Weeks Four, Five and Six
Again, I apologize for the delay in posting about my fellowship experience. The past few weeks have been very busy. Because I can’t remember all of the details of these weeks, I will be compressing them into one post.
I’m sad to say that my research hasn’t progressed much in the past few weeks. I understand this is the nature of research, but its still a bummer. In week four, I was attempting the protection reaction on the batches of porphyrin I had. We started to run low on our batches, so needed to make more. Dr. Balaz assigned this task to me and another grad student, but none of our reactions to make the porphyrin were working (less than 2% yield).
Dr. Balaz had the other grad student go back to his own research and we started troubleshooting. First, he observed me setting up and running the reactions to see if I was doing a systematic error. I trained the other grad student in the porphyrin synthesis, so any mistakes I could be making he may be as well. Nothing appeared to be wrong here, so we moved onto the possibility of contamination in my reagents or solvent.
This required us running multiple reactions, only changing one part at a time. In the sixth week, we narrowed down the contamination to one reagent – dipyrrole methane. If you recall from my earlier posts, this reagent is something I synthesized myself from pyrrole and formaldehyde. This reagent is light sensitive so I have to store it in vials covered with black electrical tape in a dark freezer. I’m not certain how it may have been contaminated, but it was and it set me back at square one.
Dr. Balaz also observed me setting up and running the dipyrrole methane reaction. He noticed an error – I wasn’t quenching the reaction or isolating my product properly, which can significantly decrease the yield and purity. Apparently I’m suppose to perform a precipitation after the Kugelrohr distillation. It was a little frustrating because they way I had been running this reaction is the way it was shown to me by a grad student who trained me. Please understand that I’m not blaming the grad student. I was frustrated that I had not asked more questions during my training to get a bigger picture and understand the reasons behind each step I took.
This is a common recommendation Dr. Balaz recites from day to day: ask as many questions as possible, then ask some more. He says that undergraduates struggle to do this because we like to be independent and great from the start, and we should not feel any shame for asking questions. He also says a lot of our mistakes do not come from a lack of knowledge, rather a lack of experience. I’m sure this is not the first time I’ve heard these comments, it was just the first time it sunk in.
If I remember correctly, Dr. Carroll also told my classmates and I that she doesn’t expect us to know of particular techniques because we don’t have the experience – we have never been introduced to them. She also ensured us that this shouldn’t be taken as a failure as a student, and encouraged us to continually ask questions. If we were to read about a technique in a scientific journal and didn’t know about it, to do more research and find out.
Now that we have narrowed down what sources were contaminated, we should be able to get a fresh start. For week seven and part of week eight, Dr. Balaz will be away on a conference and meeting with collaborators for his research. I’m a little nervous, because I would like to get something done and done well while he is away.
