Pretty Butterfly

Thursday, March 09, 2006

I had my first chemistry practical on Wednesday. And it’s the worst I had in my life. We came into the laboratory and each of us was handed a practical workbook with 5 different experiments listed inside. We were scheduled to work on an Absorption Spectrophotometry experiment this week. And luckily I had JH as my lab partner, so we can try and figure out and help each other out during the experiment. The lecturer briefly went through safety rules in the laboratory and left us to start doing our experiment on our own. He left to lecture a class before he came back towards the end of the experiment. During his absence, there were two student demonstrators to guide us and help us find answers to our questions. It’s literally read the experiment before hand and just come in to attempt doing it, and that’s it. No more spoon feeding from the poly lecturer where he brief you on the experiment and guide you along when you face any difficulties. Even though I know the way of teaching might be different from back home, I still experience culture shock. However, from now I know I have to learn to handle it.

Another shocking thing was that, the laboratory is not as advance as TP namely the spectrophotometers and some other equipment used. I might even be right in guessing that they might not even have an HPLC!! TP had so many high tech equipment in the analytical lab that I realized how good our labs were. Hiaz….Singapore is good…While I was doing the experiment, I found it quite annoying that the sinks were not at the end of working tables, they were like at the far side of the lab. And all the different concentrations of acids were directly opposite the sinks. The weighing of solids was done at the other far end of the room. In the middle were a whole range of different computers and their analytical equipment. There wasn’t plenty of space to work while using that analytical equipment and ended up accidentally spilling some solutions. I remember I had to walk repeatedly to the fume hood, sink, near the acids and computer. One of the student demonstrators was an asian who was not very helpful even though he was there to help students. =.= So ended up our lecturer was kind enough to show us how to use the machine to obtain results or we would be left struggling and not finishing the experiment and our lab report!!! Who said ang mo are racist?! Only some are…even that asian is worst. Agrh…..

Dreams never come true
8:56 pm