Suspicious-Teach8788
Lifer
I graduated in 2008 with a BS in materials engineering. I'm not a chemist, I'm no expert. I'm no PhD, but I've taken basic chemistry which virtually everyone and their mom takes whether they're doing pre-med, pre-dental, pre-pharm, science, engineering, etc. That's probably ALL the chemistry I took. Ok, there was organic stuff, but it was mainly characterizing polymer weights and stuff using chromatography but I barely passed it because it was too organic for my engineering mind, and I was competing against chem-e and chem majors.
So first of all our senior scientist/chemist quits, which is sad because he's been such a wonderful mentor for me. He documents stuff down and hands responsibilities to me and this other dude. Now while I've had the opportunity to do some of these things once or twice, it wasn't all that hard when he writes down make XX ppm of this solution or a 2.00 M solution of ___. It's also not hard to just scale up or scale down your chemistry makeups based on how much you need.
So anyway this other dude comes and asks me (he could be my dad at his age), and asks me how to make a 10 ppm solution. I say, "well the question is how much do you want? Do you want 5L? 10L? A swimming pool? ppm = g/L so just go calculate how much volume you want and you can go weigh out how much chemicals to add into your bath of water." It's not that I'm telling him off, he comes to me with absolutely no clue how to make this. Instead he wants me to BREAK IT DOWN to him and write a table showing like 5L of water, 100g of salt. 10L of water, 200g salt. Seriously? The problem was actually even easier than that. Our scientist made a 20ppm solution before we left. To measure it as a standard, we dilute it to 10ppm and 5 ppm and then 1ppm in a 3 small vials. Not hard right? He's asking me how much he should add to make 10ppm. It's not rocket science. Take a pipette, get 2 mL of solution. Now grab 2mL of DI. DONE. That hard? However much you want, just dilute accordingly. I guess he didn't understand that until I threw out 2 mL solution, 2 mL DI.....
And last week I spent an hour teaching him that if you have a 0.15 molar solution, and a 3M concentrate, here's how you calculate how to get to 0.25 molar by adding X amount of concentrate. And of course he asks how much concentrate to make. My answer was just "Shrug I just make a buttload so I never run out... or if you wanted the precise amount, just go calculate." I'm not even a chemist. Why am I doing basic algebra and chemistry when people should know this through high school.
Now recently we just hired a scientist to work in the lab, and while I'm more in engineering and manufacturing, I sometimes interface with our lab, and from what I hear this new scientist guy was asking how to calculate molarity. I thought scientist = PhD. WTF is this?
Honestly I think these new hires are people getting hooked up by someone up there. They're all friends, but seriously? I could be doing their job while I'm in high school. But honestly I don't care if they're here or not. I just get a little frustrated when I have to sit down and answer high school math/chemistry problems when I'm an engineer.....
/RANT.
So first of all our senior scientist/chemist quits, which is sad because he's been such a wonderful mentor for me. He documents stuff down and hands responsibilities to me and this other dude. Now while I've had the opportunity to do some of these things once or twice, it wasn't all that hard when he writes down make XX ppm of this solution or a 2.00 M solution of ___. It's also not hard to just scale up or scale down your chemistry makeups based on how much you need.
So anyway this other dude comes and asks me (he could be my dad at his age), and asks me how to make a 10 ppm solution. I say, "well the question is how much do you want? Do you want 5L? 10L? A swimming pool? ppm = g/L so just go calculate how much volume you want and you can go weigh out how much chemicals to add into your bath of water." It's not that I'm telling him off, he comes to me with absolutely no clue how to make this. Instead he wants me to BREAK IT DOWN to him and write a table showing like 5L of water, 100g of salt. 10L of water, 200g salt. Seriously? The problem was actually even easier than that. Our scientist made a 20ppm solution before we left. To measure it as a standard, we dilute it to 10ppm and 5 ppm and then 1ppm in a 3 small vials. Not hard right? He's asking me how much he should add to make 10ppm. It's not rocket science. Take a pipette, get 2 mL of solution. Now grab 2mL of DI. DONE. That hard? However much you want, just dilute accordingly. I guess he didn't understand that until I threw out 2 mL solution, 2 mL DI.....
And last week I spent an hour teaching him that if you have a 0.15 molar solution, and a 3M concentrate, here's how you calculate how to get to 0.25 molar by adding X amount of concentrate. And of course he asks how much concentrate to make. My answer was just "Shrug I just make a buttload so I never run out... or if you wanted the precise amount, just go calculate." I'm not even a chemist. Why am I doing basic algebra and chemistry when people should know this through high school.
Now recently we just hired a scientist to work in the lab, and while I'm more in engineering and manufacturing, I sometimes interface with our lab, and from what I hear this new scientist guy was asking how to calculate molarity. I thought scientist = PhD. WTF is this?
Honestly I think these new hires are people getting hooked up by someone up there. They're all friends, but seriously? I could be doing their job while I'm in high school. But honestly I don't care if they're here or not. I just get a little frustrated when I have to sit down and answer high school math/chemistry problems when I'm an engineer.....
/RANT.
