Many of you may be wondering what the day to day life is like for a student doing research over the summer. While I can’t give you a picture into what every interns days are like I can give you a picture into what my research experience has been like and what my day to day is like during the week.

My mornings start off at an early 5:30 most days and are started with a workout, light breakfast and shower. I walk to work and try to be in my office by 8:00am (I know I’m crazy getting to work that early). My mornings start with reading scientific papers (so many papers!!! so much information!!!) and carrying out some computational chemistry and molecular modeling on either my laptop or via remote access to the Knot Computer Cluster of the Center for Scientific Computing on campus. At 9:30 or so I set up a longer computation then head into the wet lab with my mentor to purify the products of the reactions that we left running overnight. For the purifications we pretty much use the same techniques that you learn in ochem lab classes such as: extractions, filtration, rotovaps, and (shudder in fear!!!) flash columns. The purifications normally take a couple of hours. Then we take the samples upstairs to the mass spectrometry lab to analyze the products and answer the big question, did we make what we tried to? The answer to that question varies everyday. Today we had 3 reactions run well and 1 that ran…decently. After finding out if the reactions worked we set up new reactions to run overnight, they may be continuations of the synthesis or scale ups of the reactions we ran the previous night. We normally try to set up 4 reactions and are in the wet lab until 3:50 to 5. After finishing in the wet lab I go back to my office and check on the computations I left running and analyze the results if I have any. I head back home at around 5:30 but my day of research is normally far from over.

After grabbing dinner and going for a quick run, I’m back to reading papers on anything from how to remove a trityl protecting group from histidine to what is the best basis set to for carrying out calculations on an iron-ligand system and doing computations on my laptop. Then I take a break, watch some TV then crash for the night for it all to begin again the next day.  Naturally this schedule varies with my internship’s scheduled meetings and events, but you get the picture.

One thing that will surprise you if you start doing research is how hard it is to not do research. Once you have been exposed to the questions that dig into your brain about your project it is difficult to not think about them. Whether you’re showering, hanging out with friends, or binge watching Friends, your thoughts drift to wondering about the questions that your research has presented you with and wondering what if I try this? What will happen?  It’s a fun adventurous time to spend your summer doing research and one that you should try.