For my practicum project, I worked in the Biogeochemistry laboratory at the University of Maryland. This lab is located at the Chemistry Bldg, 1526, 8051 Regents Dr, College Park, MD, 20742. The principal investigator in the lab is Dr. Sujay Kaushal, and my site supervisor was Ashley Mon.
I originally found this site because Dr. Merck sent an email to our scholars class about a potential opportunity to work as an intern in this lab, and I decided to check out their website, https://kaushallab.wixsite.com/kaushallab, and it looked interesting, so I emailed Dr. Kaushal at skaushal@umd.edu. More broadly, my advice to scholars looking for a practicum project is to firstly just reach out to as many people as possible, and secondly to try and look for more hidden positions. What I mean by that is, the places you find when first doing a google search, or a search on something like linkedin, for example, will probably be the one other people find first, and will probably be getting a lot more applicants than they have positions for. By contrast, something you have to dig a bit deeper to find will probably get less applicants, and you might have a better chance of actually getting a position. Of course, if you’re interested in something that is very mainstream this shouldn’t discourage you from applying for it, but I would say that you probably have a better chance on positions which aren’t as easy to find.
Now discussing my practicum, the Biogeochemistry lab is a research lab which primarily investigates water quality in the College Park area, looking at various parameters, such as the concentrations of various trace elements in order to determine the health of the streams, and human impacts on the streams. In the lab, I performed a variety of tasks. One task is stream sampling, where I went out to 4 of our sites, three on campus and one nearby in Riverdale MD, and gathered samples. Another task was running samples on the Aqualog, which is an instrument in the lab. A third task is post-processing data on the ICP (which is another instrument in the lab), which involves adjusting various parameters on the ICP in order to calibrate its data, since its outputs are rarely accurate initially. Also, twice during my work in the summer, I was involved in a stream synoptic, which is a much more involved form of sampling where we go to many sites along a single stream in order to gather data along the entire stream. I was also involved in various lab upkeep tasks, such as acid washing, where you rinse bottles and place them in an acid bath, to remove organic contaminants, and sorting, organizing, and putting away lab equipment. This isn’t everything I did in the lab, but they are generally the most significant activities I participated in.
During my practicum, I learned many aspects of how to practice science in a lab setting. I learned about many procedures we do in a lab, and how particular the lab is with many procedures in order to make the data as reliable and consistent as possible, even if it takes a significant amount of time to do so. Some examples of this are us letting the aqualog “heat up” for an hour or so before use, or rinsing practically everything three times before we use it. These take time (the rinsing time does add up quickly, since we are often rinsing dozens or possibly hundreds of different things per day), but we still need to do it because we’ve found that it makes our measurements as accurate as possible.
Outside of science directly, this project has given me a much greater appreciation for the amount of work that needs to be done to perform ecosystem and environmental monitoring; our lab has a lab manager, a principal investigator, three graduate students, and generally three to eight interns at a time all working together on this, yet we only perform stream monitoring on just a few streams in a pretty small area, and stream and freshwater ecosystem health is just one small part of environmental health. So, putting this all together, this project has given me a much greater appreciation for the amount of work that needs to be done to adequately monitor the health of the environment as a whole. As for my future plans, I am still staying as a physics major, however I have enjoyed my work in the lab, and I do see a career path in something like this as an option if I decide at some point that I don't like physics anymore.