Increasing Resolution

My sights  have cleared up as I finish off the first semester of graduate school. It felt as though a thick dark haze had been developing on my vision of the future, past, and present during the last month, but I am glad to be seeing clearer now that elderly wisdom rears its head. A visitation from a family member and a friend would seem to be all that it takes to feel good about life. Although, good is a relative term when there are many more battles to be fought. The battles can be broken down into a few categories: Learning, Healing, and Helping. Right now, a battle is raging over the surface of my throat, nose, and chest, the bacterias versus the antibodies, this falls into the healing category. There is another battle over my style of helping, it would seem academia is quite stubborn and applies a pressure of early chemical waste activities. Although, people in higher education generally agree that wasting chemicals is bad, most people do it anyway in an attempt to keep busy I suppose. Where is the progress I ask? The third battle lies in learning. This is by far the toughest, longest lasting, and most strenuous of battles. While my health will likely soon return, my addictions will cease, and my helping attitude will become lighter and more wasteful, the battle of learning will not stop.

Current topics of learning include: Photosynthesis, Water splitting, Carbon Dioxide Splitting, Heterogeneous (porous surface) Catalysis, Electron Transfer, Polynuclear Organometallic complexes, and Ultrafast (Femtosecond) Laser Spectroscopy. These topics are mostly outside of programmed classes although there is some overlap in the course on Organometallics taught by T.Don Tilley, who is also my recently contracted thesis advisor. Furthermore, there will be overlap in the course in Physical Organic Chemistry when Professor Bob Bergman covers Photochemistry, Electrochemistry, and Catalysis. The ultimate goal would be to generate hydrogen gas directly using only sun light, water and metal catalysts at room temperature and pressure.

Luckily, there is a computational project outlined in the Physical Organic course that will involve using supercomputers to calculate molecular ground state energies, excited state energies, and preferred structural geometry information specific to my groups molecular interests. These calculations involve various quantum mechanical and molecular dynamics theoretical electron orbital models that do a reasonable job of giving reliable data that is close to empirically determined data. Becoming adept with these tools could potentially save companies and universities millions of hours of work in the lab and billions of dollars in chemicals. Thus, while I am glad they are enforcing us to learn these programs I am also sad that the project will be completed and finished so soon. The computational faculty are very friendly though, and are willing to serve far beyond the course requirements.

I have bought a plane ride home to Portland, OR during December break. I look forward to taking a break and assimilating/integrating the intensity of the last 3 months while visiting my group support members, my family and friends. Meanwhile, I am preparing for Turkey dinner, and recollection of family recipes for a superepic holiday dinner.