Chemistry BBQ!

This, The Free Radicals readers, is your personal invite to the chemistry fueled (both figuratively and literally) barbecue that we're throwing tomorrow night!

Date: Wednesday, April 21st
Time: 7:00
Place: Nun's Park up Provo Canyon

We'll be roasting hot dogs and marshmallows over our burning review papers, homework, quizzes, lab worksheets, etc., anything you want to see go up in flames. It'll be a combo celebration of the end of the semester as well as a goodbye party for everyone who's taking off for the summer (or longer...)

So, come! Enjoy some food, friends, games....and chemistry :)

networking...and other fun activities...

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.

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?