Greetings my fellow NEWT interns, I am William Zenor. I met most of, if not all of you on the first week during orientation. I am tremendously grateful to have been granted the opportunity to share time and experience with such wonderful and like minded individuals. I thoroughly enjoyed spending time with everyone from ASU and UTEP while they were here, as well as exploring downtown Houston with them. I also had the opportunity to take them to see Valhalla which they seemed to enjoy. I met my mentor during orientation, her name is Yan Xu. She is a chemistry PhD student from China. She has only been in the United States for three years and she does not speak the most fluent English yet, but we do communicate back and forth fairly well. I was rather surprised to find out that my lab does not include working with nanotechnology or water in any way shape or form. I will be working on a means of reducing the viscosity of heavy crude oil using Metal Ligand Compounds (MLC’s). During the first week and a half of actually working in the lab I have been assisting Ms. Xu with running her experiments and verifying her data for a paper that she is writing and intending to publish in the near future. As of this point I have not been given any idea about what I am supposed to be doing for my project, I have only been helping my mentor with her work. I believe there may have been some miscommunication about the scope of the internship. I spoke to Dr. Loyo to clarify things with myself. Afterwards I have spoken to my mentor, but she seems to not understand or in unaware of the great extent of the internship’s objective. I trust Dr. Loyo will be able to assist me in getting this taken care of. In actual lab I have washed a lot of oily glassware and performed many single column liquid chromatography experiments to separate oil into it’s main fractions. My mentor and myself have already made a mistake together and wasted several hours worth of work, but it was a good learning experience. I have met with my PI twice. Once in a meeting between him, my mentor, and myself. And the second time he too his whole group of grad students, post-grads, research assistants, and visiting scholar (me) out to eat for a group meet up and a photo opportunity which was pretty enjoyable. Overall this experience has been very enjoyable and I look forward to the next nine weeks.
Here is a link to Dr. Wong’s group page where an announcement was posted welcoming me to the group. If you click the people tab you can find me listed as a Visiting Scholar. (Sounds much better than Intern) http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~wonglab/index.html
One of the many columns that I have made for chromatography.
A splendid looking group of intelligent young individuals.
William, I am catching up with the blog just now, hopefully you and Yan have come up with a project already.