Rehabilitating My Relationship With Chemistry -Week 1

After completing AP Chem this school year, Chemistry was one of the last things I wanted to talk about. However, after a couple hours of being in the Buccella Laboratory at NYU, I began to fall in love with the subject again.

I made my way to the 8th floor of the Brown building and rang the doorbell. I was greeted by Professor Buccella who walked me through some safety information and gave me goggles and my lab book. Then the fun began. After only being in the lab for about an hour, I began working with Sarina (a graduate student) and Brismar (a visiting undergraduate student) to make PIPES buffer.  It seemed easy enough, we weighed the necessary amount of PIPES and KCL, and quantitatively transferred them into a beaker, filled it to 750mL of water and began stirred the solution. It turned out there’s a lot more to making this buffer than just mixing two compounds in water and the buffer magically appears. Not only did we have to add KOH until the solution was clear and at a pH of 7, we had to che-lex it too. To “che-lex” is basically purifying the buffer, since it was going to be used for spectroscopy. Particularly, we wanted to filter out any metals, since we would use it to test metal sensors, and near exact concentrations of metals would be needed, so any unknown metals would affect the data. Hours later we finally finished making our buffer. The buffer was sacred that when we had to sacrifice a little during the process of making it, at particular sadness filled our hearts.

Making PIPES Buffer

The second day was much different than the first. Everyone got together and it was time for some lab clean-up! I’m a bit of a neat freak, so I was pretty excited. We had to clean tons of glassware, which involves a lot more than soap, water and a sponge. We re-organized cabinets and draws and at the end, and then labeled all of them (my favorite part). Some people would hate this but for me it was a learning experience, now I know where everything is!

The third day we were back to research. BB (Brismar) and I began our first titration experiment using her compound (sensor) she had made a weak prior. Before starting, we had to prepare a solution of the compound. It was pretty cool, because the we got to make aliquots of the solution then use liquid nitrogen to flash freeze them, in order to preserve the sensors in the -20o C freezer. Next we had to make a solution of MgCl2 mixed with some of the sensor, which was also fun, but we didn't get to use liquid nitrogen again. Finally we began our titrations using the fluorimeter to measure fluorescence as the concentration of magnesium was increased in the cuvette containing the solution of sensor. After collecting the data, we had to analyze it which took another day. Part of analytical chemistry is repeating the same experiment with no changes, and seeing if your results match, so we did the same titration again.

The last day of the week ended with some data analysis and a presentation from a prospective post-doc on about her doctoral work in an organic chemistry lab dealing with another type of sensor. Everyone in the lab has been so welcoming! They're always teaching me about chemistry, even if it doesn't apply to what were doing. I haven't met a group of people more passionate about what they're doing than this group. To sum the week up, not only have chemistry and I been reunited, but I’m learning chemistry has many forms besides AP Chem!