Benjamin Leong, # Week 1.5, Greenhorn getting his green finger

The expression "expect the unexpected" comes to mind when describing the one and a half weeks that I have spent so far at Temasek Polytechnic. When I arrived at the lab on my first day I was expecting to meet my supervisor right away for my lab orientation. Instead, I met Pak Siong, my supervisor, only an hour later. In all fairness, Pak Siong is a very busy man, maybe even too busy. I can probably say the same about my PI Dr. Wuang since I hardly see either of them around the lab that I am working in. Nevertheless, Pak Siong has been doing his best to accommodate whatever questions I have, and on or two occasions, has even given me a helping hand.

During the first few days, I was attached to another intern Bradon, who is a final year student at Temasek Polytechnic. He has already been at the lab for some time and would be the one to show me ropes. I consider him being the one whom I am closest to at the lab, considering that not only do we get along well, but both of us also turn out to be former ACSians. In other words, students who that attended schools that are within the same family of educational institutes. We also share several other interests, the most prominent of them being tech savvy.

Admittedly, there were difficulties from the get go. For the first couple of days, I was unable to intensive lab work as I had to complete an online safety test, which I could not attempt due to technical issues. Thankfully, I have since been able to pass the test, but then a larger problem arose - mistakes, many of them. There were many things that Brandon taught me when I was shadowing him: nutrient testing for nitrates, nitrites and ammonia, cell counting and where I could find gloves in the lab to name a few. However, the steep learning curve was a bit more than I could chew and I found myself committing many errors. Some of which might have compromised my project.

The project that I will be working on is discovering how well two species of algae grow in two different growth mediums. The workload would be divided over two weeks in the sense that I would set up algae cultures for one species, before waiting a week to set up the cultures for the other species of algae. This was to allow me to become more familiar with the tests that I had to conduct on my algae cultures on a regular basis. Even then, I had great difficulty getting comfortable with such lab procedures. On day 4, I made so many mistakes that in rectifying them I clocked out from the lab four hours later than everyone else had. However, if it weren't for Pak Siong's help, I would probably have stayed past midnight.

In summary, I would describe these past one and a half weeks as a time for me to get a lay of the land. It has been humbling, but also educational in more than one way. While it has been a slightly rough start, I have been improving with noticeably fewer mistakes being made over time on my part, and I am taking gradually less time to complete tests on my algae cultures. I will be beginning the second phase of my experiment and my side project, which is now on the topic of electro-flocculation instead of the construction of a prototype bioreactor as I pitched during my EXP poster. Hopefully, things will only get better from here on out. Many thanks to Brandon, Pak Siong and Dr. Wuang for their patience and guidance as well.