Oct 15, 2017
Stay healthy, eat your fruits!
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Stay healthy, eat your fruits!
A Change
This is what I had wanted to post about starting from the dead week last fall 2017. I don’t think my schedule this year will enable me to post very much. But I will try to do weekly updates. Maybe this blog will focus more on reflections rather than lab experiences.
But that remains to be seen.....
Back At It Again!
Yo what’s good fool
I didn’t post for the whole break because I typically refuse/can’t go online during winter. I need to update on the last week or so of lab experiments which went wild.
I also need to address the fear which I know you’re still feeling.
Hopefully this week I’ll be able to get all of that written up and online!
GG no RE
Why Choose Grad School
As the break winds to a close, I can’t help but take a moment to gather my thoughts and reflect on what I have learned over the past few months. I especially need to do this so that I can write out more impactful personal statements for the upcoming summer research applicaiton window. The more that you write, the more your mind has freedom to play around with ideas.
Going in to the fall, I was convinced that I wanted to take a break from school and not bother with the trouble of the application process next fall. I was confused about what I am really frustrated with and I was feeling lazy and apathetic. Even now, apathy still haunts me. Why bother to hustle around doing this and that trying to improve myself and improve the world around me when there is a decent chance of all this work amounting to nada?? Why should I care about anything if all I want out of life is family and powder?? I just didn’t have the long term motivation and the desire.
What I learned these past few months was that boredom is a fate worse than death. This semester I’ve faced severe boredom and it’s been really frustrating and sad. I realize that I have a short attention span but nothing seems to be able to hold my focus this fall. This is one of the huge issues I face in all aspects of my life. Boredom in class. Boredom in homework. Boredom with social outlets. Boredom with video games and the internet. It’s numbing my mind. The things that have been revving me up are research, reading, and the gym. Everytime I am able to focus on these activities I’ve felt wholesome, focused, and powerful. This is where I need to focus. Graduate school will provide exorbant amounts of these activities. This is why I need to go.
I also think that I will probably want to become a professor or such and I will need a Ph.D. to get to that level. I have been struggling to weigh starting a family and getting a job with the idea of going for a Ph.D. but what I learned was that in no way are those to facets of life comparable. I am not my father and I will not make his mistakes. It will become more obvious when the right time to start a family is and I will not be in the same position he was at my age. I will have good job prospects and be much more stable than he was at my age. I am not my father. I will never be my father. I will walk my own path.
This fall I had forgotten what I had been telling myself for the past few years. It’s what I repeated through high school; it’s what I remembered through quantum mechanics. My name is Tahoe Fucking Fiala and I will kick your ass. I will grind and push and fight my way to where it is I want to be. I know that I might falter along the way but that’s only because I don’t have a destination in mind. If I can visualize it, I will get it done. I just need to spend enough time on the visualization.
The new dream:
I want to go to graduate school and pursue research with as much as I can handle. I want to publish and push because it will keep the boredom away. I will do what makes me happy and stay healthy and stay invigorated with life.
Fuck backing down. That’s not who I am.
I am just getting started.
Monday Funday
Last day of work before Thanksgiving break. I came in and couldn’t find sarah so i analyzed my NMR and got ready to run a large hand column. I also started a reaction that required me to add the reagents dropwise over an hour. I was all over this column. I picked the perfect length and my stuff eluted exactly when I wanted it too. Finally felt like I was in control of something for once.
Sarah forgot that I wasn’t coming in on Tuesday so I when I was printing my boarding pass off in lab the next day she was really confused about when I was going to do the reaction work up. LMAO
I also meet with the new rotation student. Apparently, he’s going to work with Sarah and Michael doing the project Sarah really doesn’t like doing which works out perfectly because now we have some more people to do the bitch work for us. JK LOL. but seriously who likes making protein? Not me…..
Finally made it back to actual lab work. Sarah had collected all of the crap I had tried to purify on Tuesday and saved it for me to work up. Upon taking a rudimentary NMR of the organic layer, I discovered that it was mostly pure single addition. Not what we were going for but hey, I’ll take what I can get. So I attempted to run the Biotage on that layer. Unfortunately, when I was trying to load, for some reason, the liquid I was putting on the column started fizzing and caused the precipitate you see in the picture.
I was flipping out, sarah was gone, so I took a chill pill. I ran that column. I saved the stuff that didn’t go through. I collected all the UV-Vis active fractions. My next NMR looked fantastic.
Thorsday
God Bless Sarah Klass for giving me the day off so I could be posted up in Moffit studying for my midterm.
Last Lab Finally!!
Today I taught the last lab section I will teach of my undergraduate career. Fortunately, it was a lab I had performed myself and taught once before. UC Berkeley’s favorite, the classic alpha pinene oxide reaction. In this lab students learn about carbocation rearrangements by adding acid to a strained ring system and they fuck their shit up boiii.
The best part of the lab was the NMR. There were six spectra that needed to be analyzed and the students did not know what they were doing. It was really fun showing them how to analyze a complicated spectrum and impress on them how cool and important NMR is. What a time.
I’m sad that I won’t be having any more lab instructor - student interactions, but I’m glad to be finished with laboratory instruction. As this semester draws to a close, I feel like I’ve made an impact on Berkeley.