Fab Lab

"I really enjoy practical work..."

This fictitious phrase has haunted me since I first fabricated it on my UCAS form.

First year labs were awful. Second year labs were half-way to two-thirds alright. Now, third year labs are nearly over. In two and a half weeks, I finish undergraduate labs forever. This thought has only recently hit me in all its reality and hit me like a ton of bricks, it has. I don't want to end labs.

I don't want it to end. And it's an odd feeling, given I expended so much energy on hating labs, it seems a sort of twisted fate that I only start to enjoy them once they have to finish. It's not so much the actual work, but everything else that is included as part of the package.

What I love is the comaradery that comes from labs. An experience that no other type of teaching allows for. I love the interaction with higher powers, which, again, would be mostly unheard of in other subjects or other modules. I love the fact that it's as much a social situation as it is a learning environment and how many people I've been able to talk to, to get along with just for the simple fact of the compounds that we have in common.

While it pierces my heart to know there's going to be no more of that so very soon after I've gotten so used to it, I'm so grateful that I had this opportunity in the first place. Labs are a freaking heart-racing show of entertainment with large splashes of embarassment and frustratingly unco-operative experimenting. Labs are the worst part of the degree.

They are also the best part.

Despite all the guff I spouted on my UCAS, I'm still not really sure why I chose chemistry. It has been one of the jerkiest rollercoasters I've ever ridden but I wouldn't want to swap it for anything. It's more than the academic qualification aquired, being a student of this subject has shaped me in ways that even overly emphatic, pretentious paragraphs can't attempt to describe.

And I'm happy and I'm settled
in the person I've become.

On the jukebox: Frank Turner ~ Photosynthesis <3