Emily McIntosh's Internship Experience
My Summer in Siena, Italy
I received a IRES grant to spend the summer doing research in a Chemistry lab in Siena, Italy, and I had the most incredible experience. I learned a lot, both in the lab and out of the lab.
The research that I work on at Emory was in making solar cells out of nanomaterials. In Italy, I studied the crystal structures of the materials I had prepared at Emory. My research advisor at Emory is Professor Tim Lian. I spent a year working in his lab preparing different materials. A series of CdSe nanoparticles of different dimensions, several tin and titanium oxide nanorod preparations and gypsum powders of controlled grain size.
I worked with Dr. Gregorkievitz in the Natural Sciences department at the University of Siena. We studied these under the polarizing microscope and SEM for morphology and chemical composition. We obtained X-ray diffraction patterns using different apparatus and methods: Bragg-Brentano goniometer, Debye-Scherrer and Gandolfi camera, manual and automated peak readout, film digitalization etc. We were able to interpret this data with regards to qualitative phase identification, grain size determination and calculus of preferred orientation using full pattern Rietveld refinements. Among the results, we found that both CdSe and SnO2 had problems with phase purity which we were able to resolve through additional preparative work in the chemical lab. The gypsum powder, on the other hand, was to be excellently suited for standardizing PO. Prety much everything I did in the lab was new to me and I had to rely on Dr. Gregorkievitz for help in the early days. The first week was very intense, but things got better after that.
Approaching my research from a different angle gave me a new perspective, and I found many differences between the lab at Emory, and the lab in Italy. In the United States, research is very goal driven. This is a good thing, but research can be too focused. My mentor in Italy, Dr. Gregorkievitz would come in at least once a week with a material that he found somewhere and wanted to study. These ranged from ancient ceramics, to dental works, to fish bones. Once, when we were looking at some of these with the scanning electron microscope, I asked him, "Why are you doing this? It is not really related to what you’re studying." And his answer was that his job was doing research. He is interested in finding things out, and it’s impossible to tell what you are going to find out if you are not willing to look for it. I found that this attitude towards research rubbed off on me very quickly. I now look at research with a different angle, trying to discover, without limiting myself to an overly specific goal.
Dr. Gregorkievitz put signs in the student mensas (cafeterias) that said an American girl was coming to Siena for the Siena and needed a place to live. Maria called him. She was studying languages at the University and thought it would be fun to practice English for the summer. I became very good friends with Maria and our other roommate Valleria. We spoke in a mix of English, Italian, Spanish and hand gestures. We cooked dinner together at night, spent countless hours hanging out on the piazza, and went running everyday around Siena. I realized that Italians are not any different from Americans. Maria and Valleria reminded me of my friends from Emory.
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| Emily with other Emory students at the Palio in Siena, Italy. |
There were plenty of cultural differences though which I grew accustomed to. The general greeting in Italy is kisses on the cheeks, clothes are hung to dry, lights were always turned off if was not completely necessary for it to be on, and the only kind of food that exists is - Italian. I went home with Maria one weekend. She lives in the region of Puglia, near the heal of Italy. Staying with her family and meeting her friends from home gave me another perspective of Italy. Most of the people in her small town had never met an American and no one knew any English, (I got to practice Italian a lot). But everyone seemed to have a very positive view of the United States. In fact, there was a replica of the Statue of Liberty in the yard of Maria’s country house and her grandfather, who fought in World War II, gave me a hug and said "Bienvenuta a Italia", "Welcome to Italy".
Going into the summer I was nervous. I had no idea what to expect. I was going to another part of the world alone for ten weeks, how was I going to survive? When the time came to leave Siena and return to the United States, I did not want to go. I still talk with my Italian friends often and I hope to return to Siena as soon as I can. I am so thankful for the grant that I received that allowed me to have this truly once in a lifetime experience.