Week 11 -- Presentation, Final Thoughts

Well it’s all done now. The presentation was pretty easy to make, it was mostly just rehearsing and practicing, including some mock presentations with Dr. Mo. For my graphs, I decided to go with differences in absorbance. This was so I could show a better downward trend, showing a difference. This was then confirmed with a Mann-Whitney U test so I could find if a statistically significant difference existed between the groups. These are all the big things that happened to my project in the week. Now, onto reflection.

To be honest, this project taught me a lot about lab work. In the past, I have always followed a pre-tested lab procedure with appropriate equipment, and got a more or less expected result. This project made me do everything but that. I was using a more or less pretested procedure, but without equipment and without an expected result. I had to get used to seeing really bad results, since it is merely a part of research. Furthermore, chemistry work turned out to be a lot more draining and boring than I was used to. A lot of the labs I did in chemistry courses could be completed in a period. Only when I got to senior year was when I started doing multi-day labs. However, this project forced me to wait an hour before I could run stats, and these stats had to be collected across five different groups which was a total of five hours for just one trial. This is what I meant by not having enough time to run a second trial for any group during my presentation. The time it took to schedule with Kevan, run the tests and then do stats was simply too long to fit more than one trial in. All in all though, this was a pretty fulfilling experience and I got to learn a lot, especially how to cope with failure which I’m sure will help as I go to college.