By Samantha Smith, Yuchan Dong, and Shira Joudan
Yuchan Dong, who previously studied in China, had begun to miss life with roommates while in Canada. She reminisced about how you could talk about your lives late into the night, and spend meals chatting with friends in the cafeteria. “Luckily, at the ACS summer school, [she] got the chance to experience such life again and got to know a lot people who share same interests.” The summer school brought us back to the more carefree times of our undergraduate lives. Living in dormitories, sharing a floor with fifty-two other highly educated students, sharing every meal with our newly-formed friends, and even tackling homework assignments were just like the “good old days”. The level of diversity strengthened the value of peer-networking and real friendships were made throughout the week.
The week wasn’t just filled with relaxing chats in the Colorado sun; that was merely how we spent our free time. The days were jam-packed with riveting lectures during the day, assignments in the evening, and getting to know the local Golden beers at night (which was obviously a duty of ours as tourists). We also had the chance to take in the local scenery with hikes and whitewater rafting.
The ACS summer school on green chemistry is a competitive program offered to graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and industry members every year in Golden, Colorado. Hosted by the Colorado School of Mines, the program consists of five days of lectures from green chemistry and sustainable energy experts, two poster sessions, a whitewater rafting trip, and lots of opportunity for networking. This program teaches global sustainability challenges with a focus on sustainable energy. The ACS Summer School is free of charge for successful attendees, including travel, accommodation on campus, and meals.
Samantha, Yuchan, and Shira at the ACS Summer School
Jim Hutchison, a professor at the University of Oregon, spoke about how his department has completely reformatted their undergraduate chemistry curriculum to contain green and sustainable chemistry, something that particularly sparked Shira’s interest as lead of GCI’s Education Subcommittee. Bill Tolman, Chair of the University of Minnesota Chemistry Department, shared how students successfully cultivated the safety culture within his department. This had inspired Samantha to create new initiatives within our chemistry department. Queens University’s Professor Philip Jessop taught us about Life-Cycle Analysis (LCA) and assigned us multiple processes for which we calculated the gate-to-gate LCA. Mary Kirchhoff and David Constable from ACS gave talks on green chemistry and ACS resources, many of which would be useful to other departments. The format of the summer school allowed plenty of time to chat with the guest lecturers during coffee breaks, lunches, and poster sessions.
Many real-world issues were discussed. The worldwide energy usage and sources of energy were a main topic of discussion, as was the use of alternative sources. We were blown away by how multi-disciplinary green chemistry is, and we were enlightened on how we need experts in all fields to successfully create sustainable chemistry. We learned that to be able to effectively tackle environmental issues we need great synthetic chemists, whether they specialize in organic, materials or catalysis, as well as analytical chemists, engineers, environmental chemists, and toxicologists. We also need effective entrepreneurs and lobbyists.
Nearing the end of the summer school, a large group of us hiked up Tabletop mountain to get the most amazing view of the valley. A warm feeling of appreciation towards the summer school for bringing us out of the isolation of individual research in the busy city life was shared. We would like to thank ACS for giving us the chance to attend this amazing week. This experience has truly been beneficial to us, and we plan to use the knowledge gained during the week in our own studies as well as pass this knowledge on to our coworkers at the University of Toronto.
Tabletop mountain in Golden, CO
We highly encourage anyone interested in green chemistry and sustainability to attend this beneficial program. Application deadlines are early in the year and submitted online. The application consists of the applicant’s CV, unofficial transcript, letter of nomination from faculty advisor or another faculty member, and a one-page essay describing your interest in green chemistry and sustainability as well as how it will benefit the applicant.
The Green Chemistry Initiative Blog 