3.5 Weeks into Lab

I've realized that there is no standard that can summarize the lab experiences of our group as a whole. The range of hours people work varies greatly as does the number of experiments and amount of work we do while at work. Some people have to work 70 hours a week and some less than 35. Some people work nearly independently on their own experiments and some people only help out with minor parts of their grad student's project.

As for me, I've probably been working about 35 hours a week (excluding lunch, which is at least an hour to two each day) and haven't had to come in at all on the weekends. My group's meeting is Saturday morning, however, because it is in Chinese, I don't have to come. I don't have any sort of independent project or my own experiments. For the past week and a half, I've set up some of Sun Jiying experiments involving an autoclave for her (although she runs and monitors the actual reactions and collects the products afterward), pre-treated her products in a trimethyl silylation reaction, and run gas chromatography analyses. I mostly sit around the office a lot and read whatever I bring/can get my hands on.

Since that's about all I have to report schedule-wise, I want to say a few things about what my lab does. Sun Jiying says there are three sections within the lab: catalyst production and characterization, actual experiments, and product analysis/characterization. The catalysts used range from single metals to metals supported on activated carbon or different metal oxides. Sun Jiying works with ruthenium and different supports. The experimental section can be broadly summarized as the selective oxidation or hydrogenolysis of polyols such as sorbitol, xylitol, cellulose, and glycerol. Sun Jiying is currently working on the selective hydrogenolysis of xylitol to ethylene glycol and propylene glycol. Reaction parameters she considers include: pressure, temperature, reaction time, pH, and of course, catalyst type. The last section of the lab is fairly self explanatory. Machines used to characterize products include a GC and HPLC (new). Sun Jiying has developed a method of pretreating products with high boiling points with TMS (trimethyl silicon) to reduce their BP's so they can be analyzed using the GC.

That's about it for lab stuff at this point.. Side note on the crazy weather: so it had been cloudy and raining for about the past week and a half straight. However, yesterday and today were sunny and incredibly hot (which is apparently more normal for this time of year). My goal is not to wilt by the end of the weekend.. I should probably start using my umbrella for shade like everyone else here..

That is all..