- Managed students' attendance records.
- Prepared morning tea.
- Prepared the school's weekly newsletter.
- Taking inquiries and phone calls to the office.
- Managing the school's Facebook page.
- Processing manual enrollments.
- Distributing documents and fliers.
- Mitigating student injuries.
- Proofreading and editing students' reports.
- Polishing tropies prior to prize-giving.
Bioengineering Research Assistant
University of Otago
August - December 2023
Dunedin, NZ
The purpose of this role is to develop new ways of integrating laboratory imaging equipment, namely optical coherence tomography (OCT), with hospital equipment within clinical and operating theatre environments. The use of OCT in clinical settings is not new, so the main goal is improving image quality and stability in new areas. For this project, I am working with both an orthopaedic surgeon as well as a bioengineering academic.
The main challenge for us in this was figuring out how best to hold the patient still during the imaging. This is because even when peope are consciously trying to be hold still, there will still be some movement. This was an important challenge to overcome because optical coherence tomography can be capable of resolving features of the order of tens of micrometres in size, thus making any movements, no matter how small, visually significant.
Physics Laboratory Demonstrator (First year health science)
University of Otago
March - June, 2020 - 2023
Dunedin, NZ
Here, I worked as a demonstrator for PHSI191: Biological Physics; an introductory physics paper required to be taken as part of the first year of health science at University of Otago. The main difference between this teach laboratory experience and my previous is that those taking the class were doing so by requirement rather than preference.
Physics Laboratory and Workshop Demonstrator (first year physics)
University of Otago
July - October 2022
Dunedin, NZ
Here, I was working as a demonstrator for PHSI132; the second semester of physics that first year students would take as part of a physics major at Univeristy of Otago. I was responsible for explaining and supervising 10 students through alternating workshops and laboratories to expand their knowledge and experience of physics from basic mechanics to circuits to work with lenses and optics. I was also responsible for marking their workbooks from the workshops. The students here were those looking to continue on in physics and had a variety of interesting questions which kept me on my toes.
Administrative Assistant
North East Valley Normal School
November 2020 - December 2020
Dunedin, NZ
This position saw me providing generalised assistance to the school's administrator during the busy end of year period. My duties ranged quite a bit; from helping students with plasters when they became injured to proofreading and editing end of year reports to be sent home with parents. My most common duty was to make sure that each student was accounted for on each day which involved calling up parents to ask about the students' whereabouts if they hadn't notified the school ahead of time via texts, website, or answering machine.
Electronics Workshop Work Experience
University of Otago
February 2020 - July 2020
Dunedin, NZ
Here I was able to obtain work-experience with electronics while a new electronics technician was sought. My tasks included populating printed circuit boards with emphasis being on consistency, taking inventory for upcoming orders, and working with a client to determine their exact requirement for their custom hardware which I was then responsible for constructing.
This latter responsibility was one that I found particular interesting because I got the opportunity to work with Arduino and learn about some of its quirks. In this specific instance we needed to have analogue temperature sensors as far as feasible from a power supply box. The sensors, in this case, output a signal in tens of millivolts increasing linearly with temperature. The issue that I ran into was that the Arduino Duo measures voltage via a capacitor and the initial length of the cable, combined with the low signal amplitude, made the Arduino give faulty readings. The cable itself was acting as enough of a capacitor to offset the readings. The solution, therefore, was to reduce the length of the cable, which was simple enough.
Physics Research Assistant
University of Otago
March 2017 - November 2017
Dunedin, NZ
In this position I had the opportunity to gain hands on experience with a variety of technologies related to research. It was also an exciting position in that it was the first time I was able to put the theory I had been learning into practical application. I was also able to, and expected to, learn various new technologies ancillary to the work being done. In many cases this was a result of delegation to enable other members of the group to focus on their research and other tasks unique to their abilities. Taking responsibility for organising the weekly literature review meetings of the group is one example of this.
- Supported a quantum optics research group with their research.
- Organised weekly literature review meetings by maintaining scheduling information on the group website and communicating with each week's speaker.
- Recommended improvements to the existing cryostat design using physical models to compensate for missing information.
- Utilised SolidWorks to diagram and preview the changes required for these improvements.
- Re-enabled use of a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) for experimentation on modern hardware by revising C++ code for Matlab integration.
- Measured the linewidth of an important laser to determine experimental precision
- Researched and advised on optical second harmonic generation materials and techniques for a specific product.
- Parsed 4 years of data from local SQL database using Matlab to generate plots for quick reference.
- Utilised Blender to diagram an experimental component for publication
Documents
Physics Teaching Laboratory Assistant
University of Puget Sound
August 2014 - May 2016
Tacoma, Washington, USA
This was a position I took up while studying towards my Bachelor of Science at University of Puget Sound. Here I worked with the professor teaching the class to make sure that the students were able to complete their laboratories safely while also ensuring that said students understood the experiments. These laboratories were typically 5 tables of up to 6 students working together with widely varied academic backgrounds and experience levels.
One of the advantages to this arrangement is that I, as the teaching assistant, was able to practice explaining technical concepts and confirm what I needed to revise thus solidifying my knowledge.
- Assisted in teaching 100-level physics laboratories while ensuring adherence to relevant safety protocols.
- Worked with 4 different lecturers to grade weekly homework assignments and laboratory reports.
Psychology Research Assistant
University of Otago
June - August of 2013 & 2014
Dunedin, NZ
My task in this position was to take open-ended data recorded in questionnaires by experiment participants and convert it into numerical data in a spreadsheet for those running the experiment. The open-ended data here was the job title participants reported themselves as having. These reported job titles were compared with those recorded in the New Zealand census, which also gave the relevant conversions to the numerical values desired by the experimenters.
This was interesting for me in that much of what I was doing was subject to interpretation. What this meant was that I had to learn about ways of ensuring that my interpretations of the given data would be the same as those that the experimenters themselves would have made. The main technique for this was each of us doing the same section of data and measuring the rate of agreement between us.
- Encoded self-reported demographic data for a child development study using NZ census classifications
- Transcribed parent-child conversation to better understand language development in young children.