Blog Assignment #10: Research Project Reflection (individual)

The most interesting part about our research project was seeing a quantitative difference in the inhibition of bacterial growth, before we had done our first trial we believed a couple of the mouthwashes would work better than the rest, but it was interesting to see how significant the difference was. The most difficult part of our research was creating a technique to set up the plates for testing that yielded quality results, we never found one technique that stood out from the rest, we experimented with it and not all turned out to meet our standards, for example in trial three we used a micropipette to dispense the mouthwashes and controls directly onto the cotton disks to ensure we used the same amount per plate; this trial turned out to be unreadable. I was proud of the data we found and the research we were able to present in the form of a poster.  We had a lot of people really interested in our results.

As aforementioned we could improve our technique in setting up the plates with samples to get better quality data that is more consistent throughout trials, not that bacterial inhibition would be the same throughout trials, but that our data would be more linear. I was surprised how easy it is to get contamination in the petri dishes.  A few that were left on the cart untouched got infected.  In five years, I’ll remember how to present a poster at a undergraduate research symposium, something I would like to do a lot more often in my future academic career, and I will also remember how fun a research project is to do start to finish.