On Labs...

Did your teachers at 1 point or another of your schooling life tell you that lab's interesting, hands-on, fun and exciting? Where you get to mix 2 transparent chemicals and *poof* you get a nice colour in a test-tube; You get to dissect animals such as rabbits, frogs, hearts, eyeballs etc...all the more interesting for students into gore; You get to swing a pendulum and count the periods...how fun; (Btw, this is why I hate physics, literally dry and tasteless); As we go onto JC, we are introduced into another form of lab, labs dealing with DNA, western blotting etc and there the teachers go again. Isn't it marvellous this thing about DNA discovery, we can see the proteins, pass a current through and there you have intense bands in a sea of black.

I remember when I was younger ( before I even touched labs...when practical sessions were putting a dented ping-pong ball into a hot cup of water and watching it regain its shap), those were the rosy pictures I had of lab. And at a certain point of my life, I think I swore to be a scientist? Damn...I can't imagine studying science for so many years only to wash test-tubes in a pathetic lab.

Anyway, for those young kids still having a rosy outlook of laboratories, think thrice....because you may jolly well just end up like this halfway through the lab session:

By the way, this is the current Dr. SIYA Chen, PhD, A/P School of Sleepology, NTU. Applications are now open for the 4 years-direct honours course in Sleepology. She's hiring lab techs too...so bioscience grads, no worries...another job opportunity for us.