QUT Science - hands-on chemistry

Early on in the lectures our lecturers spoke about chemists liking reactions that go bang
or burn.
We got into the labs and experienced the beginning of these experiences ourselves.
We also applied the theory that we were learning in the lectures in the actual lab, experiments
that we were able to do.
Similar to high school we get to use a variety of lab equipment.
You use basic balances then go to the balance room and weight accurately on the Mettler
balance, Bunsen burners, glass pipettes with rubber bulbs, which is quite a skill to perfect.
Our tutor does experiments under the fume hood in small groups and we get to really
see what is actually happening in the experiments.
They explain out what the hazards are, they explain it, what, how to do specific shaking
of the flasks.
If we have to do vigorous shaking they actually show you how vigorous.
We can actually get quite violent with the shaking of the flask when we’re trying to
actually get a reaction to actually start to happen.
I didn’t realise how much I would enjoy university coming back as a mature age student
I had a very, very interesting idea of what university would be like and it’s so not
what I thought it would be.
I thought I would be struggling a lot.
There is a lot of support that they do actually offer which I was very grateful for.
Within the Chemistry realm they do actually have what they call the Maths Access Centre
Chem help, and so on a Thursday or whatever day it works out for most of us they come
in and we can go in and they actually explain out the maths behind the chemistry so if we
didn’t quite get it in the Maths and we didn’t quite get it in the Chem lecture
we can go along to those and they just explain it all out.
The tutors also help us with any questions we’ve got.
They have got a lot of patience with us so we can ask the most inane questions sometimes
and they just happily turn around and give us the answer and we’re like “oh yeah
of course, that makes sense” so they’re really good like that.