I am so incredibly happy right now! I just got a 91% on an analytical chemistry exam. That is my first A exam of the semester. This semester has been very tough and overwhelming. Since I'm a transfer student with a previous degree I only have to take chemistry courses each semester, and this semester I thought that I could handle organic chemistry 2 with a 2 credit lab (6 hours of in-lab work each week), analytical chemistry 1 with a 1 credit lab (3 hours each week), and physical chemistry 2 with a 1 credit lab (3 hours each week). That is a total of 21 hours just spent in the classroom/lab each week. My schedule is a little strange that I have odd breaks between classes and no break between labs twice a week so that makes my eating, sleeping, and working schedule very erratic. I struggled with finding time to get everything done. There never seemed to be enough time. That is why you haven't heard from me in a while.
When I signed up for this semester's classes my adviser looked at me like I was crazy having all these courses and labs at once, but then she shrugged and remembered that I'm not the typical college student. I have experience being a student. I've done this before. So she let me sign up for 3 core classes and 3 labs. I have since heard that most advisers would never suggest taking more than 2 chemistry labs at once. But why would this be? Last semester I had 3 classes and 3 labs and did just fine. I even had lots of free time to try out new recipes, keep my apartment clean, and socialize with my family and D on nearly a weekly basis! Why would this semester be any different?
Well... first of all, last semester I was in a Freshman biology class that required very little studying and the lab required very little out of classroom time for writing up lab reports and preparing for lab. Last semester's organic lab had worksheet lab reports that we would fill out with basic results from the lab and a few questions to answer and I could have done no prep work and still been just fine in lab if I'd wanted to blow off lab prep (which I didn't). Organic lecture required the most time as I read the textbook, studied the notes, and studied some more. Physical chemistry has a terrible textbook that doesn't help me at all, so after a few attempts, I gave up reading it and just paid attention to lecture and studied those notes and I was able to do quite well from that since I had an excellent professor. The physical chemistry lab required the most time for preparation and written lab reports. Each weekly lab report would take 3-10 hours to complete due to the amount of calculations and data/results to analyze and then writing it up nice and presentable. So after last semester, I expected much the same from this semester just with a chemistry course replacing the biology course.
Oh how I wish it had worked out that way. My new chemistry class, analytical, is similar to general chemistry but it takes everything to the next level and introduces new, deeper ideas and also looks at the methods of using instruments, interpreting results, and using data to come up with more tests. On a good day, this class would not present much of a challenge, and reading the textbook, studying class notes, and doing the homework would adequately prepare me for the exams. Sadly, the first 3 months of this semester I didn't have all the time I wanted to be able to read the book to really understand the homework. My homework and quiz grades were keeping my score within the average range, which is below average for me. Thankfully my professor is really helpful and has been very kind to help me work through problems and explain problems I haven't been able to solve on my own.
The lab isn't bad. I don't have enough time to adequately prepare for it which would just speed things up a little, so my partner and I ended up the last ones in lab on a few different weeks. Thankfully I've done well on all the labs; it doesn't hurt that they are really fun and interesting. Getting to work with a different expensive piece of instrumentation each week helps with that. We've done several types of spectroscopy and chromatography this semester with both older and newer equipment. The lab write-ups are the easiest for this semester, too. They consist of data sheets, showing our computations, and answering a few simple questions about the significance of our data and what the instruments can actually tell us. So this is the one class I'm not too worried about. Since this is the first semester that the lab and lecture are separate grades, the final exam will be new, but I will study as hard as I can to do my best on it and hopefully I'll secure the A.
Physical chemistry is very fascinating this semester as we delve into the quantum world of physics and chemistry. Our lecture and lab professors have switched positions and I really like the way lecture is being run and taught. I'm understanding and enjoying the lecture even more. Since I'm not even trying to understand the textbook anymore my time for this class is spent studying lecture notes, the homework, and previous test answers that have all been provided for us. This is a mostly math course with a need for understanding the concepts in order to know how the math works. This is another class I shouldn't be getting a C in. If I wasn't stretched so thin with my short-term memory being erased rather than saved as long-term, I think I could be getting a high B or even an A in here. It is my good project scores that are keeping my grade close enough to a B to give me hope of reaching it by the end.
Sadly physical chemistry lab is not going as well. The labs themselves are going great and I'm learning a lot and enjoying myself just as I did last semester, but I don't have enough time to get the reports done on time. Each week I'm writing up to 4 lab reports among all my lab periods and the p.chem. reports are taking at least 6 hours often more than 12 to complete, and I'm subtracting time not spent on the report. I'm getting A's on all of them, but after the points are taken off for them being late they turn into B's. I'm really disappointed because I know I can do better if I just had Hermione's time-turner. So I'm getting a B in the lab, when I wish I was getting an A. I'm even doing 10% better on this semester's lab exams because I understand what I'm doing!
I'll go to organic lab, now. These 6 hours a week in lab are very frustrating because neither the lab professor nor the TA seem to know what they are doing. I'll give them a little slack for this being their first time teaching it, but it's very frustrating when they don't even seem to understand the procedure or the mechanisms of the reactions taking place. I always come to this lab fully prepared because it is the most complex and I really want to get the right product. Thankfully I do prepare or I might have ended up needing to redo entire labs or portions of them. I saw the professor mislead some of my classmates so that they ended up doing unnecessary steps that actually messed up their labs. So if I ever did have questions, I always took their advice with a grain of salt, if it made sense to me I would follow it, if it didn't I would follow my gut and hope I did it right. Sometimes the manual could stand to be a little clearer. If lab was frustrating enough while we're in there, we were also expected to use a new program for our lab reports without any guidance on how to use it. I managed to figure out enough to get decent mechanisms drawn out, but each one took hours when it would take minutes to do by hand. This slowed down lab reports and made turning in two lab reports each week very time-consuming without much payout. By that I mean the labs didn't teach me much aside from following directions and doing new techniques. P.chem. labs and their reports always solidified lecture material and gave me a really good understanding of what I'd just done in the lab. So now with all that time taken each week that leaves one more lecture course to squeeze in.
Organic chemistry, the bane of this semester. Again, this is a course I could be doing well in if I had more time to devote to it. I haven't been able to read all the chapters once much less take the time to go through them a second time and answer all the study problems. I attend lecture and nothing is sticking in my mind. The online homework hasn't helped, either. I have been doing terribly on the tests, not even passing, and this is stressing me out so much. I need a C in order for this class to count as anything and the only way that is even possible at this point is if I don't do anything except study, attend class, eat, and sleep and some of those should probably overlap. If I do that I will go nuts and I don't think I'm exaggerating. My mind has never been so ill at ease as it has been this semester. The end of my second year of teaching was incredibly stressful and somehow this is even worse. I hate letting myself down and not doing as well as I know I can, and here I am doing poorly in ALL of my classes when I know I could be at least a letter grade higher in everything. I am learning nothing, I am not eating or sleeping right/enough. The majority of my social life is seeing D one day a week if I'm lucky (which this semester I've been surprisingly lucky in that respect) and talking science and nerd stuff with one of my classmates after p.chem. about once a week. My sister is now my neighbor and I hardly see her more than just in passing.
All of this led me to make a hard decision. I could lose my mind fighting to just barely pass all my classes, or I could allow myself to fail organic lecture and devote that time to my other classes to try to pull my grades up. I spent a lot of time using the GPA calculator to predict the results of each path and I decided that it was definitely worth taking a failing grade in order to feel good about my other classes.
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| I knew I could make it through the semester after I saw this. |
Oh what a difference was made! I got a 91% then a 93% on the last two analytical exams, scores which I later learned set the curve for that class. That certainly felt better than the 63% and 62% I'd gotten on the first two. With finals approaching I studied for the cumulative p.chem., analytical, and analytical lab exams and the final p.chem. lab and organic lab exams. I had just reached a B in both my lecture courses before the final so I had to do at least that well on the finals to keep them. I was stuck at a solid B in p.chem. lab and that would have to do. I had an A in analytical lab but the final was worth enough points to pull it down, and I wasn't sure on the best way to prepare for the exam. I had a B in organic with seemingly no hope of gaining enough points to get it higher. I had two unknown compounds to identify and the tests were inconclusive; I had to trust the mass spec, IR and NMR to lead me the right way and the professor had warned us not to trust that data alone. There were 330 points left to gain and I wasn't confident about how many of those I'd actually be able to get so I aimed for the 115 needed to keep the B.
So I got an F in organic lecture.
I'd made sure to immediately speak with my professor about my decision and he respected and understood my reasons. I will study this summer and retake the class next semester with much better results, I am confident in that. I will also be happy to actually understand the material and have my grade reflect my understanding. By failing organic chemistry I was able to do very well on my p.chem. exam and ended the semester with a very solid B of which I am very proud. I kept the B in p.chem. lab, no surprise there. I earned over 250 of those last points in organic lab and actually pulled off an A, a goal my sister believed I could reach, and I thank her for motivating me to continue giving my all those last two weeks. The best news of the semester is the fact that I pulled my analytical score up to an A and my professor could tell you I was very excited when I learned that news in his office. Yes, I did a happy dance, although that waited until I reached my apartment. I was impatient to know how I did in analytical lab and I finally reached my professor and learned that I got yet another A. In a semester where I thought I would be all C's and B's I managed to pull of 3 A's, 2 B's, and that F I'll replace next semester. I learned my limits, and I will make sure I don't bite off more than I can chew so that I can do well at everything I do rather than mediocre. What a satisfying end to a very rough semester.
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| I went to a photography workshop with D's sister and spent hours just taking pictures. It was wonderful. |
