Josh Walker e-Portfolio

Honors Enhancement

Inorganic chemistry has been one of my hardest classes for sure. It was such a different style of learning, it was difficult to get used to. We never really had to imagine chemistry in three dimensions, but we did it so much in this class. It may have been one of the most challenging classes, but I think that I learned a lot from it. It was more interesting material, so I was more dedicated to get a good grade. I spent more hours on this class than any other class. At the end of the class, we had to give a presentation that I forgot about because it was right after a break, but I pulled an all nighter getting it ready and ended up getting an A on it so I was happy. I had to make a different poster for the enhancement though.

For the actual enhancement, Dr. Yeagley knew that he would eventually have to add labs to this class, so we picked one lab and went with it. Here is the title and abstract of the poster we did because I tried to upload the poster but it said it was too big, sadly. We looked at the first row of transition metals and calculated the dependence of d orbital splitting patterns on the changes of the metals and changes of ligands on the metals. This was done by putting the transition metals in solid states and then mixing them with water and calculating the absorbance and energies between the molecular orbitals. We then mixed them with ammonia and did the same thing. They turned out to be different because of the properties of the water ligands and the properties of the ammonia ligands around the metals. Ammonia contains nitrogen and that caused the energies of the complexes to raise because it is an electron donating group. I like testing out labs because it helps me deal with real world applications and explains the material of classes more in depth.