Yesterday I met yet another “burnt out” graduate student and having gone through a similar episode myself, I’d like to thread a few thoughts here while it’s fresh. Please feel free to chip in. #PhDChat
1/8 First of all, feeling exhausted in research is very common. Even at other academic levels or non-academic jobs. A quirky nice read on what life has in store for us is Mark Manson’s bestseller: amazon.com/Subtle-Art-Not…
2/8 The main reason for loosing it is having too many questions and attempting to solve them all at once. What am I doing? Why am I not publishing? How will I find a job? How far is this going to go? Is my work worthless?
None other than Rahul @banerjee_r is now up taking stage for COFs industry prospect. He was asked to deliver cheaper and more stable porous materials than zeolites! #POLYMATsptl
Rahul takes on long standing challenges in COFs, one by one. First is the stability. #POLYMATsptl
Salt mediated synthesis may be able to speed up synthesis, addressing the kinetics of synthesis for scalability, another big challenge for COFs #POLYMATsptl
Will @Dichtel is getting the last day started with remarkable work on the improved synthesis of COFs. He won’t touch the apps since many talked earlier and there’s a lot to discuss for the COF mechanisms #POLYMATsptl
How crystalline are COFs? Particles are typically in microns and roughly 50 nm thick #POLYMATsptl
Some daunting questions that needs answering for COFs #POLYMATsptl
Ron Smaldone (@ronsmaldone) cracks up the post lunch sleepy crowd by the bootie (boot selfie) and COFs for girls sign he discovered in San Sebastián #POLYMATSptl
How one can game the synthetic toolbox to overcome issues in COF synthesis, is his drive, and then the imine azine mechanism control on the spot by favoring thermodynamic product #POLYMATsptl
If you want crystalline COF use boronic ester reactions. Not so quite says Ron, particularly for hexaphenyl benzene derivatives #POLYMATSptl
How to prove you’ve made 500,000 bonds per micron sq.? There’s no single analytical tool but one can combine synchrotron, xrd kinetics study and volume contraction, and a whole lot of optimism - Dieter Schlüter #POLYMATsptl
It turns out anthracene cages cross-link in a random fashion #POLYMATsptl
Taking a disorderly organized crystalline needles and mixing with TFA or other acids, you force into hexagonal packing #POLYMATsptl