I have (somewhat) intentionally delayed writing this blog post to allow some time to reflect on my experiences over the six weeks of this internship. The final week was an extremely busy, distracted rush to the finish line, with a particular focus on communicating all of our team’s progress this summer. While we spent our other weeks endlessly working on our prototype, this was our week to display our work to others and add final details to our portable incubator. And before we even had time to process the ending of it all, I was saying goodbye to all the wonderful people that I’d spent this summer with. This was an eventful week, full of triumphant presentations and sad goodbyes.

Finishing Touches

The big day was tomorrow. The day we’d been working toward for weeks was tomorrow. On Monday, we worked hard on our presentation to viewers from the Rice University community and beyond. Tuesday was our team’s moment in the spotlight to describe our project and the progress we’ve made over the summer. We spent time adding to the presentation, then practicing, and making edits from there. Since we had gone down so many rabbit holes, with code and circuitry and heat transfer and box design, it was difficult to bring ourselves out of the design headspace and into a more general one. Not all of our viewers on Tuesday would be familiar with our project, so we would have to start from our client’s motivation and the problem of water quality. As we developed our PowerPoint, we practiced our “pitch” and refined many details after each run.

Monday was also the day for making finishing touches to Petri-FI’s incubator. With our new vertical box tested with a 48-hour incubation, we were excited to show our results and progress on our prototype. However, our circuit was still connected to an external breadboard. We wanted to be able to demonstrate the box without any wires being connected to another board, so we worked hard to solder wires onto an Arduino shield, a smaller circuit board that could plug directly into our Arduino Uno. This would reduce the size of our electronics enough to fit nicely into our box’s electronics chamber. While we made significant progress on the Arduino shield throughout the day, we encountered a few inexplicable issues with the circuit, so we chose to use the larger breadboard for our demonstration on Tuesday. Nevertheless, we made small quality improvements to the box and the circuit, including a brand new Petrifilm shelf for the incubation chamber, and wiring the breadboard to work on battery power instead of a power supply. Monday was fairly stressful, but we left the OEDK feeling exciting to present tomorrow.

Presentations

Tuesday moved very fast. Just as soon as we arrived at the OEDK for the morning, we were collecting everything we would need for the demonstration (luckily our goal was to make a portable incubator) and walking over to the Bioscience Research Collaborative (BRC). We were able to relax a little during the group lunch, and it was a wonderful to see all of the other teams alongside their prototypes as we gathered in the BRC. Before long, we moved into the auditorium, and began our short presentations.

The anticipation was fairly intense, but I couldn’t help but smile while listening to the other team’s presentations. I could see all of the hard work people put into their projects, and it reminded me of how far Team Petri-FI has progressed over the summer. When it was our time to present, we stepped up in front of the small audience, and began. Fortunately, our mentors and TA’s had helped up throughout the process, so we had a ton of practice (and it paid off). After each team had presented, we returned to our tables, where we had placed our prototypes. Now, it was time for demonstrating our actual device to others, and it also gave a chance for audience members to ask more questions about our physical incubator. We were able to have a lot more fun with this portion of the day, because we were now able to talk about the features and pieces of the device that we had worked so hard to create.

Tuesday’s presentation was the biggest moment of pressure for our team, but it was not the only presentation we would need to do. We also had a Thursday presentation in the OEDK for the members of the internship as well as the project clients. Because this one was a little less formal, we had more time to dive deeper into the engineering process we followed over the course of the internship. We spent much of Wednesday preparing for that presentation, by adding to a new PowerPoint and making adjustments to our incubator. Once we arrived on Thursday morning, we had also done a few rounds of practice, and we were excited to give our last presentation of the internship. After these six weeks, the it was incredibly rewarding to be able to share our progress, even with all of its mistakes and setbacks.

Near the End

Friday was like writing the last words of a novel. As we cleaned up Team Petri-FI’s table in the OEDK, and placing our prototype and components into a cardboard box, it felt like moving out of a house. The tables that were ordinarily covered in a mess of parts and tools and wires were wiped clean; they were now blank slates for new teams, in a new time and context, to build awesome things. The feeling of the end had been building throughout the week, so it was extremely emotional to see our team together for perhaps the final time, as we removed the last remnants of our incubator from our table.

I cannot emphasize the sense of community that everyone fostered throughout the internship. During the last day, we all tried to enjoy our final moments together. When I arrived on the first day, I could never have predicted how close I’d become with my teammates and fellow interns, and I was continually surprised by the fulfilling and hilarious experiences that I shared with them. Seeing everyone each morning and hearing about each team’s struggles and successes was a huge motivation to push through our team’s own challenges. Saying goodbye to all of my new friends and mentors was perhaps one of the hardest challenges.

 

Reflection

This internship has been an extremely valuable opportunity for me to learn skills applicable to the field of engineering. In my first blog, I discussed my excitement to apply my knowledge of coding and learn more about circuit design. I can comfortably say that I learned more than I ever expected about electrical engineering and Arduino programming. I can still remember a teammate explaining to me what a breadboard was, but by the last two weeks, I was comfortably (nay, happily) building and modifying our breadboard circuit. This internship also showed the importance of good communication skills in any profession. I had countless opportunities this summer to practice nearly every type of communication, from emails and quick conversations to full presentations. We had an abundance of support from our mentors at the OEDK, and everyone was extraordinarily kind and patient when teaching us, so it really was the perfect place to take risks, make mistakes, and build new skills.

I cannot thank everyone enough for making this summer such a wonderful experience. Our client, mentors, sponsors, and fellow interns helped to create a supportive, exciting, and comfortable environment for learning. I have so many wonderful memories from this summer, and I can’t wait to see many of my new friends throughout my time at Rice and beyond.

-Kenton Roberts