i have decided to attend UCSD for graduate school

Apr 19, 2008 13:00

this decision was pretty difficult, but eventually it had to be made. what vivian calls "bromance", i call "compatibility." i found a professor there that has seemed to take a great liking in me, and says my intellectual background and my future research interests indicate a "perfect fit" in his lab. not too bad, especially since i can run along the beach after i'm done doing my research for the day.

the only negative side to san diego is that it costs a shitload of money for a small apartment, if i want to stay close to the lab (which i do). i'm not going to get any work done if it takes me 20 minutes to drive to school. i know that since over the summer, i would never get to caltech until 11am, and then i'd leave around 5. not particularly effective if i'm supposed to be working 60-80 hours a week.

vivian was pretty bummed about it because she is interviewing for UCI this monday (good luck!) and would've liked me to go there, but knew that my grad school was ultimately my decision. what she didn't know was that i would've "made the sacrifice" to be 75 miles closer to her if that really was the decision i had to make. silly vivian.

for those of you even wondering what research there is possibly to do in chemistry, i will tell that chemists are faced with the some of the more difficult, pertinent, and urgent scientific questions today. not questions like "how do i mix 600mg of acetaminophen into 3 tablespoons of water", but questions like "how can we reduce CO2 in the air" or "how can we deal with the fact that we are importing too much oil?"

so there are several fronts for chemistry to attack this "green" issue. one way is to use break down biological sugars, polysaccharides, and lignocellulose into forms of liquid fuel that we can transport, such as methanol, ethanol, or even octane. animals do it all the time by eating plants and converting the cellulose into sugar. so there is room for chemical biologists / biochemists to engineer bacteria into converting fiber into methanol. not bad.

another way to engineer different ways to transport fuel without the use of petroleum is to tap into a feedstock that is a) abundant b) cheap and c) something that we need to get rid of. and that's carbon dioxide. it's too bad that nature has already discovered CO2 to be incredibly stable and chemically inert (a good sign that it's a useful waste product), but plants convert CO2 into sugar with photosynthesis. what can we learn from them?

and that's kind of what i want to get into. i want to be able to synthesize organic molecules to harness the sun's energy and be able to engineer them into a device that can transform photo energy into voltage or current. then we can use that current to power energetically uphill reactions, like splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen or converting carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide or methanol. i feel that this starting link in a chain of many interdependent links is the key to jumping us into a greener energy economy without the use of expensive or dangerous metals.

enough rambling, i need to eat!

green chemistry, ucsd better be a good school

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