Author: 
There are several fantastic things about the summer labs:
1. I am working with people I know from my course, so we can help each other out and learn together from our mistakes. Trial and error is essential in the learning process in my opinion.
2. We have time to make mistakes. During the 3 hours we typically have in labs in the week, we have a brief window of time in which we have to work around other students, so we can’t afford to make too many mistakes. However during summer labs we have the entire day to repeat and correct our mistakes, or scrap it altogether and start over. This doesn’t mean we can or should be careless, but there is less pressure which ensures we are more likely to be successful in the first place. There are about 15 of us in the labs and we are each doing something different so we don’t have to wait around as much.
3. We can practice whatever we like. We have studied microbiology techniques a couple of times this year but over summer we can repeat everything over and over until we can “do it in our sleep”.
4. We have learned how to fill out a risk assessment properly and to consider absolutely everything and anything that can go wrong to minimize any potential risks.
Some of the techniques I have practiced this week include:
gram staining
aseptic technique
spread plating
membrane filtration
pour plating
making agar
microscopy
swabbing
making ringers solution
fiber analysis
pipette usage
As well as the above we have been taught about the various kinds of agar and what will grow on them, how to isolate growth of desired bacteria and culturing said bacteria.
We have come up with a hypothesis for our project as well. So not only have we practiced invaluable skills that will help us over the coming years but we are also able to design and carry out a project that we are interested in. I have been thinking of additional projects since December and now I am finally able to do them!
We have a busy day on Monday as we will be making agar and starting our project in earnest, carrying out field work which is very enjoyable. Last week we were able to do a preliminary trial of our experiment in order to test different methods of collecting samples. We were able to see which was the best way to culture bacteria, and the best way to collect the samples. We found that spread plates are definitely not the way forward for the work we are doing. However rolling the swab straight onto agar and using membrane filtration was very useful.