First Impression (Sarah Azmal)

-
What are your first impressions of your summer research experience? Is it what you expected? Why are why not? What was most interesting or surprising?


My first impressions of my summer research experience is harder than I thought it would be. For me, my internship is about paleontology which is pretty much fossils, and in my head, I thought the stuff that I would be working on would be easy because your pretty limited on what to work with since it just fossils. But instead what I am working on it's more complicated than it looks like.

There are IP and VP which is invertebrae/ vertebrae paleontology and what I do for both is just taking pictures of either fossil with vertebrae and without and going through a process where I save a picture and make it into this final picture where it would go straight into a website called idigpaleo. But what caught off guard was cataloging fossils. The process of cataloging fossils is so tedious. And the process is so long and since there are millions of fossils it would take forever to catalog a bunch of fossils. What shocked me the most was that what the stuff that I am working on is what people actually do as a job. For me, I don't think I would want to catalog for a job because of how time summing and tedious it is. But to think that people actually like doing that is really shocking for me. Also what surprised me was also the monster creatures that used to live in the western interior seaway. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Project Details (Zuhah)

-
We have been learning about the Western Interior Seaway and the formations that the fossils come from. Our project was about the Niobrara Chalk, Pierre Shale, and Fox Hills Formations. We compiled a bunch of data about the geologic makeup of the formations (the lithology), the different species found in each formation (the biodiversity), and we used the data to determite what the environment was like in our discussion/conclusion. We went to the beach on Wednesday to see if we could find any invertebrates. We found a lot of crabs, snails, and a few clams. We found a large, living horseshoe crab as well.
Read more

Project Description (Cyril King)

-
After completing the first week of CRISP ( Center for Research on Interface Structures and Phenomena), I had the opportunity to participate in research and experimentation based on expounded presentations, tutorials and individual lessons with faculty. The project that I am working on this summer involves the use of the Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (ICP-MS), an analytical mass technique instrument, used to analyze nanoparticles of specific elements. This week we will be using the ICP-MS to analyze dilutions of Iron Sucrose in aqueous form; testing our hypothesis if the ICP-MS instrument would detect Iron or Ferric Hydroxide. In addition to  using the ICP-MS we will be looking at the composition  size of Siver (Ag) nanoparticles; using methodology to study the concentration of Silver . The detection of elements or compounds is essential because Ferric Hydroxide ( Fe(OH)₃) is the interior of Iron Sucrose; when placed into the ICP-MS the molecules are vaporized, dried,
Read more

Project Details (Tatiana)

-
     At this point in time, my internship has been over for about a week and I am planning what I want to include on my poster. I have been brainstorming ideas of possible research questions that could apply to what I did during my internship, but this is proving to be a difficult task because most of the work I did revolved around cataloging outflows rather than actually exploring a question. So far, I have been able to come up with my methods and procedures and some of the basic information that I want to include on my poster about outflows and star formation. I also have results for my research in the sense that I have different types of images of various outflows in the Orion Nebula to showcase on my poster. However, I do not have results that exactly answer any specific research question at this point.      Throughout my internship, I learned things such as what star formation is and what happens during it, how to look for outflows, how to use various computer programs such Glue,
Read more