:rofl: Yeah.... no, probably not. The implication was very clearly that if such a thing were necessary, well... maybe P-Chem isn't the right place for you...

Clearly you didn't know Dr. Z.

A far kinder, gentler faculty member (once IAEC spokesperson, and a perfect British gentleman in every way) took one equally foolhardy ChemE senior to task for daring to ask in one of my upper division electives;

"So you keep using this term 'Ksp.' Could you just tell me what that is, exactly?"

shocked

Dr. British went ballistic, explaining that this (Trace Analysis) was a 600-level CHEMISTRY course, and that ChemE could damned well keep their undergraduates where they belonged if they didn't know any freshman chemistry, because this was a 400-level class even for them, and last time he checked, solubility products were covered in some detail in not one, but THREE prerequisite courses over the course of three separate years of preparatory classes leading to the class, and that if the student were truly curious, he could perhaps consult with any one of the two dozen graduate students whose TIME he was wasting with such a question, since any and all of us could answer it without even breaking a sweat, but that sure... he could spend ten minutes of class time on it... SURE. WHY. NOT?? (He was livid.)

The graduate students applauded when he ran out of breath, by the way. We weren't any happier than he was that those ignoramuses were in our class and wasting time with that kind of ill-prepared idiocy. WE all sat on one side of the room, and rolled our eyes collectively anytime one of the ChemE's raised their hands. It was invariably something that demonstrated that they had little business taking the course. The upshot is that this question was asked AFTER a twenty minute discussion of the merits of using a carrier to precipitate a trace analyte. So clearly understanding this concept was pretty key to the material under discussion for the previous 20 minutes. With that one question, this student demonstrated that he had NO grasp on what had just been discussed at some length, in some mathematical and theoretical detail (sufficient to jog pretty much anyone's memory, I'd have thought-- there was an audible GASP of disbelief from the grad students when it was asked).


The point of this obvious tangent is that this kind of problem has pretty far reaching consequences even into PhD training. Stupid people make us all a little dumber when they infiltrate. That's not to say that most TigerCubs are stupid... just like that Chem E student was clearly not stupid, or he'd never have made it through statics to bedevil me or my classmates... but still... he clearly had no business being in a 400-level chemistry class, no matter what he (or his department or adviser) may have thought.... it was memorable only because of Dr. British's uncharacteristically volatile response to it-- the type of thing was quite routine in a lot of my 600-level elective classes, I'm afraid.

Needless to say, the ChemE's weren't invited to the grad student study and homework sessions. Ha.





Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.