Spring Break

It's beginning to look a lot like springtime around here. I took that picture up top yesterday in the Shakespeare garden on campus. That was the first tulip. It took me a while to get this page just right, I don't think the previous versions really suited me.

Spring break is here at last. I finished my last final on Thursday. That was intense. Probably the hardest test I've ever taken. As long as I'm in the mix with everyone else I should be fine. That's really all you need to aim for in grad school.

I love Sundays. David was over for breakfast today and I made chocolate chip pancakes before I went to church. I managed to make a disaster area out of my kitchen though. I can make a pretty mean pancake with the right equipment, but in my apartment all I have is a small skillet and a stupid plastic spatula that's way too wide to even be functional. So that's going to take some practice.

My phone is all wacked up. I'm going in later to get it fixed/replaced. It's been having some problems for a while, but yesterday it just quit all together and now I'm just about fed up with it. Unfortunately the stupid Verizon store in Evanston can't replace it, so poor Dave has to drive me out to Skokie this afternoon. What a headache.

I've had a pretty exciting weekend. This past weekend was the first of three visit weekends for prospective chem grad students. It's so weird to think that a year has already gone by since I visited, and even weirder to see how it all works from the other side. I definitely feel more legitimate, but it's pretty surreal not being the new kid on the block anymore. Karl, my adviser, is the new man in charge of graduate admissions, so our group has been recruiting our brains out. Yes, that's right. Karl manages to even make social occasions a stressful time. But in all honesty I had a fun weekend. A bunch of us took some of the students around the city yesterday. Dave and I were in charge of the Millenium Park group, and Jon and Rikki (two friends of ours) went to the Art Institute. I was originally supposed to chaperone the Shed Aquarium tour, but things got shuffled around quite a bit. The best part of the day was the lunch at the top of the Hancock building. The view was absolutely incredible.

Working on getting my taxes started today. I also need to do some research for my first group meeting presentation in a few weeks. Yikes. Luckily, I can do presentations without getting too nervous. The only thing I'm worried about is getting all the chemistry up to scratch. Hopefully starting so much in advance will iron all those things out for me.

Back to work.

Experiment

Hello,

So I'm not sure what the proper way is to start out on these things, but I guess that I should start off saying: Hi, I'm Erin.

I'm a chemistry graduate student at Northwestern University, so I suppose you could say this is an "away from the bench" type of blog. But, who knows, I might throw a bit of chem your way every now and then :). Of the three things I love, two of them are chemistry and cooking. It's amazing how similar these two things are. Both allow you to use your senses, require careful time and care, and, best of all, there is more than one way to make the same dish (molecule) from scratch. And the third thing I love is a chemist who eats my cooking, so you can see how nicely everything ties in together.

I'm currently working in the field of synthetic chemistry (i.e. making large complex molecules, with therapeutic applications only found in nature from small non-complex molecules that are commercially available). This is a lot easier said than done. Since I don't have enough experience yet to do a total synthesis, my first project is to optimize a reaction that will lead me to a very specific conformational arrangement of the recovered molecule in a way that has never been done before. This too is difficult, but the cool thing is I get to make sweet catalysts such as this one:



That guy is a bright purple crystal because it has an iodine counterpart to it.

Chemistry aside, I now live in Chicago and have been thoroughly enjoying every minute of it. There is just so much to do in this city! I wish I had time to try out every restaurant there is (albeit I have seen quite a few good ones already). Grad school gets pretty tough sometimes. I've had my share of rough patches from just being over worked and over-stressed (plus my adviser is a bit of a slave driver...), but apart from all that I love what I'm doing and I have really carved out a good life for myself here. I've met a lot of great friends and Dave's as amazing as ever, of course. I'm living in my first apartment, too. It's just over a little Mexican restaurant and the train goes by my window (the noise of which I have now become immune to, thank God).

Looking forward to the end of finals...Speaking of finals I have to say goodbye to all of you fine people and study, study, study. Thanks for reading! I hope you check back often. I'll try to keep it interesting!

P.S.

I tried out Jaci's gingersnap cookies last night and accidentally added an extra 1/4 cup oil. If this happens to you bake the cookies an extra five minutes and no one will be the wiser :) So go make them because they are amazing! Plus, super cheap because you don't need to use butter or eggs, saving you $ for that omelet later on in the week...which we all need in these hard times.