Foreign Perspectives

Somehow we’ve reached the final day in the lab. This is when a lot of people realise that we should have been a bit more organised earlier in the week and be much further on than we are right now.

As we’ve moved through the steps in the preparation, the quantities and yields have dropped somewhat. The 100% return from the phosphonium salt was the best, and by the third second stage of the main line of the experiment I’m down to 27%. Not disastrously bad by itself but since the final stage of the experiment in the afternoon has a much, much lower yield I eventually found myself with just enough product to put through the IR and GC and put everything left into the NMR with fingers crossed that it was enough.

In practice a number of people didn’t manage to complete the final stage and some others ended up with nothing so having enough to test was a plus point. As one of my fellow students pointed out, it would have taken the moths a serious amount of time to produce even that amount.

The evening session was to allow us to prepare our presentations but after a long couple of days the numbers dropped quite quickly and I ended up with only a draft of the first slide and the IR analysis of the second so it’ll be an early start to get the presentation done in the morning. To give me a bit more time with that, I packed the case tonight.