Shivani's Blog: Closing the Gap - Experiencing GSET

My third elective was Engineering.m, a class on using the Matlab. Matlab is a programming/ data visualization software used it seems in many fields of engineering (Engineering.m is a pun b/c files in Matlab are saved as .m files). I signed up for Engineering.m because I thought it would help me learn some neat attention-grabbing data visualization tricks for later in life.

The class was about Matlab basics, so we learned about commands and code that could probably apply similarly to other proframming languages. We did learn how do design graphs and stuff, but nothing amazing, probably because that requires more experience. It was a bit boring when the instructor was just lecturing us about different commands, but he's a pretty cool person and this was literally my first experience with coding ever (I was supposed to be working on an online Java course during GSET but let's not mention that right now). I got really excited when, after about 10 tries, I was able to code a RPS game into Matlab and play with the computer. It was surprisingly rewarding.

Of course there were those kids who already had programming experience and/or already knew how to use Matlab. I guess this was good training for college, where everyone will have different levels of experience in a certain topic and I may and will probably be at the bottom end. In Matlab I was ok with this because I'd never tried programming before. In other topics such as Nanofab I ended up being at the top end because of my research last summer. However I'm probably be frustrated if I thought I was good at something, and then came to college to find out that I was at the bottom end. Either way I'm pretty sure the right attitude would be to find a helpful peer willing to teach you what they know. It's hard to stomach your pride and search for help, but in a world where your feelings are triumphed by external situations, remaining objective is the best way to better yourself.

Now back to Hydrogen Economy. We ended up completing the three projects planned in the instructor's professor's lab--creating graphene oxide fibers, graphene oxide aerogels, and synthesizing hydrogen from molybdenum disulfide. It was all really cool; I was particularly excited by the aerogels since the methods used to create these were different from those used to create the silica aerogels used for my research project. Also I got to know my rotation group a lot better--the HydroEcon Skwad.

I should also mention what happened with my research project. So originally we wanted to use our aerogels as water filters, but they ended up being superhydrophobic and didn't let any water through. As a result we ended up making mixed-media filter from fine and coarse sand, charcoal, ceramic beads, and gravel. We conducted some tests to compare these filters to commercial, popular filters like Lifestraw and Lifesaver Bottle. We found that our filters were not nearly as effective as the commercial ones. It may seen like our research "failed" since the novel part of it, the aerogel filtration component, proved to be a poor filter. However we were definitely able to reach conclusions speculated by papers we read. We also were able to suggest many future directions for this area of research given our findings. Personally I gained a ton of lab experience (always wear your goggles, kids) that I hadn't acquired last summer or in school. I guess I also acquired a more realistic view of research. I already "knew" that research is often unsuccessful and that breakthroughs are rare, but I think now I understand that truth a bit better. It's not so much that research is unsuccessful as it is lengthy. If my group had more time we'd have added some chemical coating to our aerogels to make them more hydrophilic. We might actually do this later this summer. Because we had so many ideas about future applications for the aerogels, we asked our professor if we could come back to her lab in late August or early September to test our ideas and possibly continue our research. Thankfully she said we could work something out; I'm pretty excited to make it happen!

The people at GSET are amazing. When I first came to GSET I was a bit shy, and found myself searching for parallels between GSET scholars and people from Montgomery. I guess it was just easier to make judgments that way. But as time passed, I unsurprisingly realized that people at GSET are completely different from any similarly-looking or acting people at Monty. In other words I judged some people before I knew them and I was way off. It's all good though because I've had a month to get to actually know them and now I have some pretty awesome friends.

Most GSETers know that this camp is not an opportunity to be wasted. Even if you're as introverted as I am, you find yourself reaching out and talking to people that you never would have approached in high school. You can literally walk up to anyone in GSET and strike up a conversation--they won't judge you or ignore you. We're all here to learn more about each other and why science is cool, and making new friends is a huge part of expanding our knowledge and experience.

We're also really diverse. It was really interesting for me to talk to people from other schools and environments. One of the people in my project group was from JP Stevens and we had a long conversation about the differences between our Science Olympiad teams. A couple of my friends go to private or magnet schools with radically different social environments and class requirements. Maybe one of the most interesting conversations I had was talking with my friend Sarbari about her school and home. She's from Robert McNair Academy, which is in Jersey City. It was really cool learning about her house and mine---she lives in an apartment building close to her friends, where she is really close to all of her neighbors. I live on an acre plot of land and rarely communicate with my neighbors. Another one of my friends has had a ton of experience with working at various places for extra money; meanwhile I've never worked for payment a day in my life.

Beyond the students, I should mention that all of the instructors and mentors volunteer their own time for free to lecture us each day for four weeks in topics way beyond high school study. They're all distinguished and really friendly, and answered all of my questions I had in great depth. I was a bit scared of my research mentor at first but after talking to her more I've found that she's a very interesting and thoughtful person. We had some really intriguing conversations about high school education and whether or not most engineers are the eldest siblings in their family.

I also need to talk about the RTAvengerzz!! The RTAs are literally the most amazing people in the world. They're like superhumans. They run everything that happens at GSET--morning sports, shuttling us to all of our classes and project meetings, guiding research groups, organizing special events and the GSET challenge, ordering food, night shifts, and perhaps most importantly, staying incredibly positive and cheerful literally day and night. During our Dry Run Presentations day the RTA Research Coordinator had to take a nap after lunch because he was watching Project Dry Run presentations from 9:40 in the morning.

Not to mention that the RTAs are all amazing people aside from their performance at GSET. They all have like research grants and play a bunch of instruments/ sing really well and really love science and people. It really annoys me when people are disrespectful to them, they deserve a huge thanks from GSET scholars everywhere. I also think people should put themselves in the RTAs' shoes, to understand the sheer amount of responsibility they need to bear.

A lot of people say that GSET was a life changing experience for them. I dont know that for sure since I haven't experienced life after GSET yet, but I'm inclined to think that I've become a lot more enlightened about the world, better at communication, self-confident, and independent than I was before. By independent I mean able to remain positive and support myself without the encouragement and sheltering of my parents; I also mean not taking the words of others personally and realizing that I have more in common with others than I previously thought. I guess I would've acquired this skill in college, but it's good to have beforehand.

This month has definitely been memorable, and although I was skeptical at the beginning, I think I can understand what is meant when the RTAs say we're all part of the GSET family. I'll definitely miss GSET and the people there, but as Dean Antoine says, it's not "good bye", just "see you later!" Looking forward to the reunion in the fall ;)

July 10, 2015: Hydrogen Economy, Thorlabs, Polynomiography, and Hydrophobic water filters

Imagine that you are stranded far out at sea, swimming against a strong current to stay afloat. You see a boat approaching and you swim toward it. As you reach, you can't hop right into the middle of the vessel so you clamber onto the edge. This is how sulfur atoms feel when they are heated up and bombarded through a quartz tube during chemical vapor deposition, according to one of the researchers working in the lab of my Hydrogen Economy instructor. Hydrogen Economy is one of the electives that I'm taking. It focuses largely on materials science, and we learn mainly about the use of hydrogen in the energy industry.

CVD is a method used to create really thin (like two atoms thick) nanomaterials. We learned about how CVD is used to create a material called molybdenum disulfide used in the production of hydrogen. Hydrogen is an ideal fuel to use in fuel cells and other power components of industry, except scientists have trouble producing/ isolating it in large quantities. The reaction can be sped up if platinum is

[Be sure to turn the captions on in the bottom left hand corner for the slideshow]

After that we had a very enlightening guest speaker. You know those fractal pictures you see at MHS as you're walking toward the math hallway? Well they're actually pieces of art created by a relatively new field of mathemetics called polynomiography by Dr. Bahman Kalantari, a professor of computer science at Rutgers. He creates fractals from the solutions of polynomials in order to demonstrate to students the innate beauty of STEM. He's internationally recognized and very successful, so I was pretty shocked when during his

Greetings from the Water Tribe, aka GSET scholars living on the 3rd floor of BEST (Busch, Engineering, Science and Technology) dorms on Busch Campus at Rutgers. We have completely different academic and hobby experiences, but we're all pretty excited about spending time together for a month learning about the real world applications of science.

Or at least we were on the first day of GSET. Then we got the schedule, the first page of which I've provided below:

I think I've forgotten what free time is. Hence why I'm writing this post on July 4th. For contrast here's the schedule for the Governor's School of Sciences. It was posted in the GSET Facebook group and made us laugh and cry at the same time:

I'm not gonna lie, GSET is intense. For the first couple days I got up early and went jogging during morning sports at 6:30, but found myself literally falling asleep in classes throughout the day. Sure, the classes were a bit slow at first, so that may have contributed, as well as the fact that they were mostly lectures, but I couldn't believe I was actually in danger of falling asleep. That would be incredibly disrespectful to the teachers and to GSET in general. I then tried skipping morning sports, but still felt tired throughout the day.

Fortunately, I've been getting used to it and the classes have become soooo much more interesting. We have two core classes, Modern Physics and Robotics, as well as Electives. For those I'm taking Hydrogen Economy, Fundamentals of Micro and Nanofabrication, and Introduction to MATLAB, a software used for data visualization.

Modern Physics is awesome. The professor, Mike Gentile, is amazing at explaining concepts in quantum mechanics and astrophysics without mathematics. I actually was really interested in dark matter last year, and did my Physics B project on the detection of dark matter particles. So, I thought I was pretty knowledgeable about the Standard Model, the 4 fundamental forces, quantum theory, etc, at least conceptually. But Prof. Gentile explained subtle connections I hadn't made before, and in only 2-3 classes has given everyone a more robust understanding of particle physics than my many hours of Internet surfing. I also was excited to hear that he's really into physics education research. I went up to him on the first day and told him about the essay I had to write on Eric Mazur, TEAL, and David Hammer before Physics B, and that I was really interested in that field of research. He said he knew a lot about these techniques and ideas, and that he really likes physics ed. research since it merges areas of psychology/ neuroscience and physics in order to understand how best to educate students.

Robotics is similarly enlightening. The teacher, Andy Page, is hilarious and, according to the RTAs, knowledgeable about pretty much everything. We're using Lego Mindstorms as robots, and instead of using the simple drag and drop programming software the Mindstorms come with, we're using another C-like environment called Brick. Our first task is to make the Mindstorm follow a black curvy line. Then we have to make it navigate through a maze, and finally we're gonna have a Sumo wrestling tournament with the other groups. Yesterday we figured out how to program the robot to follow the line. It took about 20 tries but we finally got it:

As for my electives, they're all pretty awesome. One thing I noticed is that a lot of people from other schools haven't taken as many AP science classes as I have. Either their schools don't offer APs or their science programs are structured so that it's hard to take multiple AP classes before becoming an upperclassman. For that reason, it's sometimes hard to keep up with the electives, since the teachers often use presentations geared toward freshmen or sophomore undergrads. I'll post some more info about the electives later once I get more pictures.

My research project has been pretty exciting. I'm working with 3 other GSET scholars to research the water filtration capabilities of a type of foam called aerogel. Aerogel is mostly famous for being the best insulator on earth, but it also has a million microscopic pores and could be very effective as a water filter. Research has been done on using carbon aerogels for water filtration, but we are going to investigate using silica aerogels. We're also going to compare the silica aerogels to other filtering materials (coffee filter, sand, grains, screens, etc.). Here's a picture of some sol gels we made a few days ago. Sol gels, or solution gels, are colloidal solutions that can be drained of their liquid constituents so that a intricate, porous framework remains.

Anyway, I think that's enough material for today. If you have any questions email me!

-Shivani