Research Opportunities at Tufts
With all the newly accepted Tufts students looking to make their final college decisions, I started to think of what blogs might be helpful in making…
“I just ran up and down three flights of stairs four times holding a pyrex baking dish full of filters that I just took out of a 1000 degree kiln. What about you?”
This sentence was a common answer to the question, “what are you doing this summer?” For the many of you who are thinking about applying to Tufts, this could be you in three years!
For those of you who are going to be first year students in the fall, you’ll come to know the stairs in Anderson Hall very well if you’re in the School of Engineering. For those of you who have been at Tufts for 1, 2, or 3 years, the basement of Anderson has great all gender restrooms with very dramatic lighting. You should check them out once the construction is done. Enough rambling, what did I actually do this summer? The journey begins in August of 2015 when I was casually poking around the website for the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. If you’ve read some of my other blog posts, you now that I’m a chemical engineering student, and you might be wondering why I wasn’t poking around that website. I knew even before I took my first chemical engineering class that I didn’t really want to work in the big plants of the chemical industry. Instead, I wanted to direct my focus to environmental issues. I knew that I didn’t want to major in environmental engineering because I didn’t want to take classes about cement or static systems. My interests lie in the deeply complex fluid systems like air, groundwater, and wastewater. This led me to the IMPES (Integrated MultiPhase Environmental Systems) lab. I previously worked in a materials lab in the biomedical engineering department, and decided that finding the glass transition temperature of silk films wasn’t really interesting to me, so I decided to send a quick email to the head of the IMPES lab asking him if there were any spots for undergrads in the coming semester. Luckily for me, the lab had just received a grant from the NSF with the express condition of hiring an undergrad research assistant. So, in January 2016 I started working in the lab. Over the last seven months, I’ve been helping to set up and run a variety of experiments focused on the breakdown and fate of pharmaceutical pollutants in wastewater (glamorous, I know).
I’ve really enjoyed the opportunity to be able to apply some of my chemical engineering knowledge to environmental systems while also learning new things like fluid dynamics and transport phenomena. I firmly believe in the interdisciplinary nature of engineering subjects as a whole. Devices in the lab wouldn’t work without electrical engineers who also understand analytical chemistry techniques, without mechanical engineers who understand fluid mechanics, or without environmental engineers who understand the foundations of chemical engineering. Outside the lab, it can sometimes be difficult to see thee connections when my head is buried in my thermodynamics book or when I’m memorizing organic chemistry mechanisms and reactions. My summer involved a lot more than running up and down too many stairs or dodging construction equipment. I did something that I really loved, and I discovered a bunch of new interests, and I learned from some really amazing people about the work they’ve dedicated themselves to.
With all the newly accepted Tufts students looking to make their final college decisions, I started to think of what blogs might be helpful in making…
Creating a schedule for the first time can be a daunting task, especially for a first year engineering student. There are so many aspects to consider…
It’s Monday everyone! I’ve just spent the weekend studying and engaging in Boston’s gastronomy, but now it’s time to start the week. I truly hope…