Independent Study: Cognitive Disorders Lab Research
Today's goal was to become more comfortable in the lab setting and get accustumed to what I will be dealing with for the next three weeks. For my future projects, it was explained that I needed to have very precise amounts of a certain substance in order to have the least amount of variants and the more practice I had, the better off I would be. Not to mention the idea that they are building my confidence with certain tasks so that I am able to reach a point where I can become more independent towards my study, without needing the constant supervision. For this reason, they put me through a 'pipette bootcamp' where I would set the pipettes ot their highest setting and pipette water into a weight tray on a scale. I would record the weight in mg (1mg=1ul) and repeat 10 times per pippete. There were 4 different types of pipettes, each having the capacity to measure different amounts of microliters. After all of the data was gathered, I record the mean, standard deviation, and coefficent of variant. The link below will direct you to all of my raw data: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nASqhfpMdqDbUgmxk3EpmxX4fGoAritEaZNIY7SI1ag/edit?usp=sharing The process took quite some time due to the fact that I needed to work slowly to ensure that I was being as percise as possible. Looking back to my data and after calculating the coefficient of variant then turning it into a percentage, I found that a lot of my percentages were below one (you want the lowest percentage possible; the higher percentage, the higher percentage of varibility). This impressed me considering it was my first time. However, when I was measuring the p20s I had noticed that my numbers were a little off. After discussing my findings, I learned that the scale was inaccurate when weighing such a small amount of water. Despite this, I had a great experience and was excited when I saw that the numbers were getting closer to what they supposed to be.
These are the two graphs based on my data (the only difference is the scale).
1 Comment
Michael House
5/21/2019 11:15:21 am
Great start, Caroline. I look forward to following along.
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Welcome to my first independent study!
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