Day 11

Since my internship was closed due to Thanksgiving break, I stayed at school and continued to work on my poster for the research conference. At this point, I really just had the fine-tuning left to do so I added in some more pictures, made a graph with some software I've never used before, and put in sections like the conclusion and acknowledgements. By the time school ended (it was a half-day), I was more or less done with the poster and was able to have it printed at Staples that night.

Day 10

I went to school instead of internship due to an upcoming research conference, so I spent this day in the lab with Dr. Kim to work on my poster. I used a poster template made in PowerPoint to design the actual poster and spent a lot of time trying to make or find good graphics to use. I also had to look through all of my microscopy pictures to figure out which would be good to include with the poster, and wrote up captions for each figure. To my surprise, I was actually able to finish a large portion of the poster in just one day.

Day 9

I went to a lecture on using carbon nanomaterials for various energy applications. It was an interesting overview of the different uses and types of these materials, but I wanted to hear more about the speaker's specific research and findings because a lot of what he said was background-type information.

I spent a lot of the afternoon remaking a lot of solutions that the lab had run low on, and in the process, I had an interesting experience with HCl. After washing many, many beakers, I wanted to measure some of my samples from last time to see how they were doing after they were released, but the ellipsometer wasn't working. According to one of the graduate students there, the laser was tired and needed to rest, which apparently happens frequently and for unpredictable periods of time.

Instead of working with my samples for the rest of the day, I read a wide variety of papers. The lab also spontaneously sparked into a debate about the differences between disorders, diseases, and syndromes, which even Google was not helpful in resolving. After half an hour of this, I returned to studying the papers.

Day 8

On this day, the lecture was on quantum computing, which was something I was hesitant about attending because I didn't think I would understand anything in the presentation. Although I ended up not understanding much of the last third, to my surprise, Dr. Nevard has more or less given me a lot of prerequisite knowledge for comprehending the majority of the lecture.

After that, I came into the lab as usual and did a normal prime layer addition. The solutions weren't quite ready to use as they were, so I had to adjust their pH before I could start putting wafers in. Once I was done with the prime layers, I took them into the room with the ellipsometer and measured their thicknesses. Using the thickness data as well as the numbers from previous measurements, I used Excel to perform some calculations.