Ask A Scientist Chemistry Archive

Question:
What do you do at work?
Could you describe a typical day, please. What do you like best and worst? I
dropped this question before, but haven't received an answer yet.
ionic woman

Answer:  This question will vary depending on the chemist.  I'm a graduate
student doing research at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
A typical day would be to set up and run some reactions that I'm
studying.  Each one takes about one and a half hours to complete.
In the mean time, I'll do the write-up of what I'm trying to
accomplish.  Once the reactions are done, I have to do a lot of number
crunching...calculations to figure out if the data from the instruments
I'm using is valuble, makes sense, is useless, and so on.  Computers
so most of this work.  When the calculations are done, I have to
figure out why what happened, happened.  There are meetings twice a week
with other members of the research group and professors.  There we
brainstorm about what happened during the week with the projects and
where we can go from what we have.  Teaching duties are also intertwined
in my week.  Hope this helps.  If you want specifics, let me know.
-Joe Schultz