Almost Home!

The summer may end, but the science doesn't
-Doc Feller

I think that this quote kind of wraps up my last week. I know that I am almost done, and today at lunch I gave my final presentation, but I feel like there are a lot of unanswered questions. I suppose that is the purpose of research. I just assumed I would have some closure at the end of my time here. I have finished my part of one project, but all of the analysis is yet to be done, and my second project is far from complete. The glass has been made, and tests have been run, but what does it all mean? Questions that will not be answered this summer and maybe not anytime soon, but my work here is almost done, even though the science isn't.
We have a lot of useful information, apparently. But it is taking a lot of work to sift through it all to determine what is significant and what we are actually looking for. Understanding the shifts in Raman spectroscopy of our glass and how it corresponds to the shift in peaks of the crystal and the known change in crystalline structure. I am learning a lot, but it turns out I remember virtually nothing from my high school chemistry (mind you it was almost 8 years ago now). Bonds, molar masses, atomic structures...
So now I'm working on writing the discussion and analysis part of my papers, which proves difficult when everything is not even straight in your head. I'm doing the best I can and my partner and Adam are helping me figure things out along the way.
Tomorrow is the last day here, I'm going to miss it but it will be nice to have a break for a couple weeks before its back to good ole MC and back to the classroom.

2 more weeks

Only two more weeks of my REU left! We are heading to Aimes, IA tomorrow morning to give presentations on our projects at the All-Iowa Glass Conference. There are going to be 8 talks, 1 by my partner and I, and 1 by another Coe student, also both Coe advisors are giving the talks and the rest are from elsewhere. The rest of the research students at Coe are making posters to present. Adam (my partner) and I had too much information to do a poster, because we have almost 2 complete projects finished. We get twenty minutes so that is plenty of time to talk about everything we have accomplished. I have spent the whole day making the power point look good and going over little details to get this presentation finished up.
The rest of the week we will be working on analysing some of the data we got back from Canada on NMR and writing our paper(s). This next two weeks is going to go quickly since we will have presentations for the REU students starting a week from Wednesday.
Time to get back to work!

Trip to Kansas City

Haley in one of the fountains

Flame Sealing A Quartz Tube

Preparing the sample in the glove bag

The ESR Machine

The prepared/flame sealed quartz tubs

This week 4 of us made a trip to Liberty, MO which is very close to Kansas City. We were going to a college there, William Jewell to run a test on some of the glass that has been made at Coe this summer. We were looking at the Electron Spin Resonance spectra of diferent compositions, which will be analysed and give us a better understanding of the structure of these glasses. Some of the samples we had made react badly with water so they cannot be out in the air. They were made in the glove box at Cor to avoid this issue, but William Jewell does not have a glove box. They had to be transported in a desecator/vacuum which got to sit on my lap for the whole 4 hour 30 minute trip. Which sounds bad, but it meant I got the front seat :) We got there Wednesday evening and started work on Thursday. We had to prepare the sample in a glove bag which looks shockingly similar to a trash bag with built in gloves. We hd to grind up the glass and put it in tubes, which were then flame sealed to keep the air out. After they were sealed we ran them in the machine to get the spectra. After 2 days of this we had ran 28 samples for which we have a lot of data that now needs to be analyzed. Thursday evening after dinner at Buffalo Wild Wings we drove to Kansas City to walk around. We went to The Plaza. It was full of expensive shops and restaraunts and fountains. It was beautiful and we had great weather so that was quite a bit of fun. We made the trip back to Coe Friday afternoon. Above are some pictures of what we were doing at William Jewell. And I guess Monday is back to work on making glass and running more tests with the Raman Spectrometer.

Project 1 -> DONE

My first Research project is finished!
Last week we finished making all of our samples of glass and got to ship it to England. It was very exciting. We had to write a paper detailing the entire procedure of making the glass as well as information on all of the quality control steps we took. Once that was checked 327+ (exaggeration) times, we went to FedEx and spent an enormous amount of money to have a 1.5 pound box shipped to the UK.
So now what?
Well, we got another project, with no exact deadline or requirements. We are making more glass, out of different chemicals. Going to learn how to use another technique for identifying the structure of the glass. But mostly I am just working on the paper for the first project.
I also have to give a "mid-summer REU" presentation. It's just a 5 minute power point presentation about what I have done so far, some of my results, and what I am going to be spending the rest of the summer on. I don't mind presentations, so it won't be bad at all, plus they are supplying bagels :) so I can't complain.
This week we have a lot going on. Tonight we are going to watch "Field of Dreams" because we will be taking a little field trip there next Monday (It's the pride and joy of Iowa). Then tomorrow evening we are all going to go to see the local minor league baseball team play. They are the Kernels, wouldn't expect to see that anywhere except Iowa or Illinois, haha. Wednesday I have to give my power-point presentation at 8:30 am. Then during lunch we have our weekly talk by one of the professors. After lunch 4 of us get to go to Kansas City, MO to deliver some glass and spend a few days learning about ESR spectroscopy. I wasn't on the project that made the glass, but they let a few extra people go. 2 REU students (me and my roommate) and 2 Coe students are all heading down there until Friday. Then on Sunday one of the professors is hosting a lunch at his house...authentic Italian! Should be a good time. Looking forward to this busy but exciting week.
The 4th of July weekend marked our 1/2 way point. Got our first paycheck last week, which I was anxiously awaiting. I cannot believe I am already 1/2 way done with my summer here. Day by day is slow, but looking back the whole thing has gone rather quickly. I think the 2nd half with go even quicker because I don't have any specific deadlines but we are making quite a few trips around the area.
Doc (my advisor here) is encouraging us to all perfect our group power-points because each group will be presenting on July 29th at a convention at Iowa State. So we are working on making our power points high quality.
As you can tell I've been pretty busy and its only going to get worse, but luckily I got to head home for the 4th of July and have a nice relaxing long weekend in preparation for the 2nd half of this REU.
Time to get back to work!
Gloria

First 3 weeks at Coe

Coe College is in Cedar Rapids, IA. I drove here by myself on August 8th. Research started on the 9th. I am living in one of the campus dorms, although we are trying to manipulate a way to get moved into the campus apartments. Coe is a lot like Monmouth College, except that it is in a city. There are malls and Wal-Marts and everything. It is nice to have those things available, but I spend most of my time on campus anyways. I am rooming with another student in my REU program. We are both doing research on different compositions of glass. We mix a couple of chemicals together then heat them up in a little furnace, anywhere from 1000-1400 degrees C. Then we pour them out and let them cool basically. After that we run a small amount of it through some machines to get the melting point of the glass and density and such. There are 25 students in the Physics department here this summer, and 7 other REU students. There are people all over around campus. They don't have summer courses, but there is a College for Kids, tennis camp, and a bunch of other things going on. I have gotten to know a lot of the Coe students here and we have had a good time. It's nice to have a lot of people around to do things with on the weekends. We work from 8:30 to 5 or 5:30 so the days are pretty full, but we all like to go play sand volleyball in the evenings when it cools off a little bit.
My advisor for my research has not been here the last two days so he assigned us a research paper and power point on the projects we are doing. So we had to look up journals and such on our glass and the techniques we are using to analyze them. Not a ton of fun, but I've had worse papers to write. It's nice to learn why we are doing what we are doing. My project is kind of special because after we make all of our glass (by next week) we are shipping it to England to run in a billion dollar machine. It's a neutron scattering machine that is going to tell us the atomic structure of our glass. That's probably a lot of mumbo jumbo to most people reading it, at least I know it was when I first heard about it!
It surprised me that most of the people who are here are not going to be seniors. When I was applying for these REU's I got the impression that most people who were accepted were juniors, going to be seniors. But most of the Coe students and some of the REU students are all either freshmen going to be sophomores or sophomores going to be juniors!
So far so good though, the last three weeks have gone pretty quick, I am excited to get to go home for the 4th of July next weekend and see my family. I am here until August 8th so it is like a nine week program and I am 1/3 of the way done as of this weekend!