St. Als Transition Year student. :)

Monday: Today is my first day of work experience. When I got into UL I went to Maria Quinn's office. She introduced me to John Sweeney and I got a tour of the labs. When we went into the first year physics lab I was introduced to Eamon Campbell. He had a class at the time and he showed me the vernier microscope that they were using. I looked at a pencil line and my ring under the microscope and it looked amazing!! I could see loads of tiny silver specs from the lead and with my ring I could see tiny scratches. Then at 11 am when I finished my tour I visited Eamonn again and I did a laboratory experiment “measuring gravity (g) by free fall”. I really enjoyed this as I could do the experiment myself and it wasn't teachers showing me the experiment in school. When I was finished the experiment I went for lunch. After lunch I went to John Sweeney. We went to the computer room and using the results from my experiments we plotted this graph in excel:
John then showed me how to blog my weeks work.Then at 3pm I had environmental chemistry with Jimmy Kelly and 2 other transition year students Ailbhe and Leah who are twins. Jimmy showed us how all the equipment in that lab is used.

Tuesday: I started at 10am today so before my class I went for a swim in the 50m pool. My lab was scheduled in the Health Science building which meant crossing the wobbly bridge! For this lab session I was with Mary Barrett. Leah, the other transition year student was also with me. In this class we dissected a rat!!! At the start I was hesitant but it wasn't too bad. We cut open the rat's stomach and I could see the heart, lungs, kidney... every thing!! Near the end of the class one of the assistants showed us how to take out the brain. It was a lot smaller then I expected and it was kinda unpleasant and we could even hear the skull cracking.When we finished the lab we went back over the bridge for lunch. Afterwards, we attended an Enviormental Science Lecture with Dr. Tom O'Dwyer. When we finished I joined the Equine students for a lab. We were testing for equine influenza in chicken eggs. When that class finished it was time to go home. Second day finished! :(
Wednesday I spent my morning in the Health Science building. I was participating in the Leaving Certificate biology practicals with Dr.Audrey O'Grady and her students. During lunch I sat in on a mock Law trial. This was very interesting and there is a great facility for the court session. After lunch I did chemistry pedagogy lab. This was a class with Dr.Sarah Hayes and Maria Munroe. We also did some shaping/bending of glass. I enjoyed that class and it was finished at 4 pm that was my third day over!!
ThursdayI spent my morning with Mary Barret and Dr.Wynette Reddington. First I was with Mary and I had a Histology Lab with her. Then I had a tour of the labs in the materials & surface science institute (MSSi) with Wynette. I saw many different research set-ups using various equipment. For example the high resolution electron microscope,XRD !!
After Lunch I was in the chemistry lab with Jimmy Kelly. We were looking at chemicals and equipment that is used in the chemistry labs. I conducted an experiment using a pipette and other equipment. I enjoyed the day and when I was finished my experiment I was finished for the day!!
Friday: Today was my last day of work experience:( I was with John today and we were in the physics research labs. We also went down to the F1 day for TYs. It was an all Ireland competition where schools across Ireland built and designed their own F1 car. There were races and we watched a few. When we were finished we went back to the labs and john showed me a wind turbine and how it works. He also showed me how the back of my fridge works and an experiment where you remove oxygen or hydrogen from water and it forms a gas. At the end of the day I did some work on the blog and I went home.

I really enjoyed the week and would like to thank Maria Q, Maria M, Mary, John, Jimmy, Eamonn, Tom, Jackie, Audrey, Sarah, and Wynette who helped me during the week. It was a great experience!

Laurel Hill Transition Year Student

Day One - Monday 7th of February .
Monday morning at 8:45 i rushed out the door with my brother. We arrived at Ul at exactly 9 o clock. After circurling the car park a couple of times we parked and headed in the direction of the physics department. I reached the main reception and soon found Maria Quinn the co - ordinator of the physics department.We set off and i got a quick tour of the physics department. At about half 9 we arrived at John Sweeneys office. John is the Senior technical officer and showed me around for the week. John brought me into all the labs and showed me the different apparatus in the Optics , Energy and Physics labs. We then met with John kelly and went to the paddocks for a tea break and Eammon arrived shortly after. After tea John and I returned to the optic lab which John was preparing for a lab during the week . There was 4 experiments set up and he showed me each one .There was still some setting up to be done with the Demountable Transformer so i got to scan through the booklet as John explained what was happening. Here he also showed me how a sodium lamp worked and we discussed frequency and wave lenghts which was interesting we shook a mirror to look at frequency . After fidling around with differnt wires John decided to put turns there instead of wire. I then went for lunch and arrived back a bit late. We headed to John kellys lab where he was trying to set up an experiment involving the method used by old tv's but the equipment needed was being used in the medical research lab. The second year energy students were in the lab and we went and got ice for their experiments. After we went to the medical research lab where i was introduced to some post - Grades . We then went to the Pc room and soon it was 5 o clock and time to go home .
Day 2 - wednesday the 10th of February.
Wednesday was my second day as i had to play a match with the school on Tuesday. I went to find Maria's office which i had completely forgot how to get to. After being in a few different buildings which i had thought looked familiar i headed to the main reception again and asked for directions . After getting lost a couple more times i reached it soon after 9. Maria brought me down to Eammon's lab which was a 1st year lab. It was their first lab with peter murphy and eammon had arranged a place for me to carry out the experiment also which dealt with Refractive indexes. With the help of eammon i carried out the experiment and drafted my results. After the lab was finished i headed up to John Kellysd lab where there was a laptop set up for me to type up my resluts on Excel. After fidling around with it for a while i got my results up.


Thursday 11th of February
On Thursday we went to the PC room where John told me all about Ip adresses on computers and how you can identify different computers with it.We hepled one of the students to set up a scanner so he could scan items into word. After tea we went to the library where John showed me how to locate books. We also went down to the archives which had huge amounts of books , newspapers, magazines , etc . I hadn't realized how big the library actually was. Later on we hepled a postgrade move a tank of nitrogen from the medical research labs to the MSSI. Here John showed me the Electro Magnet and some other interesting equipment. We then went to John Kellys Lab where we looked at the penny/ feather experiment which involved suckin the air out of the cylinder to create a vacumn . When we did this the feather was no longer slower to fall than the penny. After lunch i went with the Post Grads to see all their projects. First Nathan and Joe showed me the electron microscope.I thought it was really cool.They put in a tiny object to view but it came up in huge magnification. We could pefectly see the different parts which were really only about 34 nanometres .The projects were really interesting but also looked difficult and the post Grads put huge amounts of time trying to get it to work better and improve the project. Immanuel then showed me his project about off shore wind turbines which was also another impressive project.
Day 5 - the 12th of February .
My last day on work experience ! Friday began with John showing me how to download skype. I didn't realize before how convinient and useful skype was. He also showed me how it worked.We then went to the workshop and john showed me how all the equipment woked. I hepled him make a piece of equipment a post grad needed for their project .Later on i went to see two more projects which were being carried out by Susan and Paul . Both of their projects were on opitical coherence tomography. They both looked at different ways to design the otc . It involved sending beams of light into a beam splitter . They told me about how Otc has advantages over other medical equipment and how it worked. Their projects were really impressive. After this Deirdre brought me into the lab and we discussed all about lab safety and the safety thats required from the lab. We looked at different chemicals and sheets had been printed out with all the properties and dangers of the chemicals. Deidre told me about how each time a person was using a chemical they would have to print out the sheet and put it in the file. We also talked about general lab safety rules and looked at them in the lab. John was in charge of designing the physics website for Ul . After lunch he showed me things about web designing and he showed me how he was going to change the website. It was really cool . After this we went to the Optics lab where John showed be the spectrometer. He put a mercury slide into it and when we looked into the spectrometer this time we got to see all the differnt colours the original bluey colour had split up to. There was a range of different colours. We also looked at sodium through the spectrometer. It was then time to go home :( . I really enjoyed my work experience in the physics department. All the people who i met through out my time there made it extremely interesting and enjoyable for me. I learned so much and was sad to be going back to school .I definitly would recommend work experience here and would like to thank everyone who helped me and showed me around throughout the week!