Career Prep @ CanTEST

This week is career prep week. I've been at CanTEST doing work experience for the past few days and it's alright. Sometimes it's mildly fun learning something new and feeling like an important chemist but other times when we run out of things to do, it's extremely boring. I'm in the trace metals department and basically what they do is test food, water, and soil samples for traces of (potentially problematic) metals. On Monday, I prepped a batch of 50 fruit samples. Tuesday, I prepped a batch of 80 meat samples that took forever. Today, I cleaned, re-shelved samples, put filters into tubes, poured three water sample batches for Edwin (there was a water sample collected from the Inlet that was brown and smelled of rotten eggs - fantastic!), made new filters, and was really bored because Rob didn't show up to work and so he wasn't there to boss me around. Lynn isn't as hard on us which is good, but that basically = boring.

Steps to prep a batch of samples:
1) Find samples & enter ID into Labware, also creating four controls & duplicates for every 10 samples.
2) Print labels for digestion tubes.
3) Fill digestion racks with tubes & stick labels on each [must go in order].
4) Go through the tedious process of matching the IDs on the empty tube with the ID on the sample with the ID on the computer for each before weighing 5-7g of sample into tubes.
5) Enter weight to 4 decimal places in Labware.
6) Repeat a million times.
7) Bring digestion racks to fume hood & fill each tube with nitric acid.
8) Put "lids" on each tube and wait for someone to heat the samples in hot block (aka: leave to go home & let someone else pick up after my mess)
9) Bulk up digested samples to 50mL with water.
10) Screw lids onto each tube & finis!

Tomorrow or Friday, I think we (Karen, the other work exp student from Gleneagle, and I) will get to go do stuff in the instrument lab where they actually test the samples that we (prep lab) make for them. I don't really care though, the people in there seem kind of bitchy. Prep is chilll though :) We run out of things to do and we usually get to leave at 3pm/4pm instead of 5pm. Today I left at 3:30pm!

I don't have pictures of this week yet because I haven't brought my camera with me. But I think I'll bring it in tomorrow. I have to prepare some visuals for the presentation thing at school after career prep is over anyway.

Other than that, I've been trying to get a move on my dance for grad showcase. I vowed before this week started that I was going to finish my routine this week since I don't have school and just cp. Uhh, yeah. So far, I've barely even decided on the song. I think I'm leaning towards Nothing by Nikki Costa but I don't know! I'm so indecisive! I can't pick one knowing that I'm sacrificing the others and knowing that I might come up with a better routine with any of the other songs I'm considering!