Week 1 in the Ball Lab: Chemistry Boogaloo

Hello all! Welcome to my blog. Okay, so the first week is just about over and what a doozie of a week it has been! Let me give you a little background about myself before we get started.

I got my Baccalaureate in Youth and Family Ministry from Lubbock Christian University back in 2010, and as you can imagine I did not have to take very many hard science courses for that particular degree. In fact I was able to substitute a science course for something completely different, thinking that I would never have a use for it. Boy, was I wrong!

Years later, I decided to teach elementary school math and science. I had to get my alternative teaching certification and struggled a bit at first with the material, but wound up enjoying myself immensely. It’s a bit strange teaching science when you’ve only experienced a laboratory environment in high school so when the RET applications opened up I jumped on the opportunity!

With all that being said, I want you to imagine a pool. One end is the shallow end, where I had been playing with my bright yellow floaties on. The other end is unfathomably deep and filled with grad students and it’s labeled “The Ball Lab”. I decided to jump into the deep end and figure things out as I went along, and it’s been quite the challenge! I’ve learned more about chemistry in the past week than I ever thought I would learn in my lifetime. Dr. Ball has instructed me to observe, and perhaps replicate some experiments for the first week and we will meet and discuss what to do after I’ve absorbed some lessons.

My mentor Katie has been instrumental to my progress, and has been letting me get a great feel for the process of what they do in the laboratory. Her project is to take a surface, and use existing chemistries to covalently bond a one-molecule thick layer of proteins in a predictable and easily replicated way. It’s all still a bit over my head, but I’ve put myself on something of a crash course in chemistry to get caught up and I’m starting to make sense of it all.

If there’s anything that I can take away from this week is that chemistry is sometimes a slow process, involving a lot of experimentation and trying several different things at the same time to see what works and what doesn’t work. I’m also learning that there’s a ton of dead-ends in science, and that those are very informative in that they help you narrow it all down.