More Than Arrow Pusing

I'm an undergrad student living in the US and I'm staring graduation in the face.  I've taken almost every chemistry course, have done my time in two separate labs on campus, and am attempting to keep up-to-date on the field's current findings.  In an attempt to become more scientifically literate, I've started reading blogs and perusing textbooks.  In that attempt, I've come to find one thing: Synthetic Chemistry is more than arrow pushing.  What do I mean by that?  I mean that I can work through schemes and show the correct bonding mechanism.  I can read NMR's and Mass Spec readouts.  I can follow procedures and get good yields on my reactions.  However, there are subtexts and nuances that I seem to miss more often than not.  In group meetings, two professors will joke with each other on how difficult a certain compound might have been to work with, while I sit there never even knowing that it was so difficult.  Often times a paper will be published and someone will say: "Oh, that group is always doing good work" or "So-and-so published?  I wonder how mundane it will be."  There may be lists of compounds and working conditions listed for a given reaction, and a professor know immediately which ones will be the cheapest and/or most effective.  There are no classes that teach you these things, and I realize that much of this is experience talking.  But there's nothing wrong with a jump-start, right?

So I will put on this blog the new things that I've learned, come-across, or stumbled upon while reading papers and blogs and sitting in group meetings.  I hope this is the longest post I make.  I also hope that this inspires other undergrads like me to continue learning, even when its outside the bounds of classes.

-Woodward