Today was a little more slow than my other days, but it was still fun nonetheless. I again got to observe the e-cigarette tester in action (even got to press the buttons myself!!!:) I had a really good chat with one of the lead scientists on the project, Dr. Cho, and she updated me on her other projects she works on. She also explained how her interdisciplinary research for her PhD helped her career and led to the diversity of projects she is able to work on at RTI (which is definitely relevant to my interests so super useful advice).
The day got a little wild after that. While touring one the analytical labs in another building, the power went out!!! It was actually tragic for a lot of the mass spectrometers that were running at the time and even more tragic for the people running the experiments. But it wasn’t just for that one building; almost all of the buildings across RTI’s campus had no power and only two were running on backup generators. EXCEPT for Building 11, the building I work in, so I did not have to suffer through the blackout.
My afternoon did not go according to plan. Originally, I was going to observe lung cells getting exposed to different types/concentrations of “vape juice”, but the necessary supplies did not come in time. So, we changed the plan so that I would go to a lab and look at lung cells that had been already exposed under a microscope and take pictures — but the power outage decided to kill that plan too. So I worked on checking more MicroPEMs and did some more research for my mini-project on biosensors. While it was not the most exciting day because of the various setbacks, I still learned a lot — including how extra creepy power outages are in labs. Looking forward to (hopefully) looking at the cells tomorrow and continuing the e-cigarette work!
