Organic Chem Lab and your horror story.

This forum made possible through the generous support of SDN members, donors, and sponsors. Thank you.
E

Enjoyingtheride

New Member
10+ Year Member
Joined
Oct 24, 2011
Messages
4
Reaction score
0
So like at most schools, organic lab at my university condenses 1 year of organic lecture into one semester of lab. At first, I heard it was hard and unforgiving, but I figured since I've never heard anything positive about any upper level science course, this should be manageable. Our TA is brand new, and very nice. By the third week, 11/18 people had dropped and the people remaining (including me), none of which had above a D. Granted the material isn't hard, but it's more of the TA's way of grading by taking off more points than needed and deliberately giving D lab grades. Meanwhile, the lab next door had 1 person drop and the average is a B+.

Just some moral support of similar situations where it wasn't an intelligence or effort based grading system, just a crappy TA.
Members don't see this ad.
 
My organic chem lab had much lower attrition, but it still probably 25%-40% of people dropped or failed.

I'm sort of disappointed with this topic after reading the title, though. There's so many things that could go amusingly wrong in the lab section - this one girl in my lab section had the hose pop off her condenser and swing around, soaking students and notebooks alike. Fun times.
 
Gnomes said:
I'm sort of disappointed with this topic after reading the title, though. There's so many things that could go amusingly wrong in the lab section - this one girl in my lab section had the hose pop off her condenser and swing around, soaking students and notebooks alike. Fun times.
Click to expand...

+1. In orgo 2 lab, my fractionating column exploded off the top of the round bottom flask during fractional distillation. I remember we were distilling some gross-smelling yellow liquid and it got all over the hood and our lab papers. Thank goodness the hood door was down though!
 
Members don't see this ad :)
Definitely broke a couple things (condenser and drying tube), I guess they could have put a hold on my account before registering for next semester. It's tough to know that the effort you put in to a class is overshadowed by the inevitable below average grade you will receive. This based solely on who your TA is, nothing else.
 
Having a bad TA can be frustrating, though. I had a good TA for my organic chemistry lab section, but for quantitative analysis, I had a less pleasant experience. 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. That whole class was like 2nd semester gen chem for obsessive-compulsives.

My general chemistry lab TA was a real idiot, though. I misread the experiment and thought that it said to put concentrated nitric acid on copper powder. 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. So I did (because a TA would never cluelessly tell a student to do something unsafe, right?), with malodorously predictable results. 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...
 
Enjoyingtheride said:
So like at most schools, organic lab at my university condenses 1 year of organic lecture into one semester of lab. At first, I heard it was hard and unforgiving, but I figured since I've never heard anything positive about any upper level science course, this should be manageable. Our TA is brand new, and very nice. By the third week, 11/18 people had dropped and the people remaining (including me), none of which had above a D. Granted the material isn't hard, but it's more of the TA's way of grading by taking off more points than needed and deliberately giving D lab grades. Meanwhile, the lab next door had 1 person drop and the average is a B+.

Just some moral support of similar situations where it wasn't an intelligence or effort based grading system, just a crappy TA.
Click to expand...


fyi, if your program is anything like mine, your section is graded on a curve. So if the average is a D, an A will be a C. There will be some pissed off people in the B+ section because some will end up with a C when they thought they had at least a B in the bag. And you won't get anywhere by complaining about "crappy TAs". Don't turn in crap and you'll get a better grade.
 
This thread is getting me really excited about taking Organic Chemistry Lab next semester. 😳
 
BurntFlower said:
This thread is getting me really excited about taking Organic Chemistry Lab next semester. 😳
Click to expand...

Organic Chemistry is the crucible. If you can't get excited about it, it will be horrible. If you can, the whole thing will fly past. I loved o-chem and got an A, but it was still the most I ever studied for a class. The linear region of the "study time versus grade" graph is very long, and it will be miserable to get to 90% if you can't develop an interest in the material.

It helps if you have a professor who regularly digresses into "practical applications." I never plan to kill an annoying roommate with cyanide salts dissolved in DMSO, but somehow the professor talking about stuff like that made me remember it.
 
I was a doofus in my lab. I couldn't touch a beaker, RBF, graduated cylinder, etc...without breaking it. My personal best was breaking a mercury thermometer and having all of the mercury spill all over the floor. How I got a B in the lab is beyond me.
 
ISUBird100 said:
I was a doofus in my lab. I couldn't touch a beaker, RBF, graduated cylinder, etc...without breaking it. My personal best was breaking a mercury thermometer and having all of the mercury spill all over the floor. How I got a B in the lab is beyond me.
Click to expand...

Worst breakage I saw in lab was a student who broke a flash chromatography column. Ouch. It was like $150 to replace.

My personal worst was a three dollar beaker, on my first day of o-chem lab. I went to fill it with DI water and discovered that the on-tap DI water had a lot more kick than I expected; the stream of water shot it out of my hand and it broke in the sink. It was a pain anyway though, because the stock room would not take cash, check, credit or debit - only money on our student ID cards... grr.
 
Yeah lab TAs tend to be like that. The average for labs in our grade was like a B- which sucks since there are so few students in each section.

And about lab mistakes, one time I was stirring something in a round bottom flask and it just cracks for no reason. All of my reactants came out and I spent the next 20 minutes scrounging around for extra product from classmates who made more than they needed for the next step but I still didn't have enough. Got marked down like crazy for that lab 🙁
 
In my small organic lab, we had our own distillation kits that we kept in our lab lockers. During the distillation of a VERY VERY pungent essential oil (banana), I sat the distillation flask back in the kit to put it up.

The instructor came to help me with something and jostled the kit, knocking over the still hot banana oil. The spilled oil proceeded to burn through the foam in the kit and was strong enough to make the entire class leave the lab.

I still can't eat or smell banana flavored anything.
 
Gnomes said:
this one girl in my lab section had the hose pop off her condenser and swing around, soaking students and notebooks alike. Fun times.
Click to expand...
I did the same exact thing. Although in my defense, it was a REALLY ****ty hose with a big tear in the opening.

I broke a few things throughout my two semesters. The worst was probably one of those KCl crystals that you use for IR spec. 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. 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.

My lab partner broke a separation flask too. 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. Spilled sand all over the hot plate. I pretended it just kind of broke on its own and my TA believed me..."wow, I've never seen anything like that before!" :laugh:

Another fond memory is when I was in a rush to boil something and didn't use a sand bath. I just kind of held the flask on the hot plate while swirling it around. I burnt the product and made the whole lab smell like poop.

Good times.
 
Members don't see this ad :)
Although I can't relate myself, I had some friends in other bays with very unforgiving TAs. While mine wasn't easy, he was fair in grading and didn't take off too many points for not getting a good yield. Overall I guess I lucked out :luck:
 
After an hour or two of fractional distillation lab, I noticed that I wasn't getting any distillate.

I re-examined my fractional distillation apparatus. Turns out, some of the rubber seals were broken, and I had spent the past few hours inhaling all the chemicals in the original flask.

Oops.
 
Oh my word, I can totally relate to your experience in lab! It has not been the best experience for me. 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. He gets really nit-picky on everything we do and is a tough grader. 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. 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.

On breaking items, first day of lab this semester, I broke my west condenser and seperatory funnel. 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. 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.
 
Anything having to do with a mixed solution recrystallization is a horror story. But in all honesty my horror story is pretty much me worrying about whether I have a B, C, or below, which would mean that I have to retake this hellish lab.
 
I had a TA who wanted everyone in my 20 person section to ask her for permission to move on to each new step. I'm sure you can all imagine how that went. We used all the lab time every. single. week.
 
Not exactly my horror story, but last week in lab a kid spilled highly concentrated sulfuric acid all over the inside of the hood and walked away. His partner didn't know this, leaned into the hood to attach the tubes for reflux and put his arms down inside the hood. Not a pretty site..
 
i had an idiot lab partner...we were trying to use the GC...needless to say he somehow stab me with the syringe filled with an unknown compound when trying to turn around to someone calling his name.

Two problems with this situation.

1. Lowered our yield and hence our grade
2. Some unknown injected into my arm

But i lived....
 
Here's a good question: Who had a lab partner for organic chemistry? Mine were all solo.
 
I took them at another school close to home and did absolutely nothing except write raw data values and calculate error onto a hand-written sheet of paper. I never spent more than 45 minutes in lab and got As in both. I recommend doing that if your institution has a reputation for weeding in chem labs.

P.S. I did actually learn the material well enough to get an A in Biochem at my undergraduate institution
 
Ohhhh the crappy TA. The one who always seems to find something wrong, even though your main idea is perfect. You didn't put your lab partners last name: MINUS ONE. You wrote the equipment but didn't draw pictures of them: MINUS FIVE. You... well, um... I just don't like this sentence: MINUS HALF. mwahahahahah. <_<
The worst part is she never said she wanted these things, she was just making up rules as she went.

As far as horror stories, my partner and I accidentally threw away, and recrystallized the wrong product after separating. XD But that was 2nd quarter of lab, when I had a nice TA.
 
My first lab "TA" was an ~80-year-old orgo professor that consistently forgot things...including that he was supposed to attend our first day of class. We all waited outside of the lab room for like 20 minutes when another professor came over and asked us what we were doing. When she found out the guy hadn't shown up, she legit told us that she was scared he had died.

After that, the guy would tell us to come an hour early to lab because we ALWAYS ran over due to his incessant rambling. Sometimes he would forget to show up early, so we wasted an hour sitting outside of the lab room.

The whole class was just ridiculous, and he made my life a living hell (including telling me that I would make a horrible doctor because I dropped my sample in the steam bath on the last day of class). Thankfully I ended up with an A in the course because I wrote very meticulous reports.
 
Enjoyingtheride said:
So like at most schools, organic lab at my university condenses 1 year of organic lecture into one semester of lab. At first, I heard it was hard and unforgiving, but I figured since I've never heard anything positive about any upper level science course, this should be manageable. Our TA is brand new, and very nice. By the third week, 11/18 people had dropped and the people remaining (including me), none of which had above a D. Granted the material isn't hard, but it's more of the TA's way of grading by taking off more points than needed and deliberately giving D lab grades. Meanwhile, the lab next door had 1 person drop and the average is a B+.

Just some moral support of similar situations where it wasn't an intelligence or effort based grading system, just a crappy TA.
Click to expand...

My school made sure that all of the TA's graded the same. If the class averages were way different from TA to TA, the professor would adjust it. Unfortunately, most of the time the TA's were too nice and they lowered the grades. They expelled a grad student once for not grading labs and just giving A's.
 
Most of these aren't really horror stories as much as bitching about something that everyone has to go through to get to their end goal. Now if you want horror stories you should have been in my lab the day a student was trying to nitrate toluene. Needless to say he did not finish the semester.
 
I had to measure out the sulfuric acid. The bottle was calibrated and everything...

....but it was too empty. I squirted some into my vial. Too little. Squirted more. Too much. Oh damn, time to pour out. Please BionicMan, don't get any on your hands.

So what do I do? pour it down my hand.

Oh CRIKEY that's dry. Holy crap can't move finger. SWEET NEPTUNE my finger is turning pink. Race to sink, water not helping. TA rushes over with sodium bicarbonate. By the time it's neutralized, I have a long, snaking red welt that looks like a scar running down my hand. It was hours before it started to go away.

Typical day for BionicMan in ochem
 
Bumped into someone who was carrying a small amount of 10M HCl, he turned to say something but rushed over to the sink before he could, most likely, cuss me out. Just glared at me everyday for the next 2 months.

A week later I was running the same experiment and spilled a single drop on my hand...excruciating. Not sure how he managed the composure to not strangle me with tubing while simultaneously gouging my eyes out with my own NMR tubes.
 
My orgo lab is a joke. My prof plays electronic music and one time we had a little "dance off" after an extraction lab. My lecture on the other hand, is dead hard.
 
My organic lab is actually pretty fun. Granted we are usually in the lab for about 4 hours although our lab time is only supposed to be 2 hours. Our TA is a really cool guy and he understands that things take forever. I heard so many horror stories about organic that I came into the class with a crazy motivation to do well. However, as the semester ends and I'm looking back on it, it has probably been my favorite class to date besides anatomy. BTW I hated gen chem.
 
Enjoyingtheride said:
So like at most schools, organic lab at my university condenses 1 year of organic lecture into one semester of lab. At first, I heard it was hard and unforgiving, but I figured since I've never heard anything positive about any upper level science course, this should be manageable. Our TA is brand new, and very nice. By the third week, 11/18 people had dropped and the people remaining (including me), none of which had above a D. Granted the material isn't hard, but it's more of the TA's way of grading by taking off more points than needed and deliberately giving D lab grades. Meanwhile, the lab next door had 1 person drop and the average is a B+.

Just some moral support of similar situations where it wasn't an intelligence or effort based grading system, just a crappy TA.
Click to expand...

You sometimes have to watch out for TAs and young professors. They often take out years of frustrations of dealing with professors on their new students. This sometimes causes them to grade a little harsh and be unforgiving with test questions. Something I have noticed.
 
Don't even get me started on bad yields. My best was 60%, which is no small feat. Worst? 700%.

I also once ruined my entire product during one of the final steps of a 2 hour long procedure. It was some nitroaniline something or other synthesis, and I added NaOH instead of NaAc. We had to start over.
 
Had a kid in my lab put his thermometer in his sand bath to see how hot it was. Vaporized the alcohol inside almost instantaneously and sent shards of glass in the kids face. I guess its more his horror story, but I'll share it.
 
I remember back in organic lab, my lab partner was a guy who I am very certain had some significant form of social anxiety. 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 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. He would offer to divide the workload, yet it would end up me having to do most of the work. 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. 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.

And the communication was a major issue. He sounded like he was nervous about literally everything. 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. It was like everything he said was scripted beforehand.

The guy was also in my lecture and I remember during the last exam, before the final, like five minutes into it he just stood up and handed in his exam. Later found out that he dropped the class while having a solid C at that point, basically he still had this exam and the final to go and it seems he just gave up out the blue. And I literally said "Good riddance" to myself, because a certain point it was just depressing having to witness his "issues" both in lecture and in lab.

Despite all these annoyance and being responsible for majority of the ****ups in the labs, yes I admit I made some errors as well but not as significant, I still tried to maintain a positive attitude and was very respectful and tolerant of him, especially having known people before with similar but not as serious cases of anxiety-related issues. But this was on a whole higher level, that it actually was frustrating just by being around the guy.

Meh, hopefully he got help of some sort.
 
This is me during lab:
funny-science-news-experiments-memes-dog-science-fuzzy-logic.jpg


(oh god i've been looking for an excuse to use that pic)

Nothing too bad has happened to me, but the most embarrassing moment in ochem lab was when one of the water tubes on a simple distillation apparatus popped off and hit me in the face with a stream of water... in front of the professor. Luckily she's ridiculously nice and didn't make me feel even more like an idiot.
 
Camy99 said:
Ohhhh the crappy TA. The one who always seems to find something wrong, even though your main idea is perfect. You didn't put your lab partners last name: MINUS ONE. You wrote the equipment but didn't draw pictures of them: MINUS FIVE. You... well, um... I just don't like this sentence: MINUS HALF. mwahahahahah. <_<
The worst part is she never said she wanted these things, she was just making up rules as she went.
Click to expand...


That sounds really unfair that he could come up with arbitrary criteria to penalize you'll. At least he could have given you'll a rubric or something.

Could you'll not complain to the professor or dean about your TA's lack of fair grading?

Chops369 said:
. Worst? 700%.
Click to expand...

No sir. I think you accidentally discovered a way to break the laws of nature!
 
serenade said:
Here's a good question: Who had a lab partner for organic chemistry? Mine were all solo.
Click to expand...

Mine was all solo.

Also, my school has separate labs for Organic I and II. And they are taught by the chemistry professor, not a TA. In other words, our organic labs are actually pretty awesome 😀
 
Buttermellow said:
Mine was all solo.

Also, my school has separate labs for Organic I and II. And they are taught by the chemistry professor, not a TA. In other words, our organic labs are actually pretty awesome 😀
Click to expand...

Same here. I think ochem lab would suck so much more if it were taught by a TA.
 
ISUBird100 said:
I was a doofus in my lab. I couldn't touch a beaker, RBF, graduated cylinder, etc...without breaking it. My personal best was breaking a mercury thermometer and having all of the mercury spill all over the floor. How I got a B in the lab is beyond me.
Click to expand...

Your not the genius who stuck the thermometer in the sand bath are you?
 
I mean wasn't there that organic lab where a student stabbed another? Pretty sure it was in California, but who knows. Organic lab isn't hard, they try to prevent cheating so much at my school that it makes it a terrible Orgo lab. As far as horror stories go, this isn't a "horror" story so much as it is a pain in the neck. Glad to see I got so many responses though, thanks everyone.
 
Enjoyingtheride said:
I mean wasn't there that organic lab where a student stabbed another? Pretty sure it was in California, but who knows. Organic lab isn't hard, they try to prevent cheating so much at my school that it makes it a terrible Orgo lab. As far as horror stories go, this isn't a "horror" story so much as it is a pain in the neck. Glad to see I got so many responses though, thanks everyone.
Click to expand...

Sounds like you go to FAU.
 
I confused my organic layer for my polar layer, and ended up with 0% product. When I reacted my final reagent with the wrong layer, the layer and the reagent "smoked" out of my beaker leaving nothing.

Got a 0 for that lab. Never made that mistake again.
 
I forgot the best horror story of all.

The best o-chem professor at my school was holding lab and stepped out of the lab for a minute to use the restroom. While away, a girl carelessly made an unknown exploding mixture and the beaker combusted in her face, burning her. The professor was fired. I was scheduled to take him for o-chem 2, and now am stuck with a ***** for a professor. The girl has since been booted from my school for academic dishonesty (3rd count). He definitely shouldn't have left the room, and she definitely shouldn't have been experimenting with unknown chemicals.

Sigh.
 
Gnomes said:
My organic chem lab had much lower attrition, but it still probably 25%-40% of people dropped or failed.

I'm sort of disappointed with this topic after reading the title, though. There's so many things that could go amusingly wrong in the lab section - this one girl in my lab section had the hose pop off her condenser and swing around, soaking students and notebooks alike. Fun times.
Click to expand...

THIS.

There was a guy in my organic 1 lab that was a freaking disaster. My hood partner and I would take bets on how long it would take him to mess something up.

Lab 1: Forgot to cork distilled product, evaporated during the week.
Lab 2: Water hose popped off of condenser while repeating distillation.
Lab 3: Spent 40 minutes trying to figure out why his sample wasn't drying in the rotovap. (never loaded the liquid nitrogen)

You get the idea.
The crazy thing is that he's just started a Ph.D. program.
at Vandy in.....
Chemistry.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

B
To ADCOMS: What's Your Interview Horror Story With an Applicant?
Replies
19
Views
3K
Mr.Smile12
Mr.Smile12
C
Organic chemistry lab
Replies
2
Views
1K
medapp22
M
angryeggtart
B+ in "organic chemistry" for Top 10/20
Replies
4
Views
1K
AsclepiusAdvisingLLC
AsclepiusAdvisingLLC
S
Taking gen chem lab before taking lecture
Replies
1
Views
748
Mr.Smile12
Mr.Smile12
Anthodite
Taking organic chem in the summer, red flag or no?
Replies
13
Views
2K
Agape_ornis
Agape_ornis
Top