Foreign Perspectives

Tuesday was a leap into unknown territory as we were all working on our own experiments. Having 44 separate experiments running rather than 22 made for a lot of slowing down as we all fought for the same pieces of glassware, chemicals and time from tutors and the York lab people. The net effect was that I didn’t get underway until rather later than anticipated.

To start with I was one of those using the “option A” method for the first stage of the experiment. That in itself was something of a challenge as it required rather larger than usual quantities of reagents with volumes measured in litres and made it feel like a small industrial process rather than a teaching lab scale. We originally thought that we’d be fighting over the two litre flasks at the end of the first stage but in practice our staggered starting times meant that it all went quite smoothly. This particular option is a little peculiar as once it gets going there’s a four hour reflux period followed by a flurry of activity and it’s done; the other option needs a good deal more constant attention. Overall, this option fits quite nicely into the day so, in principle, could be completed in one day.

That four hour break means that you can get going on preparing the phosphonium salt. This needs a little more thought as the salt you need usually isn’t the same one as you prepared earlier in the week so I needed the hex rather than pent variety; not everybody noticed that though. If you were really organised you could probably get that salt prepared on Tuesday but I think most people were working on it into Thursday morning. It would be worthwhile to try and get it done the first day as otherwise the final day can be quite hectic.

The evening tutorials covered how to write up a lab notebook which was quite different to my style for sure although I had good comments back on the first notebook this morning. Also covered or rather not covered was the EMA: we don’t get that ’til the last practical session is completed so don’t know what we’re aiming for yet.