Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

So we recently had a ‘blizzard’ here where I am, and while my area didnt get iced, we did get beautiful lovely snow. As a budding crystallographer, I looked at the snowflakes, really big crystals and went, “OMG! Tropochemical twinning! Merohedral twinning! SQUEE SQUEE!” After realizing my inherent nerdyness, I stumbled upon to this website [...]

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Nothing to do with chemistry at all. Pop music amazingness

So I wasnt planning on putting this down, as it has NOTHING to do with chemistry, but there’s this DJ Masa from South America who mixes up Jpop/Kpop and USpop. I’m a huge pop junkie, really and well, this will probably destroy any chemistry cred I’m trying to build, but oh well. This stuff is [...]

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so you want to be a chemist pt 3

So, now that you’ve survived freshman and sophomore year and you’re still a chemistry major, congratulations! Junior year is when things really suck… 6) Junior Year This is a difficult year. Physical chemistry, inorganic chemistry, analytical chemistry, biochemistry, (insert chemistry elective here). Back in undergrad, we needed two semesters of all these classes, so we [...]

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So you want to be a chemist pt 2

So I decided to write some more since no one is in lab and I have reactions setup, so time to blog I guess. 4) Freshman year So at this point, you still want to be a chemist, after going through everything you have back in high school. Good for you! I highly recommend taking [...]

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So you want to be a chemist pt 1

So I remember reading the “So you want to be a physicist” back in the days that I did want to be a physicist. I still do, to an extent, but solid state sciences have become quite interdisciplinary with chemistry and physics, hence I’m studying both. I digress. I’ve looked around and havent been able [...]

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Arsenic, polarizability, and NLO materials

Soluble Direct-Band-Gap Semiconductors LiAsS2 and NaAsS2: Large Electronic Structure Effects from Weak AsS Interactions and Strong Nonlinear Optical Response Tarun K. Bera 1, Jung-Hwan Song, Dr. 2, Arthur J. Freeman, Prof. 2, Joon I. Jang, Dr. 2, John B. Ketterson, Prof. 2, Mercouri G. Kanatzidis, Prof. Dr. 1 * Angewandte Chemie Int. Ed. 41, 7828 [...]

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Crystallography: Which of these do not belong? pt 2

So I put up that earlier post showing the Fourier transforms. For those of you who do know the answer, congratulations. You know the basics of symmetry! Crystals are said to be periodic. As such, they fill all space and have translational symmetry. 2, 3, 4 and 6 fold symmetry shows translation. If you look [...]

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Here’s a slice of humble pie

I had a really interesting conversation with one of cohort the other day about a few things, primarily our students’ views of us. We got on the topic of assertion versus bitchyness. We could both act the same way, but by virtue of her being a woman, she’d be all the b-word and I’d just [...]

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Entitlement and grades

Now that I’m done TAing and all my evaluations are in, I can vent a little. Back when I was a scared little undergrad, I never had a sense of entitlement for my grades. Yes, I turned in subpar and mediocre stuff. But yes, I got C and Ds for it as well. I knew [...]

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Crystallography: Fourier Transforms and X-ray scattering pt 1

I’m a crystallographer in training. I love crystals. They’re pretty. Organikers love ‘em too, since it’s another away asides from NMR to go through it. But asides from using SHELXTL or CRYSTALS, the math behind crystallography is lost on some people, so here’s an exercise. So here are a bunch of pictures. To the left [...]

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