 |
 |
 |
TROUBLESHOOTING
|
|
|
Aah, yes: the bad, the worse, and the plain ugly of being an environmental scientist. For starters, let's make it clear that ESSRE should make each of their participants sign a liability waiver. Multiple times our group members saw their life flash before their eyes as they clung to a single rhododendron leaf in Site 3 for fear of misplacing a foot and thus crashing down the near vertical drop. Yes, site 3 was fun- but more so when it had rained the night before and we had to climb up the slippery hill to find samples at the top of the hill which fit our control variable. Perhaps if we were assisted by a team of professional rock climbers who could help us propel down our mountain, we wouldn't have felt as close to death as we did. But we're still alive, so it's okay.
 |
 |
 |
Besides the challenges of collecting soil samples, we had other mishaps in our experiment. The first mistake that we made was the misjudgment of matching the number of soil samples to the number of petrifilms needed to complete serial dilutions for each sample. There was a shortage of petrifilms at Roland Park, so we simply tossed samples (from sites which we already had enough samples from) and did not perform serial dilutions on them. We also managed (in the hubub of approximately 200 petrifilms) to mislabel. It was quite frustrating and caused much added stress. Luckily, we found the dilutions that we had mislabeled and everything was alright. We experienced a shortage of group members for the entirety of our experiment. One of the girls was not present for 2 full days. Another girl attended chemistry class from 9 to 12 every morning. The remainder of our group members had a lot of extra work piled on them as a result of the absences.
 |
  |
If we had to do this experiment again, we would make sure that we were more organized and more farsighted in our planning. We would have made sure we had enough petrifilms in advance to match the number of samples that we collected.