I have come to the conclusion that there are two archetypal "types" of organic chemists.
The first describes my labmate last year and one of my current labmates. This is the anal retentive, obsessive compulsive, neat, constantly tinkering, "hood is spotless" chemist. These chemists have a hugely obessive attention to detail, love excel sheets (one has an excel sheet with the CAS number, boiling point, density, and molecular weight of every compound he has dealt with ever, organized by type--solvent, catalyst, etc.), cannot stand if someone gets a drop of anything on the vacuum pump, never have sodium sulfate or silica crust on the surface of their hood, and are crazy-intense. Some people need this to be productive.
The second type of chemist--which I fall into--is the messy chemist. These chemists know when it's important to be meticulous (like when a reaction really needs to be totally anhydrous to work and will be very careful to work dry in those situations), but are okay with being sloppy from time to time when it really doesn't matter. Their hoods might have some dirty glassware awaiting cleaning, probably because they started another reaction before getting a chance to clean up. The surface of the hood might have a bit of silica gel crust from hastily pouring a column (but when it comes to actually running the column, they are very precise). Their organizational system makes total sense to them, but perhaps from the outside might seem bit in dissarray. They realize that it really doesn't matter whether you work something up with 30 mL of the aqueus layer or 50 mL. It just simply doesn't. The messy chemist, while inattentive to some details, is probably obessive about others, like, say, labelling so that they can keep track of everything they are doing at once. And they probably have some bizarre OCD system, like the way they have their reagents arranged on the bench and when it's disrupted they're like WTF DID YOU FUCKING DO TO MY FUCKING CHEMICAL SHELF? And people are like "dude, you're shit is everywhere, and you are about something little like someone putting one bottle in the wrong order? you are a MASSIVE hypocrite."
I think both chemists types of chemists have their merits and drawbacks. For example, while being meticulous is generally praised in science, a lot of the meticulous chemists really can't multitask at all because they are so busy tinkering and making everything just so which can lead to them being less productive overall. On the other hand, some of the messy chemists tend every now and then make a wrong call on whether meticulousness really matters or not. All in all, there's a place for both types and both types can be very good chemists, but it can make lab dynamics a little rough if messy chemists and meticulous chemists need to share common space.
ACS Spring 2023 in Indianapolis
1 year ago
2 comments:
I am somewhere in the middle, but I do have to say that as the lab safety officer, knowing the messy chemists can get us lots of nasty fines makes me sad... both because I want to avoid fines and because I agree that the ability to multitask and the like is necessary, and sometimes meticulousness can get in the way!
Yeah, there is definitely a point where it is TOO messy to be safe, but I'm not really talking about that type of messy. I'm talking about being ok with working with a bit of disorder messy.
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