Yet Another Valuable Interview

This past week I went on an interview with a UTD professor, wrote an assessment for ISM, and kept myself busy with other work. On Friday, I drove to UT Dallas to meet Dr. Steven Nielsen, one of the few computational chemists at the university. It was fascinating to hear how he had contributed to multiple applications through his interdisciplinary work. For example, one collaboration resulted in a process for the targeted delivery of drugs in response to light. Another one involved modeling the behavior of water droplets (the angle they make) on a surface for the harvesting of water from the air. Though the latter may seem less interesting, it helped me gain a lot of insight into how molecular dynamics is actually applied through an algorithm. Overall, I got a new perspective on the modeling side of chemistry—every interview helps me understand the vast field a little better. Last week, I also reflected on my time at Business Symposium and my success with networking. I even continued with my original work idea relating to QSAR interpretation. Besides ISM, I had a pretty busy week with the district cross country meet and All-Region auditions over the weekend. This week, I’m looking forward to making my original work more concrete through my proposal and hopefully writing more code.