A day of chemistry

Today was truly a day of chemistry for me. After a late wake-up and an emergency ride to school from my neighbor across the street, I took the ACS "US National Chemistry Olympiad" test, which ran from 8:00 to 9:50. I had participated in the same contest in 2003 as a sophomore who had just completed "Chem-Study", our school's first level advanced chemistry course. I did very well that time; I and my fellow classmate, Toby Heyn, scored first and second respectively in the region out of both first and second year chemistry students. Feeling pretty good, we progressed to the next round, where we found that many of the questions pertained to areas of chemistry that we had not yet studied.

However, this time around, I found myself at the disadvantage of not having taken Chem-Study for two whole years. While I have started Advanced Chemistry, which is actually a UW-Oshkosh General Chemistry course, we are only a week and a half into the material, which is complete review. However, as I took the test, I found that I remembered many of the concepts, though some were still a little fuzzy. Even with my disadvantage, I think I did fairly well; perhaps even well enough to progress to the next round.

After the test, I worked on a bit of homework for my Human Biology class. When the bell signifying the end of second period rang, my schedule went back to normal. I had lunch with a friend of mine from Cross Country, and while eating I worked on filling in some of the preparatory information for today's Advanced Chemistry lab, the first real lab of the class. I went through Human Biology and Band (though today was a Symphony practice day for a concert tomorrow).

The Lab proved to be quite long. It involved the gravimetric determination of phosphorous levels in common gardin fertilizers. This meant that we had to dissolved the fertilizer in water, which we ran through a filter to remove chunks. Then, we added aqueous magnesium sulfate (MgSO4) and and aqueous ammonia (NH3) to the mixture to form a hydrated magnesium ammonium phosphate (MgNH4PO4) precipitate, which we let sit for about fifteen minutes. After that fifteen minutes was up, we then had to filter out the precipitate. Unfortunately, there were only enough resources so that one person of every two could filter at a time. Of my lab partner and I, she went first. Even more unfortuante for me was the fact that the filtration at our station was one of the slowest, meaning some groups had had two sets of precipitate filtered by the time my partner was finished. This meant that I was the last to leave, and I left at 5:15, over two hours after school was over, and over and hour after the predicted finishing time for the lab. None the less, I got my preciptate filtered and I was able to catch a ride with my mother home.