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Sasha Sundstrom

Recommendations: Acronym List (AKA Alphabet Soup)

When I started working in industry, I often felt totally lost in meetings. From what I've heard, it's not exclusive to any one company - we all speak in what sometimes sounds like Simlish with millions of acronyms. I was lucky to start within one month of

Opinion: What you should know about networking

I've been planning on writing this for quite a while! Networking does not necessarily come naturally to me, but I hope that may even be more helpful than a guide written by someone who's a natural. The biggest piece of advice I got when I was

Opinion: Why you shouldn't call the women in your lab (or anyone, really) "lab mom"

I've been talking to grad students and one mentioned this in passing - group members referring to her as "lab mom" - and this happened to me as well, and many other women, but I thought we'd kind of, moved forward as a community. Guess not.

Opinion: What you should know about going to Graduate School

I can't speak to other fields, obviously, so know this comes from a chemistry perspective! Why you should go: Starting salary with a B.Sc. in Chemistry is ~$40k (2018). Starting salary with a Ph.D. in Chemistry is listed as ~$68k, but I have a feeling that

Recommendations: Industry Equipment for Academic Groups

I may have been having a love affair with the convenience of my vacuum oven for the past several months while working on some impurity synthesis stuff. I thought I'd put together a list of things that I never encountered in academia but that would have been... life

Desk Flotsam: Monitor Note

I just printed a copy of this for my monitor at home for WFH days - the worst thing about WFH has been that I haven't had this taped to my monitor (unlike at work). I was writing a batch record and needed ≥ and ≤ a million times and could

Desk Flotsam: "Greenness" of Solvents

As a new process chemist, I wasn't always up to date on what's considered a "No-Go" solvent and which ones are desirable for industrial processes. I work on some continuous improvement projects where this comes up and at one point, I came across

Resource Spotlight: SymOtter

SymOtter I've had the pleasure of working in close proximity to our visiting scientist, Dr. Isaiah Speight, for the past few months! He's been such a pleasure to have in the lab and ALSO is a huge chemistry (and otherwise) nerd. We've talked about

Desk Flotsam: NMR Impurities Table

THE ONE TABLE TO RULE THEM ALL I don't REALLY think I need to post about this, but in the interest of sharing cool stuff, the NMR impurities paper is the end-all be-all of all desk flotsam. My first time using this was definitely in undergrad,

Resource Spotlight: Not Voodoo

Not Voodoo - everyone's favorite laboratory resource! Pretty sure that every TLC stain recipe I've used has come from this site. Also love reading through the rookie mistakes section when I'm feeling bad about something going wrong in the lab -- feels good to know you&