Miss You, Bae: The Final Post

Hey readers!

Wow. I turned in my final paper on Thursday and delivered my final presentation on Friday evening, so this amazing journey has come to an end. For all my readers who couldn't make the presentation, here is the link to my slides. For you especially curious readers, here is the link to the PDF of my final paper. Thanks to everyone who stayed/came for my presentation... you guys are the best -- I felt so supported and happy to share my results with everyone!

Nailed the presentation like Iso Joe nailed that game-winner...

I'd be completely remiss to not give specific thanks to Dr. Herbots and Mrs. Haag for their amazing guidance and mentorship throughout my project. Dr. Herbots was the greatest expert advisor because she basically gave me autonomy in what kind of project I wanted to pursue, allowing me to combine the use of Ion Beam Analysis and 3LCAA to my heart's content. Yet, she provided with amazing guidance through all the steps, helping me in the lab, interpreting the results with me, and objectively judging the conclusions I made to help me strengthen them. She was truly an expert advisor, and I want to thank her for her amazing mentorship for the last 1.5 years!

Apart from being an amazing teacher and mentor, Mrs. Haag definitely gave me a lot of personal support throughout the grueling research process. For all the obstacles I faced with reducing the number of samples and semi-changing the experimental design, Mrs. Haag was always supportive and understanding, arming me with contingency plans and encouragement. I genuinely couldn't have done it without her!

Mrs. Haag = OG

On a more content-related level, the amazing way Mrs. Haag and AP Research helped me was ultimately in communicating my research. I'd been in the lab since the beginning of junior year, so I didn't need AP Research to get me started in research. BUT even though I had given poster and oral presentations and even written a published paper in junior year, I couldn't convey important aspects of my research in an understandable manner to everyone. I would either go way too technical and not reach the ultimate purpose or importance of the research, or simplify too much. Going through my project with Mrs. Haag -- thoroughly reviewing the literature on my own to nail the terminology down, planning my own experimental design, writing a proposal, and explaining my project to her -- really helped me get the importance of my research project and allowed me to easily convey the significance. 

What this manifested in was not just my own personal satisfaction of being able to communicate my research effectively (oh, don't worry that was huge), but also lots of accolades I wouldn't have otherwise won. So, in October, I got the best oral presentation at the American Physical Society meeting basically just because I had just done a lit review and explained all of my research to Mrs. Haag (also Seminar slide tips). I could convey my information clearly and understandably. AP Research also allowed me to convey the significance of my research conversationally -- I felt it really helped for interviews for colleges and talking to adults about my research.

Moreover, I was able to author another paper on the research I did for my research project, and we're submitting that for publication later this month. This Tuesday, I'm presenting a poster at the Materials Research Society meeting, with basically data entirely from my AP Research project. So, AP Research let me conduct real, interesting, and ground-breaking science but also understand it extremely well to communicate it to others. And that's pretty powerful.

As Dr. Jette said, it's all about power.

Both AP Research and AP Seminar definitely forced me to confront my fear of writing (lol... it's true). Before Seminar, I used to get super nervous about writing anything, so I would never start English assignments until the last minute. The rigorous planning that we conduct and the outlining we do made that job so much easier, and now I honestly take pride in my writing and love it. In college, I'm going to have to write a lot, so that was extremely helpful. Moreover, I learned to formulate an argument in a paper, which really really really helped me out in writing scientific papers. Because of these skills (which I DEFINITELY wouldn't have without Seminar), I could first-author a paper in a scientific journal in junior year.

So, I really owe a lot of stuff to AP Capstone and Mrs. Haag, and I will definitely continue to use the skills I gained in the program to understand and communicate research with writing or speaking. 

Well, that basically raps this year up... I can't even believe it. For all you readers that have been following for a while now, you're the best... I hope you enjoyed the wild ride we've been on... 

I've genuinely gave the last two years of AP Capstone my best, and it's the greatest feeling!

Signing off for the last time,

Yash-ip out <3

Miss you baes!

Yash

(845)

Sick Presentations!

*Nasal-y voice*

Hey readers!

So, last week, I came down with some crazy congestion/illness which severely altered my voice and gave me some headaches. But, not to fear, it's crunch-time, so I kept plugging through it. I gave 2 practice presentations last week, one on Tuesday and one on Saturday.

Literally, how I looked after blowing my nose all day and not sleeping.

For Tuesday, I started out on fire 🔥 , but then following an infamous drop of the clicker (ask Mrs. Haag -- it shattered into exactly 1,000,000 pieces), things went off the rails a bit. It wasn't the clicker, but the organization of my presentation that caused the issues. As I referenced last week, I simply broke my slides up into 3LCAA and Ion Beam Analysis. By splitting by analysis technique, I was trying to minimize repeated explanations of the same methods and stick to chronology. 

However, the transitions between the experiment and the analysis of the results were lacking, causing me to lose my wonderful audience of Dr. Scaling, Mr. Lester, Ms. Conner, and Mrs. Haag. Moreover, I was discussing implications right with the data, and I didn't have broader conclusions at the end of each section, so my audience couldn't keep track of all the conclusions I was making until I showed them my last few slides. Like most issues with explanations of my project that happened this year (let's get reflective one week early), it stemmed from my complete immersion in my project and the data, which a normal person couldn't understand from my explanations. For a greater understanding of my results and to hit all those points on the rubric, I needed to connect my results to their significance more (e.g., IBA spectra and overlays to UNIFORMITY).

It's never good when your audience looks like this when you're presenting data.

As you can imagine, making such amateur mistakes was frustrating, so I had to go back to the drawing board. 

Rip.

Going into Saturday, I needed a real re-organization and re-framing of the Methods --> Results --> Discussion sections. After talking to Dr. Herbots and Mrs. Haag, I decided to frame my entire research with 3 questions, and then divide my presentation into 3 sections based on these questions (It's "HemaDrop™ It Like It's Hot" after all, I couldn't give you a blog post without some technical information 😉 ):

1. Can hyper-hydrophilic coatings dry a blood droplet quickly into thin solid films? (Optical Observations)

2. If so, are the blood thin solid films created uniform in composition? (Ion Beam Analysis)

3. If so, what parameters optimize hyper-hydrophilicity to maximize uniformity and feasibility? (3LCAA)

Based on these questions, the clear goal of each experiment is articulated before, and I answer each question after each section. This organization worked much better, and my presentation on Saturday was much improved (only 2 minutes over and way clearer). 

RIP 3LCAA table (I took out a wildly confusing and variously colored table of values lol). You had a good run, but ultimately, my bar graph conveyed all the information you said and more. If you want to see the infamous table, you can read my paper!

However, there is still work to be done! Dr. Herbots and Mrs. Haag both stated that they wanted a clearer connection to implications when I present data, so I have been working on putting in graphics, which appear as talk connecting specific aspects of the results to the implications for answering the questions. Moreover, I need to transition better between the research questions, as Mrs. Haag said that it was really clear within each section, but why we could move on to each new one was confusing. I anticipate adding a better transition slide between sections.

Practicing has been going well, as it has allowed me to try out different types of slides and make changes. But I think I've established the best organization for my presentation, so most slide-editing should end by Monday. Then, I can hone in on my delivery, which has been pretty good and natural so far. 

Interestingly, Dr. Herbots loved the new organization so much that she suggested changing my paper to fit this organization, which has really helped my word count. I am close to 5500 words now, and still can streamline a few more sections. Monday and Tuesday are major crunch-times for cutting my paper and making sure it's my best work. 

Last week! And I think we're in pretty good shape.

As an FYI, my final presentation is THIS Friday (!), which is April 14, from 6 - 6:30 pm, so, as a loyal reader, you're invited to hear me talk about what I've done this year and some cool results.

FRIDAY NIGHT!

Please!

See you there!

Yash

(767) 

🔑 🚨

Making the Real Ideal

Hey readers!

Well, only 11 days until "The Final Upload" (aka the reckoning) and 12 until "The Presentation" (aka the end)... what does this mean? This means that we're touching up our papers, optimizing our PowerPoints, and rehearsing our presentations. It also means this is probably one of the last 3 entries I'll post -- it's been a great year, and I'm definitely intend on finishing strong.

This has no relevance, but I saw it when I searched "finish strong," and I'm still so shook...
In this gif, my research project is diarrhea, but it's way too fun to be that.

Last week, I went into ASU to meet with Barry Wilkens, the OG lab manager and resident RBS/PIXE guru at IBeAM, where he showed me some cool tricks with RUMP (a program used to analyze RBS data).

Here's a screenshot of the RUMP command line (requires some bare-bones coding)...
the creator in the 1980s was a troll, as you can see by the prompts (in white).

With Barry's help on the RBS and PIXE, I could obtain the percent composition for each element in the BSS Saline we analyzed... this is my final result! I compared this value to the percent compositions for elements in the characterized Saline solution (on the bottle), and we got some really new interesting results to add to my paper.

About that paper -- I'm still cutting that down, but I have been working on revamping the methods to align better with my project and not provide so much needless detail. But, I know what y'all really care about... current total: 5,800. So, getting there.

Just trust the process...

Regarding my presentation, I was pretty happy with my slides going into my meeting with Mrs. Haag, but afterward, I realized that I have a lot of work to do. One misconception I had when I made my slides was that I wanted to minimize the number of slides I had to below 30. For scientific presentations in the past, I had done this, but since the AP Research presentation (and all for that matter) should be really engaging, I scrapped this semi-arbitrary limit and made many many slides. From my practice so far, changing the slides regularly (as opposed to ~ 1 min/slide) gives me a lot of momentum and confidence, so that's nice. I have fixed this in my presentation.

Keepin' things fast-paced to keep the audience engaged is the name of the game

Moreover, another mistake I always make is trying to cram a lot onto 1 slide. With the new fast-paced approach, I can separate a lot of slides into 2. While I did have a good amount of SmartArt that made my presentation look clean and animations to make points, I increased the use of animation and reduced the plain words in my talk.

They don't want us to use animations to fulfill a purpose, so we gotta...

So -- the ideal presentation ultimately matches form to function... all animations contribute to the understanding of the material and nothing is extraneous. Moreover, words are minimized on the slides other than key points, so that key points are reinforced but the audience is not distracted from the speaker. Additionally, the pace should be quick, but the articulation of the ideas should be clear and measured. 

One example of a great slide was on Ved's presentation where he had the information we wanted to garner (the gap from the lit review) and the methods used to get that information (with arrows), so I'm lowkey (well, high key now) going to steal that slide, and use that idea throughout. Also, an ideal presentation should not jump around to save time and improve the reader's understanding. So, I decided I will split my ppt not by methods, results, and discussion, but into sections of experiments (i.e., 3LCAA and RBS). The main reason for this is that I was basically explaining lots of information twice when I talked about the method and then the results. So, now I minimize repetition, and the presentation should be easier to follow. 

So, the main takeaway is FORM --> FUNCTION... and keep related things connected.

While I used a lot of Seminar tips, I personally did not love that style of presentation, especially with my technical project. But, a purely scientific presentation with no aesthetic is also boring and not how most research presentations are, so I am finding the happy medium. A major tip I took from Seminar is using graphics and pictures effectively. My old presentations were trash, with no aesthetic and no form matching function, so I am really excited to use this presentation, especially because I am going to give a similar talk at the Materials Research Society Spring Meeting at Phx Convention Center on April 18. 

To practice for both, my plan is to do a presentation before I eat anything. This way, I can minimize the snacking I do and practice a bunch. I will at least get to practice 3 times a day, and if I am going out for lunch, I will practice before I leave. I don't want to do any more, since I would need time in between to refine my presentation and script, especially at first. 

I anticipate having ample practice, especially because my lab crew (Dr. Herbots and co) also want me to practice for them. Rehearsing is important, especially with the amount of slide changes I have to do now.

Well, that's it for this week -- stay posted! It's getting heated -- final 2 weeks! 

Major 🔑  🚨 ,

Yash

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