Week 9: Time Really Does Fly...

Wow, only 1 week left of my internship...it feels like I only started last week.

But, I digress from my main objective of informing my faithful readers of my progress of the past week. Although most of my time this week was focused on drafting and finalizing my final presentation for Friday, I did work on some odds and ends to keep me busy. I am redoing the Allyl Chloride with Sulfide experiment in order to determine if Allyl Chloride really is unstable in water and my controled concentration decreases like last time, or if I had a faulty control. Also, I finished up the 1,2-DCP experiment to see if I could get a better mole balance by taking less samples and therefore not getting leaks out of the septum. I haven't plotted those results yet, so you will have to anxiously wait until my next installment. I am also performing a propene + Zn64 control to see if there is any hydrogenation of propene to propane. Preliminary findings say yes, but I am still testing.

But, like I said, most of my time was spent on the presentation. I think mine went fairly well, there were a few things that I would like to improve for next time, but it was a definite learning experience. I also enjoyed listening to the other intern's presentations to see how their projects had come along since the midterm presentations. Unfortunately, that was probably the last time I will ever see many of the interns as 9 out of the 13 interns left this week. It was very fun working with them all and getting to know them better through the weeks, and I will miss them all very much during my final week. But, hopefully, I can find things to keep myself busy for next week. Like my final paper...