It’s Been Awhile

A long while, at that. Two months and a day to be exact. Yikes. I apologize to all of you who keep up with my blog better than I do. I’m back now.

This post is dedicated to KT Kennedy. KT is my lab supervisor for Organic Chemistry. I was on my way into the organic chemistry lab yesterday when KT told me she’d found my blog on HC’s website and liked what she read. I confessed it’s been a while since I’d posted and needed to post soon. She recommended a post about the lab we had done. This one’s for you KT.

As a pre-med student, I’ll be taking four semesters of chemistry here at Holy Cross. Last semester I took Atoms and Molecules with Professor Hupp and it was my favorite class. This semester I’m taking Organic Chemistry I with Professor Quinn. Organic chemistry is hard but I really like it.  It’s completely different than anything I’ve ever done before. It’s like math with carbons and hydrogens and more than one way to solve each problem.  It’s a new skill that’s hard to acquire, but like Professor Hupp was, Professor Quinn is an amazing teacher. Each of the faculty I’ve encountered in the chemistry department is especially passionate about not only teaching but also the material he or she teaches. In addition to being extraordinary teachers, each of them also gets “the big picture.” The engaging lectures, challenging tests, long problem sets, after-hours review sessions, demystifying office-hour visits, and involved labs have taught me equally as many life skills as they have taught me chemistry.

With each semester of chemistry I take, I also have lab. Lab meets once a week for two hours and fifteen minutes. In that time we perform an experiment. Now I don’t mean watch an experiment be performed by the lab supervisor. I mean actually do an experiment. Like spend two plus hours doing the pre-lab write up and quiz the night before, attend a pre-lab lecture, and then show up to lab and perform the experiment individually. We all have our own lockers for our glassware and goggles and this semester I even have my own hood.

Pre-lab in progress

The most important thing I’ve learned in the lab is patience. When I was a little kid and would get completely agitated waiting for something, my dad would always say, “Patience is a virtue.” Patience may be a virtue but little has changed, I am still incredibly impatient. Last semester in the lab, I learned, while performing a titration, that impatience would lead to my demise in the lab. The way an acid-base titration works is that if you have an acid with an unknown concentration, you can discover it’s concentration by incrementally adding a basic solution of a known concentration to the acid until it reaches equilibrium. Because the amount of acid and base are equal at equilibrium, once we know the volume of base at equilibrium, we can calculate the concentration of the unknown acid. The way we knew when we reached equilibrium in the titration was by adding a couple drops of an indicator to the base so that as soon as all the acid and base have reacted, the indicator turns the solution pink. Now, the goal is to stop the titration as soon as one tiny drop of base changes the color of the solution. Because we only had a rough idea of what volume the titration would be complete at, much precision and patience were required to perform an accurate titration. When I performed my first titration, I rushed through it. My solution was pink, but not too pink, I thought. So I asked Professor Hupp, “Is this too pink?” With an endearing laugh, she responded, “Oh yeah!” Good thing that was only my first of three trials. I was less pink the next time. And even less the final time. Practice makes perfect. Slow and steady…performs the titration.

Yesterday in the Organic Chemistry Lab, we performed a pretty cool experiment. Our main objective was to determine the reactivities of chemically different hydrogens in various compounds. We did this by mixing and heating a slew of extremely hazardous chemicals, salt, and baking soda and then analyzing our products with gas chromatography. Don’t ask me what gas chromatography is or how it works. Professor Quinn and KT explained it, it’s in my notes, but it’s almost ten o’clock on this Friday night that concludes my third quarter here at Holy Cross. I’ll figure out gas chromatography. But not tonight. Patience is indeed a virtue.

KT explaining gas chromatography

I need to get to bed. I’ll be up and at em’ at 4:15 to leave for Chicago. Over 300 Crusaders of us Crusaders are traveling to over 25 different sites as part of Holy Cross’s Spring Break Immersion Program. Over the course of this next week we’ll practice being men and women with and for others in these marginal communities in 13 of our United States. I’ll fill you in when I get back. And it’ll be less than a two-month and one day wait this time. I promise.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 28th, 2014 at 9:47 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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