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 9

Today we follow Li Hong and her colleague Shu Hui

She introduced to us some very important Machinary which they use.

This is a HPLC (High-Performance Liquid Chromatography). This machine is very delicate in the sense that it coloumns and tubing are very fiine. Before she could put the solution that she wanted to test, she first had to purify by passing it through a syringe filter. This removes particles of certain micron. If not, it may clog up the machine which can be very costly to replace.

 This is a electronic pH metre. It is very sensitive and can measure up to 2 decimal places

Li Hong then introduced us to the NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance)

Quote from Wikipedia:

''Most frequently, NMR spectroscopy is used by chemists and biochemists to investigate the properties of organic molecules, though it is applicable to any kind of sample that contains nuclei possessing spin. Suitable samples range from small compounds analyzed with 1-dimensional proton or carbon-13 NMR spectroscopy to large proteins or nucleic acids using 3 or 4-dimensional techniques. The impact of NMR spectroscopy on the sciences has been substantial because of the range of information and the diversity of samples, including solutions and solids.''