Hello all you wonderful blog readers,
As I sit here thinking about what to write for my blog post, I’m thinking back on the past two months since my last one, and a lot has happened. In July, I went to Golden, Colorado for one week for the ACS Summer School in Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering. This was a program for other chemists or chemical engineers who were interested in sustainable chemistry and engineering. Every day, they had a series of big name speakers in the field come and speak to us about different topics, from writing grant proposals and making your own business to fuel cells and utilizing biomass. Just listening to all these people who are well established in their fields talk each day was a great learning experience. At the summer school, there were two poster sessions, and I was in the first one. I was a little nervous, as I had never presented a poster before. I was worried that no one would come talk to me, but it was the complete opposite. As soon as I had my poster set up, I went to get a drink, and there were people at my poster by the time I got back. I talked to people non-stop for two hours. Two girls, who I became such good friends with, stayed near my poster for most of the session and gave me a thumbs up or smile whenever I looked over. Once there was a break in the people, I went to look at the other posters, which showcased some amazing work from all over the Americas. The crowd of people started to dwindle as people headed downtown, so I started packing up my poster, when I hear, “Oh no! Courtney! We didn’t get to see your poster yet!” I then had a good 20-minute impromptu floor poster session with some more people. The entire trip was so fun and a great learning experience. Over the week, I slowly got to learn about everyone’s research and where everyone came from. Near the end of the week, they organized a white water rafting trip. I had never been white water rafting, so I was nervous, but also excited for it. It was such a fun time and thankfully I didn’t fall out of the raft like I thought I would.
The trip to Colorado also really helped my research. I learned about the environmental friendliness of solvents and how to make your synthesis more “green,” or in other words, to make it less hazardous to human health and the environment. Hearing about other research and the different sessions gave me some good ideas on how to improve on my own research. While I was nervous to apply and spend a week away in a different country with people I didn’t know, I’m very glad that I went. The moral of the story here is to always apply for everything you can. You never know what might happen and if you’re successful, it could be a fantastic learning experience.
At the end of July, I also took a nice short vacation. I really wanted to take a week and have a proper vacation somewhere else. Maybe take a trip to Ontario and visit some family, or adventure on the west coast of Canada, but I decided to instead have a nice vacation at home. I spent the week doing things around the house that I didn’t have time to do before. I built a nice little garden in front of my house, which only now has some flowers blooming, and stained my front and back porch. It was a lot of hard work, but I felt very accomplished at the end of the week. It’s important to take time for yourself during your graduate studies to keep yourself nice and sane. That week away really helped me refocus and get back into my work when I returned.
Once I was back at Mun, I started writing my first paper on my M.Sc. research. The many hot days spent in the office writing was tough but breaking it up with other work always helped. In the chemistry building, there’s an instrument room in the basement that is air conditioned, so doing analyses during those hot days were always fun. The long days spent writing and doing calculations for a section of my paper definitely paid off. Now, my paper is getting to the point where it is almost ready to submit, and hopefully by my next blog post, I’ll have a paper published on my work! I’m trying not to get my hopes up too much in case my submission gets rejected, but this will be my first published paper so I can’t help being exciting. In terms of my research, I spent a lot of time this summer trying to optimize reaction conditions with my fish oil, and although I haven’t been able to improve it much, I’m not giving up hope yet. Things have been going well so far, and the next step, which I will hopefully do soon, is to make polyurethane films out of my fish oil-derived material (which no longer smells like fish, I promise).
Thanks for reading my blog post, and hopefully by next time I’ll have a published paper and some fish oil-derived polyurethane.