Out of the Frying-Pan into the Fire

The most exciting point in this week is definitely the termination of week of finals, but there is subtle difference this time. If I were a fresh or year 2 student, I must struggle to achieve an outstanding or at least satisfying GPA after a whole semester of study, which is prompted by a simple wish to further my postgraduate study without a torturing examination. Regarding the “examination”, you may have heard that unlike many other regions in the world, a student in China must take exams arranged by a certain university/institute if he wants a master or PhD position there. Then only excellent undergrads are recommended by the college dean to skim the awful exam, and the critical criteria is your overall score encompassing the GPA and the awards they accomplished in the first 3 years. Luckily, because my score to date enables me to keep on top providing if I don’t fail any exam, now the situation on recommendation is less stressful for me, and the score of exams become less significant.

My girlfriend, Miss 🐑, also finished her finals, thus we enjoyed a harmonious morning in a café playing It Takes Two. Video game is always one of the best recreations for me since my first encounter in an internet bar when I was a pupil when global games like Crossfire, War III, DotA were still of high population among the teens. But it’s shame I seldom play with my friends. On the one hand I feel uneasy to deal with the possible dispute caused by my clumsy operation or my partners’, thus the experience would be extremely awful. On the other hand, the friendship might worsen merely due to my personal mood and avoidance, which is not an ideal consequence. However, playing with Miss 🐑 is magical that I did not have such contradictory complex throughout the whole game time, even if we are playing the famous “cancer game”, It Takes Two. The joy of being accompany with her thoroughly overcame it, and I even felt glad to see a worse-skilled player sitting beside me. She’s really awkward in keyboard controlling, and things are slightly better with the Xbox controller but still unable to control May (one of the roles in game) at will. Miss 🐑 is an optimist, thus she was also amused by her hilarious attempt on fluently controlling the role. Therefore, after a whole morning of struggle, we simply past the Chapter One but found pleasure in it.

Actually, this week ends up with an annoying internship spanning from 28th June to 16th July, and currently I am sitting right in the office typing in my words. Here is a functional food testing center affiliated to Shaanxi Center for Traditional Chinese Medicine Research. Sounds cool in view of it’s a provincial level center. However, it is 40 km away from my campus and located in the suburb Xi’an, just at the foot of Qinling Mountains. What’s worse, the dorm they provide to us interns are dusty and disgusting. The bed is bit by the worm and covered with a thick layer of dust. If you look closer, you would find the trace of mold in the crevice of bed board (well, of course the bed board is bit by the bugs and worms before my arrival). Thanks to my parent who chatter to me about how to overcome the annoying bugs, otherwise I must have fainted at the first glance. To my satisfaction, the dorm looked slightly better after our tidying and cleaning.

The second stuff I criticize and complain a lot is the hygiene of bathrooms. The squat toilet is covered with disgusting yellow scale which is possibly the sedimentation of urine and feces, indicating a poor management of the bathrooms. Perhaps the staffs have never cleansed the toilets since they were equipped. Together with the scale, the air inside this tiny room is extremely stinky. Staying in the 1 m2 room, if you have basic knowledge of biochemistry, a reaction will immediately occur in your mind, which is the decomposition reaction of urea to ammonia. Then please forgive my foul language when I squatted in the room for the first time. I felt like being sealed up into a bottle of ammonia and deposited in an autoclave, because the temperature in day easily reached 35 ℃ which accelerated the reaction and dispersion of ammonia gas. Flies and spiders nest in such narrow and dirty room, further worsening the experience of excretion.

I am learning the operation of gas chromatography (GC) system this week. The GC system in the lab is 7890B of Agilent Technology, and I know a bit of it in my Metabolomics course. To be honest, the job in this lab is repeated and boring. They gather the sample, most of which are functional food or cosmetics, from factories or companies and analyze the effective composition using GC day in day out, but it really requires the analyzers to have a good command of GC. After all, only experts are qualified for a position in a such a provincial level testing center. In fact, although I have learnt a lot about GC in class, I am still unable to skillfully apply it into research. For instance, there are mainly four kinds of the detector utilized in GC, which are thermal conductivity detector (TCD), electron capture detector (ECD), flame ionization detector (FID) and flame photometric detector (FPD), respectively. Sometimes we connect GC with mass spectrometer (MS) to determine the chemistry nature. My professors only tell us the differences among them, but they won’t mention that every time we try to analyze a sample, we should choose the correct detector by manipulating the hardware to determine and quantify our desired composition according to their property. For example, the FID is a good detector for organic compound, ECD is appropriate for halogen and FPD is used for sulfur and phosphorous detection. Then how to switch the detector manually…blah blah blah. I believe the knowledge I learn in class is not adequate at all if I engage in GC work. Hence, to some extent, I do tressure the time here.

A necessary rotation is required among different labs, so in one or two weeks I could learn liquid chromatography (LC), atomic florescence spectrometer (AFS) or atomic absorption spectrometer (AAS). The story goes on, and let’s see what happens.