A Productive Day!

Vocab
HPLC- High performance liquid chromatography- technique of analytical chemistry used to identify, quantify and analyze the contents of a mixture
Potassium Hydroxide- KOH- strong base with a corrosive nature; dissolution in water is exothermic (gets really hot when you mix it in water)

Thursday 2/17
Today was great! It was one of the first times I felt productive the entire 3 hours. Some may find 3 straight hours of work tiring, but I find it invigorating. I started out the day washing dishes in Dr. Helferich's lab on the 5th floor. This is the process:

1. Spray each with ethanol to remove the labelling
2. Rinse with cold tap water
3. Add pre-made soap mixture and scrub with tube brush
4. All soap bubbles rinsed with tap water
5. Rinse each 5 times with warm deionized water
6. Spray with ethanol again
7. Place in drying cabinet at 50 degrees C

This methodical process is sctually very stress relieving. When I finished Dr. A. and Pablo met me upstairs and we stated pulling CSB samples to be analyzed by the HPLC. The samples were actually taken a year ago when Pablo was in Honduras working with the Healthy Schools Program. I knew I needed to be careful because the product was definitely in a finite amount. I prepared and labled each sample in the weighing room. Dr. Helferich's lab is four times the size of Dr. Engeseth's (which is actually his wife!). He brings tens of millions of dollars of grant money into the university and conducts extremely important research. All the students in Bevier know his name and approach him with their questions. I'm very happy that we know each other fairly well now, as his research with international pediatric nutrition is what interests me the most. Networking in the department has been extremely beneficial so far as I will need these conections to excel at the university the next few years.