Student empowerment through "mini-microscale" reactions: The expoxidation of 1 mg of geraniol

An easily mastered exercise that provides researchers with valuable skills and accompanying confidence in their ability to perform a class of experiments that at the outset may have been deemed impossible is presented. It is shown that the ability to design and execute reactions and isolate, purify, and characterize products on a 1 mg scale correlates strongly with experimental abilities across the entire range of preparative organic chemistry techniques.