FAT Chem Lyfe

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.

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!

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. 

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

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.

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.

Today we did a reaction work up. Sarah was being a Butt and she didn’t give me any directions but kept telling me I was doing it wrong. 

I did the extraction several different times and was able to isolate some product. Sarah attempted to follow but she just created a huge AF emulsion and didn’t recover any product. 

MY REACTION DIDN’T WORK NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

why does chemistry hate meeeeeeeeeeee :(

today in lab I got some bad news about my reaction. GFD it was the last step too..... so sad... so let down.....

On Tuesday, I had a really good day in lab. I ran the same column on the rest of our stuff as before. I got confused with the TLC because there were initially impurities on the plate, but then the fxns I thought were product, were not. Then I took TLC again and the lanes had shifted. I’m really bad at TLC but it’s the most important technique to be good at. 

Fortunately, I was able to isolate the pure product after realizing my mistake. I learned that I need to trust my visual indicators more than TLC and if the TLC looks funky, run it again. An extra 10 mins won’t kill me. 

Sarah forced me to work alone again. I felt like I stepped up and performed this time though. She’s super mellow about it though. Like she came back in and was like do you want to make this soln for ariel?? and I was like no I want to go home and eat ice cream except it’s 2 pm so unrealistic. Then I had to ask her to just command me to do work. I don’t get why she doesn’t just force me to do what she wants. I guess its more polite to to ask, but I would really rather us be on the same page about what I want to do vs what I have to do. At least ariel understood what I meant. 

Before I left, we started a reaction with the good shit I had purified. This is the last step of our wire synthesis. Then we just thread and attach to a protein.

On Friday, Sarah left me again so i got to try to figure out where my stuff was. She left me a column she had completed and was like here these are pure. Collect them for me. I took a TLC and TA DA they were not pure. So I was tripping out. Like WTF do I do. 

I like being on my own sometimes, but other times I don’t understand things and I wish sarah was there. I don’t think she cares much at all about me so that’s why she’s always gone. 

Hopefully one day I’ll be as confident about lab as she is. Maybe it’s not about confidence and more about not giving a fuck. 

Last Wednesday we taught a fairly dangerous lab. Caleb was super concerned because the students were tossing around 85% H2SO4 which is kinda nerve racking. Caleb was super uptight the whole time. And he got even more annoyed when the experiment didn’t work at all. It was kinda funny watching him flip out on everybody. 

He said that its okay to spill acid on yourself, but if you spill it on us or another student you fail the lab. This scared them straight. 

I was busy for the whole lab period which was nice. It’s fun to get to teach students who surprise you with how they approach science. Every time I thought I had all of the surprises worked out of the experimental procedure, the students would surprise me with a new way they could fuck it up. What was really funny was when one student was taking the pH of his organic layer by dipping the pH paper into the sep funnel. Eventually he had done it so much that the indicator came off into solution and turned his organic layer a bright red. But it was kinda nice for him because it turned blue when it became basic. 

On Tuesday, I was feeling good and I got work done at school. Burnout is not a thing anymore. I was bustling around all day bc I had arranged to meet with Divya for dinner.

In lab, tbh can’t remember. I think I showed up and chit chatted with sarah for a while.... I know we talked about the Wheel of Time and I remember seeing her. She wanted to GTFO bc pat is in town. 

When I was in high school, my water polo coach instilled in me a couple basic principles. The first one was already pretty obvious to me: Hard Work, Pays Off. This was my team’s cheer at the end of every practice. But the second motto, one that was exclaimed far less often, was No Pressure, No Diamonds.

I implore you to take this motto to heart.

“There's no such thing as a painless lesson, they just don't exist. Sacrifices are necessary. You can't gain anything without losing something first. Although if you can endure that pain and walk away from it, you'll find that you now have a heart strong enough to overcome any obstacle. A heart made Full Metal.”

In this quote, the author expresses that in order to find glory and truth, you must first sacrifice a part of yourself. You have to give something in order to receive. You have to study to get good grades. You have to lift to gain muscles. Nothing is free in this world. No Pressure, No Diamonds.

Last fall, I was still a naïve college student. I had no idea how to study or what kind of massive effort I would have to be put in to accomplish my dreams. But my coach’s motto, No Pressure, No Diamonds, burned deep inside me. I wanted the pressure so I pilled it on until I thought I would burst. Everybody’s limit is different, but I found mine at taking Chem 12A, Physics 7B, being involved in research, helping teach a Chem 4A lab, and working on improving my social skills. I hit my limit in the middle of the semester; I was burnt out.

Burn out is a good sign. It means that you broke through your limit. When you lose the motivation to do any work or are too apathetic to even cook for yourself, you have broken the cycle and improved yourself. You have taken on all of the pressure and are growing all of the diamonds. Wallowing in self pity and frustration is fine, but just remember that life will carry on with you living it or not. So jump back on that horse and keep chasing your dreams.

Its important to have dreams. If there is no goal, when the going gets tough, the tough don’t know where they are going. Make sure you know where to go. I found that it helps to set several different kinds of goals. Short term goals help you feel good when you’re down. Medium goals are good because you might actually accomplish something good and feel good about it. Long term goals are those that take a while to get there but feel so good when you finally do. In order to increase pressure, you need to know its source.

Each semester I have spent at Cal, I’ve taken on more and more. Each semester I reach my limit and break myself. But I always bounce back greater than I was before. Without failure,

success is meaningless. If you don’t embarrass yourself, how will you know what you’re doing wrong? Self improvement involves much failure and plenty of embarrassment. Without the fear of failure or the threat of disappointing yourself, it is easy to become complacent with life and fall into a stagnant lull. But if you remember that No Pressure means No Diamonds, I’m sure that this will not happen to you.

I’m sure some of you who read this will not know where it is you want to be going. That’s perfectly acceptable. Pick any destination. Nobody really knows what they are doing here. But one thing that is certain and that you will know, is No Pressure, No Diamonds. Even if you don’t get to where you thought you were going, if you put on the pressure, you’ll find the diamonds.

I challenge you to put on the pressure. See how much you can handle. Do all of the things you want to do. Because you’re only going to be 20 once in your life and you should want to know just where you stand with yourself. You should want to know how many diamonds you can make right now. Because you’ll only get better from here.