It Was the Worst of Times

LAST SUMMER Pizzeria Uno had a special promotional gimmick. If you could eat your way through their largest pizza--with everything on it--by yourself in 45 minutes, you didn't have to pay for it. Late one night, at the end of July, after a six hour Organic Chemistry lab, I decided to try. The restaurant manager came over and read me a list of ingredients, he made sure I understood that if I couldn't finish it would cost $12.95. I didn't know what I was getting into.

The pizza was two inches thick and weighed about five pounds. I breezed through the first three pieces in 15 minutes. No problem; but I was full and only half done. I got up, walked around and came back. For the next half hour I choked down pizza and just barely made it in under the deadline. I got the last piece in my mouth with 45 seconds to go and just managed to swallow before time ran out I couldn't sleep on my stomach that night.

Why didn't I just quit and not gorge myself like a thirsty horse that doesn't know when to stop drinking' I couldn't I only had $8.

Taking a full year of organic chemistry in eight weeks at Harvard summer school was a lot like eating that pizza. Although it seemed like a great idea beforehand, it was excruciating to choke down. But after my stomach had settled, there was a goofy sense of accomplishment. And much as I wanted to quit during the middle, it wasn't ever a realistic option.

The naked statistics don't really tell the story, but they're impressive nonetheless: two hours of lecture a day; two six hour labs and two hours of section a week, and an hourly first thing every Monday. For eight weeks, Orgo occupied my soul I got up I went to class. I went to lab. I studied I went to dinner and then I studied some more. A couple of times I even had dreams about chemistry.

The class started out with almost 200 students but about a fifth dropped out because of the pace. Most of the people in the class were taking it to get it out of the way, figuring that eight weeks of hell. But a frightening--at least to me--number of people had taken all or part of the course before and were taking it over to raise their grades.

In the third week someone stole about half the lab books that had been turned in for grading. Everyone condemned the person who did it but we all understood the pressure that had affected him. The avalanche of material you have to learn every day is huge and if you get behind it's almost impossible to catch up. We got the Fourth of July off and a two day reading period before the final, but other than that there wasn't a break. If for some sick reason you had not only to do well, but make sure you were in the top 10 percent of the class, maybe stealing the lab books wasn't such a bad idea. The course was graded on an almost perfect bell curve: about 10 percent got some kind of an A and about 10 percent making it to the end still flunked.

Often when a group is under a lot of pressure they band together as a sense of shared experience and camaraderie develops. That didn't happen last summer. Sometimes we would sit around and commiserate, but we were all too uptight and before too long we had to go back to the library to study. And in the summer studying is damn hard.

There is the heat, which gets trapped in thick walled Harvard dorms with small windows; and then there is the realization that everyone else you know is going to the beach, earning money, and having a good time.

The only time I decided to sleep through class it didn't work. At 9:30 the infamous Lowell house fire alarms went off. When I finally realized that alarms were going off all over the building. I went and took a shower. A fire can't burn anyone in the shower.

That was July. July was one of the worst months of my life.

But thankfully, after August 1, things started to come together. There were only two and one half weeks to go and I really was starting to get the hand of it. If you cash get to the point where all of a sudden it starts to make sense and you really understand what the molecules are doing, there is a certain mysterious beauty to it. Unfortunately, it is hard to get to that point.

The last lab in the course was the first chance I ever had to do real science the way the big boys do. They give you a mixture of two unknown chemicals and say, "identify them." Of course they lead you by the hand but having to figure out what to do and how to do it was a real challenge. It meant something to be able to think on my own and not just follow the directions in a lab manual.

So was it worth it? I'd have to answer with an emphatic--sort of. It was great to get orgo out of the way and not have to deal with it for eight months, but it still feels like I had to pay a pound of flesh for my freedom. A bit more distressing in the long run is that I remember practically no organic chemistry. It happened too fast. On the day of the final, reactions filled my hand and leaked out of my ears. But after the test everything dried. If I'd done it during the school year I would have had time for it to sink in and I'd be better off. But them again, with three other courses friends and extra-curricular activities to distract me, I probably wouldn't have done nearly as well. When someone asks me if it was worth it, I have to say I don't know. I just don't want to think about it.