The following reports were written by members of Environmental Science during the fourth day of the program. Some elements may have been removed/edited for various reasons, but the text that remains is in the student's own words.
Today's class was better than yesterday, because today we worked on our projects in our groups. Tomorrow we have to present them in front of our class, Shodor staff, and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.
Ebonee
Today's class was very interesting. We got to work on our projects which we have to present for the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. I think that our project is going to be a success.
Le'Roy
Today Renee and I finished collecting most of the data that we needed for our project. It turned out that finding transition structures was a lot more difficult than we expected. We were only able to find one (and we aren't sure that our structure is correct) when we had originally planned to find four or five. We have learned a lot about new computational methods and free radical chemistry in the past day and a half.
Hugh
We worked all the day on our project: I built a model about the Italian population increase in the last century, and it was hard work. Le'Roy built the same model, about North Carolina's population, and our project is to compare them together. We'll see the results tomorrow... Ciao
Emanuele
Well, today was just wonderful... Hugh and I discovered that the calculations we had been using were incorrect because we were making the wrong transition structure. So we started again, and with our new knowledge were still unable to find reasonable results. Our project has reduced itself from comparing six structures to analyzing just one and comparing it with other data we have found in an online pdf of journal article about PAN. We have started outlining our presentation, and I think that we still have a lot to say, and the presentation will be good, even if it isn't what we were hoping for earlier today. At the moment, we only have a couple big questions, like why our calculated energies seem to be backwards...
Renee'