Day 10 - Final - Thoughts

Hello, Benedict here.

I am glad to have been given this opportunity to shadow PhD students at Nanyang Technological University's  Materials and Science Engineering. It has been a very fruitful experience. It opened my eyes to both what research is about and tertiary education

In tertiary education, it it much more different from Junior College. There are no teachers there to push you to do your own work. You have to plan everything yourself, though you can still get the help of your fellow friends and the kind guidance of professors when needed. Everything from test to training means that you need to know your own subject well. Also time management is important as there will always be things for you everyday. It might be paper work like reports or hands on like doing characterisation of proteins. Overall I think it is a very independent thing.

This experience also showed me much more about research. Now when I look at things, it is from a deeper perspective, I used to wonder where these things come from.  Now I know that they are developed in labs. It is a very long process and can take years to be made. This is usually not appreciated by a layman, but now it has enlightened me. This period also showed me why research can be a long and tedious process. Although there are people who got lucky and got desired results through luck, more often than not it is through trial and error. Much similar to Thomas Edison's many trials to get the right material for the light bulb filament. Research is very methodical. If you fail, do not only try again. You need to attempt to identify what might be causing the anomly and then repeat the whole procedure. It might take long to finally narrow it down. But it will certainly be rewarding when you can finally find what you were looking for and maybe improve the life of mankind.

This programme has definitely sparked my interest in materials engineering and will always be on my mind for consideration as my future course.

Day 6 - Some familiar steps

Today we follow LiHong on her day.

Her part of the steps will seem familiar. She does dialysis, filtration and rotary evaporation. Lastly she uses DLS (Dynamic Light Scattering) to characterise the protein.

Firstly, she completes her dialysis:

 Carefully she, removes the remaining samples still in the dialysis bag.

She then filtrates the collected solution to obtain the filtrate residue

The clear filtrate still contains some protein, so she pours it into a round-bottom flask and put in an evaporator

The residue in the filter paper will be left in the oven to dry and the solution in the rotary evaporator will be left to run until residue appears. 

 We then followed LiHong to her training. Students have to apply for them to get a licence so that they can use the machines for protein characterisation.

The Malvern Nanosizer machine with the monitor. It uses DLS

The DLS machine

During the course, she learns to start up the hardware and software, if not the computer may crash if the wrong steps are taken.

She learns how to select the appropriate apparatus to use for different conditions.

She also learns how to read graphs and recognise anomalies in the graphs. A one common problem was due to dust and the trainer taught her how to spot them. The ability to recognise graph also will tell her if she is using the appropriate equipment or she should use a different machine to characterise the protein.