Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Chemistry’ Category

It’s been a bit hectic over the past few weeks as I reach the finishing line with SD329.

The final TMA didn’t turn out to be so bad in the end although I don’t think that having a TMA completion date less than two weeks before the exam was a particularly good idea.

I started the revision a few weeks ago but with the TMA needing done too,  there wasn’t much more than the revision preparation actually done over the time. I started the revision properly during the week and, so far, it doesn’t seem too bad on the first proper run through.

The course itself was as fascinating as billed. It’s an interdisciplinary course and the mix of biology, chemistry, physics and psychology changed quite markedly between the various components of the course. For instance, with vision there was quite a lot of physics, with proprioception the emphasis was more psychological, taste & small were mainly chemical and overall there was a lot of biology.

Our final tutorial is later this morning which also seems rather late for an exam tutorial as there’s now little  more than a week before the exam but with the due date of the final TMA being earlier in the week, I guess the final tutorial couldn’t have been much earlier.

Started way back in the early 1970s, the OU science summer schools have been a fixture of life for generations of students. The preparatory materials arrived shortly after Easter with the usual flurry of activity working through the preparatory material, watching the associated videos and organising the transport to and from the school.

Sadly, that’s all finished now. The final science summer schools finished in August and tomorrow the assignments for the schools are due in Milton Keynes.

Although there was quite a bit of work for me to do the assignments for the two summer schools this year, I’m missing it already. For the biology school, I really got a handle on what we’d been doing in Nottingham as I worked through the assignment and was suitably impressed by what we’d done during the week. With the chemistry school, there didn’t seem to even be a minute to sit down and think about what we were doing during the week but I’m really impressed to have made a few drops of the female sugarbeet moth pheromone all by myself (you don’t work in a group in the chemistry school): not a lot you might think but it would take a whole lot of moths a long time to make even that much.

Next up for me is going to be S347 Metals & Life which starts a week after the psychology exam in October.

This morning’s lab session was aimed at tidying up the lab for the session starting tomorrow along with final work on the presentations. I’d gotten up at 6.30am to work on mine which produced a slide of the overall process: the first time I’d been able to see what I was actually doing as the last couple of days we were just following one step after another with no clear view of where we were going.

The IR analysis last night were consistent with the reagents, solvents and even the product I was aiming for. There wasn’t enough time to complete the NMR but the alkene was the Z isomer alright so, hopefully, when I get a chance to work through the various couplings, integrations and GC they’ll also be consistent with that.

Presentations began around 11am and ran for a little over an hour (we were broken up into four groups). Thankfully nothing like the intensity of the biology one from last week but then that’s as expected as we were doing individual rather than group presentations. That said, some of the questions were quite searching and the people who’d done S346 were on much firmer ground than the rest of us.

Finally, there was the usual closing down session before lunch and the departures.

For me it was off on the bus (remarkably useful in York), to the train station for the Pennine Express to Manchester. With the early start I was exhausted and welcomed the two hour journey as a bit of a wind-down before the flight to Belfast.

I’d have loved to be looking forward to another chemistry residential next year but sadly this year is the final one for such things with the OU. That’s sad all round but particularly so for chemistry as the virtual experiments are so vastly different from the real thing in chemistry. With virtual experiments, you don’t get the feel for how long some processes take, how awkward some chemicals are to work with nor indeed do you have to work out how to get the sticky mess cleaned up.

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.

Everyone was much more organised today and acquired the various items quite early on so there were quite so many delays in trying to track down stuff for each stage of the experiment. Just as well, since as the morning progressed those on option A or B were once more working on the same methods albeit with the option A people slightly ahead of the game as the overall process was quicker.

My set-up started to look more like a “proper” chemistry experiment as the clear liquids and white solids were replaced with a range of different coloured ones culminated in a thick black oily gunge in my case. No more of the four hour breaks today and instead it was fairly constant activity.

No tutorials tonight as it was the SXR344 pub crawl around assorted York bars with the last stragglers returning well after 1am.