Bad Lab Partners

>8th lab this semester
>engineer lab partners
>"What are the units?"
>"How do I calculate uncertainty?"
>"hurr durr human error"
>screaming inside
>mfw

weed out classes tend to happen after freshman year

Fucking engineers

Dude I had this fucking cunt called Faisal in chem lab,

When we asked what concentration chemical we used for a redox titration he literally made it up because he didn't know. We did all the calculations with the value he gave us too. Failed that lab...

You at oxford by any chance?

Nah aussie here

>How do I calculate uncertainty?
Well they don't explain this shit to us.

If that were the case, then why am I in junior year and there are still fucking BRAINLETS in my classes who pick up on things extremely slowly and ask retarded, trivial questions they would have known if they actually payed fucking attention, thus causing the professor to explain literally the exact same fucking thing three fucking times. Every. Single. Class.

Anyone have a similar experience?

>middle of molecular bio degree
>genetic engineering lab
>need to do gel electrophoresis to visualize and cut a DNA band from the stained gel, so we need to get as much of our dna sample into the gel as possible
>need to pipette ~20μl of our sample to an eppendorf tube before pipetting it into the electrophoresis well, so the pipetting of both the loading buffer and the sample have to be precise
>have some weird chink partner assigned by accident that spends all his time typing runes to his friends while I work
>Am about to do the pipetting, but he interjects and says it's his turn
>plsno.jpg
>he takes the sample tube and eppendorf tube from me, opens the caps, and tries to pipette
>as expected he tries to rush the pipetting EVEN THOUGH I TOLD HIM TO TAKE IT SLOW AND AS PRECISE AS POSSIBLE
>half the sample ends up on the walls of the tube, the bottom has too little sample
>he tries to suck the wall drops back into the pipette
>eyeswidened.jpg
>sucks air and sample back, pipettes it into the bottom sample despite my reservations, fills it with bubbles and starts cursing
>after my long attempts to break the bubbles by impact, he tries to pipette what is left into the gel well
>at this point, I had already talked to a few friends about letting me cut their own part of the gel to continue the experiment
>regardless, he tries to pipette it and misses and the sample slowly disappears in the vastness of the gel, just like my hope of a smooth practical session did
>no apologies, no nothing, just "oh well" and went back to his chink messages

These people don't belong in labs, it's not like it was our first lab, there were dozens of sessions before where you couldn't have just ignored basic fucking lab practice and pipetting skills. Even THEN your partner told you a hundred times how to do it correctly, but it had no effect. What. The. Fuck.

>go to school to learn
>nobody teaches
>people won't answer your questions
>class isn't even related to the required book
This is why people join academic frats and frats with test banks.

He was clearly sabotaging

>This is why people join academic frats and frats with test banks.
Wait a minute. Is that was the Asian fraternities are about?

>Is that was
Is that what*

Holy shit I know what you mean, University of Auckland guy here, and that means a shit ton of Chinese who hold their phone sideways to make voice messages and can't speak English well. So my lab partner for stage 1 inorganic chemistry was some Chinese girl who was unable to pronounce "Aluminium" (UK spelling) and "Ammonium" differently. She sounded like those asians trying to phonetically pronounce english words without any background to the language. At least most of the tasks were individually done and she wasn't incompetent. Seriously though, learn the language or fuck off.

>payed

The Rhydberg constant is one of the most accurately measured fundamental physical constants.

Are you a mac uni fag?

nah got my piece of shit lenovo

>wifi driver works can't print
>laggy as fuck
>battery doesn't charge and has to be plugged in

would still choose over appletop

I think he was asking whether you go to the cesspool that is Macquarie University.

It actually works out pretty well here at Unimelb with the Chinese students. There are basically two socials castes: Chinese students and everyone else. There are enough of them that they just work in their own groups in labs and tutes, and the non-Chinese students work in theirs. We don't have to interact with them, they don't have to interact with us; which is the ideal situation for everyone.
It does lead to an interesting phenomenon, though, where I'm almost certain there are Chinese students who go through their entire undergrad without talking to a single local student.

>cesspool
I really don't have any rebuttal, I go here and I hate the place

Those articles about how the Uni lets pretty much anyone in were pretty damning. Students with ATAR's in the 30's were getting in!

>user doesn't know what a bench top microcentrifuge is: the post

I run gels all the time. There is a fine art to even just slowly flicking/stroking the tube in such a way to get the sample mostly to the bottom. A 20 ul volume is pretty large by mol. bio standards. Try doing 10 ul qRT-PCR setup for 384-well plates.

The number of retards here seems to increase every year. Ive ta'd some first year courses and every year they dumb it down more and more basically so the fail rate stays the same and the uni pulls in more money by letting more students in every year with pathetic atars

nah "asian interest" frats just drink a lot

he's probably referring to professional frats

Stage?

My lab partner broke a centrifuge... twice.

Not so much bad lab partners, but stupid shit I've witnessed as a chemistry student.
Some of it was retarded, some of it simple mistakes, some of it may have been sabotage.
>someone wanted to dump ethanol waste into the vat for bases because it has OH in its formula
>pharma students leaving the lab tables a mess
>some of the chemical engineers left glassware so filthy it was borderline insulting, granted it was after a polymer lab sessions, but some of them didn't even try to clean the glassware
>mysterious cases of glass ending up in the vats for solid waste, sometimes not even broken glass but types of vials we didn't use and maybe pharma didn't even use, this got the university some fines, we still don't know whether it was sabotage, lazy pharma or someone who didn't know what they were doing
>rotavapors turned to max heating for no good reason
>attempting extraction with a separation funnel but the plug didn't match the opening of the funnel
>some guy did TLC but accidentally switched his eluens for water
>in the vat for broken/unusable glass: a perfectly intact ball condenser attached to a perfectly intact flask, the only thing broken was a pasteur pipette which was stuck inside but easy to remove, our assistent was heartbroken
>one of our assistents got silica mixed up with salt, needless to say some people had to remake their chromatography column and the assistent was playfully ridiculed for the rest of the afternoon
>chemical engineer in their third year not knowing what 1-hexanol is
>chemical engineers mesmerized that after we dry a solution with magnesium sulphate, we filter it
>lab partner using wrong pump and adding sodium hydroxide instead of hydrogen chloride
>assistent adding something to your reaction mixture and refusing to say what it is
>same assistent throwing a small scoop of some fluerescent powder in a gold fish tank
>same assistent hiding a balloon with diethylether and dry ice under a bench
cont.

>assistent adding something to your reaction mixture and refusing to say what it is
>same assistent throwing a small scoop of some fluerescent powder in a gold fish tank
>same assistent hiding a balloon with diethylether and dry ice under a bench
the absolute madman

how

>someone setting up a Jones reductor without wearing gloves
>I myself once synthesised nylon-6-6 in a 2-phase system but was stuipd enough to stir
The next few I didnt witness myself.
>someone thought either acetic acids belonged with the inorganic acids or nitric acid belonged with the organic acids, either way it did boom
>someone handled palladium on activated carbon rather roughly and a spark igninted the mathanol (which shouldn't have been in the flask yet), got startled, knocked over flask, lab table on fire

a fun person desu
I once asked him where the dichloromethane was (we have a special destillation setup to keep it dry) and he tried to convince me it's a crystalline solid

>Doing temperature sensitive measurements involving the production of hydrogen gas in several containers simultaneously to avoid error in air circulation or ambient temperature
>Lab-mate lights a match and drops it in one of the containers to check if hydrogen is being produced w/o my permission
>Hint: there was a hell of a lot of hydrogen
It took 4 hours do redo it all

First time unbalanced placing of tubes

Second time poorly attached lid

>light speed measuring experiment
>it's basically a bunch of mirrors and lenses that need to be set up carefully or you won't see shit
>we set everything up nicely
>lab partner slams both his hands on the table where the nicely fine tuned equipment is and exclaims "Well done!"

>Be me
>Enter lab
>Some stupid chink as partner lol
>Oh wait
>effect of shrooms wears off
>I am not in a lab
>my partner was actually just my real analysis by terence tao textbook that I drew terence's face on
>my major is actually pure mathematics
>here all grades are measured objectively on individual skill
>no brainlets so we logically deduce new knowledge instead of labs
>lol phew

I remember for my Calc III Lab, i had some stupid hick girl who kept asking stupid shit like "whats the derivative of a natural log" and making mistakes like stating x was the derivative of any constant number

>Calc III Lab

>""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""Lab"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""'''

Your fault for going to a shit school

>Calc III Lab
>Lab

This thread makes me glad I haven't had any terrible partners. The worst I had was a well-meaning idiot who at least gave a good effort.

Not him but surely youve had mandatory tutorials for calc classes? I had physics classes that ran "labs" in off-weeks that were just mandatory tutorials in which u had to answer questions.

no because were not brainelts

>tfw spend hours doing uncertainty calculations for every single fucking trial by hand because I'm too much of a pleb to learn latex

>latex
>doing calculations
you fucked up dumbass

I think you mean Excel

>Excel
>doing calculations
you fucked up you dumbass

>Excel
>not doing calculations
you fucked up dumbass

>Using Excel for calculations
dumbass up fucked you

>having mandatory classes makes you a brainlet
rlly makez u think

>not using Excel for repetitive calculations
Dumbass you fucked up

> baby's first computational engine
you're just embarrassing yourself

>Calc III Lab
what did he mean by this?

Lol

>implying

God damn people who bring math to life.

I have a chinese international student in my physics lab and I literally do all the work each week.

Honestly, as a freshman, I feel like lectures are fucking useless for my calc and chem classes. The shit is so simple we could just read the book and be fine for the test. Especially for my chem class, sure we learn shit in the lecture but you pretty much have to read the entire chapter to know everything on the test.

That sounds horrific.

But you know, uni should be for everyone!!! /s

>I feel like

Fuck off. Nobody cares what you feel like, you stupid narcissistic little faggot. Every time I hear this phrase I want to punch a cat.

Me.

I slid the nozzle of a distilled water bottle into my lab partner's rolled up sleeve and dumped about 50-100mL into it before he noticed.

user???

B-b-but my feels

I'd bet my left nut that your lab partner is a girl

>caring about bubbles when loading PCR
>not knowing you can just spin that shit down
>thinking you need any kind of precision with loading buffer volumes
lolololol you're both idiots

Better to be in a shit uni than a good one where I have to get at least a 77% to pass aka take the next course along the line. No scaling too, its fucking brutal. I just want to smoke pot and play video games man... and have $$$.

>his course doesn't teach him a programming language

That's your lab partner you're talking about? That's your fault for not paying attention and stopping him from using the wrong chemical.