Starting with the research itself. I am not working in the same research lab as last summer. If last summer I was doing analysis, now I am doing organic chemistry - more or less the same thing I was doing all year long and I am pretty sure it’s the same thing I’ll be doing at least until I graduate.

There were 5 students working in the Downey group this summer. By the end of 10 or 8 weeks we got to know each other pretty well. I already knew all of them, but there’s nothing compared with working together daily and having to learn to cooperate by deciding who can use when the only 2 reflux condensers we had for a while, arguing over the only ether squirt bottle, or trying to squeeze NMR samples during someone else’s appointment because the NMRs were overly booked by all labs doing intense research this summer. Not to mention the challenges in finding group meeting times convenient to everyone (even though Dr. Downey usually had veto rights) or songs to listen that everyone likes (which actually worked out pretty well most of the time).

the Downey group, summer 2011

In the first part of the summer, I was working on the same project as during last school year. We did not have a lot of success during the year, but it seemed to me that the summer was even less successful. I was very driven and trying to do a lot. I was often setting up 4 reactions in the same time in the morning and 4 more in the afternoon (my record is 6 reactions in the same time), taking some 30-minute lunch breaks while the reactions were running, sometimes having a hard time figuring out which reaction is which because I did them all at once and having to repeat them, and going back to my apartment at 5 or 6 or 7 pm too exhausted  to get out of bed for 2-3 hours.

one of my reactions from the first part of the summer

I managed to fill one lab notebook in a month. According to other people in my lab, having many lab notebooks means that you worked a lot, but I discovered it’s not true. That’s because you have to write all your reactions, but if your reactions don’t work, you do nothing else, and if they do work, you have to go though a lot to purify your products.

Halfway though the summer, I was offered the chance to move to a related project that the lab has been working on for 5 years, and I took it. As soon as I did, many good results started to show up! My new reactions took longer and I didn’t have equipment to set up more reactions in the same time, which meant that I had plenty of waiting time and I usually had enough energy left to make it to the night. But not everything is paradise: the reagents I am working with now have a very terrible smell that persists in everything they touch.

This summer, I lived in a very international apartment. I shared it with another Romanian girl, a girl from Cyprus and a girl from Afghanistan. My roommates wanted to experiment cooking, something I didn’t quite dare to do on my own for fear of poisoning anyone. But after helping my roommates a couple of times, I plucked up the courage to also do it on my own. And I even ventured to other people’s apartments to cook together.

me and my favorite Cypriot, with our first attempt at baking - we baked a delicious vegetable souffle from a modified Turkish recipe.

We also cooked traditional food for each other and even for an outside guest once. I came to the conclusion that the best way to eat traditional, day-to-day food from other cultures is to live with people who can cook it. Unfortunately, many ingredients required for an authentic Romanian meal are very hard to find in the US, if they can be found at all. But fortunately, my Romanian roommate found a brand of corn gris at Kroger, which allowed us to make polenta. Polenta is a staple food in Romania, especially for poor people who use it instead of bread because corn is cheaper than wheat, but has also been adapted to many restaurant-like dishes as appetizer or as a side to the main entree. Polenta is officially in my top 3 foods that I miss while I’m away from home.

home-made polenta, served with sour cream and cheese, sitting on the poster my roommates made for my birthday.

This summer, I had my good series of weekends doing nothing but sleeping and occasionally volunteering online, but I also had a bigger share of traveling. I went to New York for more than half a day, like over spring break.  I had plenty of time to venture in museums, to walk or have picnics in Central Park, to shop or window shop, go to the Metropolitan Opera or try countless New York restaurants. My visit also included a home-made Indian dinner also attended by a Nobel laureate.

the New York view from close to Brooklyn Bridge 

posing as spider-woman in Times Square

I also went to Princeton, to pay a visit to the girl who came visit me here on campus early in my freshman year. It was a rainy day and we had to spend some time running away from rain, but overall it was fun and Princeton has a pretty campus.

 In front of my friend’s residential college at Princeton

Einstein’s house from back when he was a professor at Princeton

When I came back from Princeton, I realized that I only had a little more than 2 weeks on campus, and  more than 200 dining dollars. That’s what happens when you cook too much. From that moment on, I started eating more often at d-hall (I even made it for breakfast, something I hadn’t done since the school year ended), I had to eat a lot of microwaveable food and of course ice cream, from ETC, and took the people in my lab out to lunch at Passport on my dining dollars.

My summer would have basically be perfect if it weren’t for a little incident in my last shopping adventure. I found this hand cream at a big sale and decided to buy it. I tested it on the back of my left hand to smell its great scent. All good and easy until the next day I found my left hand fingers were getting red, and by Friday night when I had to start packing, my entire hand became red, swollen, and painful.  It’s totally not fun packing with one hand, traveling with a red hand that made people stare at you, and scaring your Mom like crazy as soon as she sees you after 6 months (the what-do-they-do-to-you-there sort of thing). But that’s not the main problem. The day after I got home I went see a doctor. Diagnosis: hand-cream allergy. How on Earth did I get this allergy when I used hand cream before (though not that brand) and I was getting pride in being allergic to nothing but aspirin? But that’s not the biggest problem either. The doctor gave me a prescription that requires eating food with no salt! I was getting excited to try real home-made polenta and other delicious Mom-specific cuisine. Now I am home and still have to wait until I try the food I miss most. That’s my big problem right now, and I blame it all on that hand cream. Guys, don’t buy anything discounted from now on!

I’d rather imagine that I’m just like you, an incoming freshman again, super excited to make it to the biggest adventure of my life: going to college in a different country.You probably heard everything about the great parts of coming to the University of Richmond, otherwise you wouldn’t have accepted. And if you are an international student, you must have heard that going to college in a different country is going to take you some adjustment. But back when I was surfing the Internet like crazy to get some feeling about how my life is going to be over the next few years, I did not find too much about what exactly I had to adjust. So now I decided to share with you some of the stuff that I found different, or that were harder for me because I didn’t know how to deal with them.

Of course, it highly depends from person to person, as well as from culture to culture, and how much you have already been exposed to anything US-related. I must have been an extreme case, because I was raised in a very different culture, in a pretty traditional Romanian family, who never even remotely considered going to another country for any other purpose than visiting. In addition, my parents don’t speak English nor know anything about US culture other than what is portrayed in movies, and neither do 99% of the other people important in my life before I came here. I am also coming from a totally different school system, which emphasizes totally different skills.

Before going on, I should also mention the textbook version of the stages of adjustment to a different culture that I kept on hearing the summer before coming here. At first you are very excited about everything new that surrounds you, you love it and nothing can seem less perfect! Then at some point you get homesick, miss home like crazy, and sometimes start feeling lonely when you realize that nobody really understands you because of your background. In the final stage, you found a balance: you are over homesickness, but you are not as excited about everything as when you first came, because now they are familiar. There is also the reverse shock, when you go home over breaks after getting used to a different culture, and armed with a new way of thinking. You are seeing your own culture in a different light, and after being educated about how great the US culture is, you may not like what you see. And because you formed different opinions while abroad, they may be different than those of your loved ones back home.

Now, a few very concrete details from my own experiences, particularly very early ones, that I can still recollect:

• That’s the way you do things here? When I first came, and I was meeting new people, they probably found me kissing them on a cheek as awkward as I found the hugs I kept getting. It took me a while to figure out that when in Romania you kiss someone on a cheek as a sign of friendship, saying goodbye, good luck or whatever, people here give hugs instead.
• I know English and I know what 2+2 equals, but… I didn’t realize I didn’t know how to say 2+2 in English until I sat in my first science class (which was IQS). After a brief introduction, we did math. It was all simple math review, and the class was very interactive. I was able to understand everything that was going on because science terminology is similar enough in all languages, but I realized that I can’t participate, because I couldn’t express my math thinking in English! I think it was in the second or third week when I finally dared to say aloud something science-related in IQS. I was so proud of myself that day! The good part is that science terminology is similar enough and my feel for the English language is good enough for a foreigner, that one month since school started, I didn’t have any communication problems in science (on the condition that I already heard the word in English at least once before).
• Is that a comma? No, it’s a dot! I remember the first homework I ever got in college, which came from IQS. It was a very challenging math homework. One reason is that I had to be very careful because I knew that the US and Romania use commas and dots in opposite ways when writing numbers. I was confused as to when to use a dot and when a comma, and I sometimes scratched a dot to make a comma, then scratched it back to a dot, and my paper was a mess. (in Romania, the comma is used as a decimal separator and the dot as a thousand separator - this was the only Math difference I was aware of, because the calculators we use in Romania are not made especially for us, so they use dots to separate decimals).
• But it was not supposed to be challenging at all! I’m talking about the same homework! One of the 10ish problems was to graph two functions. So I thought about the entire half of semester we spent on how to properly graph functions in my advanced math high school class. I started calculating for each of them minimums and maximums, inflexion points and some other special points I don’t even remember anymore, giving some random values to get more points on the graph, and doing other stuff that I learned in high school I had to do to graph a function properly. Graphing functions is the most time-consuming exercise in Romanian calculus classes. As I got to school the next day, I saw some random, approximate graphs on my colleague’s papers. “Where are your calculations for the graph?” “What calculations? We just had to sketch some graphs!” It took me a while to understand that they were using graphic calculators (something I hadn’t seen before coming to the US) and that in the US, nobody cares about teaching you how to spend hours graphing a function when a calculator (or a program like Mathematica) can do it for you. I wish I knew that before spending all that time graphing!
• I could probably see the connection between baseball and econ if I knew what baseball was! I loved how my econ teacher taught us everything starting from real-life based examples. In the second week of school, we had this example about baseball. It seemed to make sense to everybody since they were all nodding and asking questions, but I didn’t understand anything. That’s because I know nothing about baseball. A few weeks ago,  at the Academic Skills Center someone asked me for help with that problem, and not even now did I know how to do it, because I still don’t know anything about baseball.
• I’m great at chemistry! Really? We started adding chemistry to IQS a little later than the other subjects. Before our chemistry class, our professor gave us a diagnosis test, to see how much chemistry we knew already. I knew how to solve every single problem, but my professor didn’t understand most of what I did. She saw that I got the right answer, but she didn’t get how I got there. As it turns out, the standard way every chemist in Romania solves general chemistry problems, from those who just heard about atoms to my research advisor from Bucharest, is unheard of in the US. And I couldn’t imagine doing chemistry without that method. It took me a while to figure out the way in which general chemistry problems are solved in the US, a longer while than just learning how to speak scientific English.
• That’s not a D! that’s an s! Now the first IQS test that has chemistry in it comes along. We had this exercise where we were supposed to draw and label s, p, and d orbitals. I was sure I did it perfectly, but I saw I had lost half a point, and I couldn’t get why. Why do I have the letter s cut and written s on top of it??? As it turns out, my professor believed that my little letter s was actually a big D, and she assumed that I believed that my drawing represented a d orbital instead of an s orbital. My inside got outraged: taking points off for handwriting only happens with communist-minded professors I was trying to avoid by coming to school in the US. I didn’t understand at first what was going on. It took me a long conversation with my Romanian Physics professor to get that people in the US never learn how to write cursively anymore, so it’s good enough that they understand most of the other letters. (You may not even know what I’m talking about, so here it is! Notice the little s). Of course, as soon as the professor understood that I meant s, I got my half point back, so everything was ok, except that I learned an important lesson: cursive handwriting is dying! Actually two. The other one was, change your little s urgently! And I did!
• Who cares about Thanksgiving? But I want my Easter back! All Americans pity me when they find that I stay on campus for Thanksgiving break. I don’t! Thanksgiving is this nice American holiday that I am happy to experience as part of fully embracing a new culture. But I don’t feel any need to be with my family on Thanksgiving. If I were with my family in Romania, I would probably not care at all, because Romanians don’t celebrate anything on that day. In Romania, or at least in my extended family, there are two big family holidays: Christmas and Easter. For Christmas, I get to be home. For Easter, I get to be…studying! Here in the US, this year I had my first final on Easter Monday morning, so I had to spend my Easter studying. Back home, we used to have somewhat between 4 days and 2 weeks of Easter break, and I was celebrating it in the village of one of my grandmothers, with my Mom’s extended family, or with my Dad’s extended family, or sometimes we were going to both in the same day. My family is still doing all that, only that I am not there anymore. Talking to them on the phone and hearing them happy together makes me feel even worse. That is, not to mention the lack of Romanian Orthodox churches in Virginia, and the lack of traditional Easter food. Easter is officially the day when I feel most homesick.
• Speaking of homesickness! This homesickness aspect varies a lot! I have met Romanians (not from UR) who went back after a few months or a semester because they were too homesick. I met others who were at first counting the days until going home, but eventually didn’t go home at all. I have also met Romanians who go home just because the parents almost force them to, otherwise they wouldn’t. I don’t think I fit into any category, rather I have my own. I am usually too busy to be homesick. Most of the time, I am busy enough by default, that I don’t get to think too much of what I left behind. I guess that makes me less homesick than most people. I have come to the conclusion that the busier I am, the less I think about home, and therefore the less homesick I am. The only exception is when something exterior suddenly brings home back to my mind, such as neighbors speaking in Romanian to someone other than me. Even in those cases, the solutions are 1) wake up parents in the middle of the night with a phone call and cry telling that you feel lonely and miss them (only happened once) and 2) add 10 more things to do to make yourself so busy, that you can’t even hear what’s going on in the world.
• Nobody believes how busy I am! I usually don’t need to make myself busy though! Studying in the best higher education system never comes for free, even when you get a scholarship that covers all your expenses! It costs you time! And friendships with people from home who don’t get that you are literally too busy to talk to them! I know it sounds terrible, and before I came here, I refused to believe that my friends were too busy to talk to me, until I did come and saw that 1) I didn’t lose their friendship and 2) I became as busy as they claimed to be. I come from a culture where students have a lot of free time, probably more than ever, and some of my friends from home simply do not understand that somewhere else it can be different.
• Did I say I know English? I take it back! Ok, to close in the same way I began, and in the same time with something very recent. I think I mentioned that this semester I took Physics with a Romanian professor. She told me at some point that if I can’t understand something during a test because it’s in English, I can ask her, since other international students who didn’t even share another language have asked her before. I did not need to ask her though, until the final came around. I was so close! But I didn’t want to risk a lower grade in Physics because of my English. The idea of this story is that no matter how great your English is, there will always be a word or something you can’t understand. Yes, there are ways to figure out from the context, but sometimes you have to figure out the context based on that word! Like in an exam! If something like that happens, don’t be afraid to say so! UR professors are too nice to mind a question for clarification.

This post is not meant to make you change your mind about coming to this great university. I just wanted to give you an idea of some things that shouldn’t take you by surprise when adapting to a new culture. I do not feel like copying the rest of my blog here to remind you again of how happy I am for being where I am. However, if someone tells you that something is perfect, it’s pretty sure he’s lying, and I don’t want to lie.To all of you out there, have a happy summer, and get excited to join the Spiders! I’ll say hi again in the fall!

The Modlin Center for the ARTS does not usually host anything science-related, except when research posters from all fields are exposed in the pretty hallway surrounding the interior Modlin patio.I remember how last year I was going to the Symposium to get extra credit for organic chemistry and I liked a poster  so much, that I ended up joining the research group that had produced that poster. One year later, I presented my own similar poster (and I had plenty of organic chemistry students who checked my poster to get extra credit…).

This weekend I was supposed to go with other people from GreenUR to Powershift, a huge national environmental conference  in DC. However, the research symposium, and especially a fancy dinner I had to attend in the evening, complicated matters for me and I ended up not going. I was too depressed for missing the chance to see Al Gore, but as it turned out, what happened at the dinner made things totally worth it: my research advisor got the Outstanding Mentor Award, which means he has been officially recognized him as the best mentor in the school, which gives credibility to my subjective opinion.

 Since I was planning to go to DC, I didn’t get any tickets  for the new Modlin play, Things Fall Apart. When I figured that Powershift will not happen for me, I decided to get a ticket for Saturday, but I hadn’t found time to stop by the Modlin Box Office. So when I heard people at the dinner planning to go on Friday night, I spontaneously decided to join them.

The play was totally amazing, exposing me to an inside view of African culture, about which I knew very little. The performance of the actors, some of which I knew, was outstanding. I know that this school has only talented students, but it it seems like I’m getting the “I know you’re very good, but I didn’t think you were THAT good” feeling every day while I’m on campus.

It seems like this university, with outstanding research mentors and outstanding opportunities such as acting in plays like Things Fall Apart, really gives you the opportunity to bring to the surface every little piece of talent or inclination you  knew or didn’t know you have. That’s just in case you were looking for an additional reason to come to the University of Richmond!

When I got there, I saw that a lot of my friends were helping with organizing, so I offered to help. This is how I went to an event to hang out and ended up on the organizing side.

The event was a mega-success, with traditional and Bollywood-like Indian dances, Henna, and a LOT of delicious Indian food!

All performances were spectacular, but these little kids were the cutest and most impressive!

Another great performance! I was too far in the back, so sorry for the not so great quality!

I took the opportunity to wear my Indian shawl, that I received last winter break from another one of my Indian friends, Simrun, but that I never got the chance to wear so far.

people trying some of the superlicious food!

people trying the

With Shirisha, who gets all the credit!

The Henna Lady creating works of art! I didn’t get one anymore, because I got one not too long ago at a Muslim Student Association event.

As I helped with organizing, I stayed till the end to clean up, and there was this enormous amount of left-over food left. All of us took at least half of plate of the food home or somewhere else, because otherwise we would have had to throw it away. I wasn’t able to eat all the food I got the entire next day! Indian food is great, but I had enough for at least 2 weeks!

Of course it was super cool that we had an outside speaker in class, especially the next day after prospective scholars left. It got our test postponed, we didn’t have to study anything for that day, and we weren’t going to be tested on that stuff, so nobody minded if we didn’t pay attention. But as soon as the presentation started, we all realized that not paying attention was simply out of the question. The guy was very entertaining and engaged everyone, with his stories about this town from Kentucky of 300 (I think) people he grew up in, and his history about what discoveries were made that lead people to understand how color appeared in cool minerals like ruby or sapphire.

He presented these theories, including a couple we studied in class, and at some point he talked about how this latest-at-the-time theory  didn’t satisfy people anymore. “That’s where I came in” he said, and talked about how he came to a conclusion that another theory would explain things better. “And that’s how I developed the ligand field theory”. WAIT, WHAT? That theory is the basic concept of our inorganic test, and one of the main ideas of inorganic chemistry in general. SO THE GUY WHO DEVELOPED IT ACTUALLY CAME TO CLASS TO EXPLAIN IT TO US? That explains why our professor was so excited, to the point of postponing the test.

I already mentioned that his talk was interactive, right? It was so interactive, that he actually invented an award on the spot, for someone in the audience. For me! That was because I was the fastest in responding to his question that  in English would translate as “What is 5-4?” When I said “1″, he came to me, shook my hand, and asked me what’s my name. “Ana”. “Well, Ana, you just won the 2011 Harry Gray award for (something related to oxidation states)! Please give me your email address so I can send it to you!” 

During his lecture, I asked him a gazillion of questions.  And I found him so interesting, that I went to another lecture later that day, which was more of a question-and-answer session about his life and how he came to do chemistry, during which I asked him even more questions. I was impressed that he remembered my name right away, but considering that nobody else was asking so many questions, it sort of made sense.

And he hadn’t started speaking about his research on solar energy yet!  Apparently, that was reserved for his final lecture, in the evening, where a lot of chemists from all over Virginia came. Apparently, his lecture is part of an annual lecture series called Powell Lecture, that is a pretty big deal in the chemistry community of the area. Anyway, he gives his lecture and talks about this ample project called the Solar Army, where high school and undergraduate students from across the world work for him to find a catalyst that would split water into hydrogen and oxygen using solar energy, and at the end there’s time for questions. After a few questions from professionals that probably knew what they were talking about, I raise my hand timidly. At that point, Dr. Gray looks at me and brags me in all ways possible (I paraphrase): “Look at that young lady over there, she was asking me all day all sorts of intelligent questions, and she’s just a sophomore!” (I can swear I never mentioned I was a sophomore). At that moment, all the important chemists in the room were looking at me. Also at that moment, I realized I had just impressed one of the most famous chemists in the country. Wow!

The reason why I raised my hand was to ask him how can a student become involved in his Solar Army. That opened a longer discussion over several questions, and concluded that the University of Richmond has a huge potential for becoming involved in the project. An since there is student interest (aka my interest) we can make it happen. He asked me to contact someone from his team and ask how the university can get involved. A week later (after actually taking my inorganic test from the theory he developed) I contacted that person. Now I’m waiting for a reply. If all goes well, I may have just set the basis for another kind of research opportunity at the university!

Before he left, I couldn’t help myself but ask him to take a picture with me: 

Update: here are some videos of the Powell lecture. The video quality is not too great, but the audio is excellent and that is the most important. Check Part II, around minute 25:30 to listen to Harry Gray answering my questions and praising me in front of all the chemistry community from the area.