Week 1:
Getting Started

May 27, 2021

This week has just been the beginning of the wildness that is to come for the summer. Sunday started out with my dad and I moving my stuff into campus housing after the 12-hour drive from Pennsylvania to South Carolina. The housing here is very nice! They even have a kitchen with a dishwasher (Cornell take notes, please). I met and got to know my three other roommates; they are here doing internships too. We have plans to do a lot of amazing stuff this summer. I can’t wait to update you all throughout this journey.

Monday was the day of settling in, I made the much-needed run to the grocery store and began organizing my living space. It was not until Tuesday that things began to pick up. Of my roommates, two are doing research in the same lab as me but under a different professor. I did get the opportunity to watch my roommates extract DNA (pictured above) and it was very interesting. A bit later that day, I got to meet the rest of the team and Professor Tye, my lab supervisor. We talked about the various projects the lab would be working on for the summer and how we would all be involved. My primary focus would be on the water quality project.

Thursday was my first day of working at the lab, it began by going to three different rivers and collecting water samples. We also measured the water temperature, dissolved oxygen, and salinity from each site. We filtered the water samples to collect and gauge the phytoplankton and bacteria present at each river. It was fun introduction into what the rest of summer could look like.

In high school, for a year, I studied electronics engineering for half the school day. Electronics engineering is still something I enjoy and have an interest in, so when I heard that they were building water quality sensors (measure temperature, salinity, and dissolved oxygen) I was very interested in helping out. Friday, I began to work with Chandler, he had been working on them for six months alone, on the prototype. Luckily, I have a long history of soldering electronics and was able to provide guidance on how to solder. Thanks to Chandler’s work, the next step in process would be to lab test the prototype sensor and see if any changes needed to be made.

While it was a slow week, it gave me a taste of what the next 9 weeks would look like!