Day 1:
Overall I would say that day 1 was successful. It was a little nerve wracking and seemed slightly disorganized, but it all came together nicely.
I applied to this REU mainly for the mechanical engineering part, and when I was accepted and assigned an adviser, I was told it was going to be mechanical engineering. But when I was mailed a description of my research, I got nervous. And when the list of the all the students was emailed with their majors etc, I got more nervous because I was the only student who was not a chemical engineering major. That was my biggest fear for today and for the next 10 weeks: that I was going to have no idea what I was doing and that I was going to be the stupid one of the bunch. Turns out, my adviser is the only mechanical engineer on the REU staff, so it paired beautifully.
After all of the orientation festivities were over, I went to Dr. Berron's lab and worked with Leila on some basic parts of my experiment. I chipped away at silicone wafers coated in gold. Now, you don't just go to town on the wafers and hack them into whatever size and shape pieces you want. You must be careful, this is gold we are working with after all. I applied pressure with a sharp metal (for lack of a better word) stick. This caused the edge to crack and by nature this crack travels across the wafer in an almost straight line. This allows the size and shapes to be carefully easy to create. As long as you chip the wafer at desirable distances, the 3cm long pieces that are approximately 1cm wide will be obtained. Getting the wafer to begin chipping was the hardest part for me. Leila said that I was too scared of ruining the chip to apply enough pressure. But eventually, I had 6 approximately even sized chips. Each chip was then placed in it's own petri dish using tweezers as to not ruin the chip.
Next, I needed to make my three solutions. I made 1 molar solutions of three different chemicals mixed with ethanol. One started with a D, one with an F and one with a M. That's really all you need to know for now I think. I had to do some calculations using their molecular weights and densities to determine how much of the solution to add to 20 mL of ethanol. Once this was determined, the solutions were created and mixed using a vortex mixer. This is actually a very cool and clever piece of equipment. (I had never seen one before.) Long gone are the days of stirring with a stirring rod or spoon, now you can use a vortex mixer and created a little tornado of mixing power inside your contained. (I guess you can say I'm easily impressed?)
Now we have two chips per solution. But before we can place the chips in the solution, the thickness of each needed to be determined. This was done in the CeNSE lab using the spectroscopic ellipsometer. By providing the approximate thickness of the silicone to the computer program, the computer, through a method of measuring reflecting and refracting angles, was able to determine the thickness of the gold layer on top of of silicone. The thicknesses of all 6 pieces were determined in this manner.
That was all we did on day 1. The next step is to put the solution on the chip. Once this is complete the chip has to sit for 24 hours. As it was already 5:30pm, Leila and I decided to wait until day 2 to place the chip in the solution. Since I was to be in orientation funtivities until 3, Leila said that she would put the chip in the solutions for me so that we could start around 1:00 on Thursday (day 3).
Day 2:
Today started out slightly boring. I felt like I was back in school and getting lectured. Thomas More is a liberal arts school, so speech class is mandatory and my professors in my department are big on being able to go to conferences and speak on your research. So I guess public speaking is just something I have heard a lot about. But it never hurts to be reminded. Every time I give a speech I tend to get a little better and not talk as fast, so made 5th time is the charm.
Rest of the day followed as schedule. The grad school panel was very interesting and helpful. I have to admit that most of what they said I have already been told, but it is always nice to have your expectations verified. Meeting with my IGERT mentor, Kaitlyn, was also fun. It seems like we have a lot in common to be honest. And she was very entertaining. I'm pretty sure we laughed all the way through lunch.
Leadership seminars or group activities are something that I have been doing at least once a year since I was in 5th grade. While some of the activities repeat (the hula hoop around the circle), there are always new ones that get you thinking about how to be a leader in a different way. Overall, today was fun and I finally got to know a little bit more about the other REU students. It kinda seems like everyone is sticking with their roommate and no one is really contacting each other to hang out. I hope it isn't like this all summer.
After the leadership funtivities were over, I hunted down Leila -- which proved harder than I thought -- to get my data off the CeNSE computer and see how putting the chips in the solution went. Turns out she was in a meeting with Dr. Berron. But Chris ended up helping me get my data off the CeNSE computer and chatted with me. Eventually I found Leila though and the two of us, Chris, and Sebastian ended up talking about The Office. Everyone around here seems genuinely interested in talking about anything. I think I have laughed more in the past two days than I ever expected to.
So far, so good.
