Yellow for the win!

In the organic chemistry labs everyone works on their own which has both its advantages and disadvantages. You can try everything yourself, but the bad thing is that you can’t ask anyone for help. The lab is quite big and as it always is your friend who is doing the same experiment is probably on the other side of the lab, so collaborating becomes very difficult. On the other hand, when you accidentaly confuse your chemicals and end up with a grey solution instead of yellow crystals as your product you really have noone else to blame but yourself. That luckily doesn’t happen that often. To be completely honest we mostly synthesize yellow crystals anyway. No matter the reaction, the product is almost always yellow. And i fit isn’t you are probably doing something wrong… And then after every experiment we need to finish our lab report, which is due two days after finishing the lab. It is mostly analysis of the spectra and the product and a discussion on whether you have achieved the synthesis of the correct product. Eventhough we live in the world of smart technology the reports still have to be written up by hand and scanned, which naturally takes a lot of time. When you hand in your report, you can just about start preparing for your next lab. In the mean time you have to try to keep up with new content and try to stay on top of the material as well. And obviously try to balance life outside of university as well. And this was our daily life for thse 5 weeks. Apart from one actually. That was the week of the strikes, where the university staff were on strike so many lectures and tutorials were getting cancelled and in some extreme cases (like ours) even labs. That turned out to be a very nice and well deserved break for all of us, giving us the option to catch up with what we have missed due to labs.

The Christmas break was nice and relaxing, but very short for met his year. Yet still quite productive, as the first day back after the break I had a pharmacology exam. Trying to remember hundreds of drug names is quite exhausting, so I really had to try very hard to get a little bit of work done every day. But of course, I balanced my studies with some well-deserved time off with my friends and family.

The new term wasn’t starting until the 13th of January, but I had to travel back to the UK on the 2nd of January. That was because my skating team was heading to the British Championships, which was taking place on the 11th and 12th of January at our home rink in Nottingham. We had two very good skates and managed to earn the title of British Champions and thereby quilify for the World Championships which are taking place in Lake Placid in April. We are very looking forward to this final competition of the season and we are training very hard to do well there. We still have one home competition ahead of us in Sheffield, which will be like a final rehersal for us before the big finish.

On the 13th of January in the morning I was headed back to London and from the train station I was running straight to uni to make my pharmacology exam, which started off the new term. In this term we have a few new modules, like physical or inorganic chemistry, there is also Brexit happening as well as more strikes, but more on that next time…