S-STEM/TRAIN Scholar Jasmine Patricio

Blog Post Week 10 This week is going to consist just of me working on the poster to have ready to present at Metro-Tech, though it is going to be a bit hard since I have yet to start the process of running the sediment and the micro plastic through the funnel. It is also going to be challenging since I also still don’t have any of my conclusions ready. Unfortunately, I still need to shred more plastic (SPI1) which is a long process as well. So I started to shred the plastic bottle with the shredder but got extremely irritated and have decided I am just going to try and melt the water bottle the same way I melted SPI4 in the autoclave. Since that took me less than 1 hour to shred. I also was having a hard time weighting the foam to an exact 0.5 g, so I looked up if there a possible way I could melt that as well. Luckily I found a video that prove that acetone could melt foam. Hopefully this plastic shredding could be done with and my next process could finally begin.   

What this week and last week consist of is putting 0.5 (g) of each plastic (SPI 1-7) in containers that contain 20 (g) of sediment in them. We will be running a total of 35 samples, meaning each SPI will contain 5 samples that will be run through the funnel. To create a method to extract plastic from the sediment. I used a small scale to measure out the 20 (g) of sediment, not all the samples contained exactly 20 (g), some samples contained an approximate measure of 20.1 (g) - 20.9 (g). I made a huge mistake of running 1.5 (g) of SPI 3 into one whole container containing the 20 (g) of sediment instead of 0.5 (g), which caused to have less plastic sample of SPI 3, I do still have shredded plastic left but perhaps not enough for 5 samples. I also don’t have enough of SPI 2. Which means I will have to do a lot more shredding of plastic throughout this week. Also when I was scaling the the 0.5 (g) of plastic, I used two different types of scales which could of perhaps messed up the amoun...

 During the 8th week of the second semester I had a really hard time posting anything up especially since I was terribly sick beginning Sunday, I remember waking up on Monday at 8:00 am keep in mind that I have class at 8:30am. So I wake up only to find myself feeling extremely dizzy and running to the restroom to vomit. I had an extremely bad fever a cold and to top it all off my allergies were acting up the whole time. My mom decided I stay home for the day and relax since I was practically weak enough to even walk. I took about enough medicine to take me to the emergency room and I was still feeling sick and perhaps even worst. I stayed in bed with my mom making me some “organic” remedies that she calls. On Tuesday I still wasn't feeling so good, but because i had both my BIOLEC and BIOLAB the same day i insisted on coming to school knowing I would miss so much if I didn’t come. We took a test, wasn't till the end of class where Robin noticed I wasn't looking so g...

Screening Sediment from Phoenix College This week I spent one full day screening the sediment that was collected just outside of Phoenix college, I then put the sediment into a heating container that was at a temperature of 74 degrees for one whole week. What this allowed it to do is dry the sediment and allow it to break easily so that it would be able to go through the process of screening the sediment. Then after a week passed Matt gave a tool that looked somewhat like a strainer, only that this one was exactly measured at 2mm. The reason because is because anything greater than 2mm is not considered sediment. I ran the sediment through the 2mm tool at which it separated real sediment compared to other particles like maybe rocks and other particles that were inside the dirt. This is not the tool Matt gave me but a picture I found on google, but this is somewhat of what the stainer looks like. After that was finished what we did next is get ready to create the protocol from se...