By Hannah Dunstan
For a couple of reasons (of course including social distancing) the chemistry labs for student practicals unfortunately haven’t been able to open this term.
Despite this, the department has made sure we haven’t missed out on our lab hours and that we're building up some of our skills as experimental scientists: like most things in 2020, they’ve moved as much as they can online!
Usually first year chemists would have two days a week of in person labs, from 11am-5pm with a bit of pre and post lab work too. This structure has stayed almost exactly the same, but with less frequent post-lab write ups which I’m definitely not complaining about!
So, what does a typical lab day from my bedroom look like for me?
I’ll know from checking the day before what pre-lab work I might have. This can be reading set articles from chemistry magazines, researching specific methods or just getting familiar with the instructions for the day. I like to do this between having breakfast and starting the session so it’s fresh in my mind.
At 11am we log on to Teams to speak with the demonstrators who run the practical. They introduce the main ideas and sometimes show us how to do a few of the steps.
After this, it’s up to us to get on with the tasks, following the instructions in the handbook. We’ve had a mix of independent and group sessions, building up a set of computer-based skills that will be useful in the face-to-face labs we’ll do in over the course of our degree. Some of the skills we’ve worked on has included excel spreadsheets, literature reviews and even virtually modelling molecules to perform calculations on them via a supercomputer!
Usually around 12:30 I start to get hungry so I choose to take a quick lunch break around then, but it’s totally up to everyone when they want to stop to eat or get up to stretch their legs! The teams call with demonstrators is open to join whenever you have a question so although you’re sat on your own with your laptop, there’s still help available.
If I didn’t take too long eating lunch or get myself too confused, I can get the lab finished by 5pm! In those other cases where things haven’t gone exactly to plan, there’s a two week window to submit your work from when you started it so that gives me a good chance to catch up.
Although it’s a long day to sit working on one thing, there’s always a sense of achievement at the end of it knowing you’ve developed a skill doing something that you might not have even heard of before. That being said, I can’t wait to get in the labs for the first time soon!
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