Foreign Perspectives

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.