Last meeting with Mohammed

            This was my final meeting of the semester with Mohammed. It was a bittersweet moment. Unfortunately I didn’t get to bond as well with him as some of my other classmates did with theirs given my unusual circumstances regarding my original partner. For the last meeting I wanted to learn more about his family because it was a topic we never really went into. I learned a lot about his family so lets see if I can remember it all.

            First off, I was shocked to hear that Mohammed has four brothers and four sisters! He more or less the middle child at 26 while his oldest sibling is 42 and the youngest is 18. I asked what they all do and a little bit about them and this is what he told me.

            I’ll start with his youngest sibling, which is his sister Sarra. She is eighteen years old and is currently studying engineering. He also has a sister who is 22 and currently studying dentistry. Her name is Wala. I don’t recall if he told me where they are going to school but I think they are studying somewhere in the United States.

            His youngest brother Hassan is next at 24. He didn’t finish college and is helping one of his older brothers run their late fathers company.

            Mohammed is the fourth youngest and is hoping to study supply chain management here at TCU next semester. His next oldest sister is Zainab. I feel like I would get along with her really well because she is a chemistry teacher back in Saudi Arabia. Zainab has been married for the last eight years.

            The next oldest sibling is his brother Firas who is thirty-three. He is a businessman that is the manager of their fathers company. He is the one that Hassan helps. He has been married for the last two years

            His brother Abdullah is 36. He is currently and engineer for a company back in the Middle East. He has been married for the last two years and graduated from American University in Dubai.

            Husain is 40 years old and is a math teacher. I forgot if he teaches in the States but I do know that he graduated from the University of Chicago. He has been married since 2001.

            Lastly his oldest sibling is Zahraa and she is forty-two years old. She is an English teacher that has been married since 1994. Her husband is a manager for Aramco, which is the largest petroleum company in the Middle East. She lived in the States for five years and in Canada for another four because of her husband’s job.

            Of course I then told Mohammed about both of my brothers. I have a twin brother who is studying molecular biology and cello performance at Hope College in Holland, Michigan. He is a junior (duh we’re twins) and looks absolutely nothing like me. I told him that we look related but because we are fraternal twins we don’t look exactly like each other. My little brother is 18 and his name is Cole. He is the quarterback for Hope and is studying applied mathematics.

            I thought that this discussion was a great note to end on. I was also surprised at how much I learned about Mohammed by learning about his family. It was also cool to hear what it was like to live in such a big family. I thought my family of five was on the large side but it isn’t anything compared to his!

Meeting with Mohammed #5

            Earlier this week I met with Mohammed for my fifth conversation partner meeting. We met at the usual spot outside of Union Grounds, and we got right into conversation when he arrived. I asked him if he was nervous for his finals (which were this week) and he seemed to be pretty confident. I could tell he had been studying hard because he had a few grammar textbooks with him that looked like they were pretty well loved.

            I asked him how his thanksgiving break was, which was a dumb question because he had finals this week, and as expected he said he spent most of the break studying. I told him that I was about to start studying for finals and how I’m not really looking forward to it. I explained that I don’t mind taking the tests; in fact I actually sort of enjoy taking the exams. He told me I was crazy and asked me why I was not looking forward to them. I clarified that I’m not looking forward to the studying part. Tests I can handle but the long, tedious eight-plus hour days in the library tend to drive me insane. I told him that it was worth it to me to put in that much effort. When I sit down to take a final and I know all (or at least most) of the material, I get the biggest sense of joy after I finish. I told him nothing quite compares to coming out of test knowing that you did really well.

            When he asked about my break we got on to the topic of food. Realizing that I haven’t ever asked him about American food, I asked him what his favorite American food was. He surprised me when he said steak. I don’t really think of steak as an American food but I can’t really argue with the fact that steak is awesome. Mohammed added that his favorite food back home is kabab and kabsa. So I think its safe to say that he likes meat.

            After a rather lengthy discussion about different foods and how it is hard to define American food due to the large number of cultures that live here, Mohammed asked me what I’m going to be doing over break. I told him that one of the first days back (December 16^th) is my twenty-first birthday.  I told him that I would be working the first and last weeks of break in the bike parts factory that I worked in over the summer. The weekend before Christmas my parents are taking my twin brother and I to stay at the Four Seasons hotel in Denver and go to the Capitol Grill to celebrate or birthday. Other than that I told him that I’ll probably just be relaxing, snowboarding and shooting guns.

            Mohammed told me that he was jealous. I then asked him what he was doing and quickly found the source of his jealousy. He said that he would be studying even more English for the IELTS. This is the test that foreign students have to pass in order to attend and American university. He said that it insures that he is competent reading, writing and understanding lectures in order to be successful in school. This is when I remembered that I would also be studying a little over break for the LSAT. I told him this in an attempt to sympathize with him.

            The meeting had to abruptly end because he had to go study for a final he had the next day. We set up the time for our last meeting and went on our separate ways.

Learning #4

            The end of the semester is now upon us. Two more days of classes remain and I still can’t believe how fast it has all gone by. I have learned so many things this semester it is really hard to fit them all into four two-page responses.

            I know most of you aren’t well versed in the realm of physical chemistry and thermodynamics. It’s probably not a topic that most would find “fun.” Words like torturous and excruciating probably come to mind. The reason I am talking about this is because it’s a perfect example and summation of what I wrote in my first learning response. In that entry I wrote about how I was learning new ways to learn as well as putting the pieces of the puzzle together. In the last lecture of physical chemistry this afternoon we finally derived an equation that brought the class full circle. It was an equation that we used almost all the time in general chemistry and never knew what it was for.

            After years of just accepting it, an entire semester of deriving and working up to it we finally saw where the equation came from. I am talking, of course, about the equilibrium constants of a reaction and how they relate to concentrations of the various reactants and products present in the solution. We also explained why you never take the solvent into account when calculating the equilibrium constant.

            This is only true for dilute solutions, which is a pretty good approximation when talking about a solute in a solvent. Unless the solution is very concentrated, the solvent will be the majority of the solution. As it turns out this number as a function of reaction extent (or how far the reaction has proceeded) is RTln(conc solvent+reaction extent/conc solvent). The reaction extent has to be between zero and one therefore it becomes approximately RTln(1), which, of course, is zero because the natural log of one is always zero. This value therefore drops out of the equation and no longer needs to be accounted for. This is why the solvent never shows up in the equilibrium constant expression.

            Another part of this derivation yielded a huge mess of partial derivatives with respect to the reaction extent that were a result of taking the derivative of the Gibbs free energy per mole as a function of reaction extent. As complicated as it may sound or may look the derivative of that whole mess ends up summing to zero. That leaves the classic equation .

            It may not seem like much but it was a lot of time waiting and wondering where it actually came from. This is a prime example why I love taking my upper-level major courses. I’m finally learning why and where things come from as opposed to just learning how to plug numbers into these magical equations that give you the right answers on tests.

            I have also learned that understanding where things come from and deriving them from scratch has increased my knowledge on the subject immensely. I can now answer questions about thermodynamic equilibrium that I wouldn’t even have known how to start previously. I cannot only explain that the equation works but how it works. Call me crazy but I find that incredibly exciting and fascinating.

            Seeing my learning experiences this semester come full circle is one of the most satisfying feelings. I may have not learned as much material this semester as I have in previous ones, but the depth that I’ve been able to learn in incredible.