Three Weeks Left

Lab work this week has not been too eventful. I set up a couple more experiments, but mostly ran HPLCs and GCs. Sun Jiying is leaving on Saturday to attend a meeting out of town with Professor Liu and two other grad students. Because she has to make a poster to present at the conference, I had yesterday off and will have tomorrow off as well. The conference goes through Wednesday of next week but she has to attend an HPLC operation training session of sorts when she returns, so I will have all of next week off as well.

I'm not entirely sure what I will do with my time at this point. Traveling to a different part of the country would probably be cool, but I don't think it would be feasible because I have to save money for school in the fall and getting around by myself would obviously be challenging since I don't speak Chinese. I'll probably end up staying in Beijing and maybe visiting the labs other students are working in and working on my poster.

I think I've discovered my favorite things in Beijing. First of all, corn on the cob. You can get it covered in a spicy sauce at some stands and it's soooo good. Its texture is slightly different from the stuff we have in the states, though, so not everyone likes it. Secondly (actually I may like this more than the corn) is this little painting shop on what we call the cultural street. I don't know how to describe exactly where it is other than near the Hepingman subway station and famous Peking duck restaurant. In the upper story of the shop, an older Chinese man paints simple nature scenes on scrolls, fans, and papers to be framed. There are all sorts of different sizes and all sorts of different pictures ranging from flowers to animals to scenery. He always writes a little note about the scene off to the side of the picture and signs his name and stamps the painting. His wife stays on the lower floor, directing customers and basically running the business.

I've been there three times already and am planning to go back again this weekend. The last time his wife saw us coming (Allison and I were sprinting because we were afraid the shop would be closed- we got there at 7 and as it turned out it closes at 7:30), she waved and laughed at us and brought us to stools to sit on and ice cream to munch on while we waited for Marko. I bought a big scroll that I have originally come back to get along with a medium sized one that I had not originally come back to get and then ended up buying two other paintings while we were waiting. Each time I brought something new up to the counter to buy, she would just laugh at me because she knows I love everything so much and can't stop buying things. I've definitely spent over 1,000 yuan there already.. I want to take pictures with them and their shop this weekend, so hopefully I will figure out how to post those at some point.

So that is pretty much my new favorite hangout. In other news, Melody will be missing in action for the next week. She's gone to the beach today with her group for a couple of days and will be traveling to the Hunan province with them once they return. Which is really cool for her. I'm jealous.

That may be about all. We will have to see how my next week of vacation goes..

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..