this is going to be a rambling post, and it’s mostly just for me. it’s boring so don’t read it unless you really are that bored.
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This semester’s lab is different from any lab I’ve had so far.
We’re required to keep a composition notebook, it’s a huge one that’s got pretty good binding but no carbon copy papers. Pretty much our whole grade is this book, and we don’t get it graded until the end of the end of the semester. So if you lose it before then, you pretty much fail the class. They tell us to write 2-3 pages in this giant book each day in the lab. And it can’t be done after, it has to be done in the lab and signed my the TA before you go. This doesn’t sound like a big deal except…it really is a big book, the pages are quite large. I think once I got to write 2 full pages in one day. The rest of the days…I work pretty hard to get to 1, 1 1/2 if it’s a good day.
So yes, I need to write more, my grade is riding on how much I can record. But the lab is so rushed. I think that’s the biggest factor to how little I’ve been writing. Every day so far, except for one, I have gotten out of lab about 30-45 minutes after the period is supposed to be over. And I’m not the only student doing that, either. All of us are rushed, all of us are having a tough time writing enough in our books, and at least half of us are leaving lab half an hour late each day.
So we are getting out of lab late and we are still not writing enough. It seems like an impossible situation, it really does. They keep telling us to come prepared so we have enough time to do the experiment and write, but no matter how much I prepare, nothing quite gets you ready for the real thing. Especially with no lab partners though, it really takes a while to run the experiment.
The pre-labs are intense. The procedures they give us are not quite enough. It takes some looking up and thinking and planning to write our own procedures. And that’s all we’re allowed to have in the lab is our own procedures written in our own notebooks. No pictures from books, no other books, no handouts, just our own notebooks. So everything had better be in there. Eventually they are going to not give us a procedure to follow, they are just going to tell us what we are synthesizing and we will have to do research on how to do that. And then we will have to write our pre lab based on that. It sounds pretty time consuming, but I guess that’s how you do it in the real world, working in a lab.
The TAs do help out quite a lot though, which is nice. They save us time and keep us from making major mistakes. And every now and then, I get to stop during the lab and notice very briefly how cool it is what I’m doing, that I’m actually synthesizing stuff on my own, with my own equipment and following my own procedure that I wrote myself. Well…copied myself. And wrote the details in. But those moments pass quickly and I have to rush to the next part of the experiment.
There is always the danger of not finishing. And thankfully, they don’t grade much on results, on how good your product is. But you do need to finish. And record absolutely everything. I still haven’t finished the first experiment, well I finished it but I still have to do IR and NMR on my product to see if I actually got what I was aiming to make. I was supposed to use each of those two instruments twice but I only did the IR once and didn’t do NMR at all because well there are only 2 of each instrument and a whole lot more students than that who all need to use them. And the NMR can take up to 20 minutes to use for just one run, if you’re like us and are new at using it.
BLAH
And then today was so stressful. We were all hurrying about, trying to get our setups all ready for the experiment. And the setup for this lab was kinda tricky, I had a nice outline in my notebook and everything, I knew what I needed and yet it still took at least a half hour to get everything all set. And then, when the setup was almost done…The alarms in the building went off,.I still don’t know why. Probably some freshman started a fire in the gen chem lab or something. Anyway, we evacuated and had to wait outside for about half an hour until they cleared us to go back in.
I had the presence of mind to grab my notebook before leaving the lab, I took the time then to write about my setup, got a good half page in. I was proud of myself.
And then we got back into the lab and I was not so proud of myself. They told us we still had to finish today. So i tried to get my setup complete and…it took forever. I have no idea why. It wasn’t that complicated, I think the stress of it all made me go super slow.
I didn’t add my stuff in correctly and ended up losing a lot of my starting materials, which means my percent yield is going to be way low compared to the theoretical yield I calculated based on the starting materials I weighed out. I dropped the stir bar into my round bottom flask the wrong way, apparently the way that makes it break, although it didn’t appear broken. I guess I will check for star cracks next time. And then, well we were supposed to be adding stuff in but we were also supposed to be running nitrogen gas through the setup to make in an oxygen free environment. Well, apparently when you add stuff in with the gas going, it goes splash back out at you. So I splashed the hood, and stuff onto my arm. And of course my instructor saw. The day I make mistakes like all one right after the other, my instructor sees.But he wasn’t mad just told me what I was doing wrong and how to fix it.
And then, well my stuff was supposed to cook for an hour but I only had time to cook it for about 20 minutes 
. And it was still a little reddish looking after I filtered it, which means it didn’t have time to completely change into what it was supposed to change into.
So I messed up.A lot. And was so stressed out because I almost didn’t finish. But I did, and that’s what’s important I guess. I think some people didn’t even finish today because they weren’t ready when the TA said to be ready now or just go home. So at least that wasn’t me, but it almost was. I honestly don’t know how I made it out of the lab only a minute after everyone else, because I was at least 10 or 15 minutes behind them all in the lab.
BLAH
stress.
At least it’s over now. Next lab period is a new period, I will try and get more stuff right.
Thank goodness they don’t grade based on how well our product turns out, just on how much we write.
I did come home and take a nice long shower after all that mess. And then I took a nice nap with the kitty. I woke up and she was cuddled right next to me, it was super cute.
. After finals I started working immediately, full time, until just a few days ago. I finally get a few days off now to relax. Mostly I sleep and play sims 
. I also got a new camera! I am super excited about it. It has 14.1 megapixels which isn’t half bad for what I use it for. So anyway, here are some pictures I took with it!
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