Undergrads are the same everywhere...completely lost

I always find it funny to watch and listen to undergrads whenever they are discussing/dealing with a problem. I've had a particularly good vantage point of this for a number of years. Being a full time TA through my grad studies forced me to be in contact with a lot of students seeking a higher education...lord knows they need a higher education, whether or not they ever got it, who knows.

Chem labs are a particularly fun place to watch students perform...ok, maybe it's just because I do chemistry that I find it fun, but when there is a chance of spills/smells/fires/explosions if someone messes up, that's kind of cool (in a car crash kind of way). Though there are times when it becomes downright scary. Aaron was in the same lab as myself when two brilliant students not only emptied organic waste into the concentrated acid waste...and now that I have lost most of you let me just say this is one of the top things NOT to do in chemistry...So now that this has been done, and there are fumes coming out of the acid waste at this point, what do the students do? Well it sure as hell wasn't tell us what they did. Hell they didn't even bother to do that once the bottle started to make a high pitched whistling noise. No they had decided to screw the cap back on the bottle, trapping the rapidly evolving gas inside the bottle...for the moment. But good fortune (and the actual use of brains) either Aaron or I lowered the window on the fume hood where the bottle was contained after realizing that the sound was coming from somewhere in there. A few moments later the cap gave way, creating a geyser of concentrated hydrochloric acid in the fume hood...essentially a shit storm that Aaron ended up cleaning up.

Having survived that incident unscathed I can sort of laugh at it, so long as I don't think of what could have happened. Had I been standing in front of the fume hood when the bottle went off...well let's just say I wouldn't be quite as attractive as I am now (and to head off the jokes, yes that's not all attractive to begin with).

Fortunately most of the time the stupidity of undergrads is limited to harmless stuff. Like hooking up the water hose rather than the vacuum hose to a filter flask, it goes something kind of like this. The other fun one is to see the reaction on the face of a student when you explain to them that the "filtrate", which was to be kept, was the liquid that they poured down the drain after the filtration. Yes, there is in fact this much confusion with something as simple as doing a filtration.

But that isn't all that surprising, since the most common problem undergrads seem to have, is finding their way around. I'm not kidding, the number of times I have been asked "Do you know where the TA's office is?" No name for said TA (even though there are probably >100 in the building).

Actually this happened to me today for the first time since I got here, hence the post. Now I can't say it was a surprise when it happened, I clearly saw it coming. The first sign that undergrads are looking for a TA or prof, is that they will walk back and forth past your open office door. Now this in no way means that they are looking for you, or anyone from your office, in fact they may not even be looking for someone from your department (chemical engineers seem to have this problem from time to time, they think they are chemists...but they're not). So finally they enter..."Excuse me, do you know where the TA's office is?"...great, now do I bother to try and figure out which course/TA? Hell, I don't even understand the numbering system for the courses here, there is CHEM 1011, 1012, 2031...I don't know why they have 4 numbers when everywhere I have ever been before only needed 3 (they only seem to use 3 of the 4 numbers here as well). Fortunately there were two students there, and one of them suddenly had a revelation, there are office numbers on the doors! Amazing stuff isn't it? And imagine that, the TA had given them his office number as well! So using this great deductive logic they were able to figure out that the office that they were looking for was...on the other side of the hallway...

I seriously wonder how some of these people make it to the university in the morning. If you can't find a numbered room in a building you are having some serious troubles...yet I saw this all the time at the U of A and I'm sure I would see more of it here if I wasn't the basement.