Practical Results

My first practical was marked and my lecturer showed me my results. Guess what? Even though I got an almost impossible answer, I still managed to get 14/20. For that practical, I had to analyse how much iron is in a commercial iron supplement tablet. I got 0.000003755%. My lecturer even sent an email to us saying that it's impossible to get that kind of results. If that's the case, we can send the manufacturing company to court for cheating the public.

Later on, while discussing the results with me, my lecturer then told me that although my calculations were correct, my results were wrong. I shouldn't have gotten such a low result from my samples so that affected my calculations. Don't know which idiot sabotaged me! I left my samples to heat and went to do something else. When I got back to the heater, someone had taken them off and left it to cool. I thought it was the work of some good samaritan. Turns out my sample was not boiled and so my iron was not synthesized out from the tablets.

Too late to do anything about that and I was quite happy with my marks. Initially thought I would fail and get a scolding from the lecturer. My lecturer is quite a good and caring person who looks a lot like KFC's colonel with less wrinkles and a smaller stomach, of course. The day before I went to him for help with my calculations and I think he remembers me.

Yesterday was his practical class again and as usual, there was something wrong with my results. I couldn't get a stable reading for my titration results and cannot repeat the titrations as my solutions were all used up. I thought of making more solution but was not allowed. Anyway, it was already quite late and I was not actually very enthusiastic about making up the solution. So, it was with some relief when my lecturer asked me to just make do with the results I got.

After all these practicals, I realised one thing - I can NEVER be an analytical chemist. I seemed to be quite bad at getting an accurate result. I'm more of a production person so I most probably will look for jobs in the production line.

The above was supposed to be posted yesterday but something was wrong with blogspot. Luckily, I saved a copy so I didn't have to type again. Posted it today instead...