A Place for Some Ideas and Ramblings to Reside

Thursday, November 3, 2011

Whirlwind

I'm back to reality. The past couple of weeks have been pretty busy. My first academic article came back and was accepted with minor revisions. This means that the reviewers read it and liked the content, but had some questions and suggestions. We then had to respond to the comments, one of which was to make all new figures (yikes!). I did that job, and it was a little tedious, but definitely worth it considering that after sending it back, THE PAPER WAS ACCEPTED! If you're reading this and don't know me then this is much less significant to you, but I'm sure you can understand how big it is. This paper is my first publication as a scientist and I'm quite happy with it. 

On another academic note, I presented a poster at this year's South Eastern Regional Meeting of the American Chemical Society. This conference has talks and poster sessions for most disciplines in chemistry. My poster presented research on developing a method through GC-MS/MS (a very high-powered machine) to detect and quantify chemicals in tobacco smoke. It turned out that more than a few people in my session were interested in what we'd done, so I think that the presentation went well. It was a huge relief to me, as I wasn't sure anybody would care about it. I'm glad they did.

When I reflect on what I've done since starting work as a professional chemist last year, I realize that it's been a privilege to publish my first paper and present an poster during the International Year of Chemistry. I hope that later this year I can possibly go back to Washington High School and talk about my experience with some of the students interested in science. 

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