February 2004

Gillian Woodburn • The Measure of University Life

Usually, I like the look on people’s faces when I tell them I’m a chemistry major. Lately, though, “Basic Measurement” has been draining the life out of me, and I’m starting to think that what I really want to do in life is write greeting cards for Hallmark.

"Basic Measurement” is a lab for chemistry majors. We meet for four hours on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, and there’s nothing basic about it. The first five weeks, we did titrations (determining the concentration of a dissolved substance), attempting to get within 0.002 percent accuracy. It was unbelievably tedious and just about impossible. Then we jumped to gas chromatography, mass spectrometry, thermogravimetric analysis, and circuits, all things we won’t actually learn until next year.

But, these last two weeks of class have been fun. Each of the 15 students designed an experiment (mine is to measure the amount of acetaminophen in Tylenol). There’s glassware everywhere in the lab, and the three TAs and one professor have been flying around trying to answer questions. So far, no one’s experiment has worked.

As well as science and math, I’m taking German classes (I hope to minor in the language) and a creative writing workshop. Variety helps keep me sane, as does life outside the classroom. Fortunately, my roommate and I get along . . . pretty well. We met last year in Daum and this year we migrated over to Stanley. The problem is that Anna and I are too similar, according to my basic theory of roommates, which says:

We differ in one important respect, though. I usually stay up until about 1:30 at least one night a week, working on my lab reports. Unfortunately, Anna is a Sleep Princess. No light, no noise, no nothing. She’s pretty flexible on other issues, but mess with her sleep and . . . well, just don’t mess with her sleep.

On the plus side, neither of us drinks or smokes. I don’t like dancing and I’m not a fan of crowded places and smoky bars, so I find other ways to entertain myself on the weekends. The best Friday night solution: Painting Night. We turn on some music, gather a few friends, and pull out the Crayola watercolors. None of us are real artists, and everyone is a little nervous at first, but soon you see emotions coming out on paper. It’s fun and completely relaxing.

I’ll cut off for now with this snapshot of my life at the UI. As my rhetoric class last year confirmed, I’m horrible at conclusions.

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