Hi! I’m Isabelle and I’m a rising senior from NYC. I’ll be walking you through my day.
6:10: The lovely sound of my blaring alarm wakes me up. Time to get ready!
We started off with an optional early morning run from 6:30 to 7:00:
Well, that was a bit tiring (I need to exercise more)…
8:00 -12:00: Lab time! There was a lot going on in the lab today…the people working on the synthesis of the twelve membered ring macrocycle (Mario, Wei, Maia, Jaime) characterized their alkylated compounds. They also started their sodium borohydride reduction.
The fourteen membered ring group (Jenny, Joyan, Al, Charles) learned about VSPER theory, as their reaction was still in progress.
Ruoyi, Callen, Michael and I were working with the thirteen membered ring macrocyle and set up our alkylation reaction.
Lunch:
1:00-4:00: Lecture
Our first lecture was Ethics. We looked at another case study and learned about the ethics behind human and animal subjects/experimentation.
Next was Lab Safety. To start off class, we played chemistry/lab safety charades. Notable prompts included Benzyl Bromide, Callen, starting a fire with ethanol, and heating mantle. We then proceeded to talk about Acid and Base safety.
Our next lecture was Organic Chemistry. We continued learning about organic reactions, specifically looking at alkene reactions. After that, it was time for dinner.
4:30 – Dinner. We got there twenty minutes early in hopes of beating the long line.
6:00: Back to lecture!
7:00: We immediately started working on our problem sets…
7:30: Dorm meeting.
8:00: It was also Al’s birthday! To celebrate, we had ice cream and our TA’s set up a really cool escape room:
We also drew some portraits. These were the ones we did of Al (done by me, Joyan, and Jaime from left to right)
Well, that’s it for today!
See you next time,
Isabelle
