lol it's been a while
I meant to update this after submitting, but time just got away from me. :')
So, I'm all done. Completely. As of, like, a month and a bit ago. I've heard things through the grapevine, but nothing official, so I'll probably not mention anything just to be safe.
Thesis happened, and it looks gorgeous. 55 pages of pure gorgeousness (so many references, holy shit. A tenth of my thesis is just references). I'd put up a picture, but it has my name and student number and shit on it - but if anyone wants to see it, I might send a private message or something. Otherwise, not much to say, just that I did it, slept for a day afterwards, got stupidly drunk afterwards, and all of those things. Thesis defence was kinda fun, though. I got some stupid questions (my supervisors were in the room for it, I actually saw one do a double-take at one of the questions), got some fair questions. Start was really rocky - got asked about some weird thermodynamics. Like, I knew the thermodynamics about my entire system inside and out, but the question was very pointed, and I couldn't figure out which part of the system he was referring to, so I kinda just stumbled through all of it. End was great, though - last few questions I answered pretty well, and the very last one I knocked out of the park - it felt like a real mic drop moment.
See, my stuff didn't work. Firstly, intro to what I actually do above, quoted below:
So, background: I'm currently working on a type of materials known as coordination polymers, sometimes referred to as a metal organic framework. Here's the wiki page on this stuff. A lot of the finer details are wrong, but a lot of the general information is good. Essentially, think metal atom, with organic molecule connecting it to another metal atom, with another organic molecule connecting it to another metal atom, etc.
Now, when you build these things, you normally use one or more intramolecular interactions to control what comes out. These interactions are typically unknown until after you've developed a few of the systems, but you can make guesses. For my systems, my supervisor had worked with them enough that he knew it would be pi-interactions and coordination bonds. Lo and behold, he guessed correctly, and those were the driving forces for formation. They even culminated into this little motif that we call an "M2L2 macrocycle" (so named because it consists of two metals, two ligands, and it looks like a circle). Nothing wrong with that - in fact, the M2L2 macrocycle was great, because it was predicted by previous work. In fact, this M2L2 macrocycle was the whole reason we were saying we wanted to use these particular ligands. Like, all we really needed was a fluorescent ligand, but we needed a reason to use this particular one, and that reason was the M2L2 macrocycle.
The only problem that we later realised (after someone else did research on it), is that pi-stacking quenches the fluroescence. In fact, in solution, we saw a quenching of about 50%. So, when these things solidified into a crystal lattice in which every ligand is pi-stacking with another ligand, all of the fluorescence disappears. Which isn't at all what I wanted, and both my supervisors looked visibly upset when they realised what had happened. But oh well, shit happens.
Anyway, the question I knocked out of the park was quite simple, "so if your systems quench, does this mean the M2L2 macrocycle is a bad idea if you're aiming for fluorescent materials?" The reason it felt like such a mic drop is because, while this seems like a logical conclusion, there's actually promising ideas, backed up by research, that suggest you can still make these without pi-stacking - and if you do that, you can keep the M2L2 macrocycle and have the material stay fluorescent. So, I left with that answer, dropped the mic, and aced the ending.
Both my supervisors mentioend that I impressed the people in the room, so I potentially gained an extra two marks from that.
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Right now, I've transitioned into casual work as I wait for next year. I'm doing it with one of my honours supervisors - what he's done is organised for a "virtual" lab to be designed with help from a programmer in the physics department. It's actually really cool - it kinda pretends to be a real lab, in that you still have to do all the nuancy things you'd have to do if you were actually using the instrument (so in the case of a uv-vis, you still need to pick your cuvette, clean it, wipe down the sides, then fill it with a new solution). It's suprisingly fun to play with, I'm just play-testing it to make sure it's as true to the real thing as possible, and figuring out where to best put it into our current education system. If anyone has ideas, hmu.