CHEM-is-try?
Chem is try?
Chem is try, trying to make the most of every lesson
Chem is try, trying desperately to stay awake during lectures and tutorials
Chem is try, trying to make the most of every second and minute
Chem is try, trying to waste away your precious youth by making you learn something so obscure and incomprehensible
Chem is try, trying to finish your practical on time
Chem is try, trying to make sure you don’t spill that bottle of nitric acid
Chem is try, trying to wash all the apparatus with distilled water AND complete your practical on time
Chem is try, trying to wash that sodium hydroxide off your hands and stationery
Chem is try, trying to work out your practical questions
Chem is try, trying to keep your practical worksheets clean
Chem is try, trying to get the exact value for titration
Chem is try, trying to wash off that screened methyl orange stain from your fingertips
Chem is try, trying to hand in your assignments and tutorials on time
Chem is try, trying to understand the questions in your assignment
Chem is try, trying to outsmart your classmates
Chem is try, trying to be half as good as the best person in your class
Chem is try, trying to keep cool when the classroom is so stuffy
Chem is try, trying to keep warm in that cool freezing LTs
Chem is try, trying to out read and out learn your batch mates
Chem is try, trying to remember everything in the lecture notes
Chem is try, trying to pawn your classmates in every test
Chem is try, trying not to fail the next quiz
Chem is try, trying to get that attention of your teacher (cos you really love chem.)
Chem is try, trying to hide from the teacher (cos you have no idea how to answer the next question)
Chem is try, trying to get that wonderful feeling of ecstasy when reading up on chemistry
Chem is try, trying not to fall asleep on your chemistry notes
Chem is try, trying to make your teacher teach faster
Chem is try, trying to make your teacher explain yet another time
Chem is try, trying to make everything more fun than it already is
Chem is try, trying to convince yourself that chemistry might actually be fun
Chem is try, trying to show off your extensive knowledge
Chem is try, trying to hide the fact that you barely know enough stuff to pass
Chem is try, trying to teach others about chemistry when the teacher fails to do so
Chem is try, trying to learn form your classmates when your teacher just can’t teach
Chem is try, trying to convince others that chemistry is fun
Chem is try, trying to persuade your parents that you really shouldn’t be taking chemistry
Chem is try, trying to convince yourself that chemistry is the only subject you are currently taking
Chem is try, trying to convince yourself that chemistry does not exist on your timetable
Chem is try
Now I get it, now I see.
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Was trying to open another folder, but Finder (the equivalent of window's explorer in Mac) lagged a little while scrolling down and I ended up click another file instead. Which turns out to be a word document containing the above.
This was a little... something that I wrote back when I was in Junior College. It started when one of the lecturers was going through the chemistry exams, and he/she said that a student wrote the following at the back of the exam script:
"They say that ignoranceis bliss,
but now I know that what I do not know can hurt me too."
Must be a humanities student who wrote that hahaha. Then the lecturer proceeded to tell about us that "chem is try".
It was rumored that the chem teachers in my JC always sets super, duper, ridculously hard chem exams... even though our teachers kept telling us that they lowered the standard a lot in my year, we didn't believe them...
Chemistry used to be my favourite subject. My favourite of all the sciences... but eventually... my lack of aptitude for mathematics, which is used a lot in physical chemistry, and more importantly, my loss of interest thanks to my inept chemistry teacher killed my interest for the subject. JC was the dark days of my life. The dark days that stretched through to my uni life... I simply lost interest in studying... teachers taught PURELY and SOLEY for the sake of getting you through this stupid national exams called the A levels, and that was that. I studied for the sake of knowing, learning, expanding my horizons. I don't study for the sake of passing one stupid fucking exam just to get into university! I don't study for the sake of studying! That whole attitude and culture of the school just turned me off learning. I stopped learning. Only studied and read through the lecture notes for what it's worth. I didn't even do a single of the past year exam questions or mock exams from other schools... Thankfully, somehow I managed to make it through. Probably by virtue of the stuff I learned back in secondary school I guess... and I still did decent enough to get into a course that I liked, and wanted to do.
I was at a loss to study bio or chemistry then, but in the end my poor results in H3 chemistry pushed me away from chemistry. I guess I didn’t study enough, didn't practice enough... but I was really glad I took it anyway. There were times when I wondered that maybe I should have taken chem istead of bio, but I might have died in all the physical chemistry classes. And even though I do love organic chemistry, I wasn't THAT good at it. Then again I merely learnt on my own. And during options lessons in secondary 4. JC... they didn't really teach much. Even in the H3 classes they didn’t explain throughly enough, it's like you were mostly on your own, and they were teaching uni level stuff, not just basic year 1 uni stuff, I feel that it was more than that. Well some of my friends with seniors in uni taking pharm chem told us that what we learnt in sec 4 options was their year 1 uni intro modules stuff... And it's true, I had some chemistry intro modules and it's stuff we learnt in sec 4, plus a little more.
So that's how JC was. Boring, uninspired, unchallenged. Where we were challenged in H3, the support wasn't enough for us to grasp the content throughly, and prepare us for the exams. We knew the basics taught in lecture what they did not even show us once how a particular mechanism can be appiled in more complicated structures... but bam that's exactly how the exam questions are. Ok, I'm smart but sadly not smart enough to figure it out on my own. Not motivated enough too maybe. But overall it just left me with a bitter taste in my mouth.
Not to say that JC was completely wasted. I did still learn things, though not as much as I would have if I got to stay in the same secondary school enviroment for another two years. I took H3 chemistry and learned all the stuff about lead compounds, structure activity relationship etc... well I don't exactly remember all the details about it but I grasped the main concepts that was enough. I did more spectroscopy methods... well actually scrap that. I learnt about all those in sec 4 already and JC didn’t really add to that knowledge. I did learn more in uni though, MALDI, TOF, advanced NMR... And I did take part in this thing called the Science Research Program and spent a lot of time, very enjoyable time back in the same group as I went to interships previously for in IBN. And I went back after JC too, it was really fun times and I learnt a lot, a lot.
I've always been good at grasping concepts, and really that's a hell lot more important than remember small details like the structure of all the amino acids. Which I still can't remember right now. I would remember them all if my research worked with thouse, but I've not done such research yet so nope. Anyone can memorize facts. And granted there are occupations and instances where you need facts on hand. But take away those pressurizing moments, and in the research world, when you spend time thinking and planning experiments... its understanding and being able to apply what you know that counts. There's always the computer, and there's always the Internet, and there's always google, pubmed, or whatever search engine you use to find the relevant facts, papers, information that you need. Of course you need to know something to know what to look out for in the first place. That is why you need to know the concepts. But I don't waste my time trying to torture myself to memorize some formula because I can just look it up. Or save the formula in a place like Evernote for my own reference in the future. I suck at memorizing such stuff and so I leave it to other gadgets remember it for me.
It's my broad interest and all the chemistry background that I have, coupled with my ability to quickly grasp knowledge that allowed me to get on so comfortably in this job so far. I have absolutely no background in environmental engineering... but I could understand that set of masters course notes that my sup threw at me well enough, so that I'm not lost in their meetings and discussions. I feel comfortable, at home even, with the equipments used because I know how they work, how they function. My sec 4 options and IBN training ensured me that. That said, I would still go back to life sciences for my PhD though. I miss it. Cell culture and all. I miss them. No matter how much I learn now about environmental eng, I still feel like a pretender, I still don't know even half as much as the rest... the PhD students, the RFs. I'm a foreigner in a strange land and I know that. My own forte there is like qPCR, and even then it was only something I picked up recently and I've not had the full range of experience with it yet. For one, I've not really designed my own primers before.
Oh wells. Its lunch time, so I shall end my rumbling here. Till next time!
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