And just like that, another school year has started! My first summer as a college student has ended, and everything is getting started soon. Before school really picks up, I’d like to take a moment and reflect on summer.
With a donation to helping the Texas camps after the floods, our campers got to pie a counselor in the face.
College (believe it or not) was the most different from high school that it could be, and I was almost expecting all of my friends to come home from their schools and also be different. It seemed crazy that that wouldn’t be true. Now I can’t speak for other people, but my summer felt the same, in the most delightful and comforting way that that feeling of home can be. For the past six or so years, I’ve worked at a day camp as a camp
One of my campers brought us all flowers on the last day of camp!
counselor, which I did again this summer, where I’m in charge of the kindergarten and first grade group (yes, they are adorable). College always felt like this huge, life-changing experience, and it was really rewarding to come home with all of my new experiences and still feel like I hadn’t been gone any time at all.
This shows the difference in structure between polyethylene, the most commonly used plastic, and PVC.
Over this summer, I also continued my research with the Sharada Lab with the Center for Undergraduate Research in Viterbi Engineering (CURVE) Fellowship. I helped with a project focused on dechlorinating PVC, a process necessary for recycling PVC. PVC (yes, like PVC pipes) is actually the second most commonly used plastic. Plastics are polymers made up of long chains of carbon, commonly linked with hydrogen atoms and crosslinked or branched to other polymers. PVC plastic is stronger and more durable than other plastics because there are many chlorine atoms attached to central carbon atoms along the polymers. Plastic is commonly recycled by being melted down into pellets that can be repurposed, but when you heat up PVC, the Cl atoms form hydrochloric acid (which is very corrosive). With the Sharada Lab, I explored different pathways of dechlorinating PVC with a rhodium catalyst in an attempt to calculate product selectivity. I was actually able to do all of my research remotely from home, as the Sharada Lab is a computational chemistry theory lab, and I can do all of my work right from my computer (If you are interested in computational chemistry, feel free to check out https://sharada-lab.usc.edu/, where you can see some of the other research the Sharada Lab is working on). While less social, this allowed me to be home in Chicago for the summer, and continue working as a camp counselor.
Now, I’m back in LA and ready for it all to start again! I’m taking Organic Chemistry this semester (wish me luck) among other things, but at least I have a kitchen this time around.
