You know when you have those moments when you realize just how much time has passed since, I don’t know, some event, perhaps, and it makes you feel old? Well, in grad school, we (well, I really should say *most of us* and *should* here) have these moments when we realize just how long we’ve been in grad school, and that we should probably try to finish up. It goes something like this:

I remember when I was a first-year, and figured I’d be tying up loose ends by the time I was a fourth-year, so that I could graduate in 5 years like a normal graduate student….Oh shit! That was four years ago! I should probably get on that whole “meaningful-research-dissertation-writing-defense-thingy”.

(PhD comics is pretty much spot on to the whole experience!)

I started this damn blogging thing at the end of my second year. I am a fourth-year now, and a senior graduate student in my lab. It’s weird having post-doctoral fellows come to me for advice about their experiments. Though we all have legitimate work to get done – at all stages of gradschool, I mean – my work is starting to feel a little more, well, legitimately frightening. In my second year, I had to give a divisional seminar, where I talked about my research project for 30 minutes in front of my division. I did fine, but I didn’t enjoy it. I had to have a good presentation, but it was, well, not really a great big deal. Every second-year student gives one of these talks, no matter how far they’ve progressed in their research. Now, I’m looking down the road at tfinishing a manuscript ASAP because I already have half of the data for my third paper and want to start writing that, a conference in January to prepare for, my fourth-year seminar to plan and give sometime in February, another trip to Brookhaven National Laboratory in late February/March, a second conference in April – which reminds me that I need to submit my abstract by November second, and then more Brookhaven National Laboratory work come end of summer-ish. Somewhere in there I need to fit in two weddings, the lab’s annual group trip to somewhere, and hopefully a week or two off for some fammy-time and r&r on Cape Cod because I haven’t been there with my fam in longass time, but of course that depends on whether I’ve gotten enough work done to take time off.

This was my “moment.” I realized it’s going to be quite hard to fit in the whole dissertation writing thing as it is. I also have given myself the goal of graduating before Thanksgiving 2010 (as opposed to shortly thereafter, which is my projected finishing-up time frame as it stands now) so that I can go have Thanksgiving with my fammy and not be insane. It doesn’t leave much time for futzing around on the intrawebz.

Folks, I’ve decided I’d rather graduate than blog, and because I have lousy writing skills and much writing to do, and also because I know my tendencies pretty well, this means, well, kinda choosing. My scant posting in recent months was due to doing a lot of work and not idling at my desk trying to come up with ways to occupy myself. I no longer have to try to come up with things to do; my plate overfloweth. I have more to do than I can handle alone, and my boss has seen fit to split my project into two offshoots (a good thing, meaning that I’ve established a solid enough, interesting-enough base that it can have branches) and give me a first-year minion to train. Which reminds me, I forgot to put that on my list.

So what comes next, after this gradschool thing, after this next year, you may wonder? Frankly I don’t know. I’ll be staying Austin until July 2011, because that’s when my lease runs out. But I’m expecting a high degree of chaos then as well, with the whole trying to find jobs for two PhD’s (Dr. Boyfriend and I) in one location, moving, settling in, you know, life.

I’ll try to keep up with range reports, and what have you. But blogging is getting bumped lower and lower on my priority list these day. The thing is, I’m almost too busy to miss it. I’m a much better scientist than a blogger. I don’t have a whole lot of original ideas that are blogworthy (or that I’m willing to share with the intrawebz. Like my plans to take over the world, for example. I don’t go public with that shit. Wait…f***! ). I’ve never claimed to. One of the reasons I started this blog was so that I could share the whole secret life aspect of science, ya know, because, we’re not just a bunch of white coats. I think I have a pretty interesting “secret life,” if you will. I’ve played symphonies, danced the Nutracker, had a career as a professional figure skater, shot in a pistol competition, worked as a zamboni driver, and learned some legit circus tricks. Thing is, right now, and for the next year, I’m gonna be mainly a white-coat donning lab monkey. My “free” time is mostly spent hanging out at home or otherwise enjoying the computer-free company of my dog and Dr. Boyfriend, and occassionally some other characters, you know, because it’s important to maintain at least some minimum degree of social behaviour.

So, thanks to all my readers, friends and frenemies, for making this really fun while it lasted. Wish me luck in the real world. I’ll try to update you with my status from time to time. Gun stuff, dog stuff, some other stuff perhaps, interesting science stuff maybe – I’ll probably do a blog cleanout soon, so if you want to take incriminating info about her evilness, moi, do it now I’d really like to post my next publications because I think it will be totally bitchin’, and that means essentially coming out of anonymity. I wish I could do both blogging and science to a likeable degree, but you’ll just have to believe me on this one: I can’t. Most of it has to do with my being a very, very slow writer. I’ve gotten somewhat better at writing, though not proofreading, and to put forth the kind of posting I’d really like to be able to do, it would mean devoting alot more time to it, a lot more research. And with the amount of time I need for researching and writing the stuff in my job description…well, I’m being redundant. You get the picture. Leave requests for posts (e.g. more showgirl chronicles…I know I haven’t been good about continuing that little series).

I’m not going galt, and I’m not going off the grid. I’m just, well, almost 30 and I need to finish my PhD. You can blame my boss for making me do real work and requiring that I go to conferences and national labs, train first-years, and publish research findings. Kidding. I actually want to do all these things, and I’m stoked that I get the chance to do them. I have to honor that!

Buh bye intrawebz (sort of), I’ll miss you! Check out my blogroll!

Xox

SB

(That’s me on the left. Better living through chemistry! By the way, I like to pronounce the “Ch” as one would in “cheetos”. Or with a good ol’ hebrew “ch,” like “chanuka” or “challa”.  Resisting maturity since 1981…)

- Body still recovering from last weekend’s pain fest. My doctor shot me up with lidocaine, injecting it straight into these things he calls “trigger points”: tiny muscle knots that everyone has but that have become aggrivagted in my case, and have increased pain receptors, decreased vascularization, and have begun likening themselves to scar tissue. A more permenant/ long lasting treatment might be Botox. Imagine that! By numbing the trigger points for an extended period of time, the muscle spasms would cease, and the entire muscle would be able to let go (in my case, the muscle is the trapezius), allowing me to strengthen the supporting muscles so that, by the time the botox wears off, my trapezius would not become strained. Worth a shot.Aaaaaaaaand – I could tell everyone I was having botox, and funny looks would ensue. heeheee.

- Lab is nice on a rainy, cold, sunday afternoon.

- I’m extremely nervous about what will happen with healthcare. My doc had posted his views on the debaucle in his waiting room, and, because I happen to think he’s a terrific GP with a tightly run ship, I thought I’d share what points I’m agreeing with: 1.) Participation in the program should be optional for practicioners. I agree with this. On the flip side, there’s the argument of “oh gosh, we won’t be able to spread reform and get all those uninsured people healthcare if we don’t force every practicioner to participate.” Let me tell you why  I think it’s better to make participation optional at this point: the reforms won’t take effect for years anyways, so it’s kinda pointless to force participation right now anyways. A far greater argument is that forcing participation is the same thing as standardizing medical practices. Maybe one day, we’ll be able to do that, however,  usually practices aren’t standardized until it’s been established that they will work. We don’t know if the reforms will work, so it’s a pretty nonsensical and possibly dangerous and wastefull (considering time and money) to force all physicians to adopt these reforms from the get-go. If they work, more physicians will join the program.

Um, I guess that’s all I really feel about that right now.

Back to experimenting.

Yesterday evening started off as a nice, romantic night in: good wine, some cheese, a movie about guns (Lord of War), and then it happened: our weimaraner decided to chase the stinky, funny-looking, black and white cat that had wandered into our yard. About halfway through the movie, we heard the clacking of the dog door and instantly smelled her skunkiness.

The kicker is that Elektra apparently did not learn her lesson the first time. The skunk apparently remained in our backyard, and, as Dr. Boyfriend went to the store to pick up some, uh, odor removing items, it got her a second time. Stupid dog…

We have de-skunkified the canine. Tomato juice, apparently, is not the way to go; it only works after like 5 baths in the stuff. Instead we looked up a nice home-made chemical bath recipe: hydrogen peroxide, baking soda,  and dish soap.  Elektra was not a happy girl, after being first sprayed with a skunk, then with enzymatic cleaner, then with what is essentially RCA cleaner. But she no longer smells.

We are still in the process of de-contaminating our house.

This morning, I made an appointment to get my neck/back chiropractored on Wednesday. Wednesday was the earliest day they could see me, I would’ve liked to get in sooner. See, I didn’t exactly sleep last night. I nabbed a few 20 minute naps in between contorting in pain and unsuccesfully trying to cry myself to sleep. Twice. Dr. Boyfriend woke up and massaged my poor broken body and held me while I wallowed in pain, misery, tiredness and self-pity at 3 AM.

This will be my 4th trip to the chiropractor since joining the Synchrotron experimenters one and a half weeks ago.

Got an appointment to see my GP tomorrow. Hopefully he’ll give me a prescription for muscle relaxers, so that I may sleep better – or at all. This will be very important when it comes time to run the beamline on the synchrotron, since we operate 24/7 in 12 hour shifts. Tried to get an appointent at university health services but they were all filled up with sickly undergrads. The wait at urgent care was 4-5 hours, and, though they offered to put me in the queue, they heavily recommended taking a butload of NSAIDs instead. Their exact words were “if you choose to wait, you’ll probably get H1N1.” I said “no thank you,” and left. Besides swine flu, the thought of sitting for 4 hours made me want to committ supuku.

And I’m back in lab. Much of the right side of my body from my upper neck down to my hip is numb from the irritation and swelling caused by the incessant muscle spasms. It’s kinda like a temporary relief, as long as I don’t try to move too much. Like turn my head more than 20 degrees.

*sneers at potentiostat*

Damn that instrument. Actually, to be technical, it’s not the potentiostat itself that works me over for the worse, its the custom electrochemical devices with their finicky alignment, brittle leads, and tiny screws, and having to set them up in the goddamn hood. I hate those things. Not to mention, stuff doesn’t work as nicely as it does in my regular glass cell, despite their fancy-cool custom machined-ness. Seriously, I get the best results in a 20-cent glass vial using three electrodes which I have expertly bundled together with parafin wax. Science….

Apart from the searing pain, working on the weekend isn’t all that bad. By the second consecutive weekend in lab, working 7 days a week feels totally normal. Plus, I work a slighter schedule: usually only about 6 hours, compared to the 10-12 hours on weekdays.

I’m currently synthesizing my back-up samples, it’s getting down to the wire. On a side note, tetrachloroplatinate is a pretty, pretty platinum salt. A 0.1M  aqueous solution is a deep sunset orange.

Thought I’d share what life is like on the cutting edge of nanotechnology with the rest of the internet. I have a short breather while I wait for my solutions to de-oxygenate.

Two months ago I started a side project. It has become my thesis research. It is also totally and completely ballin’. It’s nanotech to the extreme. Plently of people are fabricating nano things with other nanothings, like putting little nanoparticles (very small rocks) on the nanorods or nanotubes (heh. I said “rod.”). Nanotubes are typically on the order of 25 nanometers in diameter and several hundred nanometers long. In my world, that’s big. Also, nanoparticles that people typically  work with are on the scale of 3-5 nanometers in diameter. That’s also on the large size, in my world. The nanoparticles I make are all clusters of 55, 147, and 240 atoms, and are all less than 1.7 nanometers in diameter. The difference between a 1.7 nm cluster and a 5 nanometer cluster is several hundred atoms. In my area of study, analytical chemistry of materials and surfaces, several hundred atoms is a huge difference. In fact, as small a difference as 10 atoms can be significant when considering the relationship between composition, structure, and properties on this end of the nanoscale. I can’t disclose fully what my research entails, because I’d like to publish it and earn the right to say “I did it first, nyah nyah,” so I’ll speak loosly about some of the details. Roughly, what I do could be considered ultra-nano fabrication. While it’s pretty high tech to modify 20 nm wide nanotubes with little clusters, (nanofabrication, if you will), ultra-nano fabrication would be taking a 1.7 nm particle and decorating different parts of it’s surface.

Yes, my head is very big right now. But I happen to think I’m entitled to go on this ego trip.

Anyways, it’s not all glitz and glam. I just got back from my second chiropractor appointment this week. Finally feeling pretty good in the neck area, hopefully it will get me through another weeks worth of bending over the potentiostat. Just under 2 weeks to go until I’m off to the synchrotron, and one co-worker on the project just got back from having H1N1 for a week and a half, and my other co-worker just left for the weekend for family time. We’ve been stressin’ to get stuff done. To top it all off, we got the “drop everything you’re doing right now” email from the boss on Monday because, due to a mix up, our deadline for submission was moved from February 1, 2010, to this past Wednesday. We got the grant written and submitted with 28 minutes to spare.

I’m still learning my way around this electrochemistry thing. My experiments are working, but they could always work better. I have a full plate with trying to get a paper out and preparations for the synchrotron studies, and everytime I show data that I think is good enough, the boss wants me to tweak it “just one more way.” It’s never just one more thing to try. I’ve been saying that I’m about one more solid week of data collecting from having enough for this paper, and that keeps getting pushed back. I realized that my eyes are bigger than stomache in lab right now; there’s no way I can do the series of experiements that I want to do and prepare the synchotron samples at the same time. So, now, it’s more like I’m a month and a half away from having the data I need for this paper. Once I realized that I would have to cut my work load down by half, my headache shrunk by about half as well. Imagine that! While I’d love to get it all done and have my cake and eat it to, it’s just not going to happen. I need these synchrotron experiments to go as well as they possibly can. It’s all going in my dissertation, anyways. It’s still hard – and has always been a personal difficulty – to slow it down, and take a few steps back. Especially when I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

The synchrotron will be a fun time. It’s a huge structure, and working on the beamline, as we call it (it’s a monochromatic x-ray beam) is like being inside an instrument. I’m not sure if regulations will allow me to post pictures (my guess is not). We operate 24/7 in shifts. The nifty thing is watching the experimental results appear before your very eyes. Visualizing the interference of wavepackets and seeing them yield the pay-dirt at 3 am is totally invigorating. Makes it all worth it.

That’s all I have time for right now.

Lissa – let me know if you want to meet up with me and Clea in NYC when I’m done experimenting!

After the boss shoehorned me into the upcoming Brookhaven excursion at the last minute, I broke out my calendar to roughly plot out all of what I need to do to prepare my samples in the next 2 and a half weeks. Working backwards from the date we fly out of Austin, I determined that the latest possible date to begin my “contingency plan,” (in other words, should my synthesis or sample prep for the trip become so utterly fucksored that it leaves me no choice but to remake samples) is Wednesday.

At this point, I need to work straight through the next two weekends. I don’t know what I’ll do if I hit a snag….

Wish me sanity. See you when I get back on October 22.

**(In)sanity update**

Got into lab this morning and hadn’t even dropped my gear off in the office before Susie, one of my co-workers who’s been working on the beamline at Brookhaven for the past 2 years, grabbed me to chat about preparations for the upcoming trip. Apparently, we’re not just doing preliminary runs on a handful of my samples, but most of our time is going to be devoted to my project. It seems that the boss, in a meeting with Susie last week, got excited about the prospects of this little project of mine and came up with a slew of stuff he wants done in-situ. Damn, sure would’ve been nice to be aware-ified of this at the time. Oh, and something screw-tastic happened with communication lines between bossman and the folks who fill our grant at NSLS. The boss thought we had until February 1, 2010, to submit our proposal for more beamline funding. Wrongo. Apparently, that shit is due on Wednesday; we have two days to write a grant proposal.

I’m starting to lose my shpadoinkle.

Whiskey, please. STAT!

**UPDATE number two**

We got the grant proposal submitted 28 minutes before the deadline. Whew! Now back to my regularly scheduled insanity.

- I’m really enjoying the cool fall weather. Sign me up for more of this cold rainy buisness; I like wearing a sweater and sipping cocoa while waiting for the morning bus.

- After 5 days spent waiting on the synthesis of my stupid nanoparticles, I finally get to do science today. Yes, synthesizing nanothings is also technically “doing” science, but it’s like watching paint dry. Or waiting for water to boil – very slowly. The damn things just stir in their vials. It’s the advanced monkey work part of my job, as I like to call it; the part that a highly trained primate could do. Synthesis is kinda also like cooking. There are recipes. The recipe for my nanoparticles is something like this: mix 2 parts dendritic polymer to every 147 parts platinum tetrachlorate (which is a verrrrrry pretty sunset orange color) in water and let stir for 72 hours. Add 10-fold ratio of reducing agent-to-platinum ion, seal tightly and let stir for additional 24 hours. Place solutions is cellulose sack, seal off, and dialyze for additional 24 hours. Remove from cellulose sack at exactly 24 hours (this is the part I f***ed up last time) and store in glass vial.

- My PChem student is doing very well, with one exception: she forgot to turn in her homework which she had halfway completed. Her PChem courseload is very similar to mine, judging from her homework assignments, that is, it is work intensive. The homework is essentially where PChem is ingrained in the students’ heads, not in the actual classroom, reason being that the teachers flat-out don’t have time to explain very much. It’s up to the students to jump onto the playing field and learn how to play the game. SO far, my student has done well. She’s learning how to play the quantum mechanics game quite well. She can now visualize integral calculus and intuit expectation values without calculating them. Back to the homework issue: the PChem homework for a good solid pchem class should take students between 10-20 hours per week to complete. I know for a fact that she did about half of it, because I worked on initial steps with her, and later checked her final answers. I was priding myself on how well she was doing, on the fact that I had complete confidence in her ability to play the quantum game, having already walked her through initial steps.

Then I found out she screwed the pooch. She wasn’t able to finish putting the work in on the homework because she has another ugly upper level class, advanced organic chem. Why, I asked her, didn’t you hand in what you already had? You put in at least 7-8 hours on that! Apparently, she felt guilty for not finishing it, and too ashamed to turn in unfinished work. So, because you didn’t want the professor to think you’re slacking off, you decided not to hand in anything rather than get about half the credit for the problems you already did, which you worked hard on and were correct? You ridiculous creature! Folks, this girl is me approximately 5 years ago. I used to screw myself over like this all the time. If I was late to class or lab, I simply wouldn’t go that day. I felt dreadfully embarrassed and disrespectful walking into a lecture that had already started, so I would skip, rather than show up in the middle of class. Idiotic reasoning, right?! Of course, I set her straight, and told her she’d better not pull that kind of crap again. I think she got the point. I had a mind to email her professor and vouch for her having worked halfway through the set prior to the deadline, and then tell her to tuck her tail and ask to hand in her assignment late for partial credit, but I resisted. That would be meddlesome.

**UPDATE**

Now with more pressure!

- Just found out I’ll be going to Brookhaven National Lab to do EXAFS  (extended x-ray absorption fine-structure spectroscopy) at the the National Synchrotron Light Sourse (NSLS) for a week…3 weeks from now. I’ve been up in my boss’s grill about doing EXAFS because I do love the quantummy goodness of the technique, and I also love me some reubans from those NY delicatessens, soooo I win! I’m officially on team EXAFS. It’s kinda a big deal because of the scarcity of beamline time; EXAFS beamlines require supercoliders, so there aren’t a whole lot of them available. This, of course, means my work day will become about 4 hours longer and this will probably be my last weekend off for the next month. So, I got what I asked for, but will I like it? All work and no play usually makes barbie a surly girl. On the upshot, if everything works out, I’ll probably have more than half of the data for my dissertation. No pain, no gain, right?

Backstory: in a conversation-gone-wonky over negative campaign adds, the following point was made to justify the “can’t send an email” shot that Dems made at McCain: “Well, Stephen Hawking can send an email and he’s paralyzed from the head on down.”

Well, I responded, Stephen Hawking has done a shitload more than most people. And that got me thinking….

IBD recently polled over 1,300 practicing physicians about their positions on the government’s ideas regarding the healthcare overhaul. The results are pretty clear:

I fully anticipate the response from liberals to be along the lines of “those doctors who would consider quitting are evidently greedy capitalists, are clearly uninformed and this poll is clearly a work of Satan because it was conducted by Inverstors Buisness Daily,” or something of similar intellectual arrogance.

(By the way, IBD commissioned a list of doctors from a list broker. The names of the doctors to whom the polls were mailed were chosen at random. Over 1,300 samples is also a pretty good sample size; Rasmussen polls typically have a sample range of about 1,000.)

Forty-five percent of doctors would consider quitting. I don’t know which statistic is more striking, that nearly half of our doctors would consider no longer practicing medicine, or that two thirds of doctors don’t believe the government can cover 47 million more people at a lower cost and a higher quality of care. Considering that these guys are in fact the front line of medicine, I’m inclined to believe that brushing off their positions on the reforms we seek to undertake would be, bluntly, fucking stupid.

IBD also provided articles detailing the opinions of doctors both for and opposed to reforms. I can’t say either side is significantly more or less in the know than the other. The comments from the doctors who opposed reforms were definately diluted with a lot of anger and empty clammoring about how unamerican socialized medicine is. But some of the doctors polled discussed their experiences working in the healthcare systems of Great Brittain and Canada, and felt that the government’s hand in healthcare made the working conditions (which are already quite stressful for GPs) pretty damn tough.

On the pro-reforms side, many of the doctors embraced the ideology that medicine needs to be extended as a right, not a privelige, not only for moral and ethical reasons, but also because we’re all in the same boat, and we’ll get sick together. However, I was a little doubtful about how well informed the doctors are about the our population and our relative healthcare needs and the availability of such care. One doctor opined that the poorest half of the population gets poor healthcare. I am in the poorest half of the population, and I happen to have fantastic healthcare (BCBX of Texas, and my particular plan is a NFP provider too!). Of course, I’m in my mid-twenties and in fairly good health, and this is not so for everyone.

Regardless of our doctors’ positions on politics and the role of government in medicine(which, if you ask me, doesn’t make a rat’s ass of a difference; if you’re having surgery, what do you care about more: your doctor’s skills as a surgeon, or their political views?) these are our doctors, and we need them to stick around. The bottom line is: whether or not they are greedy capitalist pigs doesn’t matter; good luck getting your higher quality, less expensive medical care when there’s a shortage of doctors.

- just got another notification telling me that my abstract was accepted at the symposium preceeding the conference I’ll be going to in January. Double-win.

- Found out the hard way that I can’t purify Pt dendrimer encapsulated nanoparticles for over 24 hours because they begin to precipate out of solution at that point. Strangely, I did not encounter this problem with Pd particles, but apparently Pt is a different beast. That’s science, folks. I don’t know why, I’m not asking questions (because then I’d be expected to find out why my particles crash after 24 hours and I’m frankly not interested in why it doesn’t work when there’s already a well defined parameter for getting it to work. Wish I’d known that earlier…) I’m just going to stick with whatever gets me viable particles. So, it’s back to square one of my synthesis. There’s another 5 days wasted…

- Yesterday, rather than meeting with our collaborators, the boss suggested that we scrap the meeting and all go out for beers in honor of our collaborating professor having just given his tenure talk. The boss told us some pretty funny chemistry stories from his days post-doc-ing at MIT. Good times.

-Went to an super kickass talk. John B. Goodenough (that’s actually his name) gave a sweet chalktalk to the Center of Electrochemistry today. I spent most of the talk with my jaw agape. Prof. Goodenough was the guy who more or less invented Li-ion rechargeable batteries. And he’s the shit, let me tell you. He’s a baller. Most talks I see are of the “I’m pimping my research” variety. The CEC chalk talks, however, are more like a University lecture….for professors (as opposed to college students). The auditorium was packed with about a 50/50 mixture of professors and graduate students, all taking notes. The topic of the lecture was “tuning redox couples in transition metal oxide solids”. I made a personal note that I ought to email my undergraduate physical chemistry professor, Prof. Barnes at UMass, and thank him for teaching me about expectation values, density of states, and overlap integrals. Had I not been previously exposed to the convention of graphing probability distributions on a verticle axis, or hadn’t been forced to prove the Vitrial theory and model it computationaly, this lecture would’ve been completely – and I mean COMPLETELY – lost on me. This kind of shit makes me love my job oh so much, in ways that no amount of degradation from my superiors or experimental failures can detract from. Today, I watched some of the best minds in the fields of electrochemistry take notes and ask questions. It was fantastic. It had a lot of quantumy goodness.
Folks, I was in the bottom 50% of my high school class, I only applied to 2 colleges, and didn’t even think I was cut out for college, period. I went to the state public university. I’ve often regretted not having my shit together enough to maybe go to a better college, especially when I hear stories from Dr. Boyfriend, who went to Cornell, and my little sis, who went to Skidmore, but then I get experiences like these, and it more than makes up for all that. Sitting there, in the auditorium, I regretted nothing about my education. The stuff I get to see and do kicks so much ass, sometimes. And the best part is that I’ve worked my ass off to get here and it’s made me better for the wear. Thanks, Dr. Barnes, for the hell assignments in quantum and stat mech (see side story at the bottom of post) Squeeeeeee! I’m so pleased

-QOTD:

“Just because you get a good answer with a model doesn’t mean the model is correct.”

“I see I’ve run out of time. Feel free, all you who are bored and hungry, to go to lunch. I’ve got to stay and educate the professors!”

- John B. Goodenough

[Side-story]

The year was 2005, the month of August. I was starting my senior year at UMass, Amherst, and had just decided to pursue post-graduate studies in Chemistry, after majoring in  Kinesiology (applied physiology). I threw myself on the laboratory doorstep of the good Dr. Vachet and pleaded with him to take me on as an undergraduate researcher. I had been doing research in the Kinesiology labs since freshmen year, and I had completed a minor in chemistry, but would need more chemistry experience if I wanted to get into graduate programs in chemistry. That wasn’t all I would need. Dr. Vachet became my adopted advisor, and broke the news to me that I would have no hope of getting into a decent graduate program, let alone succeeding in chemistry if I did not take an additional full year of physical chemistry. His exact words, if I remember correctly, when viewing my completed coursework, were “you need to ace PChem.” I believe I let out an audible groan in response. Physical Chemistry a.k.a. PChem is universally revered across undergraduate institutions s the most difficult and intense and unpleasant of undergraduate chemistry courses. To make matters more ominous, I had to obtain a waiver from the chemistry coordinator in order the add the course, waiving the pre-requisits of calculus, multi-variate calculus, physics II, and physics III. Since I wasn’t in the chemistry department, the coordinator was allowed to neglect the pre-reqs (essentially, this cannot be done for chem majors, but since I wasn’t one of those, overseeing my course of study wasn’t their responsibility), and asked me why I was taking PChem. When I told her, more or less, for the fun of trying to get an A in the course, she told me flat out that she thought I was insane. I did not perceive this as a good omen but registered for the class anyways.

On the first day of class, the professor, a new faculty member by the name of Barnes, began writing in the upper most right corner of the front chalk board. By the end of class, he had worked his way all the way across the front board and more than half way across the board that ran down the entire length of the classroom. On the board were greek letters, roman letters, subscrips, superscripts, and I had no idea what any of them meant, except for maybe one or two of the small ones. I knew lambda was wavelength, nu was frequency, h was planck’s constant, and E was energy. The rest of it was alphabet soup. I was physically shaking and in the throws of anxiety by the middle of that first class.

I followed Dr. Barnes to his office after class and explained my situation: I knew next to nothing about multivariate calculus or modern physics, I wasn’t a chem major but was trying to land myself in a graduate chemistry problem. I told him I couldn’t distinguish the equations from the derivations on the board, couldn’t see the forest through the trees. Then I flat out asked him “What parts of this material do I need to learn in order to ace this course.”

“Everything,” he answered, smiling politely.

“Ok,” I said, and walked out.

The class was at 9:00 am. I took two shots of whiskey in my coffee before class for the first month of the semester, to take the edge off as I learned caluclus and modern physics and quantum mechanics all at the same time.

I got an A- and Prof. Barnes wrote me a letter of recommendation. It was good enough to help me gain admission into 3 of the top five graduate programs in analytical chemistry.

Thank you, Mike Barnes. I owe you a lot.