On May 28th, 2009, a collection of Emory University Chemistry Students traveled halfway around the world to Rome, Italy. Eighteen students, two professors, and one teaching assistant made it; one more student would soon join our new family in the near future. Throughout this experience, each individual will form new friendships, grow mentally, physically and in any other way they desire, and share memories that hopefully last a lifetime. This is going to be my personal blog about the experiences and new knowledge that I obtain.
This first blog will attempt to illustrate my humbling experience at the poster session on June 3, 2009. As an Emory student, I sometimes pride myself a little too much in that I attend one of the top twenty universities in America. Though students at Emory University may statistically have much higher earnings throughout their life compared to the general public, I believe that it is important to remain humble and aware that we may not be as knowledgeable as we think we are.
During the short presentations by some of our fellow new Italian friends and researchers, they gave us a preview of their poster. I am not going to lie; I did not understand a majority of the information that they were presenting. Luckily, I was not the only one. After sitting through the presentations where I felt like I was the most unknowledgeable person in the room, I set out to find at least one poster that I could somewhat understand. I settled on Olive Oil as Seen by Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy by Daniela Valensin, one of our Italian friends who is currently a researcher at the University of Siena. Even when she was explaining her poster to me (as simply as possible, I’m sure), I only understood bits and pieces of the information. I did learn that in her research, it is strongly suggested that there is a way to correlate certain peaks from graphs (I do not remember specifically) with sensory qualities, such as bitter taste, vinegar taste, pungent, etc. Also, I learned that olive oil, like many other consumer products, has different classifications based on quality. The categories are based upon the percentage of oleic acid and it’s organoleptic properties. Extra virgin olive oil is considered to be the highest quality of olive oil with less than 0.8% free acidity. Lapante olive oil has high acidity of greater than 2.0% and poor organoleptic properties. Overall, it was a very humbling experience that showed me that I have much to learn about chemistry research along with controlling my ego.
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I agree with Andrew in that at times we forget that doing well at Emory is not the end all of academic knowledge. There is a lot that we have yet to learn and understand as there is an immense amount of research and new topics being investigated. It is important to stay humble and acknowledge the work being done by people around the world.
ReplyDeleteChi: It made me smile to be a part of your new family. :) <3
I was definitely that other person who didn't understand much at that chemistry poster session :)
ReplyDeleteI agree with both Dhruv and Chi. This trip, so far, has opened my eyes to so many new things. Some are academic and others are practical-the bottom line is that learning is a lifelong process. It was so overwhelming to sit through the presentations of professors who are much more advanced than I am but, at the same time, I think they learn as much from us as we learn from them. It's so cool!
ReplyDeleteWe do learn from you Courtney! I also want to remind Andrew and everyone else that the San Miniato students are graduate students. They are pursuing a masters degree in chemistry. You will learn more about the educational differences when you chat with them tomorrow afternoon.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree Andrew. I was pretty lost too. But after speaking with some of the researchers, I realized I knew more than I thought. We analyzed NMR graphs and peaks this year during Organic which is what these scientists did during their research. Also, we learned things about fats/oils this year which also is applicable to their research. Plus, they spent a ton of time researching their topics and only had a couple of minutes to explain it to us.
ReplyDeleteI concur, Mike. My post was directed at how I discovered that I actually knew more than I thought I would. Though at first sight every poster seems disturbingly incomprihensible, if we go past all the complicated specificities and realize that presenters live and breathe the science that we are currently studying, we can start from the point of the things we learn in our science classes and realize that the posters are just specific examples and applications of the science. Yay for what we have to lok forward to in the future...
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