Andrew Mah, Entry #1, Totally Unexpected

My first two weeks at Khalizov’s lab just came to an end. The transition has been somewhat rough since there were many unexpected parts of the lab I was not prepared for. But, I am trying my best to get myself back on track.

Anyways, before I get to the actual lab experience, my daily schedule at NJIT goes from sometime between 9:30 and 10 in the morning to 4:30 in the afternoon. My lab is really flexible about times, so this has been great for me. Commuting from home takes about 30 to 40 min since the traffic to Newark is always packed. I have tried many different ways to get to NJIT: train, my mom/dad dropping me off, and Uber.

Now, going back to the lab experience, I thought I would be prepared for the lab since I visited the lab back in February and also got the lab safety training out of the way early. However, the lab turned out to be a more of an applied physics/engineering lab than an environmental chemistry lab.

The lab is very small in terms of people and size. The lab is located in Tiernan Hall, which is one of the older buildings on campus. There are only four people working under Dr. Khalizov currently: Ogo, a graduate student studying chemical engineering, Matt, a graduate student studying applied physics, John, an undergraduate student majoring in environmental science, and me, a high school student. I work extensively with John, whom I have gotten to know pretty well over the past two weeks.

Dr. Khalizov is not really involved in the project that I am working on. I realized this project is under Matt’s control, and he has been giving John and me things to work on.

The project, which is studying reactions between salts and mercury compounds, requires us to build all the machines before running the actual experiment. It seems like building the components will take significantly more time than doing the actual experiment.

John and I have been working to build a device that can heat the inlet, where the mercury compounds will be mixed with helium to convert the elemental mercury into gaseous oxidized mercury. In order to do so, we built a box that can heat an electrical cord to high temperatures. The electrical wire will be wrapped around the glass inlet. Using a variac, the electrical cord can be heated to different temperatures.

Another thing I am working on is the glass tubes. The glass tubes will be inserted into the glass reactor in the experiment. They will react the mercury and the salts together. I have been successful in coating the glass tubes with different solutions such as sodium chloride and glutaric acid using a vacuum. Furthermore, I have calculated the thicknesses of the glass tubes by varying the molarity of the solutions, and I am working on figuring out how uniform the salt solutions are coated on the glass tubes.

I gave my own presentation a few days ago to update the members of the lab, including Dr. Khalizov, on my progress. They gave me tips for the future work I will conduct in the lab. Each day has been getting better for me in terms of the independent work I am allowed to do, so I am definitely grateful for their trust in me.