It has only been 3 months since I last did lab and I made a complete ass out of myself during lab yesterday. First lab in Year 2, I felt ilke a fish out of water - my brain was frantically groping for oxygen so I wouldn't die because of the amount of mental stress.
My stupid stunts aside, the lab protocol looked as if it was written for lab professionals or an English professor. There was almost no clear directions on doing the lab, and most of us were reading our protocols for the first time because the Smart chem department rearranged the sequence of our labs yet failed to inform us before hand. All that were written were solutions of specific requirements which we were supposed to MAKE out of the existing chemicals that were nothing like what were needed. For example, the protocol said "
Exactly 1M HCl" but what we had was a 2.018M HCl. What totally screwed us up and wasted our time was the ENGLISH and the PHRASING. A good example would be:
"Weigh exactly one-tenth of a mole and add to it the exact amout of solution B which contains one-tenth of a mole HCl."Can't they just make things simple and say 0.1 mole and 1M HCl ??!!?
Now I can't even perform the crucial calculations on my data. I can't even produce the graph. All because I still lack the reading at time infinity, so I gotta go back again on Friday with my partner to measure.
With my first lab already done, it finally feels like school has officially reopened. I'll be furiously rushing out my discussions and reports, coupled with tutorial questions, and I'll be repeating the cycle every week.
