SWOSU Day 20: Pset bond > triple bond

This is Wei, coming from you live in SWOSU’s CPP! Get up on your feet and MAKE SOME NOISE!!! (Inside Out 2 reference) 

So, welcome to blog number two, where sleep is a luxury and caffeine is a necessity. Today, I made the questionable life choice of getting 5.5 hours of sleep, so I am veeeeeery much exhausted.

First things first: 8 am to 12 pm lab – four hours of being surrounded by chemicals. Today’s highlight? Spilling half my product in the fume hood. Yes, you read that right. The precious compound I synthesized ended up decorating the fume hood in Barbie-core pink :’). Thankfully I had some more product left that needed to be frozen, but for the first half of the shock I couldn’t stop wondering if this was going to be my villain origin story. 

Figure 1: Pre-spilled product.

Figure 2: Me and Joyan <3

After the lab catastrophe, lunch was served and I got myself sushi! Since I woke up pretty late, I had skipped breakfast so I was hungry.

Figure 3: Lunch time!

Little did I know, another surprise was in store – no chopsticks. Desperate times call for desperate measures, so me and Callen attacked those rolls with forks. I know, I know. Scandalous. Please don’t cancel us.

Figure 4: Fork-chopsticks thingy

Post-sushi, it was time for inorganic and organic lectures. After 3 weeks of SSP, I have started to see chemistry in our lives sprinkled everywhere: chairs, trees, trying to find the point group of the most absurd things I set my eyes on. Time passed by quickly per SSP usual and dinner was served (pizza). As a New Yorker, dominos taste the same, even in Oklahoma. The hour before our spectroscopy lecture, participants were creating a very interesting yet concerning math equation, very SSP core.

Figure 5: Wanna try to solve our equation?

The day culminated in an epic showdown with our inorganic problem set. Picture a group of sleep-deprived students, caffeine-fueled and barely holding on to sanity, wrestling with character tables and matrices. 

Figure 6 and 7: Pure chaos

It took us over three days, but we finally finished. There were tears, there was laughter, there was probably a sacrificial offering to the chemistry gods. Yet, we still have 1 organic and 3 spect psets to do tomorrow.

To end off my blog, I want to share one of my favorite quotes as a love letter to SSP Synthchem:

“There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There’s .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. […] I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful.” – The Fault in Our Stars

Slowly but surely, I have started to mistakenly say “I’ll take my pset home” instead of “dorm.” I’m sure of one fact and it’s that I have found another “home” of mine, and that is at SSP. I truly don’t think I can put my love for SSP in a way words can describe it. I isolated myself at my high school since I did not allow myself to trust anyone in my school, however, at SSP I was able to be truly and purely me. No one judged me for acting a certain way or saying certain things, in fact, each one of us brought a unique and quirky part of ourselves here and I believe that is what makes SSP so special. I loved getting to know each participant more and sharing pieces of our lives; each story reminded me how 12 people in a room could merge such a mosaic of diversity, each so different and uniquely ours to share. While skeptical of my choices of switching programs from biochemistry to synthetic chemistry at first, I can now proudly and happily say I have no regrets about choosing synthchem over biochem. I would not have been able to get to know each participant so closely if I were to be in the program with 36 (?) people.

Though my “infinity” with SSP synthchem might just be 5 and a half weeks, it has truly been the experience of a lifetime. I will forever be glad I spent my summer experiencing this all, through all the struggles and all the highs, I wouldn’t have traded it for anything else in the world. Thank you for teaching me the true meaning of collaboration, teamwork, and resilience.

  • Wei