[fc417fc802]

> working all day at 18 degrees c and constantly smelling her colleagues’ lab animal feed

That sounds more like biomedical research than chemistry? At the risk of stating the overly obvious to you do keep in mind how great the differences are between subfields. Synthetic organic versus materials science labs will look like entirely different professions from the perspective of a layman glancing in the window (which they are I suppose).

[coderatlarge]

fair point - yes this is a biochemistry lab but her part is specifically to do with analysis of lab data collected from someone’s specific experiment. so she’s learning practical things having to do with actually doing new science in a real environment though she’ll need to generalize a bit in her mind (hopefully correctly but then developing intuition and imagination matters too) to the pure chemistry aspect of it. she’s generally excited to meet actual professionals in their day-to-day work who have specific performance expectations of her and who really care that her part is done correctly and can be thoroughly audited and verified for accuracy. this time she’s not getting her hands on actual lab instruments and things like that (she does that at school and hopefully in next summer’s internship if she can can get one and is still interested by then); but she’s seeing how data comes from each of those physical world manipulations and what is done with it afterwards.