Aspirin Lab

Sadly this is not a lab that I will be participating in. Basically it was a high level lab that involves creating aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid), and I understand next to nothing on how this happens. The initial setup looks like this:

This would take chemicals acetic anhydride and salicylic acid and combine them together using the catalyst sulfuric acid. Chemicals are heated up in a hot water bath and then cooled with ice water to induce crystallization. The chemicals are left overnight. The next day the solid aspirin is added to the top of this:

In this section, the crystals are cleaned up of residual. This is were my class would stop, but in the full lab, the aspirin is purified  by dissolving the crystals and recrystallizing them.

This lab was higher than mine and my classmates understand at this time, but hopefully I'll understand as the year progresses.