Foreign Perspectives

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.

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.