Comment by nonameiguess

It's great that opportunities like this exist. Doing a project like this at all is such valuable experience. You must have learned a ton and can take that with you for all future projects. The only real quibble is the experimental setup is not really scientifically valid. UV light on its own kills algae, so you're going to detect a monotonic effect roughly equivalent to the altitude increase assuming a reasonably constant rate of altitude increase just from the cumulative exposure. That's not the same thing as detecting a change purely because of altitude.

Who cares, though? Scientists train for many years to learn the details of experimental methods in their specific domain. The engineering and hacking experience on its own is what really matters here.