It was like everything he said was scripted beforehand. He was very repetitive with certain lines, basically if he wasn't able to come up with anything else to say he would just repeat what he previously have said for no apparent reason, even if you already have commented on it at that time. He sounded like he was nervous about literally everything. I am not sure if he needed specific directions or was misunderstanding the procedure, but for the most part it was like he was just zoned out.Īnd the communication was a major issue. Had at least a couple of experiments where the experiment would either over-boil or over-heat, only because I would leave him to watch it while I was getting extra supplies for the setup. He would offer to divide the workload, yet it would end up me having to do most of the work. I would look at his pre-labs and notes he would write and they were very extensive and detailed, yet it seemed for the most part he was completely clueless about what was to be done. At the beginning of the semester I thought it was just a temporary 'shy anxiety', but about couple weeks in it was more apparent that it was somewhat more serious. I remember back in organic lab, my lab partner was a guy who I am very certain had some significant form of social anxiety. When I got to reorganizing my drawer, my mortar and pestle fell onto my condenser and funnel which I had to pay for and it really stunk, ended up paying $70 to pay for both. The person that had had my drawer before had left it as a big mess and a lot of the glassware was dirty so I had to go through everything and clean it. On breaking items, first day of lab this semester, I broke my west condenser and seperatory funnel. I too am on the brink of a C and D and am putting a lot of work into it but it feels like it's not paying off with the way the TA grades everything, Also, my school also has lab as a one semester class too with everything combined. He's been hard to approach for questions and accused me of not paying attention during our lab lectures even though I had a question on one thing that I was not getting. He gets really nit-picky on everything we do and is a tough grader. I've been struggling in mine as I ended up getting a TA that is brand new but for the majority of the semester, has come off as a dick. Oh my word, I can totally relate to your experience in lab! It has not been the best experience for me. I burnt the product and made the whole lab smell like poop. I just kind of held the flask on the hot plate while swirling it around. I pretended it just kind of broke on its own and my TA believed me.'wow, I've never seen anything like that before!'Īnother fond memory is when I was in a rush to boil something and didn't use a sand bath. I also broke a ceramic sand bath clean in half (full of sand) by trying to force a round-bottom flask too far down into it. My lab partner broke a separation flask too. He didn't even notice, but my TA took 10 points off my lab report for breaking it Lab partner broke another in the same exact way a couple weeks later. I was cleaning it with acetone and it slipped out of my hands and shattered, right in front of the super grumpy >70 year old PI.

The worst was probably one of those KCl crystals that you use for IR spec. I broke a few things throughout my two semesters. Although in my defense, it was a REALLY ****ty hose with a big tear in the opening. This was of course on a basic level my fault for misreading the lab handout in the first place, but I didn't get in trouble, probably because there were many witnesses to her telling me to do it.Ĭlick to expand.I did the same exact thing. So I did (because a TA would never cluelessly tell a student to do something unsafe, right?), with malodorously predictable results. I thought, 'isn't that going to make noxious gas?' and so I asked the TA, 'are we really supposed to mix nitric acid with copper powder in step such-and-such?' to which she replied that yes, that was correct. I misread the experiment and thought that it said to put concentrated nitric acid on copper powder. My general chemistry lab TA was a real idiot, though.

That whole class was like 2nd semester gen chem for obsessive-compulsives. We hit it off well at first, but I think he grew to dislike me because I combined an obvious enthusiasm for chemistry with a lack of enthusiasm for doing experiments over umpteen times to get the really precise results he demanded. I had a good TA for my organic chemistry lab section, but for quantitative analysis, I had a less pleasant experience. Having a bad TA can be frustrating, though.

My chemlab