12: Conclusions

Hi everyone! As I wrap up my Senior Project journey, I wanted to share some thoughts and lessons learned from this project.

First off, I would like to say thanks to my advisors (Dr. Juner Zhu from Northeastern University, his post-doc Royal
Ihuaenyi, and Dr. Mo from BISV) for finding time out of their busy schedules and helping me throughout my journey.

If I was to do all over again, I would definitely want to start way earlier; like, during the summer. At the start, I was undecisive as to which project I wanted to do; and battery was actually not one of the ideas that I originally came up with. Since it was a last-minute decision, I had to do a lot of background research before I found battery recycling as a potential project. I was also late to reach out to potential internal advisors, and finally, I actually didn’t finalize my experiment until a few weeks before the Senior Project was over, and by that time, it was too late to order supplies and materials. So, yeah, I would have definitely wanted to start over the summer, and by the time school started, I would want to have an idea confirmed as well as an external advisor, so all I really needed to do was to find an internal advisor and then go into the details of how the project was going to work, such as outlining a plan for each week.

A second thing (this one’s specific to me) was that I should have reached out to any labs that I could do my work in. I had planned to do my lab work in BISV, but I underestimated the required equipment that was needed, and that hindered my progress in any experiments. I see now why most of the Senior Projects are CS or mostly online research and data collection (such as surveys).

Nonetheless, I was still able to learn a lot about battery recycling and share that with you. And after experiencing going through a research project, I have learned my lessons and next time, in college, when I go through the same steps again for another research project, I will make sure I don’t make the same mistakes again.

I hope you enjoyed following me and my Senior Project. And if you’re a future student looking at doing a Senior Project, I hope my journey has given you inspiration and I wish you the best.

Until we meet again. Kevin Xuan signing off.