Personal engagement

As someone apart of the Filipino-American culture, my family liked to eat a lot of seafood. Another favorite of most of the kids in the family was eating Nutella, which was a brand of peanut butter. My family used to tell me that these foods were important, that it gave me Omega-3 Fatty Acids. One major problem with this, was that I was allergic to both of these foods. So, I have to take supplements to get these vital nutrients, but it always threw me off that the supplements came from fish. Fish go rancid quickly, so why wouldn't the supplements as well.

Due to the conditions during the school year, I chose to do a data analysis lab instead of a wet lab. It was a difficult decision to make, since I knew that if I did a wet lab, I would know more about the experiment and be more precise in my paper. However, I did not have a space at home that would be safe, since I had siblings to take care of and the chemicals that would have been used in the experiment were toxic.

I also went through several different wet lab ideas, instead of this original lab, since I preferred the wet lab. I thought about doing the chemistry of paper recycling or about how much ammonium nitrate it takes to be toxic to fish in a body of water. In the end, I stuck with my original idea and looked through several papers worth (some papers had enough material to fill more than 100 pages) of material relating to my idea.

I gathered several papers worth of data in order to make whatever conclusion I had more plausible. Before I could use the papers though, I had to understand each of the papers' aims, who made them, if their method was reliable, and whether I could use the data in my analysis. Even if I did not include the data in my analysis, I still used their conclusions to influence my own.