Proverbs
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- A day in the library can save a week in the lab.
- A week in the lab can save you a day in the library.
- Excess equals success.
- If you don't get what you like, try to like what you get.
- If you spend all day on the internet...you may not graduate in time.
- Knowing the chemistry of a reaction before running it once is better than running it ten times without knowing anything.
- No one ever spends as much time in the lab as they think they need to-just more than they know they want to.
- No project is ever finished faster than you thought it would be.
- No one leaves details out of a paper without a reason.
- Only a dry solvent is a good solvent.
- The more you try the luckier you get.
- Yields go down faster, easier, and with less warning than they go up.
- You can never have too much starting material.
- Just because you found it in literature doesn't mean it's correct
- If you want to save time, do it right the first time around
- Just carry it on to the next step, it'll be easier to purify and isolate later.
- Getting a PhD isn't about intelligence, it's about perseverance.
- The worse it smells, the greater chance that it will bump.
- If it is highly colored, you will spill it on yourself.
- Never trust a label.
- Don't have time to do it right, but have time to do it again?
- When in doubt, throw it out.
- 100% consumption of starting materials does not necessarily mean good reaction
- The flask only falls when you are not there to catch it.
- Cowboy first. You can be more careful later. And you'll know you have to be in the future.
- Measure twice and cut (react) once
- Let it sit, and it goes to sh*&.
- A gram in hand is worth two in the flask
- Projects take as much time as you give yourself.
- Always keep the supervisor out of the lab: A one hour visit by The Old Man can set you back a month.
- Scale it up? Go BIG or GO HOME!
- Q: What's all that brown precipitate floating around? A: Probably your product. Filter it off and see.
- There are two kinds of people, those who finish and those who do not.
- The more frequently you TLC a reaction, the sooner it goes to completion.
- Expensive glassware begs to be broken
- A day in the library can save a week in the hospital
- The success of a reaction is inversely proportional to the value you attach to it
- Experiments should be boring - explosions are NOT FUN
- Just because your advisor references a paper and so does your book doesn't mean the reaction works
- A little contaminant makes a huge difference in color
- reactions do not run themselves
- There is no try... there is do or do not
- do not reinvent the wheel
- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.
- too much analysis leads to paralysis
- 10 seconds labelling a sample saves 30 minutes identifying it later.
- You don't have to be the smartest student in graduate school, just don't be the slowest buffalo in the herd.
- Cleanliness is next to success
- Two weeks in the lab can save a day in the library
- Change or you will be changed
- Always run a crude NMR
- Love your chemistry, chemistry will love you!
- Real chemists pee in the sink
- The flask is our canvas...the periodic table is our paint.
- Anything is possible with a small equilibrium.
- Decomp is never that far away.
- One chemist's side product/decomp is another chemists target.
- If it was easy it wouldn't be worth such a fancy degree.
- If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the precipitate
- Golden rule of organic synthesis: Never throw away anything (except into a labeled flask)
- Never do a column on a friday afternoon
- There are NO trivial reactions.
- It's not the cage that sings, it's the bird inside.
- your path to a PhD is a straight line between two dots. Most people follow a squiggle path. You DONT want to orbit (the first dot).
- Time is one thing you can never get back.
- Extractions and Columns always take longer than you think
- garbage in, garbage out
- Boiling is an uncomfortable phase
- There is no better action than over-reaction.
- assumption is the mother of all screw-ups
- five percent equals ninety five percent! It is only a question of optimization...
- The work isn't done until the pigs are fed, watered and ready to fly!
- Don't assume the reaction will work...It won't work until next month.
- the more you get,the more you want
- The more you learn, the dumber you feel
- The bigger the coffee cup, the better the chemist.
- Dropped glassware always breaks on the third bounce.
- Rearrangements happen.
- Just do it!
- Never just do one thing at a time.