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 fourth-year graduate student and PhD candidate. This was my last week interning here, and I am so sad to be going home but it was an amazing experience!
This week was spent finishing up a lot of different things. On Monday the majority of my day was spent running prep plates. We made 6 prep plates and filtered 11 strips, because we weren’t totally sure what was the product or not. This took a really long time, and so that was the majority of what we did on Monday. Tuesday we spent setting up and running five reactions, then extracting and evaporating. I also learned about how to name some of the chemicals – for instance, where chemicals are placed on a phenyl group can be called ortho-, meta-, or para-. On Wednesday, we worked up the five we set from yesterday, running prep plates and filtering them out again. I also started to work on the slide deck for my wrap up talk at the group meeting on Friday. The week didn’t involve a lot of heavy reactions because Thursday and Friday were my last days but they were also when a lab-wide clean up was scheduled and no one was supposed to be doing their chemistry. Thursday Madison also helped me with my slideshow, and then we started cleaning. There was a lot to do, and everyone was busy. I put a lot of chemicals away by looking up their CAS number for the formula, and then organizing them by carbon number. Friday was also a cleaning day, but again, I ran through the slides one last time with Madison, then we went to a meeting with people from *NSPIRE, an organization that works with local colleges and gives a symposium once a year. We then went to lunch, and got food from the Thai food truck near us, going with people from the meeting, a small group from California State San Marcos. Everyone was really friendly and was really fun to talk to. Afterwards, I talked to Keary a little bit, and he was really nice and gave a lot of insight into chemistry. Keary, if you read this, thank you so much, and I really appreciate everything you’ve done for me! The Engle lab was so much fun! Then it was time for the group meeting, and I had to give my presentation. I talked about what I had done with Madison, and the main project, alkyne difunctionalization. It was really scary but everyone was super supportive. The lab also all signed in a card for me, and it was really sweet! The end of Friday was really hard and I was really sad to go, I’ve made some really fun connections in the lab and I am going to miss everyone so much! I headed home on Saturday and got back to the Denver Airport that afternoon. This was a shorter blog, but I wanted to say thank you to everyone following along and I’ve learned so much here!
I made this chemical in my last week(this week). It was so pretty and glowy!
This was also an NMR from one of my compounds, each peak corresponds to a hydrogen on the compound.
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