A weekly inside look at the unique faces and personalities that make up The College of Wooster community.
Chris Good ’19, a chemistry major and math minor, shares his experience working as an intern at Dow AgroSciences this summer, as well as his plans for I.S.
Welcome back to Wooster! How was your summer?
It was great! I worked as an intern for Dow AgroSciences company for about 10 weeks over the summer, and it was an amazing experience. I think the best parts of the entire internship were the people I met and the professional relationships I developed. Just working in an industry position like that really helped me figure out what I want to do after graduation. I went into the internship hoping to see if I wanted to go into the industry after my education and to see what degree I would need to succeed in an industry position. Coming out of it I answered those questions pretty clearly.
I heard that you were working with equipment worth thousands of dollars. How was that experience for you?
Well, for the past two years I’ve been working with my advisor, Paul Edmiston, on a Chicago wastewater project where we were quantifying chemicals in wastewater treatment plants and how upgrades at those plants affected those chemicals — could they reduce them, like these toxins? So I was using this machine we have here called a triple quadrupole, and it cost around $300,000, so it’s very high up there. So I’ve had experience working with that, but going to this company they basically have up to 20 instruments like this, and a wide variety of them for different projects. So it was really cool to get my hands-on time with the instruments, especially because we only have one here at Wooster. But definitely some of the things I learned here at Wooster transferred over to these instruments at Dow.
Will you take some of the things you learned at the internship and apply them to your I.S.?
Yeah, definitely. We were supposed to get another instrument like the mass spectrometer we used at Dow, but unfortunately the funding wasn’t there for it this year, so I’ll have to do some outsourcing — go somewhere else — and hopefully the company will let me go back down there and run some samples in their lab. And there are other options to use instruments around the country as well.
And do you know specifically what you want to do for your I.S.?
Yeah! I actually had my first I.S. meeting earlier today. I’m working with stream water down in Hawaii and I’ll be analyzing chemicals down there and how they biologically affect native Gobi fish. So these fish — they lay their eggs upstream, and they’re washed into the ocean, and after about six months they come back upstream and their body actually changes so they can inch up waterfalls up to 100 meters. But these toxins can actually affect that metamorphosis so that they can’t climb and they can’t survive. So I’ll be looking at the concentration of those chemicals and seeing what are the bad ones — so it’s really like a toxicology study.
Wow, that’s really cool. Will you travel for your I.S. then?
I actually traveled this past spring to Hawaii. It was kind of like a paid vacation — I went and collected some stream water and it was really fun.
Outside of I.S., is there anything you’re excited for going into your senior year?
Yeah. I’m the president of Beta Kappa Phi, so we’re excited for the rush season — you know, trying to boost our membership so I’m looking forward to that. We also have a big cross country season; I’m also a cross country runner. But I tore my ACL earlier this summer, so I can’t run, but I’m looking forward to still contributing to the team, even if it’s just being a cheerleader at our meets. So I’m really looking forward to those two things outside of I.S., and I’m definitely looking forward to I.S.
Interview by Desi LaPoole, a Features Editor for the Voice (Photo by Matt Olszewski).