Rossana Cubillan: The Magic of Chemistry

During the summer 2016, I had the opportunity to participate in a research project in a paid internship at Lander University in the Organic Chemistry laboratory. The general project consisted on synthesizing iron oxide magnetic nanoparticles to be utilized in epoxy telescope mirrors which at the beginning sounded terrifying and challenging. Before starting the project, I did not know what to expect from it and was somewhat afraid of what was soon approaching. But throughout the project, I came to the realization that my abilities and knowledge could help go through the challenges and solve the problems that may arise. Besides improving my hard skills in relation with the chemistry knowledge I had thus far, this internship helped me improve my soft skills significantly, specially my problem solving, self-confidence, team work ability, and time managing skills.

Starting from day 1, I was encountered with challenges and problems that needed to be solved. The very first one was deciding the set up for the experiment. I was following procedures from other research peer reviewed papers yet the description of the set-up of the experiment was not described in detail. Therefore, a decision on how to set-up the instrument and what kind of flasks to utilize had to be made. At the end, after some trial and error, we had come up with a set up that had potential. The picture below on the left is from the 1^st arrangement we had chosen to utilize and we slowly did some modifications to it until we reached what we considered a good set-up (picture on the right).

Moreover, challenge one was overcome but more challenges were to appear. The second challenge was to carefully perform the experiment and ensure I would obtain the results I expected. The purpose of the research was to make magnetic nanoparticles yet the magnetism of the nanoparticles could not be measured until the end of the experiment. When it came time to test for magnetism, nervous thoughts filled my mind because I was afraid my experiment had not worked out and I had wasted materials in performing an unsuccessful experiment. At this point, my self-confidence increased because after the experiment, the particles were found to be magnetic. All the particles synthesized in the experiment agglomerated towards where the magnet was which meant that they were in fact magnetic. I was excited and happy to see that the experiment had worked and I successfully completed the task I was assigned. I had proven myself that I could put to practice the hard skills that school had taught me and helped me develop.

Working on the laboratory also improved my team-work abilities. There were two interns, me included, working on the laboratory on similar yet different projects. We both were utilizing the same instruments which meant that from time to time we had to plan accordingly so that we would not try to use the instruments at the same time. Nonetheless, it was crucial that we communicated with each other to ensure that we both had enough time to run our experiments. Our improved team work ability was evident to us specially one time that we had to work together in order to fix a broken instrument. Both of us needed to use a mechanical stirrer to keep our reactions mixing. Unfortunately, we lost a screw which attached a metal rod to the motor of the stirrer, and because we did not have that screw we could not utilize the stirrer. After a few days of brainstorming and trying different things such as using electrical tape to attach the two pieces together, we found a way to fix it by using a metal attachment and new screws.

From all these experiences, I believe what had the most valuable impact on me from my breakaway was improving my communication skills. English being my second language has been one the biggest challenges I had to encounter since I moved to the United States. Public speaking frightened me for being afraid my pronunciation would not be correct or proper. As part of this project I had to present my findings multiple times and one of those times was at a regional conference called SERMACS (Southeastern Regional Meeting of the American Chemical Society) that took placed in Columbia, SC in October 2016. While at this conference, I had the opportunity to explain and share my findings to other chemistry students and faculty members. This conference showed me how to share scientific findings with peers and how to take constructive criticism to improve my experiments and further enhance the research project.

A normal day in the laboratory would consist on a list of tasks to get accomplish during the week such as preparing and testing samples, cleaning used flasks, and running experiments. Especially with experiments, we had to be very careful of time and attempted to plan the experiments as much as possible. At the same time, I learned how to be flexible and not always follow the plan given that sometimes the experiments or the preparation of samples could take longer than expected. Nonetheless, sometimes I had to remind myself that it was okay if things did not run as planned.

My internship experience taught me that I could explode my potential to the fullest to improve not only my knowledge about chemistry but also soft skills such as problem solving, self-confidence, team work, and time management. Although at the very beginning I would get discouraged when experiments did not turn out well, I quickly learned that failures are not always a bad thing. As long as I learned something from it, a failure could be considered a success.

Working as a fellow researcher in the Organic Chemistry lab at Lander University gave me the opportunity to expand my knowledge and introduced me to what conferences in my field of study are. I was able to use concepts and abilities I have gained throughout my college education and realized that I am able to do above and beyond what I thought I could. If I could have the chance of picking again, I would definitely choose to work on the laboratory on a research project again without hesitation.

Rossana Cubillan graduated from Lander University in the spring 2017 with a Bachelor’s degree in Chemistry. She was an international student at Lander from Maracaibo, Venezuela. During the summer 2016, she participated in a paid internship at Lander University in the Organic Chemistry Laboratory working on the synthesis and characterization of iron oxide magnetic nanoparticles for shape-memory epoxy telescope mirrors. After graduation, she hopes on attending medical school to pursue her dreams of becoming a surgeon.