More wine

At the banquet today I tried to wines. I tried a cabernet sauvignon, and a chardonnay from some place callled charing hills or something. Both were okay; tasty, drinkable, but not amaazing.

Energy efficiency workshop: day 1, part 2

The fourth speaker of session 1 was Garry Rumbles, a cool guy with a British accent who defended the bulk heterojunction cell. The main message I got from his talk was that the Band diagram is wrong (and therefore that physicists are dumb!). The reason why the Band diagram is wrong is because it hides a lot of the details that are present in molecules, such as the locations of the triplet states, and of various trap states. Also, it doesn't show the fact that holes and excitons annihilate each other. Maybe this is because of the coulombic attraction, although I'm not sure.

He pointed out that the big breakthrough, credited to Alan Heeger, was that you could make solar cells with C60 as an electron acceptor, and with this solar cell architecture you get very slow recombination rates. In P3HT the exciton diffusion time is 300 to 500 ps, which I guess is pretty short, and so the distance excitons diffuse is less than 10 nm. I knew this already. Then he went on to discuss some stuff that was probably important but which I didn't write down and don't recall. Finally, he showed a plot of how a solar cell degrades--it can last for ~50 days, although it seems to have degraded quite a bit by the end of it. He also commented that the most efficient organic cells that have been recently made were made in companies, not in government-funded research labs or universities. And he talked about intrinsic and extrinsic sources of degradation. Extrinsic ones that he listed were oxygen, water, and UV-presumably, they react with the active material, but the material could be protected. Also, there are effects like Delamination, PSS (not sure what this means now but it's in my notes) and Reducing the metal. Intrinsic effects were oxidizing effects, due to polarons (or related to polarons), reducing species, and intermal conversion (which presumably heats up the system and causes thermal damage).

I guess that last point is interesting because internal conversion is the way in which plants dissipate heat, and is deemed "safe" compared to the alternative of a long-lived excited state chlorophyll. I guess heat damage is an issue in things like computers and optical devices, where we need to have chillers and heat sinks. At the same time, plants are probably a lot more exposed to air than computers or laminated (i.e. plastic-enclosed) solar cells, and so they heat from them probably gets conducted away a lot faster. Or maybe there's just less heat to be released. In any case, I wonder where the boundary is between internal conversion=good and internal conversion=bad. Maybe it's not such a good thing in solar cells.

Then he talked about Time Resolved Microwave Conductivity (TRMC) which is this technique that measures charge transfer rates and recombinations lifetimes, I think. I'm not really clear on this but the technique seems cool, and he harped on the importance of considering the triplet state in these calculations, something that I guess solid state physicists don't do. He also mentioned that P3HT has pretty good Intersystem crossing. There was a question at the end about tirplets, and how the are too low in energy to really charge separate.

Which brings us to lunch. I ended up chatting with this guy who works on singlet fission (into triplets). He emphasized the importance of fission rather than intersystem crossing as the desirable mechanism. I guess I had never differentiated these two mechanisms in my mind, so I suppose I should look into that. And at lunch I met some grad students from the Kapteyn Group, who were all cool.

The next talk was about the hydrogen economy. The main point the guy tried to make is that we should only focus our research funding on things that will scale, in time. He doesn't think Carbon sequestration will every become commercially relevant. and apparently crystalling PV cells pay for themselves in 30 years, thin films in 1-2 years, and wind in a few months. And he thinks wind could surpass nuclear energy by 2020. And apparently hydrogen requires 30% of the stored energy in order to generate the fule. But I was a little bored and started doing other things in my notepad.

Then there was a guy who talked about the redox chemistry of water oxidation. I was not really awake, although surely all that is important. THe take home message there was that doing a thorough kinetic analysis of your system is an important thing to do.

And then there was another guy who talked about making photoelectrochemical cells. His main point was that metal oxides are the class of materials taht are most promising. They are stable ("most rocks are oxides") and can be semiconductors. He's doing combinatorial analysis to look for candidate metal oxides, and he's developed modules that can be given to high school students who can help out with this. I thought that was cool, and something I probably wouldn't have liked, at least in theory, as a high school student.

The final talk was by this wonderful lady--she talked about CO2 reduction, but I was tired and learned nothing. But I do remember, either from her talk or the preceding one, that there are catalysts available for making methanol or hydrocarbons out of CO2( without having super-high energy intermediates) but not ethanol--so , that's is a problem for GM potentially.

The poster session was excellent. I learned about triplet fission, and talked to someone who worked on doing 2D spectroscopy with pulse shaping.

Wine Tasting

At the poster session, about which I'll write soon but not now, people were drinking wine. I like wine and the greasy eggplant I had consumed for dinner left me wanting wine, but it cost $6.50 at the bar for a glass, and I didn't want to pay. It looked like maybe some people had these red tickets that got them wine and beer for free, but I especially didn't want to ask.

So after the poster session I walked to safeway, intending to buy some apples and wine. In addition to apples, I ended up getting tea bags, a cucumber, some cherry tomatoes, and some celery. But to my dismay, the Safeway had no wine. So I purchased my produce (And a Colorado mug) and left. Fortunately, a young and probably underage boy who worked at safeway told me that there was a liquor store down the street. So I walked down the street, and shortly I came upon this wine haven called "spirits and wine." The people inside were kind and friendly. I wanted to buy a single bottle and get out, but I also wanted to try something new, but then again I also wanted to get a wine I knew I would like in case the new one was bad. So in the end I got a

Oxford Landing Shiraz, 2006 (South Austrialia) which cost about $7.

and a

Mosel River Riesling, 2007.

The only criteria I had going in was that the wine had to have screw caps, because I don't have any stoppers at the hostel. This turned out not to be too limiting, although it kept me from buying the Yellow Tail Resiling I was going to buy initially, or anything from Sutter Home.

I like the Shiraz, although I wouldn't have a few months ago. I only started liking red wine very very recently--maybe a month ago. It kind of reminds me of the Pinot Noir I had with my grandparents. It's kind of fruity, I think (I guess I don't exactly know what fruity means when it comes to wines, but I use it anyway), not sweet, and has this taste of "I could get really nasty and start tasting like acetone, but right now I'm just pleasantly intriguing and very wine-like."

I would buy it again, and drink it, but I wouldn't tell people that they absolutely must drink this wine if they want their life to be complete.

As for the Riesling:

It is delicious, sweet (but not too sweet, not like the sweet Reisling I had at Suppenkuche on June 29th). It's fruity, and tastes bubbly even though it doesn't actually have bubbles in it.

I would definitely buy it again, although I dont' know for sure that it's the best Riesling I've ever had or anything. I like Riesling a lot.

Other wines that I have had:

Carlo Rossi Sangria: This was my first (maybe second) love, only I learned that if you keep a huge jug for a month it will, eventually, get nasty. Maybe some vintage years are better than others; the last time I had it I couldn't help but admit its less-than-perfectness, even though I still love it because Sangria is Delicious. It is sweet and delicious and like bubbly fruit juice.

Sutter Home Muscato: If Sangria wasn't my first love, this was. It is sweet and fruity and tastes of delicious muscato grapes and is delicous. And cheap. And Delicious.

Yellow Tail Pinot Grigio: I tried it at my parents' house and liked it.

Sutter Home Gewurztraminer: tasty

Some other kind of fancy-pants Gewurztraminer that I had at an italian Restraurant in LA: not tasty, although I didn't admit it to Robert at the time

Some fancy-pats Muscato

Pinot Noir for $16 (one of the Cheaper ones, don't recall the brand): didn't like it at first, but this was the first dry red wine I enjoyed when I had it with my grandparents.

Alazani, a Georgian wine that Borya brought over once: Delicious. And Red. and somewhat sweet.

Cheapo Zinfandel (don't recall the winery--this is why I'm writing these things down!)--pretty good, but not when it's been standing for a month. But good to cook with.

The Brain, it is Full: CU workshop, day 1 part 1

Today was the first full day of this energy efficiency workshop that I'm attending. There were 8 full talks (~45 minutes each) plus a brief introduction to energy policy in the beginning by a guy who works for the Department of Energy, which I didn't really follow too well other than that it seems like the DOE is funding a lot of weapons research and a lot of fuel.

The first talk was by John Benner, who talked about the economics of solar cells. He said that photovoltaics are in a pretty typical "growing curve" in terms of how markets develop, but there will need to be a lot of breakthroughs in order for solar-generated electricity to become cheap enough to be competitive with fossil fuels. Showed some calculations of projected growth rates. He also mentioned that because people have underestimated growth of the solar cell market in their predictions, there hasn't been enough supply of solar cells to meet the demand. Also, that we might be in a "bubble" wrt solar cells, where the cost of the modules is going down, abut the price is not because people will pay. Later, though, there was a discussion about how much energy it takes to make a solar cell; it turns out that you don't get any net energy out of your installation until you stop building new solar cells.

The next talk was by Arthur Frank, from NREL, who talked about dye sensitized solar cells, and about the properties of titania and sensitizers that were desirable for these cells. It turns out that organic molecules are catching up with the more expensive ruthenium based dyes in terms of efficiency. Also, the surface roughness of the titania determines things like charge transport. There was also a comment at the end about trap states in titania, and he said that no one really knows much about traps. Presumably traps are defects in semiconductor structure--at least that's how I always thought about them--but they may not be bad. The person had asked whether there are different kinds of traps (i.e. deep vs. shallow), and whether it's possibly that one kind slows down diffusion and the other kind encourages exciton recombination. And at the end there was a comment about how some Japanese engineers had tested a solar cell for 3 years and it dropped in efficiency by 5%, but this wasn't due to the dye leaking (some dye-sensitized solar cells are made of liquid electrolytes).

Then we had a break. I ate a bagel and some fruit. Then Brian Gregg, also from NREL, talked about small molecules solar cells, and about doping organic semiconductors to improve their performance. The highest efficiency organic solar cell is 5%--not good enough! He talked a little bit about why the conventional band diagram that people use to describe p-n junction solar cells in silicon is the wrong picture to have; how a state diagram is more accurate. Also, unlike Silicon, you can have an open circuit voltage in excitonic solar cells even if your electrodes have the same work function, because you only have hole transport through the material, and not electron transfer. This has to do with the energies of only one of the HOMO or LUMO lining up with the work function of the electrode. There was also something about how you can use chemical potential gradients to help you with your solar cell in addition to electric field gradients, even though you can't do this in silicon. I didn't quite understand that
.
Then he talked a lot about interfaces and the problems with recombination; however, I wasn't sure if he was omitting recombination in bulk because it wasn't important, or because that wasn't what he studied.
He also talked about how In small molecules, the binding energy of the exciton is about 0.25 eV, which is more than the thermal energy available at room temperature (kT). So excitons have to diffuse to an interface and then be split at an interface, in order for them to be useful. But even at the interface the coulombic attraction doesn't go away. There are ways to overcome this, but they end up wasting 0.9 eV, which is a lot. It think this involves some sort of thermal energy, but I didn't understand how it works. He also had a way of overcoming the coulombing attraction energy, but hasn't demonstrated it yet. It involved doping, and he proceeded to talk about the effects of "doping" for the rest of the talk. (Actually, a professor from Maryland who I talked to later and who works on SPM told me that she doesn't think doping is the right term; that really, you're polarizing the molecule differently). But yes, apparently some recent work out of Peter Peumans' group at stanford showed that super-purifying P3HT doesn't actually make a better device--but people don't know exactly what these dopants are.

So Brian Gregg's group has apparently done some "chemical" doping, which increases the dielectric constant of these molecules (the ones he used was PPEEB) and through that maybe increases the mobility (if I understood correctly). And through the Poole-Frenkel equation, which is a super-oversimlification that works, this increases the conductivity.

The next guy was Garry Rumbles, and talked about bulk heterojunction cells, and his talk was cool, so I'll write about that later.

Distopia

Today was the first day of our energy efficiency conference, and Nathan Lewis, a chemistry professor at Caltech, gave the keynote. He is an extremely charismatic speaker and an obviously intelligent man. His talk was very depressing. It was much like watching An Inconvenient Truth, except more scientific. He had a few main points that I've remembered in the hour and a half since the talk ended:
1. There is enough non-renewable fuel to provide 3,000 years' worth of energy
2. But that fuel will dump lots of CO2 into the atmosphere if we use it

3. CO2 is a stable molecule--it doesn't react with oxygen on its own--so it doesn't really break down on its own, ever. It needs a catalyst, like something they use in photosynthesis.
4. There's a lot of energy coming to the earth from the sun
5. But the only way to store it in a way that will scale to the entire world economy is in chemical bonds, i.e. in fuels. Not batteries.

6. If we don't start building solar cells soon, then we (by we he means the world) will build coal and gas plants, because that is "business as usual," and those have a lifetime of 40 years

7. By 2050 we will have dumped enough CO2 into the atmosphere that scientists predict bad shit might go down (or something--I'm not too clear on this part, and I don't think anyone really is) unless we stop emitting now

8. So we better stop emitting CO2 now, guys.

Then Walter Kohn (nobel laureate and creator of the much-despised DFT) suggested that maybe we should try to reduce the world's population. Nathan Lewis replied that that's not very practical; plus, if we were to do that, we'd have to get rid of mostly Americans. Then he answer a question about methane and the meeting was dimissed.

Bouldering

I've arrived safely and soundly in Boulder, Colorado, where I will attend an energy efficiency workshop from tomorrow until Friday. I'm staying at the International Hostel, which is a frat house turned Hostel. I've managed to piss off the front desk guy by being totally clueless about checking in procedures, and by somehow not knowing the code for getting in here after hours--either that, or else he's just not friendly and grouchy. But staying here is inexpensive, my room is clean enough, and the showers, which are basically metal boxes, are going to be a character-building and water conserving experience that will, I'm sure, make me happy to have packed my shower sandals with me on this trip.

I really really liked this town when I first stepped off the bus from Denver. It smells of pine trees. I walked the 0.8 miles to the hostel and was pleased to see people out and about; this seems like a real college town--maybe Berkeley is like this at night, but I don't live in Berkeley. But after I went through the checking in awkwardness here and went for a walk in search of food, I felt a little less in love with the town because I began to feel self-conscious. I wanted food, you see, real food, but most places that were open at this hour seemed to be intended to serve people alcohol. Which is good and fine, except that I don't have anyone to go drinking with right now. I ended up buying a middle eastern chicken wrap from a convenience store where I also bought dental floss and deodorant, and it tasted pretty okay, except that it had all the standard subway sandwich vegetables that add this uniform taste to everything, masking the potential distinctiveness of incredients like chicken and feta cheese. In any case, I got my food, and now I am fed with something more than chocolate-covered esperesso beans. And it is late, and I must go tend to my assigned reading if I am to get what I want out of this workshop.

For the reading of it

I recently finished reading Edith Wharton's "The House of Mirth", which had been offhandedly given a tenuous thumbs up by Anna many many years ago when she went off to college and I looted the books in her room that were not deemed important enough to accompany her. It was, indeed, very good, especially for the kind of drawn out victorian novel that I expected it to be. It was basically about this attractive 29-year old named Miss Lily Bart going about living her elaborate social life in New York in 1900, attending parties and looking for a husband to take her out of her poverty. There are numerous important plot turns and it all ends quite tragically (as the inside cover put it), but the thing that struck me was this line, somewhere, about how to Lily it was important to live wealthily, or at least giving the appearance of being wealthy, because a live of poverty is practically not worth living.

I guess I remembered this phrase above others because it made me realize that I've somehow acquired an analogous value, if you replace wealth with something like being social and having lots of friends and exciting moments of passionate feeling. I can't put one word to my values the way Edith Wharton can to a character in a book, but maybe someone seeking to find the most laughable about me could. Anyway, one of my biggest fears is having my life reduced to a monotony of *getting up, going to work, coming home, eating dinner, occupying myself in some retarded and uninspired fashion with some menial task like washing dishes or laundry or cleaning the bathroom or watching tv, and then going to sleep, and repeating from (*) ad infinitum. This lifestyle wouldn't necessarily be objectionable if I had no other options, but the objectionable part is having other options, having access to life's more titillating pleasures (or pastimes) and not partaking of them because of inertia. And by tittilating pleasures, I mean things like inviting friends over for fun, whacky, and/or noisy parties, going out dancing or hiking or wandering the city streets at 3 am, taking up a hobby and getting sufficiently non-sucky at it to be able to impress ignorant onlookers...the kind reader gets the idea.

I'm not going to go into whether or not this is a reasonable thing to fear, and what kind of spoiled brat this might make me. I've thought about whether this fear is justified or not (it's probably not), about whether there's anything wrong with a simple lifestyle (when you put it this way, there probably isn't). The point is that I have this fear and that it's a pretty big part of how I perceive my life. I maybe be a snooty stuck up brat (much like the fictional Lily Bart) but the point here is not that I should try to become less of one.

Back to the point--I'm afraid of falling into this kind of lifestyle. And compared to what college was like, this last year has been, socially, a narrowing of my world. I don't hang out with friends as often as before. In part, I haven't wanted to. I haven't had any big parties like the housewarming tea party or pirate party of years past. I've frequently thought that it would be cool and fun to do, but ultimately I haven't done it. And that's okay, because I haven't really wanted to badly enough, but whenever I contemplate the matter I'm plagued by a fear that if I don't kick my social life back into the gear it used to be in, my world will slowly shrink into dull nothingness and I will end up an old stiff-nosed crotchety woman who wears starched vests and walks about town with her nose high in the air and a thin condescending smile towards all the fun things of life. That would be kind of sucky, because I want to partake of the fun things in life.

I guess my fear of not having an exciting social life starts from my earliest memories, where fun things were equivalent to parties and lots of other people being around. And having parties requires some amount of social capital (and funds too, enough to feed people or at least enclose them and give them a place to sit, but I'm ignoring that for now because that cost need not be high). But, as I learned, having parties is a good way for me to feel that people like me, but it's not always very fun or very fulfilling for me. And so sometimes it feels like I put all this energy into something that I don't actually enjoy, but just do because somewhere, somehow, I've gotten the impression that that's the only way to live life.

In reading "The house of mirth" I felt like, on one hand, I could understand all these people's needs to outdress and out-entertain their co peers, but on the other hand, the struggles of victorian high society seem so petty. For the first time, though, in reading about the petty lives of rich people, I didn't feel like I was above their petty struggles because I work for a living, dammit (or could potentially, at any rate, but that's another story). Now I understand that a lot of these rich conceits stem from that same desire to make live be about something more than making a living and getting by each day. And so I empathize with those fictionalized stories instead of scorning them, because this same desire is the source of many of my insecurities about how I'm living my life.

I am what I am

I've started going to the Israeli Dance class at Berkeley's Hillel this semester. It's a much more active class than the one we had a stanford; there are a lot of Jews (mostly from LA) who come and a lot of them know a lot of dances. So it's been a really awesome experience to learn all these dances.

Socially, though, it does feel a little awkward. Everything feels a little socially awkward actually. As I was walking home today I realized that yes, making friends has always been hard for me. That doesn't mean I can't or don't do it; I have a lot of friends, and I enjoy meeting people and making friends (this is one example of how just because something is hard doesn't mean that I can't or won't or shouldn't do it). Nonetheless, being in new environments with people who have very different interests and goals from me is hard. It's a new feeling now because I'm not as used to it as I was before.

When I started going to the Israeli Dance class at Stanford, I felt a lot more awkward. I felt ugly and young and immature. People didn't really talk to me (because, as it turns out, making friends and starting conversations is hard for other people, not just for me), and so I felt like there must be something wrong with me. Then, after dancing with these people for nearly a year, that feeling went away. Well now it's back, because I'm in a new crowd. I feel uncomfortable again, although I really don't feel like there's anything wrong with me. It's just unusual, after spending all my days in lab where I feel, on the whole, pretty comfortable. It's good for me to feel uncomfortable like this, though; it reminds me that there's more to social interaction than discussing interesting topics (i.e. science) and it keeps me from getting too full of myself, which I am wont to do at times. For you see, there's still a large part of me, that will probably never go away, that assumes that all those undergrads (or at least the ones that don't smile at me, which is about half of them) hate me and thing I'm disgusting and want me to disappear from their holy Hillel forever.

I'm particularly reflective about this today because I saw my piano teacher's daughter, Paula, who goes to the Israeli Dance class after mine. After chatting with her and some other people I ended up borrowing a book called "Dancing with Cancer" by Loui Tucker, a dance teacher from San Jose who had breast cancer. The book is a compilation of the emails she sent out to her family and friends during the course of her therapy. It's written very well and very honestly; a part of me was bothered by her confidence in herself and in her network of friends and in the love her friends and everyone around her has for her. I think I was bothered because I'd like to have that kind of confidence in myself and my life, and I don't, at least not now.

I'm so lucky to have the family and friends that I do--and I know that--but knowing and feeling are two different things.

Humbled Revision

So, I have a midterm on thursday that I have a very good chance of failing--like seriously failing, due to sheer ignorance-- and over the past week I'm trying to get off my self-righteous soapbox and actually learn quantum chemistry. It's a very difficult subject. I dislike my professors pedagogy because it doesnt' really help me learn, but the truth is that there are a lot of approximation methods with their plusses and minuses, and as graduate students in physical chemistry we should know about them. I have an enormous amount of respect for my TA, not least because he gives me no credit for my half-assed homework assignments and also because he's actually quite good at answering questions.

So what's the point of this entry? That I'm looking for that balance between my self-righteous approach to my own educations (i.e. what are these fucktards doing not explaining anything to me?!? They can't teach worth shit!) and acknowledging that sometimes new things are hard and sometimes I just need to work a little harder than I maybe want to. I don't really know where that balance lies.

How Chemistry textbooks work (apparently)

Okay, I think I get it. In Chemistry textbooks, when an author is going to explain something to me, he will first tell me the results, tell me (in just enough detail to get me confused) what the essence of the thing he is going to cover is, and then dive into a chapter that covers the material for real.

I guess I understand the value of this approach. This way, I know why I should care about the method before I get into it. THe problem is that these introductions have just enough confusing terminology that when I read them before having read the actual chapter I get horribly nervous and feel like I don't understand anything at all.

But even in the course of the chapter, there is still this issue that the results are presented before their justification.

Take, for example, Configuration Interaction. It is, to my current (2-days' worth of exposure) understanding, a method of approximating the ground state wavefunction of an n-electron molecule by taking linear combinations of known n-electron wavefuctions and varying the linear combination coefficients such that the energy is minimized (i.e. use the variational principle).

Szabo and Ostlund covers this well. I'm not just saying this because Szabo's first name is Attilla, my TA recommended this book. But I guess the sad truth is that I actually have to read the whole 40 page chapter. I don't have that kind of attention span.

More on Chemistry vs Physics

As I was drifting away to sleep five hours ago after writing my previous post, I realized that the reason why I don't feel the same hatred towards physics departments as towards chemistry departments is due to specific people. There were plenty of people in my physics classroom that made me feel like there was hostility; however, I interacted with enough people in the department at Stanford who were friendly and who encouraged me to learn rather than resenting my taking up their time. These were people who liked learning and cared about teaching. And while there was a lot of them, they are still individuals that stand out. The thing is, in physics, probably half of the people with whom I interacted wanted me to half a positive learning experience; the rest didn't care. In chemistry, the vast majority didn't care. I can name 2 people who positively influenced my learning as a chemistry major, and both of them I met through research. I can name 10, maybe 15 or even 20 people who positively impacted my physics education. Maybe the people who go into physics are more my kind of people?

Why I hate Chemistry Departments

I decided last week that I hate Chemistry departments. I don't hate Chemistry--I almost majored in it in college--nor do I hate Chemists. Nonetheless, there is still something about chemistry departments that makes me deeply miserable, and I think that the greatest challenge I will have to overcome in grad school will be to figure out how to learn chemistry from the wonderful chemists that surround me in our department without falling into a pit of despair.

I first realized that I hate Stanford's chemistry department about three years ago, when I was a sophomore in college and was taking Quantum Chemistry and Analytical Chemistry, and had declared myself a chemistry major. By then, I had been working in a biophysical chemistry research lab for a year. I enjoyed research a lot--I met smart, fun, interesting people who shared many of my interests. I liked working on my own project, and even though it had not been going so well for the last six months of that year, I still valued working on it. Since I had all that going for me, I figured I could declare chemistry as my major, study it, and go on to a happy grad school in the sky.

But I was wrong. Mostly, I hated my classes. My biggest hate was Analytical Chemistry Lab. I think it was because I perceived that the TAs hated me. One of my TA's would go on and on about how lazy we Stanford students were compared to her undergraduate university (which, in case anyone is wondering, was not MIT). Ok fine. We are lazy. So I came to lab feeling not only bad about how I didn't understand the lab, but also feeling horrible about myself because clearly, this is even an easy class compared to the *real* chemistry classes out in real universities. Now, as a grad student, I look back and think "well it was just a lab class, it doesn't really matter." But it did really matter to me at the time, and being surrounded by TAs who resented having to teach me did not really encourage my love for the subject at all. Now I realize that many TAs resent having to teach because they have a lot of work to do themselves. My TA probably did not personally hate me, because I doubt she cared enough about me to really feel hate. I was just one of the many frustrations in her life, and a graduate students' life is filled with frustration. And the way one of my current labmates put it is this: Grad school is set up such that grad students always feel stupid. So they take out their feelings of inferiority on undergrads. If he's right, and I'm not sure if he is yet, this is probably what was happening in that lab.

Quantum Chemistry was the class I had been waiting to take for all of college. I tried to enjoy it at the time, but looking back, it was a major disappointment. I came out of that class with an appreciation for quantum mechanics, but with absolutely no intuition for it. I was sad. I wanted intuition. I wanted to understand what that spin-spin splitting that we had learned about in the context of NMR really was. And I wanted to understand what resonance structures really were. And what orbitals really were. And what the Stark effect was. I thought it was reasonable to expect to get this kind of understanding from a class that called itself quantum chemistry, but I was wrong. And it wasn't entirely for lack of trying. I read the textbook, I did the homeworks, I went to office hours, and I stayed after class asking the TA's lots of questions that, most of the time, they couldn't answer. What stands out in my mind the most was the introduction of spin. Spin is crucial to everything in science, and I am not even exaggerating--I am plagiarizing. The great David Chandler told me (and the rest of my Statistical Mechanics class) last semester that the difference between bosons and fermions is the most important distinction in all of science, because without it, you wouldn't have electrons, or the Pauli exclusion principle, or atoms or molecules...or proteins, or anything else that is Good in life and Fruitful for science. And so, given the importance of spin, and the distinction between fermions and bosons, you would expect--or at least hope--that a Quantum Chemistry class, the only quantum mechanics class required for chemistry majors, would teach people this loud and clear: Fermions are particles with half-integer spin, and bosons are particles with integer spin. And you would also think that in order to teach people this, you would tell them what spin is in a way that they can understand, or at least use.

I didn't get any of that from my quantum chemistry class. I also did not do too well in it (I got a B+). I was sad. Were it not for the experiences that were to follow, I would probably just assume that quantum mechanics is beyond me. Fortunately, I had a wonderful boyfriend who suggested that maybe if chemistry wasn't making me happy that I should major in something else. And when I replied that I was too incompetent to major in anything else, he dismissed these insecurities as being stupid. So stuck between stupid and stupid, I picked the less painful of the stupids. I had decided that if I was going to be bad at whatever it is I would major in anyway, I may as well major in something interesting, like physics. And hey, by the time I graduated with my physics degree, my GPA had gone up and not down, as I had expected.

And I say that not to brag, but to get to the point that mystifies me now. There is this idea in the scientific community that physics is harder than chemistry. I had this idea myself too in undergrad, which is why I felt so much hesitation about majoring in physics. But actually, this idea is kind of odd because the problems chemists try to solve are much more complex than those that physicists try to solve. But the problems in chemistry are so complex that chemists don't have time to go through the basics, and so there is a certain level of basic knowledge (e.g. What is a Hamiltonian? What is Angular Momentum? What is reduced mass?) that is assumed but rarely learned. And that stuff is really important if you ever want to build intuition.

And that brings me to the biggest source of evil in chemistry departments : my peers. And specifically, the hostility that I sense from my peers when I ask questions in class. You could say that this hostility is all in my head, and maybe I am exaggerating it because, yes, I am Jewish, but from talking to people I know that I am not the only one who feels this way. And that is what I completely don't understand. Presumably, we all want to learn chemistry, which is why we're in these classes, and so we should welcome each others' desire to learn. But for some weird reason it doesn't work that way. In the 2 chemistry departments I've inhabited, classes are percieved as a necessary evil, at best. Now, yes, chemistry is difficult. And yes, professors aren't always great, although the ones I've had at Berkeley all have been so far. But I think that as students, we're responsible for our own education and ultimately we have to make sure that we learn. And that is why I ask questions--to make sure that I learn the material. I'm about 90% sure that (most of) my questions aren't completely retarded. And yet, somehow, I do not feel asking questions is something that students feel comfortable doing, even when they are confused, perhaps because they are intimidated. I think this is bad, and more specifically, counterproductive. And maybe because everyone thinks that they should understand everything, or have seen it somewhere.

I think it comes back to the fact that a lot of basic knowledge is assumed in chemistry, but never really taught, so many people use terms that they haven't precisely defined (such as "coupling") and use shorthand notation (because writing out wavefunctions in full is too cumbersome) where a slight "typo" on the blackboard could completely change the meaning of the equation. This all makes me nervous and uncomfortable; in a safer environment, I can generally ask questions. But a chemistry department is not safe. Questions are not welcomed, since they are seen more as an annoyance for everyone than an opportunity for everyone to learn.

A postdoc in my lab said that it seems like physicists embrace each others' quirkiness more, whereas chemists are in general more socially conscious. I agree that this is true, although my evidence is not statistically significant. Still, I doubt my experience is unique--Stanford's chemistry department lost quite a few undergrad majors, and of the ones that stuck to it, a good number hated it. I don't know why. And even though I'd like to change things, I don't think it's in my power, at least not now. Now, I think, my objective is just to survive this hostility, and to extract all the wonderful knowledge that chemistry professors have to offer without becoming horribly depressed, like I did three years ago.