Week 9: When It Rains, It Pours

If going to class is like Oregon's weather, then research is not. Classes have set times for exams, routine homework, and predictable (albeit unending) project deadlines - just like Oregon has a set times for it to rain, routine drizzle, and predictable (albeit unending) dreary weather forecasts. Research on the other hand is less reliable. Sometimes days will pass with nothing exciting to work on, while other days you'll be in the lab into the evening, frantically trying to fix machines, run experiments, and update lab notebooks all at the same time. With research, when it rains it pours.

This week it poured. Early in the week I finished up my lepidocrocite and goethite data for my four probes. As unimpressive as it spounds, this nearly doubled my dataset. I continued to use the other UV-Vis (ours is still broken). By Tuesday I had most of the data into graphical form, and Wednesday I spent the entire long day making my poster:

Thursday I started with a new Fe(II)-Iron oxide, hematite. I made 16 samples of that mixed with probes (four iron II samples x four probes = 16 samples). In the afternoon I began to write my end-of-summer paper.

On Friday were final presentations. A number of people came by the poster presentations, some of whom knew almost nothing about chemistry, and others who are professors who teach about redox chemistry. Therefore, I had a challenging but fun time trying to explain my project to a variety of people in a variety of ways. Near the end of the poster session my PI came by and we discussed what I should do the next week as I wrap up my project.