Summer Internship Journals: McCauley Reardon '17 at Bruker Daltronics
Throughout the summer, we will be sharing journal entries written by eight Rivers students about their experiences as interns at some of Massachusetts’ leaders in science, technology, medicine, and business.
Among the sites where the students will be interning this summer are Brigham & Women's Hospital, Boston Children's Hospital, Harvard Medical MEDscience, Freight Farms, and Jackpine Technologies. Our first journal comes from junior McCauley Reardon '17, who is at Bruker Daltronics learning about Mass Spectrometry and High Performance Liquid Chromotography.
Honestly, it was a lot of fun to tell everyone who asked about my internship that I would be working with mass spectrometry at Bruker Daltonics. But what I didn’t tell people was that I could really relate to their confused expressions. Prior to receiving my internship, I had never even heard of mass spectrometry or high performance liquid chromatography. But the first week, I walked out of the building every day at 4:30 knowing one hundred times more about mass spectrometry than I knew when I walked in at 9:00.
Before I can get into mass spectrometry, I first need to explain a little bit about high performance liquid chromatography, or HPLC. HPLC is the process the sample goes through before it enters the spectrometer. The overall function is to separate the molecules in the solution based on their polarity. HPLC alone cannot be used for our purposes because it records the retention times of the molecules (how long it takes for the molecule to come out the other end of the instrument) and since multiple molecules can have the same retention time, we need mass spectrometry as well in order to identify them.
Click here to read the rest of Cauley's journal on our Facebook Page.
© 2021 The Rivers School. All Rights Reserved
Rivers admits academically qualified students and does not discriminate against students or families on the basis of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or ethnic or national origin in the administration of its educational programs, admissions policies, scholarship and loan programs, athletic programs, and other school-administered programs.