End of Week 3 - Kate Wang

I know I was supposed to post this at the end of last week but because of some password issues I didn’t get a chance to post it until today.

Anyway, not much has happened since I last posted. Today I started working on the project that I will actually be presenting in the fall since everything I’ve been doing up till now has really been practice and research for the company. Now I’m finally starting the project to determine the correlation between particle size and the absorbance of a macromolecule. The first polymer that they gave me to test was really small and particle sizing with the microscope was very difficult to do since the computer wouldn’t recognize the separate beads without me having to remove majority of the selections they made. Also, the polymer gave some ridiculously high adsorption rates which was very good since it helped Tom figure out what size is the most helpful in absorbing the macromolecule.

At the end of the day, Rob had to leave early and I didn’t know how to find something to occupy my time with so I asked Tom if he had anything I should work on and so he told me I should start working on my presentation (which I didn’t really want to do yet since I wasn’t 100% sure that I understood everything yet). Luckily, in the end Rob gave me some polymer to wash. Also, we ran out of one of the buffers that I use to make stock solution so I had to mix together all of the previous stock solution which was very tedious and irritating because of the shape of the volumetric flasks. In the end, I did look at the power point slightly while I was waiting between the washes.