Second Day

Today, my group went to the School of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering. There, we met our project supervisor, Mr Kevin Kho, as well as some of his students, who were either undergraduates or PHD students. I felt very grateful for they are willing to spend their time teaching and guiding us along the way. After spending about an hour in the morning talking to us about himself and the challenges that Earth faces, Mr Kevin Kho brought us to the laboratory where we done our distillation project. He first went through how the machine distillates, not to mention about how the Gas Chromatography (CG) machine worked. After going through the machines in the lab, Mr Kho proceeded to let us use the machines. He had given us some conditions and we were expected to get some results through the use of the machines in the lab. Although my group faced some challenges in completing this task, we all felt that the activity was interesting and fruitful. Here comes our project challenge. We were expected to produce a solution with 77% ethanol with a variation of 0.2%. We were only supposed to use the Distillation column and the Gas Chromatography machine. Though we failed to do so, we found this challenge to be fun. At the end of all these, we ended up reaching back to our rooms very late and we were all very tired. During this day, I learned how the distillation column and Gas Chromatography machine worked. Also we learned that we must have vision and persevere to the very end. At first, I thought that distillation only had to do with the separation of mixtures, but during this project, I found out that through distillation ad Gas Chromatography, much more things can be achieved, but it still required effort. Currently right now, there is not much that I can find where I can apply this discipline, but it is more of the perseverance part which could really impact my life in the future. I find that today was much more engaging for the students as compared to the first day where the main focus was on the plenary sessions. But as engaging as it can be, we still need to be disciplined and put in effort in order to complete a task.