Inspired by our water resources research with Dr. Wodzinski, Harrison Wong and I decided to do a spin off on one of her research projects over the course of the school year. Dr. Wodzinski served as our faculty mentor, and we used data from her agricultural runoff project in designing our project, “Filtration Capacity of Sand and GAC for Phosphate Removal.” Instead of mixing sand and activated carbon together homogeneously like we did with Dr. Wodzinski, we decided to create layers of sand and activated carbon to treat the contaminated water. For this project, we applied for and received an Undergraduate Research Center (URC) grant. As a result of receiving a grant, our time spent researching was funded, and we were expected to present our research in video format and in person at the Undergraduate Research Symposium (URS).

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By presenting our research project with my partner, I completed Dissemination 1-3.

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After completing our project, it was rather straightforward as to what venue we would be presenting the research at. As I mentioned, we received a URC grant and were therefore expected to present our work at the URS. Before disseminating our work at the URS, we were asked to submit an abstract for attendees to read as a short introduction to the research project. At the URS itself, we presented our work to two sets of judges and interacted with other attendees by summarizing our research and answering questions about it. It was a rewarding experience to speak with interested parties on what we had been doing over the past year. I especially enjoyed presenting our project to people outside of the engineering discipline because they are usually unfamiliar with water treatment. Compared to my Technical Writing class presentation, this presentation felt more meaningful because it aligns exactly with my field of interest and took a lot more time and preparation.

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Since we decided to do a poster presentation, we were also asked to record a video presentation of the research poster. Harrison and I used YouTube to record a voiceover of our poster in which we both took turns sharing the different sections. This allowed virtual URS attendants to view our poster asynchronously since they were unable to attend in person. The video also made it possible to share our research with family and friends so that they too gained a better understanding of the project we had been working on that they had undoubtedly heard about.

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As a part of my career, I will need to present work to groups of people. It will also be necessary to take things a step further than this and submit the results of an engineering project in the form of a final report which will be available to the public.

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