Saturday Blogging of Life: Chapter 3
As my imaginary audience may notice, I have changed my title to "Saturday" as none of my posts seemed to be ending up on Friday. Honestly, when I get back from school, I tend to laze and watch something with the family. Saturday is my recollection day of what I need to get done.
Speaking of which, this weekend was once more filled with a trip to the school for the same research project as last time. We already did the presentation portion on Thursday, during which cookies and coffee were being served (while pancakes were being freshly made just upstairs to help out students preparing for finals and the like...mmm, pancakes...), and today we had to work on the paper that's due on Tuesday.
Believe me when I say that writing scientific papers are not easy to do, especially with a <1000 word-limit. Four hours working and we managed to get 561 words. Well, at least afterwards, one of my group members took all three of us out for a simple dinner at a sausage restaurant. Apparently, they make their sausages themselves and have their own recipes and whatnot, so I was pretty eager to try the bratwurst-for I love bratwurst-and was a bit disappointed in the flavor. I think that's okay, since the food was free.
Speaking of long hours working, I seem to be on a roll. Friday is the ideal day to go home early, right? That's what I thought. But then, even with my graduate student mentor gone sick from the lab, I decided to take on my synthesis through the next step.
Big mistake on my part. I hadn't even done that step myself, and it had a lot of parts that could have gone wrong (I am still hoping it did not go wrong, I won't know if I did it right until I go back into the lab), and some potential for danger. I only got through it mainly because of my fellow undergraduate researcher whom had been doing his experiment at the same time and was familiar with the reaction...then he broke a piece of glassware that I was going to use that just so happened to be around $200...and then he ruined his own experiment from being distracted with mine. I just had to keep saying sorry, this poor guy had wanted to get out fast just like me, and luck was definitely not with him that day. It even turns out, that was the first time he had broken anything in a lab!
But, as it turns out, the experiment he had to set-up once more, which is a pain to do by the way, he managed to make it much cleaner and nicer than the previous one and finished up pretty quickly. As a result, he left at about 3 p.m., whereas I had to stay to do all the other parts of my reaction on tentatively-scribbled-notes and poor memory before I finished at 5:20. Even the graduate students were going home at that point, so I would not have been able to stay any longer than that. Such a tiring day.
And let's not forget my all-nighter on Tuesday night! This week was so hectic and filled with important deadlines, that I did not even bother thinking about the consequences if I missed any of them, because I just did them, one-by-one. If you happened to be curious, Tuesday night was spent doing research and organization to make a "discussion" on a real chemistry article, due on Wednesday, March 13 at 5:00 p.m. by e-mail. Needless to say, I was in the class for which the paper was due and could barely keep my eyes open! If I look at my notes for that day, I see scribble lines and unfinished words or structures, that is how exhausted I was.
Even now, I am falling asleep as I write this post, so I'll be stopping with this, and wish everyone a good weekend!
P.S. Wow, I can't believe I wrote all of this last night and did not bother to post before falling asleep in front of my computer. Now it's not even Saturday. Fail.
Speaking of which, this weekend was once more filled with a trip to the school for the same research project as last time. We already did the presentation portion on Thursday, during which cookies and coffee were being served (while pancakes were being freshly made just upstairs to help out students preparing for finals and the like...mmm, pancakes...), and today we had to work on the paper that's due on Tuesday.
Believe me when I say that writing scientific papers are not easy to do, especially with a <1000 word-limit. Four hours working and we managed to get 561 words. Well, at least afterwards, one of my group members took all three of us out for a simple dinner at a sausage restaurant. Apparently, they make their sausages themselves and have their own recipes and whatnot, so I was pretty eager to try the bratwurst-for I love bratwurst-and was a bit disappointed in the flavor. I think that's okay, since the food was free.
Speaking of long hours working, I seem to be on a roll. Friday is the ideal day to go home early, right? That's what I thought. But then, even with my graduate student mentor gone sick from the lab, I decided to take on my synthesis through the next step.
Big mistake on my part. I hadn't even done that step myself, and it had a lot of parts that could have gone wrong (I am still hoping it did not go wrong, I won't know if I did it right until I go back into the lab), and some potential for danger. I only got through it mainly because of my fellow undergraduate researcher whom had been doing his experiment at the same time and was familiar with the reaction...then he broke a piece of glassware that I was going to use that just so happened to be around $200...and then he ruined his own experiment from being distracted with mine. I just had to keep saying sorry, this poor guy had wanted to get out fast just like me, and luck was definitely not with him that day. It even turns out, that was the first time he had broken anything in a lab!
But, as it turns out, the experiment he had to set-up once more, which is a pain to do by the way, he managed to make it much cleaner and nicer than the previous one and finished up pretty quickly. As a result, he left at about 3 p.m., whereas I had to stay to do all the other parts of my reaction on tentatively-scribbled-notes and poor memory before I finished at 5:20. Even the graduate students were going home at that point, so I would not have been able to stay any longer than that. Such a tiring day.
And let's not forget my all-nighter on Tuesday night! This week was so hectic and filled with important deadlines, that I did not even bother thinking about the consequences if I missed any of them, because I just did them, one-by-one. If you happened to be curious, Tuesday night was spent doing research and organization to make a "discussion" on a real chemistry article, due on Wednesday, March 13 at 5:00 p.m. by e-mail. Needless to say, I was in the class for which the paper was due and could barely keep my eyes open! If I look at my notes for that day, I see scribble lines and unfinished words or structures, that is how exhausted I was.
Even now, I am falling asleep as I write this post, so I'll be stopping with this, and wish everyone a good weekend!
P.S. Wow, I can't believe I wrote all of this last night and did not bother to post before falling asleep in front of my computer. Now it's not even Saturday. Fail.