Foreign Perspectives

Things kicked off much quicker this morning as we’d already checked all the glassware yesterday and we’d a better handle on where things were and what to do with them.

Starting with the carboethoxymethylenetriphenylposphorane that we’d made yesterday the plan was to prepare our alkene using ethanol as our reagent (the others starting from the same product used different reagents). There would have been more time between steps today but we were performing a direct synthesis and one using competing reagents so the second synthesis filled the gaps in the first which made for a very full day.

Reaching the end of this stage of the synthesis meant that it was time to analyse the end product using NMR spectroscopy, Infrared spectroscopy and gas chromatography. In practical terms, few people managed to complete the analyses as the various tests weren’t run until quite late in the afternoon so there wasn’t much time to do the analysis before we had to hand in our lab notebooks for assessment. Yup, on this course they actually do check your lab notebooks. This first assessment doesn’t count towards the final mark though and it’s intended to give us pointers as to how to do better when we’re writing up the second lab notebook which does count towards the final exam.

Tonights tutorial discussed our overall results as we’ll need to know how best to make a double bond that’s either E or Z. Also, we’d to pick which of the three substances we’d like to have a go at preparing (queen substance, farnesol and an insect pheromone). We’re going for the pheromone basically because loads of people started off choosing the  queen substance and farnesol is covered in some detail in the pre-course notes already.

Catering-wise, the lunch lets things down and the breakfast and dinner are excellent.