 I am Quessica Garba Ampe and I am going to be a senior in chemical engineering. I'm working right now on creating non-spherical particles from spherical microbeats. How I do that is by embedding those in a film and manipulating the film in different kinds of ways. Because of that I have to learn how to like design a lot of machines, build a lot of things, look at literature and see what people have done in the past, think of what people haven't done in the past and what we can do that is different. My research focuses in the area of fluid mechanics and polymer physics. In particular, so in the past what we did was we developed basically models to understand the flow of biofluids like blood or cells or vesicles. So what Quessi is doing in his surf project is basically creating micro particles at different shapes and sizes for these fundamental microfluidic studies. I think the main thing that I want surf students to get out is just an idea of what research is really like and I think for them it's really an opportunity for them to know whether there's something that they would want to pursue in the future. The surf program is a great opportunity for me to dip my leg into like the pool of research and see how grad school would feel like without actually being in grad school. I just really wanted the experience of full-time research. This summer I went from me just coming in and asking what do you want me to do today to asking how can we make this happen and what are the bigger goals in sight and what are the things that we can do today that will help us get there and it went from me asking my graduate mentor that to me asking myself that. We have extensive conversations every day but there's a few days where it's just me and my work and it really is my work now.