From: Doug Rhoades (8/8/00)

To: Bill Walker

First of all .....Thank You! I've definitely learned a valuable lesson through hiring a summer intern. I also believe I was very lucky in getting Nicole. As we had discussed a couple of weeks ago, I'm ready to hire another intern immediately ...Do you know of any that might be available for other than summer sessions?

I did take Nicole out to lunch a week ago Friday. At that time I asked if she might be interested in coming back over the winter during breaks. She seemed very receptive.

You had also asked about projects she worked on. Her duties included:

From day 1, she took over IC analysis. At that time, the IC work was backed up with many samples coming in daily. She learned the IC analysis in about a day. On day two she was helping develop a better spreadsheet to make data reduction easier. After a couple more days, I had her install an external zip drive for data storage onto the laptop used for IC data reduction. On the third week, a new data acquisition system I had ordered for the IC showed up. She installed that system on the lab's laptop and got it up and running within one day. All chromatograms are now stored on a zip disk and can be called up at any time thereafter for re-integration or editing. It then took another four weeks (six weeks) overall to get all IC sample analyses finished and caught up (about 250 total samples during the month of June).

From the third day, I started Nicole multi-tasking while using the IC. The sample archive area had been a mess for a couple of years. She began by disposing of all water based samples (IC stuff that is basically water). All acetone rinses were evaporated under a hood. This was all done at the same time as performing IC work. Not only did Nicole separate the archived samples by type (water to drain, acetone to evaporate, hazardous for "proper" disposal), she also completely reorganized the sample archive shelves. They are now labeled by month for easier identification, etc

Previously, the room had been used for storage and I had only been disposing of old samples when I had time or when I ran out of room. There were also samples that had been found from 1995 above the old lab area (rentals area now). She also worked on disposing of all these samples (a year's worth). She also took down a full inventory of all hazardous chems/samples for final disposal. That work will be finished by the end of August (same vendor as last year)

From the fourth week on, Nicole took over analysis for all gravimetric samples. During the month of July alone, she went through about 100 Method 5 beakers. I know this because she cleaned all the beakers in-house during the week of July 4. There are now 100 beakers going through the cleaning cycle this week. Most of these gravimetrics projects were M5/202 analyses with back 1/2 MeCl extractions

Two other special projects were finished during her tenure: One was re-plumbing all gas lines for the three GC's in use in the GC lab. Previously, there existed a tangle of stainless line that who knew where it went. though she had never used compression fittings before, she re-plumed the lines so they could all be usable. Only one of the lines had a leak at the end. She was definitely not afraid of working with her hands. There is now no reason for cylinders to be in the GC lab (except maybe a cal cylinder or two)

The second project was to install HP Chemstation onto a laptop. This required a little doing. The laptop needed to communicate through a docking station to other peripherals plus the HP A/D card. She got it up and running within a day

Even though this report is a little late, I'd like to thank you for encouraging me to use a summer intern again

Douglas D. Rhoades

doug_rhoades@cleanair.com   ======================================================================