Graham, L. et al.
Many students on campus are facing a difficult financial choice; either buying an entire week’s worth of groceries, or going to their weekly Chemistry lab and accidentally chipping one frail beaker.
“I haven’t seen a fruit or vegetable in the past nine weeks, so I could really use that money for some lettuce,” said first-year student Jessica Wang, “but this week’s lab has like seven of those tiny NMR tubes that shatter if you look at them.”
Luckily, lab TA Dr. Adam Eilmann, whose students have nicknamed “Atom” [1], has some tips for those who fear that a mishandled beaker could bankrupt them.
USE OLD GLASSWARE
“Always go for the oldest-looking glassware. It’s counterintuitive, but those are the ones that’ve been around since the 80s. They’ve survived coked-up frat nerds for decades.”
CUT OUT THE COFFEE
“Coffee is expensive and makes your scurvy-ridden hands shakier than usual, which increases the likelihood that you will hit the resonant frequency of that delicate burette and cause it to shatter.”
HAVE A REALISTIC BUDGET
“The typical undergraduate breaks, on average, about two thousand pieces of equipment per semester [2], so set aside a few million dollars to pay for those “oopsie” days.”
