On being an o-chem lab TA

It's very funny to me; all of a year ago I was a struggling sophomore messing up the very most basic of things in organic lab. I remember feeling frustrated, feeling like I was bad at lab, feeling like I was one of "those kids" for the prof and the TA.

Now I am a lab TA for organic, and it's all very automatic. I can anticipate the questions before they come; my eye gets drawn to certain very specific mistakes. It's usually things like "no you're sep funnel isn't broken, you just need to uncap it before running it down," or "by the way, your reflux condenser hoses are connected backwards," or "you don't need to heat that--25 degrees is room temperature," or "do more polar things run higher or lower than less polar things on silica gel?" or "is water more or less dense than most organic solvents?" or "you should really put boiling chips in that".

Furthermore, when people ask me for NMR help, it's funny what seems so obvious now. Like common solvent peaks--being able to just identify ethyl acetate or isopropanol or ether. Just knowing what shifts and J-values are characteristic of what.

I guess I can see how some of my professors are the way they are after, you know, 40 years of this.