Chemistry Club Meeting: 10/6/06

The third 2006-2007 SIUE Chemistry Club Meeting was held Friday, October 6, 2006, at 2:00 p. m. in the chemistry club room (SL 1107). All officers were present. There was no new business.

The Monsanto tour was held Friday, September 22, 2006. While the tour was more biologically focused than chemically focused, it was still very interesting. Twenty-one SIUE students and faculty attended.

Upcoming chemistry club events include homecoming, Tri-City Youth, trivia night at Dr. Lindell’s, book/bake sale, National Chemistry Week, and Halloween Party at Dr. Shaw’s

• SIUE Homecoming is holding Family Day on Saturday, October 7, 2006, from 9:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m. All departments will be participating and providing demonstrations. The chemistry department will also have a table with hands-on activities for children including slime, magic snow, magic sand, and UV beads. Volunteers are needed to set-up and be at the table for homecoming. Sign-up sheets are available. Volunteers should meet in the atrium of the Art and Design Building. Many alumni will attend.
• Chemistry club is participating in the Tri-City Youth program through SLDP. We are attending Holy Rosary School in Fairmont City, IL about four times this semester to do demonstrations. Holy Rosary’s after school program has about forty children ranging from K-8. Our first visit was Friday, September 29, 2006. Upcoming demonstrations will be held October 20 and 27, 2006, from 3:00 – 5:30 p.m. Contact Lindsey Hamilton (lihamil@siue.edu) or Crystal Hise (chise@siue.edu) for more information.
• Trivia night is a social event where the physics, biology, and chemistry clubs all join to participate in games including Trivial Pursuit and Scene It. Pizza will also be provided. It will be held Sunday, October 15, 2006, at 3:30 p.m. Those people volunteering to help set-up should be at Dr. Lindell’s no later then 2:30 p.m. Directions to Dr. Lindell’s are available in the chemistry department office or on the chemistry club bulletin board.
• Chemistry club will be holding its annual book/bake sale this fall, October 16-18, 2006, from 10:00 a.m.-3:00 p.m. Volunteers are needed to man the table and donate baked goods. Sign-up sheets are available.

Next, upcoming events for November were discussed.

• We will be making silk-screen chemistry club shirts on Friday, November 3, 2006. Everyone is welcome to submit a design. We will be voting on possible designs Thursday, October 19, 2006. One possible suggestion is “Chemists do it in the lab.” Dr. Wiediger and Nathan Motl will work on making the screens.
• John Kramer coordinated a tour to the Corn-to-Ethanol Plant at SIUE on Friday, November 10, 2006.

Recently, the Physics Club made its own room on the second floor of the Science Building. They had a dry-erase board posted to the wood wall. Mariellen suggested that we contact University maintenance to do the same in our room since the dry-erase board on the easel takes up a lot of space.

Chemistry Club needs to decide whether we would like to rent a computer from the University at $33/month or $400/year. The other option would be to buy our own or ask for a donated computer. If we rent a computer from the University, OIT will perform any maintenance on the computer. If we purchase our own computer, we will need a warranty because OIT will not maintain it. Club members requested that programs be added to the computer, including SciFinder Scholar and Isis Draw, to make it more useful to chemistry majors. We will enlist chemistry faculty for their help.

Student volunteers are needed to create an ACS poster for the upcoming spring convention. The abstract will be due soon. Jennifer Redding, Lindsey Hamilton, Dan Cranford, Dawn, and Rosie Harnack volunteered. The spring 2007 convention will be held in Chicago from March 25-29, 2007. Students may visit www.chemistry.org for more information.

Finally, Dave Herrmann gave an update of his new program, Cougars Volunteering for Science (CVS). He received a grant through the American Chemical Society for $400. Groups of at least three students will take a box that contains a hands-on experiment into the classrooms of local schools. Demonstrations include acids and bases, food sciences, liquid nitrogen, and biodegradability. CVS will be targeting schools with a high percentage of underprivileged children in the sciences. Demonstrations will occur four times per semester. Volunteer hours acquired through CVS count as SLDP and scholarship service hours. Students performing the demonstrations will be required to participate in a training session, which will be held within the next two weeks. Dave will be sending out an e-mail update.

The chemistry club meeting was concluded at 2:25 p.m. Our next meeting will be held on Thursday, October 19, 2006, at 2:00 p.m.