Maiya Wagner – Organic Chemistry at TSRI, Engle Lab – Week 3

Hi everyone, to recap my name is Maiya Wagner, and I feel so blessed to be given the opportunity to work in San Diego interning at the Scripps Research Institute. I am working at the Engle lab, which works with catalysis, and is run by Keary Engle, and with Madison Wagner, a third-year graduate student and PhD candidate. This week was busier than the last, and was super fun!

The Pfizer plant, where Madison and I, with her husband and Kevin and Kevin’s intern, picked up the glassware

On Tuesday my week began, in total I helped Madison set up four reactions – two were able to be done in the first day, and the other two were supposed to take 24 hours to react. Our first reaction used LiOH, and was a clear mixture. We extracted the mixture with a buchner funnel. This worked pretty well, adding water and ethyl acetate is a way to separate the products by density and separate the components. Our second reaction was similar, but it was a pepto-bismol pink and the consistency of yogurt. It didn’t work very well at first. But that’s okay, we made it better and extracted it the same way, and then later would continue working on it. On Wednesday I went to a Safety Officer Meeting with Madison, it went through all of the different safety updates. Some of them applied to biology labs and didn’t apply to us, such as biohazard and where to find Recombinant DNA procedure updates. Some of them did apply to us, such as the chemical waste and changing out containers. I learned that the Engle lab had a waste bin that got lit on fire. After the meeting we went back to the lab to clean up the other reactions, the two from Tuesday. They worked okay, but when extracting one of them was really hard to remove from the funnel. But it was worth it because it turned a really pretty teal color! The other one was a black tar-like substance that was a lot easier to extract but there was a lot of residue left in the flask, so we weren’t sure what that was all about. Thursday was my favorite day, we started out by running two prep plates. These worked somewhat, we ran the plates on the two reactions that took 24 hours, mine was a lot worse than Madisons (we each did one) but again, it was okay! I’m still learning and it’s going good! We then went to make tie-dye shirts by the auditorium with Kevin, who works at the Shivan lab, and his high school intern Jacob. Mine was pink, orange and yellow, and I had never done tie-dye before. It’s really hard to do, and all of the designs I found got really complicated so I just made up a pattern. It turned out not that bad! We came back to the lab and tried to extract the pepto-bismol yogurt mixture again, it worked a little bit more but weird things started happening with the extraction. Basically, the compound is supposed to dissolve into water. And it did – at first? But then we extracted it and it stopped working and started dissolving in the ethyl acetate. Trying to go with it, we continued to separate but there were still things in the water as it glowed under a UV light. Disclaimer –  water should not glow under a UV light. That day we also took a field trip to Pfizer, they’re closing the San Diego plant and donated glassware to the Engle lab. On Friday there was another group meeting, but this time there wasn’t a problem set or anything. It was the wrap-up talks for two people there, Alex and Evan, who are going to be leaving soon.

During The Weeknd’s concert.

Outside of the internship, the other pinterns and I have kept busy. Many times after work, we get home, have dinner and watch a movie or play a game, but sometimes we do things. On Tuesday we went shopping, on Monday I cooked dinner of Chicken and Potatoes and Tomatoes, it was simple but not horrible, and Friday after work there was a concert we planned to go to. I missed it, but Shiloh and Azari went, and Lana was there for the last part of it. On Saturday we drove to Los Angeles! I had Raising Cane’s for the first time, and it was really good, but I’m not sure if it is better than Chick-Fil-A or not.

That Saturday night we went to The Weeknd’s concert at SoFi Stadium, and that was a really memorable experience. We were given wristbands that glowed to the music, and the concert as a whole was really good. I learned that the stadium is about 76,000 people, which is a little less than 3 of the population of Montrose put together. The music was really good, and the openers were good too, Mike Dean (who’s an audio engineer and does a lot of collaboration with the Weeknd) and Playboi Carti. It ended late and Lana’s grandma who lives near the stadium was so kind to let us stay in her condo that night and take us to dinner the next morning. All in all, it was a really fun week and all of the things I’ve gotten to see and do here have been very memorable. I really hope we figure out the sludge.