The students in this project are always working hard. This group consists of undergraduates majoring in Physics, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Petroleum Engineering, Biochemical and Biophysical Sciences, Civil and Environmental Engineering, or Mathematics. (We’ve already had enough team-building events to bridge the inter-disciplinary gaps, don’t worry.)
Obviously, this group of students must find a way to juggle their respective course loads and commit intensive time to research. Being a USIP II member incurs several weekly requirements: 1. Students dedicate AT LEAST nine hours of research time each week. (This means nine hours of sitting in the physics laboratory doing research before, in-between, and after classes.) But let’s not kid ourselves: we’re all spending way more than nine hours in the lab now. This is our full-time job. 2. Students attend a group meeting every Friday afternoon from 5:00 to 7:00 PM, where they sit around in a large, familial circle and share progress-updates, weekly announcements, and plans for future improvement (see bottom of the page for a picture). 3. Students juggle additional USIP II responsibilities. Some of us organize team-building events, some of us coordinate with professors from around the U.S. to come in and give special lectures, some of us help students flying in the April launches prepare their payloads, and some of the very best of us run blogs! We’ve even helped Dr. Talbot at the University attach and fly a balloon-tethered radiosonde already. 4. Students attend sophisticated dinner parties thrown by our commander-in-chief, Dr. Edgar Bering. This means that we lowly USIP II students are actually leaving the lab every now and then to go rub elbows with the best and the brightest in the nation. Obviously, being a USIP II student is tough and the responsibilities are endless. But don’t feel bad for us! This is exactly what we were expecting and is definitely what some of us were wanting. So while we’re jumping hoops and trying to keep all of our balls in the air, we’re having a grand old time, honestly. See the photo of George and Michel at the bottom of this page if you don’t believe me. editor: Jamie Lehnen
0 Comments
Note: This is the second USIP project to take place at the University of Houston, so we affectionately refer to ourselves as USIP II. To see work done by the first USIP group, please visit their separate blog at: http://usip-uh.blogspot.com/
This Undergraduate Student Instrument Project (USIP) is a student-led effort at the University of Houston to improve ultralight balloon technology for auroral and stratospheric studies. With recent advances in consumer electronic technology, students will attempt to create new instrumentation to be launched into the auroral stratosphere and ionosphere layers of the atmosphere using payloads weighing less than six pounds and costing less than $3,000 each. A group of 24 students will build between 6 to 10 payloads, through which they will study topics such as air glow, auroral spectroscopy, and bacterial sampling of the upper atmosphere. This is a student-led project, meaning that students decide on their own team leaders, arrange their own team meetings, and conduct their own research. (No relevant article or publication will be left unscathed.) WARNING Side effects of following this blog might include: -Sympathetic exhaustion -Frequent bouts of confusion -Excessive exposure to circuit design and code languages Read only as recommended. |
Archives
March 2018
Categories |