Oh wow. This is my grand achievement in Organic Chemistry.
Monday, February 26, 2007Wow. Today was such a great day. Okay, maybe only the part when I did stuff on behalf of Common Grounds (because I felt like I was doing something!) with Deanna. But the best part of today? Fuckin' getting results in organic chemistry.
Okay, you say "Who cares?"
Let me tell you. If you have never preformed an organic chemistry lab experiment then you, my good friend have never felt frustration. There's all these organic chemicals and their solvents, acids and bases mixed together and dried with sodium sulfate attached to a condenser and everything is measured in micromoles and milligrams and μL (microliters = 0.000001 L). They are insignificant measurements and its so easy to screw up. It's not like cooking where you just add ingredients based on the taste or how much you feel should go in (thats how I cook, at least. I never "measure". It's always a gut instinct).
Anyway, in all my years of doing organic chemistry (okay, maybe only a semester and a half) I have not once made a product. I've had left over solvents and drying ingredients. But I have never been able to isolate a product. Or at least not by myself.
But today, man that all changed. I went into lab, with my prelab done (in the Bio lecture before class, granted - but it was fresh in my mind!) and I said to myself, "Okay, today I am going to follow all of the directions. I will measure everything out to the exact decimal point. I will not screw up because today's lab seemed too easy to screw up."
And I didn't screw up. My crude product was a clear liquid while everyone else's was a brownish solidy liquidy substance. I was able to boil off all of the diethyl ether and I was left with my product which is... propyl p-tolyl ether.
Is anyone even fuckin' impressed?
Everyone else got weird IR spectras. Mine, according to the professor, looked better and closer to the correct IR. So...drumroll...look:
Okay, you say "Who cares?"
Let me tell you. If you have never preformed an organic chemistry lab experiment then you, my good friend have never felt frustration. There's all these organic chemicals and their solvents, acids and bases mixed together and dried with sodium sulfate attached to a condenser and everything is measured in micromoles and milligrams and μL (microliters = 0.000001 L). They are insignificant measurements and its so easy to screw up. It's not like cooking where you just add ingredients based on the taste or how much you feel should go in (thats how I cook, at least. I never "measure". It's always a gut instinct).
Anyway, in all my years of doing organic chemistry (okay, maybe only a semester and a half) I have not once made a product. I've had left over solvents and drying ingredients. But I have never been able to isolate a product. Or at least not by myself.
But today, man that all changed. I went into lab, with my prelab done (in the Bio lecture before class, granted - but it was fresh in my mind!) and I said to myself, "Okay, today I am going to follow all of the directions. I will measure everything out to the exact decimal point. I will not screw up because today's lab seemed too easy to screw up."
And I didn't screw up. My crude product was a clear liquid while everyone else's was a brownish solidy liquidy substance. I was able to boil off all of the diethyl ether and I was left with my product which is... propyl p-tolyl ether.
Is anyone even fuckin' impressed?
Everyone else got weird IR spectras. Mine, according to the professor, looked better and closer to the correct IR. So...drumroll...look:
Okay, so it might not be much. And I'm sitting here looking at the real IR spectra for propyl p-toyl ether and it looks nothing like what I got. I think mine still has too much water in it as you can tell from the semi big wide dip on the far left. The things next to that, I'm not sure.Meh. It's better than some of the other spectra. Let's hope this isn't the last time I get a product.
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on Monday, February 26, 2007 at 4:48 PM.
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