Last days of Fun, First days of work

Here are some of the interesting things that we've done during the past two weeks.

Michigan Alumni Event: We "students of this chemistry program and the joint institute" were invited to participate in Michigan's 3rd annual alumni event. This event was quite an experience because was gathering of alums as well as featuring speakers such as Rich Rogel and Lloyd Carr. In addition, we got to listen to an absolute marvelous violin performance by Xiang Gao, a world famous violinist. Not only was the music amazing, but the violin he used was also very impressive: 1699 Stradivarius violin “Lady Tennant”, which he received from the Stradivari Society of Chicago. Below is a link to some of Xiang Gao's play.

http://www.udel.edu/violin/music.html

During that week, we also attended an acrobatics show and the Peking opera. The acrobatics show was just great! One of the performers juggled 9 balls on the floor and another biked along a rope while ridding a unicycle with shoulder pads. The Peking opera was interesting because we were allowed to see the actors paint their faces.

By the end of the week, some of the people from our program went on a trip to Xi'an. The rest of us stayed behind and visited the summer palace on Saturday and the Temple of Heaven on Sunday. The summer palace was a nice place to just chill and walk around. We also took a boat out to the lake.



Temple of Heaven was cool but the main temple wasn't as big as I expected...haha I guess those National Geographic people did a good job filming. Prior to visiting the Temple of Heaven, Julia the Join Institute Program director, took us to a famous dumpling restaurant, where Tom and I had an eating contest....it ended with each of us consuming 35 dumplings...pretty disgusting..haha



First week of work:

It was great to finally start doing what we are here for, but as with most internships, we didn't get very much done the first week. Kelly and I are both in Prof. Pei's lab, which focuses on the synthesis of novel light emitting materials, which could potentially be applied to electronic devices. So the type of work done in this lab is definitely very interesting. The past week, I watched my Ph.D student Hai Bo conduct organic reactions such Sonogashira and Suzuki. It was exciting to see how these reactions, which I've learned about in Ochem, are actually done. Next week, I will start ( and hopefully finish) a set of reactions that were just completed in our lab and the findings have just been submitted to a scientific journal.

I think it is also important to mention the lab setting here at PKU. The inorganic and physical chemistry department have just moved into a brand new building this year. The old building, which is undergoing renovations will house the organic department and others that I don't know about...sorry I guess that was my random short update on the chemistry buildings.