Lab Life Continues July 18-22

This week was full of continued learning from my coworkers and successful 3D printing. 

Apparently either PhD life and dating don’t mix well, or my coworkers were just having a “venting sort of day”. When the main topic of lunch conversation was about “every woman should watch and truly listen to the messages in ‘He’s Just Not That Into You’ and ‘How to be Single’.” Then the conversation progressed to Polish Tinder, which apparently is a legitimate dating platform here where people actually use Tinder to find a husband/wife. Well, I guess I'm glad I'm not currently planning on a PhD? 

Over the weeks I've improved my Polish vocabulary to also include the things below: 

Polish: ‘Nei’ = no ; ‘no’ = yes; ‘przepraszam’ (psheh-prasham)= sorry/excuse me; ‘na zdrowie’ (naz-dro-v-yeh)= to health (cheers)

Then my Italian coworker decided to also teach me more Italian this week. The Italian I know includes ciao (chow)= hello/goodbye but I was taught how to say F* you and F* it, which I won’t include the Italian on those… So I’m not really sure how useful of an Italian lesson I had from my coworker, but oh well it was a funny conversation nonetheless. 

This week we also finished our printing with the current hydrogel I was working with to create better images for a future publication. The problem with the gel we are printing is that it is reverse temperature responsive which means high room temperatures make the gel stiff (too stiff to get through the printing head). Our lab where the 3D printer is generally a non-AC room because there is also cell studies and chemical hoods in the room which prevent the AC from being on during those experiments. Thus the outside temperature has a large affect on our printing abilities so using the same parameters on two different days can unfortunately yield different results. Ultimately Wednesday was one particularly difficult day because it was extremely hot compared to the rest of the week. So we had quite the “humpday” filled with engineering and problem-solving to find parameters that would print given the changes in the room. Once I got working parameters I showed my supervisor the pyramid that I managed to print in which she promptly (accidentally) dropped on the floor and SPLAT went our sample! So she wasn’t allowed to touch the samples the rest of the day lol I had to be more delicate with them ;) As the rest of the week progressed we continued to have good results and got a cube and a pyramid to print well with the gel. We still had fun in the lab though, you could tell by Thursday we were silly and ready for Friday after a long afternoon of printing. 

The 3D modeling software I use and then a half destroyed sample during optimizing stages

SPLAT goes my pyramid

Our cube :) 

Having fun again on Thursday :)

Friday was a big day for me— this was the day that we planned to print the Block M models I made for the 3D printer. We spent a couple hours disassembling the 3D polymer printer and changing the material so we would print the Block M in blue, but eventually we had it all set to go. Unfortunately nobody marked the material we were printing so we guessed (wrong) as the first time we printed an M it didn’t exactly work out so well. However, we went back on Monday and changed the printing parameters to the other material (lowering the printing temperature) which fixed our problems and allowed us to print a beautiful Block M as a souvenir for me and my 3D printing summer! Naturally this was the most important component of my summer internship- making sure to print a Block M :D 

GO BLUE!