Rolling Along

I really enjoyed Mod3 because it had a nice balance of hands on lab time, researching topics that interested us, making us practice our oral presentation skills, and we ended up with a neat little battery we can show off at home.

I never thought having too much gold could be a problem, but when we visualized our nanowires using TEM, our results looked nothing like what Professor Belcher showed us in class. I was scared that we had somehow managed to mess up the experiment (again), and was a little relieved when I heard it had happened to all other teams as well. Thankfully, we all got working batteries, so I guess too much of a good thing isn’t such a bad thing?

I didn’t anticipate one of the hardest parts of this module to be the rolling of the batteries (we’ve all rolled pizza dough before, right?), or the manipulation of lithium inside the glove box to prevent it from reacting with oxygen and exploding. Attempting to do this ourselves showed me how it is often not the biology or chemistry of experiments that cause them to fail, but other external factors play a huge role as well. Thankfully we had the magic hands of Jifa to help us out.

Although I don’t particularly enjoy speaking in public, practicing this is a very useful skill, and doing so on a topic of our choosing and in a welcoming environment like 109 is a great way to practice. Despite feeling like I learned a lot this semester, I didnt believe I knew enough to come up with a reasonable, interesting and viable research proposal. Nicole and Apekshya really impressed me with their knowledge and we ended up having a proposal I am quite proud of.