Week 8:
An Ending in Sight

July 14, 2021

It is very bittersweet that I realized my time here is starting to come to an end. Though I am still a few weeks out from leaving, I have already begun to mentally organize everything I own into boxes that will be packed into my car for my drive back up north. I will leave my final thoughts for my last blog post, but as I start to think about my time coming to an end, I realize how different the South is from any part of the country. It has been a great opportunity to get to know a region of the country that I have only heard about. When I applied to college, I decided to apply to schools in areas I had never been before to experience what life is like in other parts of the world or state, I did that with Cornell and Iowa, and I got that with this internship.

My week started out as usual with working on the sensor; it seems every time we get close to being successful with the sensor, something else goes wrong. It is a lot of troubleshooting and small detail work that makes working with technology difficult. I cannot imagine how frustrated Chandler must feel with working on the sensor for more than six months and not getting any closer to finishing. Despite our frustration with continue to work on the sensor in the hopes that one day we can get a consistent run with accurate data.

Same as the previous weeks, I spent the middle of the week working on the covid lab. While I enjoy the work, one thing that I have noticed in the last several weeks of working on this lab is the waste. It never crossed my mind how much single-use plastic is used in science. I do try and be as sustainable as possible when it comes to my daily life (even though most pollution comes from corporations and not individuals) and witnessing how much plastic is being used for science makes me hesitant to enter a career that aids in producing all that waste. While I know it is for science and cannot be avoided, just like medical waste, it is still a bit disheartening to see it, nonetheless.

After finishing the covid lab for the week on Thursday, my lab mates and I learned that a group of children from the YMCA would be coming in next week for a biology summer camp. To prepare children to be in the lab space, we needed to make sure everything possibly dangerous was put away and out of sight. We also made sure to tidy up and organize the space, which took a few hours. The lab room where the covid lab takes place is being renovated, so we usually workaround around the contractors. All the things stored in the lab being renovated were being stored on the tables of the lab used for the sensor. So, we had a lot of stuff to put away with not much space to put it. It took us some time, but in the end, we made sure everything was ready.