 My name's Rina Savitello and I'm going to be a senior in material science engineering. My project deals with oil and water emulsions. They're mainly found on U.S. Navy vessels and these big ships take in a lot of water and oil and surfactants that come from soap and they found that there is a really large concentration of surfactants in bilge water. So it ranges from 10 parts per million to 2,500 parts per million. The surfactants are what help stabilize the emulsion and make it hard to separate and the whole point of filtering the bilge water emulsions is to separate the oil from the water so that they can skim off the oil before discharging that water into the ocean. I have several students doing semester research and Rina is one of them especially during the past spring semester and the advantage is the summer is that they have a lot more time to work on the period they can really concentrate. They're juggling a lot during the school year. They have exams, they have multiple classes and during the summer they can really concentrate. I feel like surf in general is giving me more opportunity just because they have extra seminars that we can go to that help develop our professional career. The mentorship comes not only with a faculty mentor but a graduate mentor as well and I've been working very closely with my graduate mentor and he's been helping me a lot but Professor Martinez my faculty member has been overseeing almost everything. Anything I submit I send to him prior and he'll look over it and edit it. We also meet every week and I show him weekly PowerPoints that I make and he'll make corrections or suggestions and then based on that I'll be able to convey my communication and data to people. I'm hoping to present my poster at another conference and to hopefully publish the paper that I'm writing. I think this will help me in applying to graduate school and for my professional career.