Life as a lab chick

I'm taking a break from writing about Europe to get down my thoughts about another magically amazing thing that happened, right before Europe! Which it this: I got my first real post-college, salaried, big-girl-pants job.

I really didn't write a whole lot during the three months after graduation. To sum it up, it was awesome. 

At first. 

After about two months, though, I started feeling not so awesome about it. I loved being able to have a bomb morning schedule doing everything I usually had to cram in before or after classes, but I still felt idle and lazy and I missed having work to do (one can only deep-clean one's apartment so many times), and MOST of all I was getting way, way discouraged about the job search.

You don't have to be a genius to know that a science-based career in Utah is hard to come by right now. It's allllll tech tech tech and more tech. Web development, customer service, marketing, social media analytics, sales, and more stuff that I generally kind of... am the opposite of. Actually I should give myself some credit in that I totally built up a little repertoire of HTML skills during junior high in jazzing up my MySpace page often, like every other kid my age. [:

I interviewed and applied and wrote cover letters like it was going out of style. Over. and. over. I cried on Ryan a lot. I interviewed at places that I had no interest in, just to have something going in my life. And that was dumb.
In March, my absolute dream job popped up in front of my eyes. Oh. man. I still think about how incredible it was that this job opened up right when I was searching!! I so badly wanted something in science. I also wanted to work in a lab because I loved my mentored research in my professor's dendrochronology lab at BYU. And in general I had always wanted to work in the water branch of a municipality, but as I searched more, I began to think I'd have to be dreaming to get anything like that without getting my master's degree. But there it was - a water quality technician in a laboratory. Key words there - water, technician, lab. YES. IT WAS REALLY POSSIBLE.

After two rounds of interviews I was hoping against hope, and I finally got the call with my future boss on the other end asking me, "So... do you know why I'm calling?", obviously trying to hold in his laughter while I flipped out and tried not to squeal. Rest assured I was able to hold back and let it all out once I had hung up. Then when we had a whirl-wind week and a half that included a spontaneous visit from my mom to celebrate my last week of unemployment, and officially moving out of the Provo bubble! 

So, that's how I became a lab tech for the Metropolitan Water District of Salt Lake and Sandy, or as the gruff-on-the-outside-but-cotton-candy-soft-on-the-inside operations guys call us, the lab chicks. The plant where I work treats all the drinking water for our two cities, and we three lab techs do daily, weekly, and monthly chemical analytics on the raw and finished water to a) make sure it's where we want it to be in regards to cleanliness and chemistry, and b) to keep tabs on its long-term patterns and conditions. I absolutely love it. I drive home from work pinching myself that I get to have a job that benefits people, and also perfectly fits what I love - science. 

It's fun to look back to my beginning months and see how far I've come. My first two months were seriously like trying to drink out of a firehose - so overwhelming. But I'm proud of myself and my progress. My two coworkers are ANGELS and are so patient. I have gotten so much help. I've passed off over 15 different microbiological and wet-chem tests. I can spit out acronyms with the best of 'em, and trust me, these people love acronyms - SOPs, DOCs, LCSs, SDSs, TOC, DOC, BacT, THMs, TDS, TSS, QC and literally a hundred more... I can properly identify and differentiate between Erlenmeyer, filter, and volumetric flasks, as well as burettes, pipettes, and our countless other forms of glassware. I get to use epic words and phrases like combustion tube, auto-titrator, non-purgeable organic carbon, klebsiella pneumoniae, autoclave, and every now and then - "Recharge the catalyst!" I've reached my goal of perfecting "The Flick," the perfectly measured flick of the wrist that dispenses just the right amount of water from your sample when it measures just a few milliliters higher than your needed measurement (starting out I would attempt it and usually dump out like half my sample). Really I'm just amazed at the human brain and how much information it can absorb and apply. Thanks to the absolutely awesome people I work with, I have such a good time at my job. 

I've taken pictures of the daily things I do for my family to see, since they are the ones that hear the most about my job. I want them to see what I'm talking about when I mention things:

My home, the lab!

Monthly sampling of our finished water being sent out to customers through the Salt Lake Aqueduct. 

 Big pipes and pumps sending our squeaky clean water out to the peeps.

 The view from my office.

 This was one of my favorite days - we sampled the effluent (the water being drained out) of a new reservoir for SLC. This is what the insides of those enormous water reservoirs look like! For scale, you can see a hand rail down in the left hand corner of the picture. These things are huge and echoey and just awesome.

 Sample run days are nice because you get to get out of the lab and get some variation. Most of the day is spent driving and collecting samples from 7 to 10 sites in our distribution, including reservoirs, aqueducts big and small, and raw water sources.

Taking a small sample to test the chlorine residual before taking the regular sample (this is where I got the most practice on "The Flick." [: ) A nice and pink reaction to the powder we add indicates that there's still a good level of chlorine in the water even when it's far from our plant.

Inside the huge vault surrounding the inlet and outlet of water at our Terminal Reservoir. 

Those pipes are nearly six feet in diameter. Sampling down here is not my favorite; the huge pipes of cold water keep the vault around 40 degrees!

The little 100mL bottles we collect daily bacteria samples in, and the tunnel of death I have to walk down once a month to do monthly sampling underneath our second water treatment plant. I just sing happy songs and try not to think of zombies.

A couple different sampling points, a spigot and a vault. I get to climb down into that dark hole! It goes about 25 feet down under ground to reach a big pipe.

Water in the sedimentation basins, on its way to filtration. After disinfection, we add charged chemicals to the raw water that basically act as little magnets and pull all the yucky stuff into little clumps. In the sed basins the clumps settle to the bottom, and the now much cleaner water heads to the filters for its final cleaning.

Data entry and paperwork! Some Quantitray (bacterial test for raw water), pH, and Colilert (bacterial test for finished water) benchsheets in all their glory.

Checking the chlorine residual of our ultrapure water system, and a page of the data output of my TOC samples.

The data are entered into our lab software, and then we print out a review report for our lab supervisor to review and send off to our clients!

When I first started, I sat at my desk reading SOPs (standard operation procedures), SDSs (safety data sheets), and preparing for DOCs (demonstrations of capabilities) all day (I wasn't kidding about the acronyms. It's a little out of hand...) and wondered what on earth my co-workers were talking about when they complained about how busy their week was. Now I see what they mean! I'm in the lab for so much of the day now that I hardly see my desk anymore. Sorry desk.

The TOC corner, where I've been living since the beginning of July. I started out absolutely HATING this machine for how much grief he gave me, but he and I have slowly become friends. [: Mr. TOC measures the total organic carbon (TOC) and dissolved organic carbon (DOC) in water. My week is composed mostly of filtering, acidifying, pouring, and finally running 10-20 samples per day, which will take the machine roughly 9 hours to do. Luckily I don't have to be there for all of it! Mr. TOC is so darn sensitive that often sprinkled into that aforementioned weekly schedule are furious bouts of making new standards, matrix spikes, or filter blanks when he's feeling particularly crabby and decides to fail my previous controls. But lately he's been working like a dream and I like him lots!

So that sums up how I bring home the bacon! I can't believe it's only been five months. I feel like I've learned a year's worth of information. There were multiple days earlier on where I fought back tears with the frustration I felt at all the mistakes I was making and confusing SOPs I was wading through. But now most of it is a breeze, and for that I am so thankful! I have seen so much growth in myself and I can't help but say that I am really proud of myself. I continue to get so much help and encouragement from my coworkers (I love them so dang much) and Ryan. I love the company I work for and work I get to do. I am so lucky! I love my job as a lab chick.