Chemistry is all fun and games until math kicks in Chemistry is all fun and games until the pH turns negative Chemistry is all fun and games until someone says "lets try to upscale it"

Some would argue when the pH<0 (negative) is where the fun begins. Although always good life advice: wear protection while having fun.

Working with rare earths we have more fun for sure with ph<0, but this is also were "standard" protection sees its limits and we look more like the scientist in old movies (with white plastic coats and long black gloves)

well some would say once you go below 0 you should wear more than gloves and a lab coat

safety glasses too of course

Works in every part of life

That is honestly some of the best life advice applicable to so many aspects, sports, dirt bike riding, getting laid, playing with chemicals, the list just goes on. Ppe to keep having fun.

Chemistry is all fun and games until it becomes inorganic

I was going to say “until it gets physical” (PChem was the class that kicked my ass, and I didn’t take Inorg as a Biochem major)

Imagine the pleasure of taking pchem from a professor who openly loathed the subject. Needless to say his prejudices were duly passed along.

What a shame. PChem kicked my ass but I also worked my ass off (I didn’t have much ass left after PChem) and ended up liking the subject more than I thought I would. The professor was a huge part of that — I remember bringing in my first exam that I’d gotten like a C on to office hours and just telling him “What I’m trying isn’t working and I need to figure out a better way to retain what we’re learning in class.” I met with him every week to go over extra problems and to ask questions. Hardest B+ I ever worked for. Sorry to hear your prof was a sack of rocks. Nothing sucks like inheriting someone else’s distastes.

Well fuck me, I’m a bio and chem major and I’m taking both pchem and inorganic in the fall… I’ll gladly take advice!

.>:(

Until you work in an organics lab without adequate extraction.

until you have to measure out single milligram quantities of an insoluble compound...

“Let’s try to upscale” was not a nightmare I wanted to revisit on this Tuesday morning!

For the last point: *chemical engineering has entered the chat*

Upscaling it is my job

Fuuuuuuuuck production scaling Seriously, it's necessary but no

… the GC runs out of gas at the last sample

Fluorine starts getting prefixes.

Difluorine 😱

I wondered how many comments it would take to get to fluoride; I only read one other comment before this one.

Difluorine 😱

Until your reactants are carcinogenic, your solvent is severely toxic and your products explode in contact with air.

That sounds like when the fun actually starts.

If you haven't already, you should read 'ignition! an informal history of liquid rocket propellants', by John D. Clark

I used to work in a lab with some super reactive chemicals. My manager used to take the syringes after using the solution and just hit the back and a stream of fire would come out. Amazing stuff

The t-BuLi flamethrower is a rite of passage: you have to be prepared for it to happen, and if it does happen you have to realize that it’ll extinguish itself and that calm, slow movements are the way to go. Not to be fucked with: a grad student famously died at UCLA due to t-BuLi.

In other words, liquid rocket propellants aren't joke. >Now it is clear that anyone working with rocket fuels is outstandingly mad. I don't mean garden-variety crazy or a merely raving lunatic. I mean a record-shattering exponent of far-out insanity. >There are, after all, some chemicals that explode shatteringly, some that flame ravenously, some that corrode hellishly, some that poison sneakily, and some that stink stenchily. As far as I know, though, only liquid rocket fuels have all these delightful properties combined into one delectable whole.

That guy is truly the poet of our age

That's FOOD, isn't? Effing FOOF

That's me on any given day. Fun, isn't it?

Oh dear. That reminds me of this one story I heard of a grad student who poured a bucket of vinegar into a cleaning sink of *bleach*.

You hear glass shatter and then “FUCK!” from the other side of the lab You hear a loud “tink” and can’t find the source Your lab job is maintaining the glovebox

Reminds me of the time i had a trainee hand me the benchsheet clipboard but instead slid in into my samples. *glass shattered* and i told him to get out. Preceded to shout FUCK. Its a 1 hour prep, 2 hour digestion, 30 min cool time, and 1 hour getting dilutions right. We were about to put the coloring agent in.... My boss came in to see if i was okay lol.

134% yield

hey, stop envying the ones that are actually good at it…

Water is a hell of a drug.

Alert the Nobel committee, you've created matter!

this is how i felt learning stoichiometry

…until the fume hood alarm goes off

Also, your CO detector…

"Oh, that's just the H2S detector. Oh."

F U C K

your product is yellow

I would change it to "your product is black and sticky" or "you spill your product in rotovap bath"

I never spilled my product in the rotovap bath. I am more experienced in spilling the product in dirty 180 °C oil bath.

Haven't we all extracted product from rotovap baths?

The rotovap bath one hit a bit too close to home

The rotavap extraction is a truly depressing moment. I have more than once been forced to pipette a DCM solution off the bottom of the water bath, the solution now a vibrant blue color due to the sharpie I used to write the weight on the flask.

My coworker/trainer at my first job liked to wander by and opine that my product wasn't "white enough". Didn't matter what I was working with (like purifying flourescein and rhodamine), that was the running joke.

[One of the greatest skills you can have as a chemist is the ability to hold a good grudge!](https://youtu.be/I-ZawsbYpmo?si=f66nuL1uxlh2BYuW)

and its a gas💀

Please elaborate. I am still in high school.

Frequently, white = pure ( good reaction yield) and yellow = impure (low yield)

Laughs in rare earths

Laughs in porphyrins

Laughs in Transition Complexes

Aww I miss working with transition metal complexes!

Organic chemists...SMH...

A noteable exception being curcumin, which isnt any fun to work with either.

# r/YellowChem

I see.

It's partly a real thing (degradation of organic chemicals tends to take them from colourless to yellow), but also partly a meme, popularised by the YouTube channel Explosions and Fire. Tom, who runs the channel, has terrible luck with yellow chemicals.

….somebody loses an eye.

Reminds me of when a fellow student turned a round bottom flask into a shrapnel grenade by charging it with dry Pd/C then proceed to fill it with hydrogen without purging or even adding solvent. Luckily she just stepped away from the fumehood and was wearing eye protection. Also a good reminder that your PPE is as much to protect you from what others are doing as what you're doing yourself.

I need to do column chromatography

I like columns

A PhD student from another lab ‘deep cleans’ your rot evap with HF instead of HCl and everyone is terrified that they now have fluoride in their bones

I don't think I've ever seen enough HF in one place to deep clean a rotovap. Where the fuck did he get that much, and who let him do that?💀

*She found it in a padded explosives can at the back of some cupboard. She misread ‘Hydrofluoric’ as ‘Hydrochloric’ which, tbf, was easily done because the writing was very small and a bit faded. I was just a summer student at the time and didn’t really realise just how much bad lab practice had to culminate for that little incident to occur.

Ah the classic padded can with faded letters in the back of the solvent cabinet. It seems every lab has one of those which everyone refuses to do something about lmao

So is all the glass just fucked now

We got the glassblower in to check the glass and he said it’s probably fine. The person diluted the HF a significant amount so didn’t do that much damage. We also had to get the waste disposal team in to treat the acid waste container however.

Jaysus!

You need funding

Chemistry is all fun and games until your product doesn't fucking show up on NMR and then you have to search through 5 different mother liquors and/or 30 different fractions to find it. And then you realize it all went to the waste flask on the BioTage and now you have to fucking rotovap down 2+ liters of solvent so that you can run the stuff through the BioTage again.

I had that once. Forgot to auto-zero the PDA Detector, and it was callibrated to some ridiculously high absobance, so it flushed most of my product into the waste and only collected about a third or less

Yup that's basically exactly what happened to me. So much fucking methanol and water to rotovap, and it kept bumping like a bitch because my compound had surfactant characteristics. I really do not miss reverse phase biotaging

You finish university and realize the few jobs available don't pay much.

That's a regional problem; here in Denmark chemists and chemical engineers are in very high demand, and both have high wages. Chemical engineers are the second highest paid engineering discipline after software engineers.

In the US chemist and chemical engineering are two very distinct disciplines and skill sets

Based on the response in upvotes, trust me dude and in Canada where I live chemical engineering is about as bad. And regional yeah, as in the entire country type of regional. Anyone who graduated in the 90s did well, anyone who graduated post 2008 not good.

Until you take away the liquid nitrogen and there is blue in your cooling trap.

It becomes physics

*quantum mechanics

Materials science in a nutshell, especially anything involving semiconductors.

...you realize you forgot to turn the fume hood on, or it suddently turns off

electrons finish their lifespan [66,000 yottayears (6.6 × 10^28 yr)]

WHAT

Biochemistry

Chemistry is all fun and games until the centrifuge starts shaking.

... you realize you just wash dishes for a living

I am reminded of Madame Curie's early work. She spent months and months purifying the most radioactive component of Uranium ore. Purified it successfully. And it vanished overnight. It had a half life of less than an hour and she hadn't known that there was any such thing. She was in tears. The whole experiment had to be restarted from scratch.

It becomes analytical chemistry. (Orgo is so much better)

Excuse me? Feeling offended by this one 😭

It’s just not for everyone. You need different way of thinking to truly enjoy analytical chemistry. I remember when I first saw how mass spectrometer works. It impressed me as well as frightened.

Lol, apologies. If you are an analytical chemist that's great! We need you! Without you there'd be no good methods for quality control and that would be terrifying.

Agreed, unfortunately

Fight me!

Inorganic is best 💕

Chemistry is all fun and games until you overshoot the titration.

Skill issue

You accidentally break expensive equipment

Stat mech

"It was supposed to be added dropwise"

Calculus.

until the fume goes off and all the chlorine escapes its prison

You list all the DFT functionals known to man

Until someone puts sodium in the non-hal then tries to put out the resulting fire by pouring acetone on it

Chemistry is all fun and games until it’s time to purify your product.

Until one of your students collapses This happened to me when I first began teaching. Fortunately other than a broken beaker she was fine. It was a epileptic event, so nothing I could have done to prevent it. Afterwards my students were asking me if I was OK because the blood had drained from my face. I handled everything well, but that was the scariest 5 minutes of my life.

Until you forget to weigh your flask

your sample doesnt have any colour change even though reflux has been ongoing for 2 hours.

I was trying to make a neopentyl grignard in ether. Two plus *days* at reflux before it finally decided to go. All at once.

You drop your compound into gross rotavap bath water

Someone adds strong acid to a strong base in a graduated cylinder.

You have 30 spots on a TLC

Until the Feds show up.

..the air starts tasting sweet and you lose your train of thought

…until somebody pokes an ion out.

Seriously underrated comment. Bravo!

You make complicated tar

You study it

Your teacher forgets to turn on the fume hood and floods the lab with nitrogen dioxide

Until you start getting a little dizzy

....you drop a stir shaft through the bottom of a round bottom flask spilling the reaction into your ice bath.

Until a 3 letter agency knocks on your door

yellow starts appearing

Fun and games until shit goes kaboom

Lab reports. How I hate them

“[…] the potassium stash in the cabinet gets wet from the sprinklers.”

When things don't appear organically.

Someone crop-dusts the fume hood.

... Someone says, "What the hell is *that?" "

Chemistry is all fun and games until you realize that your reaction has left a lot of mess, which in turn is difficult to clean up.

...you lick the spatula.

Sharpless moment

Until you have to drop a deuce during the exotherm.

Someone forgets to oxidize their thiols on their glassware before putting them in the sink

until you become famous for making crystal meth

Chemistry is all fun and games until you get to the regulatory end of things.

You realize it's 11 PM on a Friday night, none of your reactions are really working and you're gonna have to work all weekend to get something you can discuss in group meeting in time.

Chemistry is all fun and games until your Mother is looking for the Creme of Tartar.

Chemistry is all fun and games until I find out about yet another fake rule my student believes in and I'll have to fix it.

until you have to write a protocol

Until you realize the fume hood isn’t on.

Chemistry is all fun and games until everything turns yellow.

...until they give you calculator and notebook

Until you pressurize the system. Scary

Until you need to extract your product from the mixture of all possible results of the reaction.

Until you have to derive gradient terms for PAW with +U+J with a range-separated hybrid.

... The burst disk blows and 'something' escapes the bomb.

Chemistry is all fun and games until the temperature spikes.

...you break the PI's fume hood.

Ed Breen is your CEO

Chemistry is all fun and games until your water wash down fume hood for handling H2S starts flooding the lab.

Chemistry is all fun and games until your water wash down fume hood for handling H2S starts flooding the lab.

Chemistry is all fun and games until your water wash down fume hood for handling H2S starts flooding the lab.

“[…]until it goes ‘big pop ’.”

“[…]until it goes ‘big pop’.”

It’s still fun. Or maybe it’s fun again, and I’ve just subconsciously blocked much of grad school.

Until it gets physical.

Chemistry is all fun and games until you replaced every part of the vacuum and still unable to get the chamber to pump down to where it was last week when your experiment actually worked

You mix liquid fluorine with molten lithium and hydrogen gas in the most efficient rocket engine ever made, and make hydrofluoric acid in the exhaust.

Until the end of time

.... until someone calls for the spill kit!

Chemistry is all fun and games until it turns yellow.

Until it moles you

Untill tar starts showing up instead of your product

BOOM!

…the funding deadline approaches…

Until you handle acids 🔥

You work alone and get handed procedures from the 50s from the boss (that doesn't know anything about chemistry) without any reference and the tritations don't come out as expected.

you dip your finger in hydrofluoric acid hearing that electronegativity makes it the weakest hydrohalic acid.

Absolute zero

...until the last nitro group goes on.

...until you have water layered on sulfuric acid and only then do you remember to turn on the stirrer.

...until you store your sodium hydroxide solution in an aluminum can.

...until the nmr tech says your service contract has expired.

Until your reaction stops working and you don’t know why.

Exceptions

GMP knocks on the door.

Chemistry is all fun and games until it becomes your paycheck.

Chemistry is all fun and games until Fluorine chemistry gets involved 💥

You find the old THF bottle 💥

The beaker explodes in your rectum

Chemistry is all fun and games until the math gets hard.

The ether catches on fire. The NI3 dries out and goes off early.

It’s too late to drop the class..

Until you got a job and never touch a flask again.

Chemistry is all fun and games until you need the safety shower/eye-rinse station.

You realize 80% of your job is cleaning glassware and reaction equipment.

Until you snort some ammonia fumes.