We're back!
San Francisco was amazing! We were able to see a pretty full spectrum of what you can do with chemistry. The ACS meeting was great for seeing what primary research is going on (my favorite presentation was on fluorescent nanodiamonds used for bioimaging. So cool!) and expanding our horizons with the sheer volume of experiments and studies that are being conducted by chemists.
We also had the opportunity to tour UC Berkeley and UCSF, giving us a taste of what grad school is like. Can I just say that Berkeley is incredible? The NMR room alone was awe-inspiring, let alone the 8 chemistry buildings of the college (not just department) of chemistry. Dream school? I think so. Many thanks to Dr. Woodfield for setting us up with a tour! And many thanks to Tyler for said tour! At UCSF we had the opportunity to tour the lab of Nobel laureate Stanley Prusiner (who won the award for his work with prions). The lab was completely self-sufficient, with two floors, only one entrance for safety/security reasons. They grow their own bacteria, antibodies, proteins, etc, and they have their own TEM. Let me say that again. Their own TEM. Just for their lab. For the pleasure of viewing all of that, we owe Dr. Bates much gratitude! And lots of thanks to JC (spelling?) for showing us around! We want BYU to hire you!
We also toured the biotech giant Genentech, giving us a look at careers in industry. We were able to see pretty much the entire process from drug design and modeling on computers to the synthesis labs to prepping drugs for human trials to packing the drug compound into pills. It was awesome! (and the cafeteria, as I've said before, was amazing...) Many thanks to Dr. Alex Andrus for setting this up for us!
Also, a huge thank you goes out to Dr. Andrus and Dr. Burt for driving out with us/driving back with us/flying out/flying back (it's a long story...Risk Management was not too happy with us before we left, we'll just leave it at that), taking so much time out of their busy schedules to help us out.
Even as we return back to our 391 papers and realize how much we've missed from a week of class, we are so grateful the department has allowed us this opportunity. It has been so eye-opening to see what is out there for ourselves, instead of just listening to people tell us what it's like. I'm really hoping we can do this again next year at the Spring 2011 ACS meeting in Anaheim. We've got more grad schools to tour, research to present, swag to collect (just kidding...sort of...), and fun to be had as we explore our options in chemistry.
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