Phase 1

May came crawling in, reluctantly, taking her precious time. Didn't she know that I've been waiting on her for a while now? May would mark the end of my first semester as a PhD student, the first semester of actually thinking (because I thought I was thinking before this semester, but I only now discovered the real definition of thinking, while reading), and the first semester as a Prep TA. Coming straight from my undergraduate, I had no clue what to expect, think, or do. Nonetheless, with the guidance from my mentor/advisor, it was a successful semester in my books, giving me a sense of great satisfaction at the end. 

Summer 2019 began like all others...with me being elated to take a break from the school year. After about a week of total relaxation, I continued working on myself, thinking up short and long term goals. My summer goals were to complete 3 papers, albeit this was a very ambitious and far reaching goal for a first year PhD student, who was still discovering where she fit best in this program. Nonetheless, I stuck to the goal, and dived into reading papers, or trying to. I dabbled with papers about photosynthetic processes, rice, crop modeling, and climate modeling. I soon rediscovered that there is so much I don't know. It got me thinking, "If I had a super power, I think it would be to touch any literature and absorb all the information." Unfortunately, I don't have that power. So I read on.

In addition to this, I signed up for two conferences, and aided my lab mate in experiments. We planted a lot of rice seeds! After a couple of weeks, we had very sad rice. They wanted to be outside, basking in the sunlight, but outside was not ready until the next week. When that week came around, we transplanted the rice plants, fertilized the field. The rice were soon happy again. In the third week of June, we planned to do measurements.

The weather app showed that it was supposed to be raining that week, but it was as if they had hired a new sun. This new sun did not come to play any games, it took it's job too seriously. It was hot! Scratch that... it was HOT. Skins were burning, shoes were on fire, and our vehicles had been replaced with furnaces. We came to the field at 5:30 in the morning, then began measurements at 6. We used our LI-6400XT and the MultispeQ devices, to obtain information which would inform us about the photosynthetic capabilities of the rice which we planted. MultispeQ takes measurements in 12 to 15 seconds, however using the Li-6400XT, meant that we would take about 3 hours to complete the measurements of the 80 rice plants...on a good day. We measured 3 times for the day, with a break at 10 AM, and at 1 PM. My lab mate and I laughed a lot, sang very loudly, danced a little bit, and learned about each other's cultures... all while doing science! It was fun, call it fun in the sun. 

On the 9th day of measurement, on the 1st of July, we ran into difficulties. We had a makeshift underwater battery, which lasted the whole day without changing (which was sweet because the batteries which came with the device lasts about 2 hours), connected to our LI-COR machine. We connected the battery via some make-shift wiring and high physics connections (real scientist business). On the 9th day, the pin, where the battery was connected to the Li-6400XT, broke off. It could not power on, until we could change the pins. We needed just one more day of measurement to have nine points to construct our temperature and light curves. We were able to obtain a LI-COR from another department, and after our minor set back, the first phase of measurements was over.