3/31/2023
Hi everyone, I hope you are well! In today’s blog, I’m going to talk about my experiences in various lab classes during my time at Amherst. The labs my first year were almost entirely virtual, so I’ll talk a bit about how those operated, and I’ll also talk about what you can expect if you enter introductory and higher-level physics, chemistry, and biology classes. Please email me at sgoldsmith24@amherst.edu if you have any questions!
Biology labs
Although I am a biology major, I find biology labs to be some of the most arduous of the lab classes I’ve taken at Amherst. Reactions often take a long time, and because some of the lab time is devoted to understanding concepts while reactions are running, I sometimes struggle to keep up with my classmates in their progress in understanding what is happening and why. In my molecular genetics lab especially, I struggled to understand the intricacies of the work we were doing in lab. Pre-lab readings helped sometimes, but I often needed to revisit exactly what we did multiple times when studying for a test. That being said, I enjoy doing bench work, and recommend biology labs if you do too.
Some of my intro biology labs were conducted outdoors: for one of them, we got to look for plants and animals on a nature walk, and in another we counted a certain type of plant in a given square area. I enjoyed getting to be in person (this was during my COVID year) and outdoors, and being able to physically interact with what we were studying.
Chemistry labs
Chemistry labs are some of my favorite labs that I’ve had at Amherst. I’ve taken a year of organic chemistry, which involved 3.5 hour labs once a week. They rarely lasted the entire time, and the protocols walked us through each step of performing reactions. Unlike physics labs, where we have to design our own experiments, in chemistry labs we did the experiments (often with some unknown substances) and had to determine what reaction was occurring, where molecules transferred, and the identities of various unknown substances. A lot of labs ended with crystallizing products, which we could weigh to measure our yield of our reactions. In one lab we got to dye a piece of fabric, and in another we got to make a polymer that formed at the interface of two liquids. The lab professors gave quick lectures at the beginning of each lab to help orient us to the week’s reaction, and were very very good at answering questions on the fly and helping students move forward. I highly recommend organic chemistry at Amherst.
Physics labs
I’m in my first physics class at Amherst right now, so I only have experience in the PHYS-116 (intro physics) lab. It is different from the labs in other science classes in that we are not given a protocol; instead, we are given some model to test or some question to answer, and have to design an experiment to find the solution. It is a little painstaking and frustrating to figure out what to do for each step instead of being told what to do as in chemistry or biology, but I recognize that the best way to understand a concept is to be forced to really grapple with it. These labs usually take close to the full time, and involve building pulleys and ramps, and launching balls across the room. It’s pleasant but toward the end of the three hours I think we all find it a little hard to stay super focused on the task at hand. My lab professor is incredible, and I learn a lot about concept application in the lab.
Thank you for reading! Have a great weekend!