For the first few afternoons, you'll get introduced to the course with a few instructive lectures to help prepare you for what you are about to do. Before starting in the lab, you'll learn about organizing a project, about writing documents such as proposals and final reports and memoranda about giving talks, about statistics and data analysis, and on safety in the laboratory. The lectures on safety and management of chemicals are given by guest speakers including Parnela Greenley (Industrial Hygiene Engineer), Linda Wolfe (Associate Biosafety Officer), Donald Batson (Safety Officer and MAnager), and Preetinder Virk (Chemical Hygiene Officer in the Chemical Engineering Department). Then you'll proceed to your respective laboratory and the fun begins!
Course 10.26 includes a few statistics and data analysis lectures to complement the Course 5.310 material. Topics which may be covered include precision and accuracy, sample standard deviation, standard error of the mean, Student's t distribution, confidence intervals, significant figures, propagation of errors and least squares curve fitting. In addition, more advanced topics cover reporting of errors, statistical design of experiments, blocking and randomization, non-Gaussian distributions, sensitivity studies, statistical inference and generalized model building.
These topics are covered at an introductory level, with the primary goal to make students aware of the techniques that technologists are expected to be able to use. Projects vary considerably in the degree of statistical sophistication required, but students are expected to learn and use techniques appropriate to their specific problem.