Happy Thanksgiving!

These past two weeks I continued to build on my original work and met with my mentor as I prepared for Research Showcase. Over Thanksgiving Break, I didn’t work too hard because I traveled north to see Charlotte, Richmond, and Washington, D.C., but I was happy to have the break, and I’m already eagerly waiting for Winter Break. When I met with my mentor, we discussed my original work and possible directions for my final project. I was also a little surprised to learn that the most successful computational chemists often don’t study chemistry—their background is in mathematics or physics. Later on this year, I’ll try to apply the concepts I’ve learned to a dataset and compete with other people trying to get the best performance. I’m happy about this because I want to be able to do something with a real-world application, and something like predicting drug toxicities is naturally relevant. With my original work, I’m adding more introductory tabs to the website so that a layperson could begin to understand computational chemistry concepts without needing a chemistry or computer science background. I’m aiming to do this through clear examples and visual representations of data. Next week, I’m looking forward to getting closer to finishing my original work and designing my display board.