Internship Project

At Electrochaea they are still working on perfecting their reactor and gas production. This creates a need for a lot of data collection to find out what is working best and keeping the archaea "happy". So the task of data collection has fallen to me. As my mentor and the other workers with in the company change the different strains of archaea, amount of gases and much more I am collecting the data to show how that has changed production and the stability of the archaea's living environment. On site at the reactor this took place every 10-15 minutes. At first that was hard to keep up with and each collection took me about 13 minutes with the two remaining minutes I showed what I had found and run and start the process over. This was a continues process for a nine hour shift. I got the hang of the data collection and was able to finish within the 15 minutes, but still just barely and then they changed it to be every 10 minutes (because they where running an experiment that changed the agitator speed) this forced me to become faster and by the end of the second day I had cut my time down to only six minutes and was able to collect two pages of data in just one day. On site at the lab they don't do this testing as much, but when they do I help out. It is collecting the same data, but is much more complicated using the more accurate/expensive machines they have in the lab, but I am slowly getting the hang of it. When they aren't having me test data I do work around the office as well as help set up presentations and booklets for my mentor to use on his business trips.

My main project for this internship is data collection, but I have many other smaller project for each day. Through these projects I have learned a great deal of information about working in more high tech labs as well as enhanced and created more skills such as accuracy and speed through data collection. My office help has showed me how a company functions and little things I didn't realized were needed. Without my mentor or the other people I am shadowing throughout the company I wouldn't have been able to learn any of what I have so far and would never have had this amazing opportunity I am enjoying so much.