I am so fucking tired. My god. I don't know how I managed to get this sleep deprived.

The semester goes ok. Physical chemistry is giving me some demons because I suck at math. That last stat therm test was pretty brutal. I hear Dan's tests are always brutal though. Anyway, it's just going to be something to get through.

I don't have much structured course-time as I am only taking one lab class but a lot of homework all the time. I'm also working on something in one of my profs labs so in between classes I'm usually running reactions and working things up and taking NMRs and so on. Squeezing in time in the lab on top of a full load of classes is a completely different matter than having seven or eight hours during the day to just do chemistry like it has been doing summer research. It's making me really excited for thesis next year, though.

I love being in the lab doing projects. What I don't like are class labs. It honestly just feels like a huge waste of time to spend eight hours taking data that no one gives a fuck about and has been done thousands of times before and will yield crappy results and then spend another ten hours writing some bitchy-ass stupid lab report where you have to anal-retentively propigate all the error and so on. It's just biochem methods and analytical that I have to get through still and then I am relieved from stupid lab classes. I guess I see why they are useful and necessary, but by junior year you just sort of feel done with it. I want to be in lab the doing research and not doing annoying pedigogical exercises. The exposure to lab techniques is good, I guess, but I almost feel like I'm at a point where I can pick up most lab techniques as necessary.

I've also been thinking more and more about applying to grad school next fall. Basically, I just want to be in a situation where I am discussing and learning about science at a high level and being in the lab. I've always thought I would take a break between grad school and undergrad but I'm starting to think that I'm ready to move on to that phase of my life.

quantum mechanics won't solve all your problems

It took three years of chemistry education, but I think I finally understand what a wavefunction is and what quantum chemistry is. While I have very little native interest in the process of integrating over all space and solving differential equations to reach quantum mechanical approximations (I'd rather appreciate the fruits of other people's labors in that area...or get the computer to do it), I think I finally get quantum chemistry is all about conceptually (and why it is very bizarre). I think having calculus, statistics, and physics really solidified all of this for me--even if I can't do the math facilely operationally, I do know what a differential equation is, what the dot product is, why probabilities have to integrate to one, what the complex conjugate is, and what polar coordinates are...and Dan, Maggie, and Alan have given me a pretty solid conceptual idea of what the mathematical gears behind orbitals and energies are.

Depending on what I do later in life, I may or may not need to confront all this at a higher level, and beyond just a conceptual level, but I think I'm content now with the fact that I'm not going to have time to take it before I graduate.

I'm feeling better about my life choices right now. Working on my inorganic chemistry problem set--and I realized that this class is really fucking cool. It gives you just enough quantum mechanics to appreciate what quantum is and what the beauty of it is. I mean, I know that at some level I knew what orbitals were, but it's kind of neat to see a function (even if we're not going into the nitty gritty details of the mathematics) graphed in polar coordinates and suddenly an orbital appears.

I'm also feeling better about the freakout I had on Friday where I wished I had been a straight chemistry major. Because effectively, I've taken pretty nearly the same courses as a chemistry major but I also know about as much biology as a biology major. I'm a little deficient in the math department, but I do know a lot of science.

I'm a lab TA organic chemistry, and tomorrow they are doing Grignards. Hopefully no one will point the heat gun at a flask of ether. It should be exciting times, though.

There's so much to chemistry

Basically what this semester seems to be boiling down to is physical and inorganic chemistry are waaaaayyyy different from organic. Jesus christ.

I've been fussing around trying to calculate the numerical radii for the radial nodes of a 3s and 3p orbital for frickin' ever.

and so it goes

Today I decided to drop my biology seminar in favor of keeping all of my chemistry courses. I'm feeling good about this decision, and I have a tough semester ahead of me but I really like all my courses (well, besides stat therm, but stat therm is a necessary evil), and regardless of whether or not it's more or less work than my other classes, it is one more thing to keep track of. The course is offered every year so I can take it next year, and bio seminars are good courses to take as a senior. I haven't attended it yet, which makes it easier to drop, and I really like my advanced mechanistic organic chemistry class. Advanced mech only has 5 people in it which gives it a nice small feel, and overall it's just a fun course. Which means I'm taking all chemistry courses, and only 3 units (technically). Inorganic (even without the lab) and stat therm in particular are highly time consuming courses and not going to seminar on Wednesday nights gives me more time to hammer through psets and study for them. I have a good feeling about this semester; not taking any biology courses is going to be a little weird, but whatevs, at least I have biochem.

It also gives me more time to play with my little project (although PEOPLE KEEP USING THE COMPUTER LAB SO I CAN'T USE SCI-FINDER! grrrr).

Onto making flashcards to help me memorize the periodic table for inorganic.

I feel like my rather shitty math background has been a constant handicap. Due to the fact that the math department at Reed only teaches theoretical math geared towards math majors, and due to the fact that Rao (the math head) determined my semester of calc I at UIC as equivalent to Reed math 111 (calculus), I have managed to skate through Reed college only taking probability & statistics. Because of this wacky math system, math 112 is more introduction to proof writing than a calc II course, and I was told that unless I was really into theoretical math it wasn't going to be fun and it certainly wasn't going to be useful. I never took calculus in high school and I didn't want to push physics to my junior year (thank god I didn't).

Due to this situation the chemistry and (especially) the physics department pick up some of the slack. Yesterday I learned how to take a second partial derivative with respect to two different variables. Having never taken a multi class, I picked up the concept of a partial derivative and how to do it in intro physics when learning about the wave equation. I had never seen the notation for a double partial derivative before. I'm a little shake on integral tricks too.

I'm usually ok with this fact, and I've kind of accepted that I'm more prone to think about the world in descriptive terms. This doesn't mean that I'm not down for a few computations, but I'd rather plug it into a modelling program or mathematica. I'm good with scooting around arrows, stability rationalizations in the style that organic chemists do it, and basically things that operate in pictures and words with small amounts of algebra and maybe a derivative or two. I love to learn about biophysics and I think the techniques that are out there are quite fantastic, but my understanding of them is all in pictures and words. Same goes with NMR. My feeling for the physical world is one where math is a tool, but I'm not interpreting it through it. I see math is a way to get better pictures in my head. This is at a stark contrast to the way physicists--and for that matter, even physical chemists--seem to view it--as if they interpret physical phenomena through math.

I'm re-learning about the quantum numbers for inorganic (I learned it in intro chem once but forgot) and there's always something in the book like "you can solve the Schrodinger equation for hydrogen and hydrogen-like nuclei, but we're not going to go into it in here" and sometimes it makes me feel bad about not taking quantum. It's like, even though I did quite well in my synth class, I feel like I don't have quite the feeling for what is all behind it as some people. I know that what I learned in intro physics I generally rarely use beyond bits and pieces here and there, but it was good for backing up my general physical intuition and understanding for how things work. Conservation of energy, waves, momentum, acceleration, electric and magnetic fields, these are all fundamental things that I need to understand as any sort of scientist--and are even helpful conceptually for biology. Ploughing through it all, I can't really do those problems anymore but I left with a better conceptual understanding of the physical world. Dan reminded me the other day that physical chemistry does this for other types of chemistry, i.e. the pictorial representations of stability rationalizations are quantifiable (well, sometimes) and that's where the theoretical basis for these qualitative observations come from even if we don't always have the computational power and models to find them quantitatively. It doesn't mean I have to want to be a physical chemist, but I do realize the power in other chemical approaches and understand why I need to learn about them.

I think a lot of my issue with math is a lack of confidence from being "bad" at it for so long. I mean, calculus is a tool like algebra and not like WHOA COMPLICATED OMG MAGIC!

On the up side, speaking of nice, fuzzy picture-based synthetic organic chemistry, Pat gave me a little project to mess around in the lab with. He gave me a couple compounds he'd like to make and test the pKas. I need to go play with Sci-Finder to see if they have been made before. This is good; they're small molecules and models for the types of compounds the lab as a whole works with, but in the past the research I did with him was more guided like "here's this idea I got, I'd like you to try it out" instead of asking me to find preps that I might be able to run. I also know more chemistry and know how to use Sci-Finder better than I did when I worked for him last summer, though.