During my sophomore year, I was very interested in the possibility of going to graduate school. What are graduate schools looking for? Undergraduate research experience. Therefore, I applied for a fellowship through the Department of Chemical Engineering at Penn State. Several weeks later, I heard back with good news! I spent my summer after sophomore year (June-August, 2009) in State College working 40 hours/week with my research project. The research project was with Dr. Janik’s group.I decided to continue research throughout my junior year. This time, I was working on a completely different project. My new project involved the analysis of Lithium conduction in the crystalline polymer, LiClO4 PEO. Polymer electrolytes are very useful because of their conductivity potential in rechargeable, Lithium-ion batteries. In order to analyze the movement, different stability energies and transition state energies needed to be calculated. This research was very heavily computational, using external nodes (computers) to process the data. The picture below shows the computer modeling of my project:
Throughout the school year itself, I spent approximately 10-12 hours/week with regard to research. This number includes the time spent in lab as well as the time spent in group and individual meetings. I highly recommend getting involved with undergraduate research if you are at all interested. It allowed me to be more involved with my major as well as get to know the faculty and students better. In addition, it helped me make up my mind as to whether or not I wanted to go to graduate school.
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