Reflection

Correlation of Palm Flora and Carriage of Microbes on Mobile Phones

As our project has seen its completion, and with the posters presented with much
confidence, it is now down to the final part, writing a reflection. It was definitely a great
experience which we have gained throughout this Mentored Student Project (MSP), which
had taken a long course, of 6 months. The main reason we are able to write a reflection
today, is mainly due to the teamwork and hard work put in by the team members, our
mentor, Ms. Aparna Tripathy as well as our guide Dr. Vinod Pallath.
A sea without rough waves? Definitely no. Our project which was an experimental
study was indeed a tiring one, and we did experience some of the rough waves in our
voyage, but we did manage to get through. We should say that our project was a very
successful one, but with more time we would have reached to a great height. This project
required an ethical clearance, which was one of our toughest times we had gone through
while trying to commence the project. We even thought of switching to a simpler project.
But yet, we kept our fingers crossed, and lo, we did obtain the clearance after a long time
duration, which allowed us to collect samples and proceed ahead.
It does not take much strength to do things, but it requires a great deal of strength
to decide what to do. - Elbert Hubbard. Choosing a topic for this project was a very difficult
task for us, as we wanted to do something significant, hence we took MSP as a platform to
learn and achieve high. With the thought of publishing our paper in our minds, we chose
this topic, to correlate organisms from both palms and mobile phones. It was
unquestionable that this project required a lot of time, attention and dedication, but we did
not realise it while choosing the topic. But realising it only when we started off with the
sample collection. It is known that first timers are prone to making mistakes, but it was
different in our case as we had a strong pillar of support, in the form of our mentor and
guide. We not only learnt more about microbiology and sample collection through this
project but, we also learnt about humane values. Mainly, because the one who was guiding
us guided us in that manner.
The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member
is the team. - Phil Jackson. That is indeed true as we depended on each other very much to
seek completion. With the deadlines provided to us, we pushed ourselves to the maximal
levels to meet the deadlines as we were short of time due to the delay in the project
commencement and the holidays we had in between. Looking back, at the end of the day,
all five of us beyond doubt learnt about mutual respect, sacrifice, teamwork, hard work, and
of course time management.

C 15
This is indeed a project which can be further explored and learnt about in the future
as it gives importance and priority to hygiene and transmission of diseases. Hence, given an
opportunity we would love to continue to work more on our very own project. This MSP has
set a stage for greater studies and researches to be done by students, and we are very
thankful to be a part of this and to have learnt a lot. Working on our next research or study
would be much easier for us mainly due the experience we obtained here.
Thank you.