Bonding and Antibonding experiences

So I was looking at some of my old blog entries and I found this from Thursday, April 23, 2009. It's about a nerdy chemistry bonding experience. I figured this might be a good venue to share it again:

Party...chemistry style

Some of my chem friends decided to get together to watch a goofy movie after our finals ended. I was looking forward to some nice relaxing chill time. It was definitely fun and entertaining (my friends even more than the movie- one knew all the words and two sang along sometimes), but not quite as relaxing as I had expected. People commented on the laws of buoyancy violated in the river-floating scene, debated over whether the gloves the characters wore were latex or nitrile, and disputed the presence of carbonyl peaks in the clouds. Call me a slacker, but I'm totally okay with not mentioning chemistry related topics while watching a mindless movie after finals.

Actually, I lied. That was probably my favorite part: the nerdy jokes. That's why I love those people- their simultaneous coolness and nerdyness and total self-acceptance. While watching that movie in a basement classroom of the chemistry building, I realized I'm definitely going to miss them this summer- nitrile gloves and all.

National Lab Day: The Results!

National Lab Day was awesome! We were expecting around 60 students to come, and we ended up having about 175 students plus 25 parents. 200 people!!! All enjoying a Saturday morning filled with chemistry!

A huge thank you to all of our volunteers who helped out! You did an incredible job of running all the demos, conducting lab tours, making liquid nitrogen ice cream, registering people, shepherding kids around, etc. We could not have done it without you!

Here are some photos so you can get a taste of what the event was like: (more are in the Y Chem display case :) )

We are definitely planning on having this event next year. For those of you who participated, we would love your feedback so we can make it even better the second time around!

The Deprotonators are here...

Greetings from San Francisco!!

Sara, Sam, Megan, Matt, Erin, Nate, David, and I are all here at the national meeting for the American Chemical Society, and oh man, has it been fun. Yesterday we arrived around 8:00 PM (after watching six episodes of "Avatar: the Last Airbender" while driving, woo!!) and hurried over to the undergraduate social for some "networking", food, and music, proudly wearing our Deprotonators t-shirts. Too bad the networking was actually just undergrads standing around awkwardly trying to dance while music was playing in the background. Good for us for dancing like spazzes anyway to "Tik Tok" (sort of fulfilling a lifelong dream to rock out with a bunch of chemists at a national chem convention in San Fran to that song. Ha.)

Today started out with free breakfast at the graduate school recruiting session. We greatly enjoyed collecting swag (highlights included awesome hand sanitizer from UCLA, flashdrives from Vanderbilt, and a chem theme shirt from Duquesne) and learning more about different grad programs. We spent the rest of the morning going to various presentations and enriching our chemical knowledge. Lunch was spent in Chinatown, afternoon spent at more presentations/poster sessions/expo/undergrad industrial chemists networking (actual networking was done here). Tonight Dave's presenting a poster at the Sci Mix poster session, so that will be fun for us to browse around.

Being here has really opened my eyes as to what is available in the field of chemistry. You can do anything with this major, which, not going to lie, is a little overwhelming. There is so much research going on in such depth on so many subjects by so many people. It's amazing.

Chemistry is awesome.
We want to come back in 2011 in Anaheim. We also all want to be presenting (fingers crossed).
Join us?

Star Wars Spandex Dance

So in our chemistry technical writing class, we have a talent moment before class begins. Today, Matt was up. Here is his gorious rendition of Stacy Hedger's famous trumpet performance of the Star Wars Theme Song:



P.S. It's also on youtube
Click here for the original video.

Janitors Hate Elevator Selection Rules

So Katie, Sam, and I really like posting amusing sticky notes in the Benson elevators. Shahn gave us this great idea so today we posted the elevator selection rules. (For an explanation of selection rules, see Wikipedia) The selection rule is that delta F cannot equal +/- 1 where F is the floor number. Of course, like all selection rules, just because it's forbidden doesn't mean it doesn't happen; it just means it doesn't happen very often.

Last time we posted something, it was removed within a half hour. (This will be the subject of a future post). The same thing happened this time! So, we put signs back up again saying do not remove. These were removed again! We're considering mounting an offensive....

Anyway, here are pictures of the signs for your amusement. Posing for the second picture was really impossible while we were trying to do it ourselves, so we finally got some random guy in the elevator to take it for us. His look was priceless.