Wednesday, January 9, 2019

Chemistry arranged by purity

7 comments:

  1. I'm not sure whether polymer chemists would be between analytical and organic or between analytical and physical - probably the latter, but I don't know.

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    1. And nanomaterial chemists should be below biologists when they realize it's just y2k colloid chemistry...

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  2. I was really surprised to find that organic was considered the most ultra-competitive extreme type-A personality area when I arrived in grad school. At my undergrad school, organic was relatively easy because the class was mostly bio majors and premeds with a handful of chemistry majors (and many of my classmates ended up washing out of bio or premed into easier majors after bombing O-chem). P-chem was a killer because there were no non-majors in the class to make the curve easier, and I had always thought of it as the hardest area of chemistry until I got to grad school and found that all of the over-the-top 80-hour-a-week groups were organic.

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  3. and biochemists only appear when there's a Nobel prize being drawn.

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  4. I though chemists made crude measurements on pure materials and physicists made precise measurements on crude materials. What physical chemists do is hotly debated.

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    1. They are mostly keyboard jockies.

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  5. Biochemists can do it all at any "purity". They are missing from this line-up if you truly understand the difference between a biologist, chemist, and biochemist.

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looks like Blogger doesn't work with anonymous comments from Chrome browsers at the moment - works in Microsoft Edge, or from Chrome with a Blogger account - sorry! CJ 3/21/20