Uh oh. The last week has arrived. While some of us had already finished our projects, others were spending extended hours in the lab trying to do theirs. On top of all that, we had to finish up our abstracts describing our projects as well as make a 10-20 minute presentation on our project as well. Our weekend was spent on a camping trip in the woods, where we set up a bunch of tents and spent the night making s'mores and having fun with each other. After the weekend was over, we started off the week with a talent show, where everybody was required to participate. It was actually extremely fun to watch, as there was a nice blend of comedy, artistic skill, music, and acting with the performances. In the end, the best performance was given to the two twins in our program (both extremely talented and extremely smart) for their Super Mario violin playing/light-saber fighting skit (long story haha). The rest of the nights we were given off in order to either relax, or finish up our presentations and abstracts.

My last few days at lab were extremely exciting. I finally finished everything I needed to do and I just had to check my results under the scanning electron microscope (SEM). I went with one of the students in the pharmaceutics lab, who took me every step of the way in that lab, and we looked at our particles. It took us a total of 6 hours to finally confirm that my project was successful!

Anyway, the last two days were spent giving presentations to all our fellow students and faculty members. It was in a pretty big auditorium, but everybody gave exciting presentations and it was great to hear what all the other projects were about in detail. The last night, we had a very nice banquet and we received our Superman SSTP shirts (since we saw Superman returns in theatres and IMAX like 3 times, we felt it was only right to have our superman logo). We then sadly had to make our goodbye's. It's extremely hard after spending six weeks with a group of 18 kids, an amazing director, 3 down-to-earth R.A's, and an always-smiling liaison to just leave. But I know that those six weeks were among the best of my life, and to be able to participate in scientific research at such a young age was a blessing for me. SSTP gave me an opportunity to do this and I know it was worth it.