Final Exam Week Approaches

The spring semester is coming to an end, and I realize that taking too many classes doesn’t work for me. One reason was that I didn’t get to spend that much time with my kids this part of the year. For example, the only time I saw my oldest son was at night when he was sleeping or in the morning heading off to school. I spent most of my time at school, I felt like I ate, slept, and worked at the campus. Although it did payoff in the end, the grades I got were acceptable before the final exam results. Good Luck to all fellow interns for exam week. I look forward to next semester in the fall, and plan to work on a car to broader my knowledge in repairing things like Fix-It-Felix, Jr.

 

Figure 1. The picture shows the Scantron form in action for a exam. Again good luck to the lab interns who have final exams.

On the other hand, my knowledge around the bio department is more of a natural reaction. For instance, I can walk into the lab and mix, autoclave, and pour media; moreover, I can prepare sterilize test tubes, sample and inoculate plates, and count CFU’s if I have previous incubated plates from the previous days of sampling. It seems like a lot in one day, but it is a natural outcome due to the hours put into the internship. If I had time to do something else after the project, I would autoclave bio waste of the biohazard bags, help Kim setup labs or disassemble labs, wash dishes, or other tedious work. I know I used the word “tedious,” but I meant tiresome and not boring like the definition. The constant pace of pouring three hundred plates of TSA liquid would be the meaning of the word “tedious” in my sentence above

I have sampled this week the Handicap buttons, lab work benches, and the classroom Apple IPads. I thought the handicap buttons would have more CFU’s, but the result showed that the inside bathroom buttons were mostly contaminated. The sun beaming down on the campus could be another reason for low counts on the handicap buttons. The UV rays can disrupt their DNA which it codes for their function as a microbe. Furthermore, the temperature for the week of Phoenix, AZ has been an average of 93°F for the past three days. Thus, the temperature converted to Celsius is 33.3° C. In conclusion, bacteria want moisture, warmth, and nutrients; they existed more in the bathroom because the moisture from maybe completely dried hands and locked in moisture from the outside temperature. The air outside is dry and the sun hitting the handicap door maybe messed with the results. The updated bar graph below in Figure 2 show them in order from highest to lowest.

Figure 2. It looks like the lab workbenches of the DB building are less in CFU's. Thus, the highest is still drinking fountains, and soap dispensers came in second. In conclusion, outside objects in Arizona seem like they pose likely no harm for contacting or gaining transient flora on the hands.