<p>I’m a freshman at a pretty competitive university. Due to my AP Chemistry credit and my advisor’s great opinion of me, I was granted a position as a chemistry lab technician (working for my advisor). However, I didn’t really expect my work to be as important as it is when I took the job. For last weeks lab, I had to prepare 4 batches of 15L NaOH solutions at approx .3M and titrate with oxalic acid to get the concentration to 4 decimal places. My calculations were to be used as the standard to grade all of the gen. chem 1 students. </p>
<p>I thought I did decently, until I came into work today and saw corrections made to my calculation for one batch. Apparently my calculations were off by .01 M of the class average (which is a large difference seeing its to 4 decimal places)…I didn’t see any corrections made to the other three batches, but I was still extremely embarrassed. One of the chemistry lab technicians made it seem as if the professors were slightly upset. My advisor didn’t mention it, I just saw the recalculations in her office. I feel horrible :/. Like this completely ruined my day. She felt so highly of me, but I don’t know why she would let me do something of that importance. I understand there are other factors, I wasn’t the one who made the oxalic acid. Another student did. So that could have been an issue. Any suggestions of what I should do? Should I talk to her about it? I know this is probably an over-exaggeration, but I feel like I screwed up big time. Like, this was at least 100 students who could have suffered from my mis-calculations.</p>