Reflection Essay

My project for the practicum was analyzing methane concentrations of sediment at the wetland Jug Bay. I found the research internship course, FIRE199, the program for my site, through an email that was sent out by the College of Computer, Mathematics, and Natural Sciences. After reading the email, I decided to take the chance by applying to this opportunity because it sounded interesting and aligned with my interests and was able to get into the course. I would advise future SGC Scholars who are looking for potential internships or research opportunities to always reach out to professors or anyone that may have information about certain opportunities. There is no harm in reaching out, and it could eventually lead to them connecting with future supervisors and mentors.

The tasks I performed at my internship involved physically going to the field to collect samples of soils in various locations, aliquoting the samples into smaller portions, extracting gas within the aliquots using a small needle and excreting the gas in order to analyze the methane concentration using gas chromatography. Additionally, we had to create the structures used for taking the soil samples, which were just long plastic tubes, where we would drill small holes in the side, in order to easily be able to aliquot the samples.

Before this internship, I had no prior knowledge on soils and how gas moved through the soil. However, through this internship, I was able to not only work directly with soil, but also learn about certain processes in the soil that allow gasses like methane to form in the soil. Also, I was able to gain experience in using lab equipment and methods like gas chromatography, a process that I have never had any experience with prior. The only times that I had been able to use lab equipment was for labs for classes like organic chemistry and cellular biology, where the main objective was to gain an understanding in how to use this equipment. However, this internship was vastly different from those experiences because I was not only learning how to use new equipment, but also being able to recover significant data that serves to answer a research question.

In participating in this research internship, I was able to gain an understanding and appreciation of what many researchers did in their everyday lives. Before this, I did not have the clearest idea of the strenuous work that researchers would do, definitely underestimating the amount of time they put into their own research. After experiencing this firsthand, at a shortened amount of time compared to other researchers, I knew that this was definitely something that I would consider doing in my future. No matter how much time I put into the internship, I enjoyed every moment of it, even if it meant taking hours to aliquot the soil into smaller samples. Also, because my project involved working with other students, it allowed me to gain a sense that science is best done together with others. Conducting lab work without others is extremely difficult because of the amount of repetitive tasks and time spent in the lab. This experience actually pushed me to involve myself in a lab, so this semester, I reached out to one of the graduate students that were subbing in for one of my courses and asked her to participate in one of her labs, in which she replied yes. So since then, I have been volunteering at her lab, doing similar research to what this research internship had focused on. In addition to this, I want to be able to participate in my own research study, so I plan on taking my education to the graduate level, where I would potentially apply to UMD's own graduate program MEES.

Last modified: 12 May 2025