13th, 2016 – Determining Proper Dilution for Plating and Preparing LB Agar Plates Today was a relatively fun day. The agar plates with various dilutions of soil bacteria from both the north-facing and south-facing slopes had incubated all weekend and thankfully had some growth on them. I was a bit surprised at how quickly… Read More

8:00am “I love my job!..Love my life!!” A few hours of banging my head against the wall later- “I need to go home and play with my dogs..” Today was really stressful, some real issues with Excel. In the end, perseverance won. 6:00pm “I got this.” I will finish this. Excel will not beat me. Cheers,… Read More

These first few weeks of the internship were very exciting. I am still in a state of disbelief over being selected for this incredible opportunity. I have learned the basics of programming code using a language called Python and read several papers on fluvial geomorphology. My project focuses on determining how three different processes affect downstream… Read More

June 10th, 2016 Today was extremely fun! I learned that there’s a lot more to the process of transferring bacteria onto agar plates than simply just slopping some soil into PBS and then scooping an arbitrary amount up to dump onto the agar gel. It’s quite possible for too much bacteria to grow on a… Read More

June 9th, 2016 I showed up to the lab happy to find out that the peptidoglycan extraction hadn’t happened yet! I was excited that I would be able to see how to go from having a concentrated solution of bacteria cells to only having fragments of their peptidoglycan leftover. Although I was ecstatic for learning… Read More

June 8th, 2016 Today I met up with the other interns at the Sustainability, Energy and Environment Complex (SEEC) building at Research Park. We filmed our elevator speeches which were a 1 minute long summary of who we were, who we were working with, what our projects over the summer consisted of and the importance… Read More

June 7th, 2016 Today I worked on creating 1/100 LB agar plates for the experiment. It consisted of weighing out solid compounds with a digital scale, washing agar powder using DI water and the magnetic stirrers, autoclaving the LB agar solution to sterilize it, letting it cool on the magnetic stirring plates, adding antifungals using… Read More

June 6th, 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… Read More

So, the first week I was extremely excited but of course nervous. The first couple of days were just filled with surveys, ice breakers, and short informative lectures. My favorite part of the week was the trip to the Mountain Research Station (MRS). We went into the mountains and camped overnight with periodic stops for… Read More