First Week...

So, at first for awhile I was pretty nervous and I thought I would be left to figure a lot out on my own, but my grad student was really nice and on the second day I met another girl who was going to be working on the same lab as me. So it's nice to know I can sort of work together with someone else and some of the lab work we do works out nicely when done together. Most of the other kids here I met are a lot nicer than I expected and they're all pretty cool. I'm really looking forward to the rest of the summer.
The big machine on the left is the GC and the smaller on the right is the plotter. Basically we put in 0.2 microliters of our solution into the machine and set the parameters accordingly(most of it is just guesswork) and wait for the plotter to print out scans of what was in the solution. For the last two days we've been looking for the peak of octene-1 and couldn't figure out why it wasn't showing up and assumed we just weren't zoomed in close enough to see it.