IdioC's Fifth Dimension
In the past few months, I’ve spent most of my time in some rather strange facility, and no, probably not the one you immediately think of. I doubt padded cells have good enough internet connections.
This is the quaint and unusual world of the chemical laboratory. Where people are beyond aware of the potentially harmful nature of strange powders and liquids, let still opt to stand in front of them in a glass cupboard in the hope that through stirring them or heating them it changes colour or forms lumps before 5pm. Where work involves changing one thing you can’t visually determine into another equally enigmatic species by the shape of a couple of a graphs, in the hope it might be medically or physically useful. Where you might handle something lethal, then consider it perfectly fine to eat your lunch in the room next door. Yet, allegedly, we’re just making some sort of living and are perfectly sane.
We are the people in little white coats.
Spending at least three years getting a degree – well, one-and-a-half if you discount the lie-ins while others got notes, summer breaks and moments of insobriety – clearly wasn’t enough to deter me from staying in lab work. Student life needs little introduction: absorbing the discoveries of the past hundred or so years as spoken by the great minds of the areas in question, after getting the notes of missed lectures a week before the exam; repeating the experiments of those who attempted new and innovative things, then making gargantuan mistakes through skipping off to lunch early; then striking our own paths through the wilderness of the scientifically unknown, usually turning out to be circular or old tracks in papers from 50 years ago that were just slightly overgrown. Somehow I avoided setting myself on fire, accidentally inhaling something to make me drop dead and cartoon-style explosions throughout my time and left University with a piece of parchment, wearing thick, black robes against all sense on one of the hottest days in summer and getting rained on in the British tradition. This was, however, a bitter-sweet moment, the friends from my department had PhD places lined up, the friends from my societies had their own paths to follow, whereas leaving with a BSc meant there was no space for me yet in the department I had worked in. The city that I had grown to know, love and get frustrated with the transport system of over the past few years was going to be left behind, with my career looking uncertain: a one-year MSc course would be difficult to find, a one-year MSc course in a research area relevant to where I’d worked before yet more so, a one-year MSc course with the money to keep me alive a needle in a haystack.
However, the wonders of modern technology, such as computers, needles usually being made of metal and enough caffeine to search through the potential paths in a coffee-blurred haze meant that the haystack was easier than ever to burn down to leave the needle behind. I could live 75 miles away and leave what I’d known behind, but have a living doing what I wanted to do. Move down for a year, do the work, get the parchment and then I could look for the suitable next research step, possibly moving back to see all the friends and places I’d left behind. Money talks. Importantly it talks to shops so I can get food, to landlords so I can get a roof on my head and to bars to get me beer at the end of the week. It’s an effortless negotiator.
But it was never going to be that simple, was it?