S-STEM Scholar Kassandra Barrera's Blog

This week I am excited to say that I will be attending the 19th Annual Minority Access Conference in Washington D.C. and I will be given the opportunity to represent the research I have been doing on microplastics for the past year and a half. I am beyond grateful to be given this opportunity, being able to present what I have been working on for so long, and also getting the chance to take a look at other peoples research as well. I am going to use this trip as a learning experience because there is going to be so many workshops and I will be learning tools that will be able to help me become a better presenter and a better researcher in my future studies.  I will be leaving this Thursday, so wish me luck!

This week I was working on my proposal for the research that I have been doing for the past 3 semesters. It is really interesting because every semester I find myself finding something new to add to my protocols, and I find a new discovery that other people might be doing. While I was working on my proposal for this semester I had to add using the FTIR machine. The FTIR (Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy). This is going to be the next phase of our project which is very exciting because we will get to incorporate another machine into our research. Last semester we had the opportunity to use the SEM which allowed us to see the micro level of what was happening to our plastics. Now we want to use what is actually happening with the chemical decomposition and to do that we will be using the FTIR to get better readings. So stay tuned!

I am excited to say that Maria and I will be attending this Arizona Industry Association conference on October 3rd. Thanks to the recommendation by Dr. Cotter we decided to give this conference a shot, and sure enough, we were accepted got the email confirming our attendance. This will be the first conference we will be attending for the year, so we are going to dedicate some time to practice our presentation and to get more familiar with speaking in front of crowds of people again. I am really excited to be attending this conference and to see what kind of research other people are doing around the valley. It should be a good learning experience for us.

It feels really good to be back in the lab. My summer was really relaxing after a hectic spring semester, so it felt nice to relax. But, I had a big realization when I came back. Looking back at all the research I did last semester with my team, this week taught me a lot about organizing everything and making sure to label and date everything. We had some dates that were not matching up with our test tubes, which was causing significant confusion. In the end, we were able to organize everything as best as possible and definitely used this as a learning experience. In the picture to the right, I decided it would be good for the team to be able to log everything that was done in the lab for the day. Writing specific details of everything we did will help when we have to look back and pinpoint particular information. Also coming up with a better technique to label and maybe start color coding stuff in different colors will help us a lot in the long run.