1. What are some of the ethical issues that you are grappling with in your research? What are some of the ways in which you are responding to these questions?

This question was really difficult for me to answer. It's kinda ironic (and very funny) for me to say that environmental waste is an ethical issue in my environmental chemistry laboratory, but it's something that still persists throughout all types of chemistry research. For instance, when a step went wrong in our synthesis of the catenanes, all the product had to go into DCM waste. This meant that a lot of chemicals and energy was wasted on a product that was never utilized to create the final result. I believe this is one of the many reasons my lab requires all graduate students to carry lab notebooks: to minimize the small mistakes and generated waste.

2. As you continue your research, have you considered alternative viewpoints in your investigation? If so, how have these alternative viewpoints enriched or changed your project?

I feel as though this question came at the perfect time in my lab work. When we were on the second stage of our synthesis, we realized that the product we had received not only had a lot of impurities but it was also not the correct product based on the proton NMR. Thus, we had to redirect our attention to other, more modern papers on the de-protection we were trying to conduct with the reactants. We found a paper that utilized pyridine hydrochloride instead of the boron tribromide solution we were trying to force. Thus, we ordered the pyridine hydrochloride and are starting the experiment this week with more product that we synthesized on Saturday.