FOUR WAYS joining a lab will CHANGE YOUR LIFE (not clickbait)

WRITTEN BY YALE HUANG

ILLUSTRATED BY CHARLOTTE CHANG

Contamination is the nightmare of scientists around the world. Trifluoroacetic acid on your gloves? Scrub your hands, call EH&S, and pray to the chemistry gods that you don’t have permanent skin damage. Mycoplasma in your tissue culture? Toss out everything in the incubator and endure the judgment of your peers for delaying their experiment for weeks. 

As I stared down at my bowl of malatang, disposable chopsticks in hand, I felt the sure-fire signs of contamination creeping into my brain. I’d spent the last few weeks slaving over finals and hauling myself through the unenviable task of moving apartments, leaving me with no time to make my triumphant return to lab. But it didn’t matter. Unconsciously, I’d pierced one end of the wrapper with the tip of the chopsticks and pulled the paper off the other end—the same way I would unwrap a pipette in a tissue culture hood. 

Oh my god, I thought, a chill skittering down my spine. I’ve been infected. 

As a wise man once said, “All roads lead to lab.” So here are four ways joining a lab will irreversibly alter your brain chemistry. 

I. How to be the Best Roommate in the World

Column chromatography is the final boss of chemistry. Not because it’s a technically difficult or physically demanding experiment, but because after spending hours collecting your desired compound drop by drop, you’re left with the world’s most awkwardly shaped glassware stuffed to the brim with chemically-contaminated sludge. And here’s a spoiler: columns are awful to clean. They’re too tall to fit into the sink vertically, but can’t drain water when held horizontally. Try to cram them in regardless, and you risk shattering their delicate glass tip and earning a resigned sign from your grad student. 

At this point, an amateur might throw up their hands and proclaim the impossibility of the task. Fortunately, I am no amateur. Through years of setting up and tearing down experimental set-ups, I’ve honed my ability to wash glassware and forged myself into a connoisseur of oddly-shaped bobbles. 

Beakers and graduated cylinders? Child’s play. Vacuum traps? Scrubbed ‘till they’re glistening. Even columns no longer pose a threat. Simply angle the column diagonally and rinse acetone directly into the bulb, and gravity will finish the job. 

Naturally, this skill extends outside of the laboratory. When I was a freshman naive to the wisdom of the scientific field, I used to take at least an hour to clear a single sink of dishes. But after cleaning chemicals that burn through gloves and turn skin necrotic upon contact, the sight of my roommate’s stained tupperware stacked sky-high in the kitchen no longer fazes me. All it takes is a little elbow grease.

II. Totally Not Suspicious White Powder

Chemistry uses a concerning amount of white powder, which means that labels are a vital component of keeping your inventory organized and safe. After all, how else can you tell the difference between a vial containing sodium bicarbonate (totally harmless) or sodium metal (incredibly explosive)? 

Part of maintaining a meticulous inventory includes noting down the date of acquisition for time-sensitive chemicals like peroxides in order to track its natural degradation. It’s unfortunate, then, that the same habit rarely crosses the boundary into the everyday, because I’ve seen things in the back of my freezer I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy: conditioner bottles, brick-hard tupperwares of soup, bags of frozen chicken nuggets congealed into eldritch monstrosities of meat, ice, and plastic. The issue compounds exponentially with roommates. There’s no way to tell if your roommate’s actually going to eat that take-out container of soggy fries or if they’re conducting an experiment on mold for a Nature paper.

So after one too many close-calls with suspiciously sour chicken, I’ve adopted a new strategy. Whenever I shove a pack of frozen fruit or gyoza into the freezer, I scribble down the date it was opened. If I bring leftovers home, I tape a post-it note on the lid to remind myself that it’s a race against time (and mold). And you know what? Not only have I cut down on food waste, I can instead forge courageously onwards, confident that my four-day old leftovers won’t reduce me to tears on the toilet. 

Think of it like this: if you find a suspicious Tupperware of liquid in the bottom rack of your fridge, would you rather spend ten thousand dollars at the ER or know what exactly you’re putting into your body? 

Exactly. 

III. Simple Five Step Recipe for Chocolate Chip Cookies 

When my great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother first set her eyes on the rolling plains of good ol’ Wisconsin, she found home in the fields of butter-yellow corn and the ever-encroaching threat of the Midwest accent. Her favorite activity while waiting for my great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather to skip home from school was to sit mournfully by the window and ponder the human rights violations of the 1800s. Her second favorite activity was to bake warm, succulent chocolate chip cookies, the kind ripped from your five a.m. fantasies when you’re curled over your biochem textbook and blearily contemplating dropping out to start your own bakery. 

The meticulous process of baking has long since been a source of comfort for me, especially during the worst of my late-night studying sessions. When you’re confused about the contradicting intricacies of organic mechanisms, there’s nothing more satisfying than immersing yourself in a recipe and emerging with a batch of delicious sweet treats. As the professors always say, “chemistry is just like baking!” 

Turns out that’s not just an aphorism meant to ease the minds of new chemists. It’s also the truth! Beyond sharing reagents like sodium bicarbonate and glucose, chemistry and baking both require precise measurements, diligent oversight, and improvisation when things inevitably go south. There’s also a certain artistry in baking that echoes the aesthetics of chemistry. Every ingredient in a recipe plays a chemical role, whether that’s fluffing up the batter or brightening the flavor of a tart. Once you’ve learned the logic behind each step, the doors to the baking world fly open much in the same way that experimental chemistry explodes in scope after you pass organic chemistry. 

Not to mention the parallels in the technical aspects! Aliquoting the precise ingredients required for a macaroon or a soufflé becomes child’s play after experiencing the judgemental gaze of your grad student as you attempt to measure two milligrams of a very, very expensive reagent using a miniscule spatula, praying that you won’t drop 1000 dollars worth of chemicals on the analytical balance.

All that to say: we should bake more cookies during finals week.

IV. You Won’t Believe Number 10!! 

For a majority of my freshmen year, I cowered in my dorm room. The combination of COVID-19 and the stress of adjusting to a new environment robbed me of the opportunity to explore college, both socially and academically. So I rotted in bed, convincing myself that I had time. Even after I joined my first research lab, I remained a terrified, anxious student whose time in CHEM 7L had been truncated by the pandemic and whose knowledge of organic chemistry remained woefully inadequate. What if I dropped something important, or destroyed thousands of dollars worth of equipment? Worse, what if I disappointed my professor, and he regretted accepting me as an undergraduate researcher? 

Doubt was an ugly infection that plagued my every move. But we’ve come a long way since the days of leeches and blood-letting. For all of my fears and insecurities, my first research experience was uplifted by a kind and supportive PI, a brilliant graduate mentor, and the cleverest undergraduate peers I’ve ever had the honor of meeting. As I stumbled, tripped, and crashed my way through my initial training period, they picked me up, brushed me off, and helped me mature, not just as an academic, but as a peer and friend. 

Sure, lab is an infection. But it’s an infection that’ll push you to your academic limits and grant you expertise you’ll carry into every aspect of your life. For all the time I’ve spent scrubbing glassware, labeling reagent bottles, and carefully measuring out milligrams of ammonia sulfate, I’ve never regretted a single second of the time I’ve spent in the laboratory—and neither will you.