Week 1

Made it through my first four days as an intern. I’d like to thank my parents and . . . just kidding. Really though, I didn’t beak anything so I’m happy. The real challenge this week has been getting to work. I live in downtown Portland and commute using the Max, for those of you non-Portlanders that’s somewhat like the Bart in San Francisco (public transportation). I walk 45 minutes to the Max station every day. While I could take a bus I like the brisk morning atmosphere. Everyone is out to accomplish something, may that be their morning caffeine fix or getting to work on time, they’re all out for a reason. Once on the Max though I’m set. I just need to get out of bed.

Ahhh, looks like I lost my luck. I just broke my first piece of glassware, oh yeah! I am running an experiment to examine the degradation of TCE, trichloroethylene, with high sulfur iron, FeHSA. To study this it is important that the iron doesn’t sink, we want it to react. So we put our vial on a rotating machine that essentially mixes our solution. In my case it also throws our solution. Guess I just needed a small initiation into lab, no big deal.

I’m going to go remake that.

By the way, if you are interested in what I’m working on google “FePRB’s”.