My visit at RICE University was a blast! I had the honor to meet the other interns that are from my university (UTEP), ASU, and RICE. When Monday rolled around, I was nervous to know that I was going to have to socialize with students that I had met via WhatsApp days before the big day. Luckily for me, everyone was outgoing and open to different topic discussions. For the first day of orientation, I was introduced to the different types of water treatments and ways that can be used to improve. I found it fascinating when one of the RICE mentors gave a presentation of his findings as well as the movie that was shown. The movie gave me an important insight of the different ways that the water is used in different parts of the world. On the second day of orientation, learning each interns background and research captured my attention in a way that I would still like to keep in touch with them even after the internship ends.
Here, three solutions are being vacuumed and dried to extract iron in order to use for the nano project.
Here one the left, the three solutions are being dried to remove the iron. On the right, H2SO4 is being mixed with KMnO4 and graphite for 24 hours.
My first day back at UTEP was not what I was expecting, but it taught me that there is more than just being inside the lab messing with chemicals and that’s reading. For the first day, all I did was read further into what I was going to be working on this summer and to get an idea of what types of chemicals and materials I will be using. As for the second day of the internship, I finished reading what I was assigned to read and was able to exchange questions that I had about the article. Later that day, I was taken into the lab for a short period of time to get an idea of how mixtures work and how to follow and prepare them properly. During last year’s internship, there was a project that was left half way finished and Dr. Villagran and my mentor Karen have asked me if I was willing to continue on it as well as working on my project. At the end of the day, I agreed to take on the other project as well and will now be working on two projects by the end of this internship.