So thanks to everyone for all the encouragement and helpful comments in the last entry. Even though things have settled down, I’m still debating transferring out. However, I’ll take some of your excellent advice and wait until exams are over.<\/p>\n
To continue the drama that is my life in the chemistry laboratory…
\n
\nI got the results for the last two labs that I did for the analytical course, and my accuracy and precision scores were definitely somewhat better than I expected. On the first one I wasn’t expecting to get more than an eight combined; none of my titrations agreed (plus or minus a milliliter is REALLY big when you’re only dealing with about 10 mL) and that lab itself just wasn’t great (our penny didn’t dissolve properly, we lost some copper when I added more acid in desperation, for some reason my partner’s solutions never turned the right colour, I overshot about three times, I stopped being able to tell the difference between “latte” brown and “coffee” brown, I had a midterm that evening (the fateful organic chemistry midterm of doom<\/i>, as it turns out) and I was just totally breaking down that day.) I got a thirteen instead. Heh. Still not great, but I’ll take it.<\/p>\n
The other one, I got a 20 *_*! This happened because *coughcough* I only submitted one set of data. Our TA said we only had to do one titration. I did two, but do you guys have any idea HOW LONG it takes to enter titration data into a spreadsheet? It’s like this:
\nBuret readings:
\n20.10, 20.50, 20.84, 20.98, 21.32, etc.
\nPotential readings:
\n100, 120, 126, 142, 150, etc.
\nNow imagine having 80 data points to enter.
\nIt takes forever! It was already 5 o’clock and I knew my second titration was screwed up, so I left it alone. Heh. Now let’s hope the prof doesn’t notice and take marks off. Not that it really matters in the end. If he does, well, we’ll blame it on our TA. :tongue: If you look, almost everyone in his section submitted only one set of titration data. Hahaha. Go us. Besides: it was a partner lab, and since there are an ODD number of students in our section, I was left to do it by myself T_T<\/p>\n
Oh, and I TOTALLY can’t wait to get back at my organic TA (TA evaluation on Thursday! :star:). I’ve never had a Chem TA that was so rude and unhelpful to his students :notsure: In the last lab, we had a little exchange like this:
\n“Um, my graduated cylinder isn’t dry…”
\n“So don’t use it, obviously.”
\n“Um, well, obviously, but I wanted to know if there was a quick way to dry it…”
\nI mean, he doesn’t need to give me that kind of attitude! ESPECIALLY if he didn’t go on to say what else I could do instead. I might have been happier if he’d added, “Go get another one from Stores” or something, but this kind of terse reply really exemplifies his attitude in the lab. It’s not a helpful one. -_-; And he made my friend’s sample blow up out of the flask and up the addition funnel. AFTER watching another student do the EXACT same thing. -_-;;;;; I mean…. really.<\/p>\n
My inorganic TA still pwns them all! She’s so awesome and she never makes you feel stupid :biggrin: Even when the three of us (on the same bench) got some odd product, she said, “Well, you can really see the crystal structure in this, and it could be actually that this is a lot more pure than what other people have synthesized…”<\/p>\n
And a last story from my analytical TA. He was marking our notebooks and he was looking for my name on his list, so I helpfully give him my last name and he says immediately, “Yes, I know,” which prompts a double-take from me. He goes on to say, “You’re the one who always sends me emails.” “Oh. Am I the only one who sends you emails?” “Ah, well, no, but … you’re prominent.”<\/p>\n
XD I swear, TAs are there so that we can bug them with emails! I’ve sent more emails to TAs this year than I have to professors in my entire life!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So thanks to everyone for all the encouragement and helpful comments in the last entry. Even though things have settled down, I’m still debating transferring out. However, I’ll take some of your excellent advice and wait until exams are over. To continue the drama that is my life in the chemistry laboratory…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-quotidian"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/undreamt.org\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/undreamt.org\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/undreamt.org\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/undreamt.org\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/undreamt.org\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=444"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/undreamt.org\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/444\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/undreamt.org\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/undreamt.org\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/undreamt.org\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}