Foo - just lost all my motivation... *RANT*

It's Friday night. At 6 PM, I go to set up my chemical reaction, and I see my coworker about to set up a reaction he shouldn't be setting up. The reaction is not optimized yet, so he should not be running it on a large amount of material. Instead, he's supposed to be trying lots of reaction conditions to optimize this reaction. What was he doing? You guessed it... running it on a large amount of material. More bluntly, all of the material we have. Happily, I stop him in time.

Then I try to discuss with him how he should optimize this reaction. I try to prod and guide in as general terms as possible so that he can feel like he's coming up with the ideas, but that doesn't work. I lead him a bit more directly, which results in him coming up with even worse ideas. (!!!) I ask him to explain his reasoning (something we do in the project team on a very regular basis) and he tells me "I don't know. You do it." ("It" referring to the work he's been assigned.) As those of you who see my posts regularly know, my language is usually very clean, but...

What the [insert profanity of choice] is this [insert derogatory term of choice] [insert profanity of choice]ing thinking? (Now repeat, inserting different choices in brackets. And again. One more time. Okay... now moving on...)

To avert further aggrevation, I give up on coaxing him and simply explain to him to how to do things and explain the logic behind my choices. But now I've lost all my motivation. This guy has a PhD. He's completed three such projects before. I'm earning my PhD right now, and I've never completed such a project (namely a natural product total synthesis) before. Why is it the third time this week that I've had to babysit in order to avert disaster, and then hold his hand (figuratively) and walk him through the process of doing research in such detail that most undergrads would find it insulting if I did the same to them?

Okay, as unmotivated as I am, it's time to go get my work done for the day. Thanks for letting me rant. Just one last comment before going back to running my reaction...


!@#$!@#$!@#$!@#$

Okay, I feel a bit calmer after letting that out.

damn... give me the job... i'll do whatever the hell you say for PhD pay. (excluding certain things not related to science)

Just curious, but do you go to UCSD?

Tell him his diploma has been recalled. Sounds like a real danger to his future co-workers if he isn't stopped now. :D

If i was where you were, and a chemist, I would be making thermite right about now..

Yikes! That's too bad, jschen. Your lab mates can make your life so much easier or so much harder :mad: Is there someone you could talk to that's the head of the whole project? PI?

Just setup your own checmical reaction: Whiskey, Ice, Water.
Stir with finger, sip, and do not give this Phd to power to ruin your day. :)

What this #@*! does will not help or hurt you nearly as much as your reaction will.

Just setup your own checmical reaction: Whiskey, Ice, Water.
Stir with finger, sip, and do not give this Phd to power to ruin your day. :)

What this #@*! does will not help or hurt you nearly as much as your reaction will.

I prefer the reaction without the ice. For me it's more whiskey, brain cells, fun...

jschen you should be my chemistry teacher unlike my boring one who's only exploded like 2 things the WHOLE year! Thats perpostrous while the other teachers class lights stuff on fire every week!! Gah shes soo boring.

man.. mine only blew up his hand a few times with soap one day... and that was it.

damn... give me the job... i'll do whatever the hell you say for PhD pay. (excluding certain things not related to science)
Sorry, I don't control the payroll, or else I'd invite you to take his place right about now. By the way, postdoctoral fellows don't make all that much. With some supplemental income on the side (consulting income and investment income), I make more than he makes.


Just curious, but do you go to UCSD?
No, I'm at the Scripps Research Institute (http://www.scripps.edu/). It's very close to UCSD, and it's a small private research institute that's been historically really strong in biology. It started building up a chemistry program 17 years ago and started a graduate program something like 15 years ago, and today, it's one of the world leaders in organic chemistry. I'm not as familiar with international choices, but for organic chemistry grad students in the US, Scripps and Harvard are the obvious top choices. I'm at Scripps because I already studied at Harvard before.

My professor is the first chemistry professor here and the chairman of the department. The institute has two Nobel laureates, both winning the Nobel prize in chemistry. (One of them is a biologist, but pioneered the use of NMR, generally considered a chemical tool, to study proteins. The instrument we bought to lure him to our institute a year before he won the Nobel prize cost the institute $7 million. It's worth it, though.)


Is there someone you could talk to that's the head of the whole project? PI?
Well, unofficially, I head the project. So I guess I can talk to myself. :p My other coworker and I are seriously considering talking with the PI about this if things continue. It's not a random fight that really annoys me. The other coworker once got me upset enough in a conversation that I walked out and decided not to work for the day. But though we fight, we get over it. And we exchange ideas effectively (if sometimes in a hostile manner) and respect each other's ideas. I know he works harder than I do. He knows I think more carefully than he does.

But the guy we're annoyed at, I wish he would someday propose something interesting. Even if it ends up being a bad idea. He could propose anything, really. I don't care. But in the absence of doing so and communicating results properly, I don't see how he's doing science. Working with him, I've come to realize that doing science involves, in the most general terms, three things. (1) Ideas are born. (2) Data is collected. (3) Conclusions are communicated. Repeat. This guy really only does (2) much of the time. But a robot can do (2). It's (1) and (3) that make a scientist.


jschen you should be my chemistry teacher
Well, maybe if things go well enough for me, I can be your professor someday when you're in college. Cool demos, though not of much practical use, are an important part of bringing chemistry "alive" for the students. :D


Just setup your own checmical reaction: Whiskey, Ice, Water.
:beer: Later tonight. Gotta go tend to a reaction first.

Sorry for your encounter of the craptastic kind. I've got an extra beer if you need a chaser.:beer:

This makes me very glad I get along with my co-workers. Sure, some are better than others, but we're a pretty easy-going workgroup, thankfully. I get mad at the equipment(when it malfunctions) more than my fellow employees, but that's just one of my pet peeves, really.:o

:( sucks
I feel for you :(

so jschen, if i ever needed help on my chemistry homework, youd be the man?

I think you need to blow off some steam by riding home at twice your normal speed. That way you can tend to another reaction: lactic acid + your muscles = new personal best

i think the most explosive thing i ever saw done in my class was she threw a pea sized ball of potassium in a big tank of water. Haha we had to wear googles on and we were like 10 feet away from it...while the other, cool teacher, class had twice the size potassium, with no googles on, and they were right next to the tank. why do i get stuck with boring teachers??

that makes no sense but okay

i think the most explosive thing i ever saw done in my class was she threw a pea sized ball of potassium in a big tank of water. Haha we had to wear googles on and we were like 10 feet away from it...while the other, cool teacher, class had twice the size potassium, with no googles on, and they were right next to the tank. why do i get stuck with boring teachers??
Sodium is bad as hell! We set a tree on fire in my hazardous cargo class. It was awesome!:D

so jschen, if i ever needed help on my chemistry homework, youd be the man?
If you ever need an explanation of a concept, post in Foo and I'll try to get around to it. If you want me to do your homework, you're out of luck.


I think you need to blow off some steam by riding home at twice your normal speed. That way you can tend to another reaction: lactic acid + your muscles = new personal best
Unfortunately, today's not a commuting day thanks to scheduling issues. I had a choice of riding my 15 mile pre-breakfast ride (1800 feet of climbing in 15 miles, including a short 17% pitch :D ) or riding my commute (6 miles round trip), so I chose my 15-miler. And with the temperature dropping with a storm rolling in, it's hard to set PR's. I felt really good on the climbing today, yet I was 3.5 minutes behind my PR thanks to taking it a bit slow near the beginning (needed to warm up) and going downhill slower (too much wind resistance from my windbreaker).

I wish I was taking on Mt Baldy tomorrow morning... with all the steam I could blow off, I'd probably manage to take a decent chunk out of the 30 minutes I still need to cut out in order to reach my 2006 goal.


i think the most explosive thing i ever saw done in my class was she threw a pea sized ball of potassium in a big tank of water. Haha we had to wear googles on and we were like 10 feet away from it...while the other, cool teacher, class had twice the size potassium, with no googles on, and they were right next to the tank. why do i get stuck with boring teachers??
:eek: Potassium and water in a high school demo? Yikes! That's pretty nasty if you manage to do it right. ie Carefully clean off all the mineral oil protecting the potassium from water vapor in the air, break it into really fine pieces, and then chuck it into water. But with plenty of mineral oil still coating it and just a ball of the stuff, it's not that exciting. A clean piece of rubidium (below potassium in the periodic table) about the size of a grape with decent surface area dropped into water will generate enough pressure from the combustion of the resulting hydrogen gas to shatter a Pyrex beaker. Cesium (below rubidium), well, I wouldn't want to stand near that experiment.

We also did Sodium before and that was boring. Yeah the Potassium was all metallic silver on the outside..

You would've had a heart attack if you saw me mixing liquid nitrogen into my yogurt then...

slvoid, speaking to me? Or addressing someone else? Liquid nitrogen and yogurt should be no big deal. Nitrogen is very inert, and at those temperatures, not much happens anyway. Mixing liquid oxygen with stuff, on the other hand...

Then you probably would've had a heart attack if you saw me brewing home made liquid oxygen out of the air in the lab with liquid nitrogen and playing with matches...

Or getting high off my dry ice/ethanol charpy impact tester/temporary bong.

Actually LN and yogurt isn't as easy as you think. You get really smooth frozen yogurt but if you don't do it right you a) get metal filings in your food (bad) and b) get yogurt all over the lab. What tends to happen is that the LN makes it to the inside of the yogurt cup then rapidly expands just as the yogurt freezes. The bubble then bursts and explodes, sending shards of yogurt all over the place. Then its just a race against time to lick the frozen chunks off the equipment and floor before it all melts.

Liquid oxygen is nasty stuff. Organic chemistry students who are a bit naive or not thinking clearly have been known to accidently end up with liquid oxygen sitting around. Seeing it sitting around where it shouldn't be is usually a good sign to leave the room. Just in case. It's readily recognized by its blue hue. And since only very particular conditions will cause it to collect in the first place. (No, I will not describe how to collect liquid oxygen.) If I'm a professor someday and I see a student purposely generating liquid oxygen with no good reason, I probably would demand that student's expulsion.

As for liquid nitrogen and yogurt, yes, I could see how it could splatter yogurt all over the place. However, extremely good stirring can avoid this. Alternatively, slowly add in the other direction (yogurt into liquid nitrogen). I imagine that should solve the problem.

I probably would demand that student's expulsion.

Boy i wish you were my teacher if you taught me chemistry in college:p

Me me me me can I describe how to suck LOX out of the air???
Yogurt into LN does pretty much one of 2 things.
1) Turbulence can cause it to balloon out as the gas expands underneath it.
1a) Then you get pretty bad boiling and rolling.
1b) Or the top pops open and now you get a liquid nitrogen fountain and chunks of frozen yogurt on the floor.
2) Or it freezes and your chocolate yogurt turns into a long frozen turd.

You know what else you can do is pour some LN in your hand and really quickly flick it at someone in the lab. The LN soaks into their clothes and starts smoking and you scream ACID!!!!!!
Or when your coworker's doing a load controlled compression test from a hydraulic machine, if they're new and the only have 1 mode of control going, pour some LN on their sample while they're not looking and wait for em to start the test. The bang sounds like a shot gun going off.

We also did Sodium before and that was boring. Yeah the Potassium was all metallic silver on the outside..
They must not be doing it right.;) Of course, we had a pretty good chunk of clean sodium.

Did they do the non-flammable powder demo? Probably more of a hazcom than a chemistry class thing, really. Scared the crap out of us sitting in the first and second rows of class, tho.

Yeah, I had to go off on a line operator for not listening to me (associates and operators are required to take order from test engineering before their own line managers)....pretty much he destroyed thousands of dollars in fiber optics after I told him to stay the &^% out of that test area.

He thought it would be good cable management to zip-tie them together....with a #*$& zip tie gun...he broke the fibers in most of that cluster, cutting our test capacity in half.

....fortunately my splice jobs got done thursday....I still want to choke him till his eyes shoot out like corks from a champagne bottle though.

damn... give me the job... i'll do whatever the hell you say for PhD pay. (excluding certain things not related to science)

PhD pay? Unless you're a highly sought after researcher/speaker or doing scientific lab work, PhD's (professors) are some of the lowest paid people. Beginning prof's where I did my master of arts started at 24,000 per year--we do it because we love it. No I'm not a PhD (starting one soon), but I love to teach, lecture and speak publicly (I currently do a lot of itinerate speaking), so it's what I'm pursuing.

I prefer the reaction without the ice. For me it's more whiskey, brain cells, fun...
why ruin good ETOH with H20?

marty

They must not be doing it right.;) Of course, we had a pretty good chunk of clean sodium.

Did they do the non-flammable powder demo? Probably more of a hazcom than a chemistry class thing, really. Scared the crap out of us sitting in the first and second rows of class, tho.

lol im pretty sure it was the regular kind. I remember she had to cut it like cheese though haha. It only made a lot of sparks (boring) and then it became just one flame (majorly boring).

but nooo the other class does methane exploding bubbles. :mad:

They must not be doing it right.;) Of course, we had a pretty good chunk of clean sodium.

If you've seen a more reactive metal react with water (potassium, rubidium, cesium), you'd think sodium is pretty unimpressive.

Edit: Seeing EJ123's response, yes, his teacher is messing up the sodium demonstration. It shouldn't be sparking. It should be going off with a very loud bang. My high school teacher's demonstrations could be heard several classrooms away. And that's not all that big a chunk of sodium.


PhD pay? Unless you're a highly sought after researcher/speaker or doing scientific lab work, PhD's (professors) are some of the lowest paid people. Beginning prof's where I did my master of arts started at 24,000 per year--we do it because we love it.

It's true that PhD's generally are paid pretty poorly for their expertise. Especially in academia, unless you happen to become one of the absolute best. One does not go earn a PhD in order to become wealthy. One does it for love of what one studies. A few do become wealthy, but statistically, you're far better off doing other things if maximum earnings potential is important to you. That said, PhD organic chemists in the pharmaceutical industry do okay... starting pay is about 90K. Too bad I'm not really interested in becoming a cog in a big pharmaceutical company.

haha oh last week my teacher had one of those super large jugs of water, it was empty though, thats used in offices for dispensing water. Well she put some methonal ( or ethynol i cant remember lol) and she turned the huge jug around untill all the methonal evaportated. Then she said she needed a volunteer to throw a small popsicle-sized stick that had a little flame at the end, inside the jug. Heheh, well the guy went sort of slow when he did it, and didnt manage to put it in right when the flame was in the opening to the jug, and BAM this explosion thing happened, and the small jug opening became a mega-sized-kitchen torch! lol and his hand was almost engulfed it in the flame. He jumped back and cussed at the same time LOL. the flame was supposedly not a high amount of heat though. I know that the end reaction was water.

What made you want to be a chemist jschen?

It probably was ethanol since (1) methanol fumes are more toxic and (2) pure methanol flames are colorless.


What made you want to be a chemist jschen?

Well, you asked for it... I have always been a math/science type. Both my parents are medical doctors, and they always hoped I'd be one, too. I always excelled in the math and science classes. For example, I set the curve in multivariable calculus and linear algebra at Pomona College in my junior year of high school. Perfect scores on every exam (including any bonus questions), near-perfect homework. And the summer before my junior year of high school, I was going to travel around Europe on a school-related trip, but I initially turned it down for a math program, then turned that down for a chance to do molecular biology research.

Also in my junior year, I was taking AP chemistry. (Took AP bio the year before, then AP physics senior year. Skipped the non-AP classes.) For extra credit, our teacher had us take the local exam for the American Chemical Society's search for Chemistry Olympiad (a big international high school competition) participants. I got the highest score in the area (and a $1000 scholarship) and then took the national exam. Despite a major boo-boo in the lab portion of the exam (misread a number), I got one of the 20 highest scores and made it to the national training camp. Then at the training camp, after two weeks of intensive studying in chemistry, I made it onto the four-person US team. The ACS sent me to Moscow for the competition, where I got 63rd out of about 170 participants from about 50 countries. I had a major lapse of concentration in the lab portion (a recurring theme!), without which my score would have been more like 8th-12th out of 170.

So my senior year of high school, I decide one of my major goals would be to return to Chemistry Olympiad and do much better. Took physical chemistry and organic chemistry at Harvey Mudd College, doing very well in the first and acing the second. Easily made it back on the team. This year, the competition was in Montreal. (What a disappointment... the year before Moscow was Beijing, and the year after Montreal was Sydney.) I got 2nd by the slimmest of margins, largely due to another problem with my lab portion of the exam. (Recurring theme indeed!) Without that issue, I would have blown away the competition.

I might be bumping up against the maximum post length, so I'll continue in another post.

Wow lol cool:D.

The problem I had with the lab portion clearly was the difference, but mentors for the US team partially attribute my failure to get 1st place to my paying too much attention to girls at the training camp and spending too much time studying the wrong type of chemistry. :D But whatever... just a random high school competition, even if on an international scene.

I went to Harvard for college, and my freshman academic advisor (a non-scientist himself, dean of one of the humanities departments) tells me that I have a unique opportunity to really excel in the sciences given my background and the resources Harvard has to offer. He recommends focusing on the sciences, somewhat compromising my liberal arts education in the process. I could always pick up other stuff in my required elective courses and outside of class. I think it over and agree to such a path. My college transcript over four years (and no summer school) has 31 math/science classes on it and 6 non-math/science classes. Let's see... 2 math, 3 physics, 2 undergrad bio, 3 graduate bio, 7 undergrad chem, 6 graduate chem, 8 for research.

A bit of an unbalanced academic experience, yes, but fully leveraging the resources of Harvard science. I made up for this unbalanced experience by having a more balanced experience outside of class. Anyway, I join an organic chemistry research group the summer after my freshman year since I decided organic chemistry was my favorite area of chemistry. By early junior year, I decided I really liked chemistry and med school was out of the question.

I like organic chemistry because it has the right mix of theoretical and experimental for me and the right level of detail with projects with the right timeframe. I still remember the day it first "clicked" in my head and I "got it". My work is a nice mix of theoretical and experimental, strategic and tactical, pure and applied. It's a field that enables other fields, from medicine to material science.

why ruin good ETOH with H20?

marty


Because if it has no water...and is 200 proof you are F'd as it has been chemically dried with benzene not good not good at all. give me 190 proof and then your talking (that means there is 5% water in it).


As for the co-worker I find it far worst when it is your boss telling you to do or doing themselves things that you know don't work as is or is just plan stupid and wasteful of lab resources ($$$$$$).

If you've seen a more reactive metal react with water (potassium, rubidium, cesium), you'd think sodium is pretty unimpressive.

Edit: Seeing EJ123's response, yes, his teacher is messing up the sodium demonstration. It shouldn't be sparking. It should be going off with a very loud bang. My high school teacher's demonstrations could be heard several classrooms away. And that's not all that big a chunk of sodium.


Oh, I've seen some pretty impressive reactions on the telly, but I think I'd rather keep it that way. Sodium might be the biggest reaction I'd like to see in person. I'm not as young and eager as I used to be.;) It was still really cool, tho.