Before I came to University of Santa Barbara, I expected to be miserable and have to endure the ridiculous amount of work every day. However, my experience as a summer intern is actually very delightful. First day I showed up, the staff threw us a warm welcome party on the beautiful Goleta beach, and my lab mentor took me on a tour to the beautiful campus of UCSB. I have been to many universities, UC Irvine, UC Riverside, University of Michigan Ann Arbor, and University of Chicago etc. I have to say that UCSB is by far the most beautiful campus I have ever been to.

Another great experience about the summer internship is the seminars and GRIT talks. I have sited in three of those events. Every single one of them expands my horizon. In Professor David Valentine’s talk about ocean exploration, I learnt that there are large quantities of barrels, which contains toxic chemical DDT, are currently sitting on the ocean floor of our beautiful California coast. Those barrels are also leaking toxic chemical substance as I am writing this post now. When my girlfriend and I are having sushi dinner this weekend, I will certainly bring up this “exciting” news.

In lab, I really enjoy working on my project, which is to make tiny gel particles. By doing experiments on making different sizes of particles, I learnt how to use fluorescent microscope and measure length of the particles with imageJ. I was also trained on lab safety, which I surprisingly found it very interesting. The best part about lab safety is that one can never be too safe. Lab safety should not be taken lightly. Working in lab really is a unique experience for me. I now appreciate the grinding undergrad classes, which I will be taking for the next two years. To understand materials and pay attention in classroom definitely makes huge impact in term of performance and efficiency.