In three days I have been to three different cities in three different islands in three different modes of transportation. To make it clear enough that's off to the city of golden friendships by land, then to the queen city of the south by sea and finally to the city of smiles by air. From Iligan City I travelled to Cagayan de Oro then to Cebu and lastly to Bacolod.
And then back.
My classmate and I were chosen to represent MSU-IIT in the 72nd Philippine Institute of Chemical Engineers National Convention (PIChE) National Student Congress 2011 Quiz Show in Colegio San Agustin in Bacolod City. They chose us because apparently my classmate is the top student in our class and probably because I often win in quiz show contests at home. There are three members in a team and our third member, a year behind us, once had an overall grade point average of 1.0000 (extend decimal place indefinitely). That just goes to show we were the best that the department could possibly gather.
But we lost.
My classmate and I have joined this for the second time already and the results are, well,the same. Last time we finished 8th place among 11 teams. This time, Tadaaa!! The 9th. Yes, we did not prepare because we thought, without ever learning from the first experience, that stock knowledge is enough. The next thing we realized, after hearing the questions, our stock knowledge is nowhere to be found. It had escaped us and the flow of thought balked at the sight of problems solvable in 120 seconds. One problem especially left me feeling queasy. It asked about the pH of a 0.5 M sodium acetate solution given that the hydrolysis constant is 5.8x10-10. I went on getting the pH by equating the hydrolysis constant to the ratio of x2 over (0.5)(1-x) and assuming x is very small compared to unity, neglected it in the denominator and went on solving for x. This is the concentration of the hydronium ions in the solution, and the negative logarithm of this is the pH. Brilliant.
Big mistake. Sodium acetate is not an acid and x should represent the concentration of hydroxide ions, not hydronium ions. Thus, the negative log gives the pOH and not pH. My answer, 4.77 is therefore utterly wrong. It should have been 14-4.77 or 9.23.
What's so depressing with this is that this is the first time in my quizzing history that I mustered the effort to solve a problem. Usually I leave that to my teammates and they leave the general knowledge and recalling skills to me. But when this question came I felt like having the moral responsibility whatever to answer it. I came a subtraction close but a concept too far. Depressing. The same thing happened to me last year when the question asked for the name of molecules that are mirror-images of one another, that is, chiral. I answered stereoisomers, but it is the larger group. I knew the question asked for a sub-group of stereoisomers but my memory failed me that time. I contemplated suicide after hearing the answer. Guess what, it's enantiomers.
Probably the reason I ace quiz shows at home is because the questions have categories. General Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Current Events, Literature, and General information. In the student congress the categories were Gas Absorption, Reaction kinetics, Heat Transfer, Chemical Engineering Thermodynamics etc. I have always told everyone that I am not the brightest in the Chemineering majors and excellence in these fields almost always determines the winners of this competition. Nevertheless, it is flattering to be chosen again to represent the school. My classmate and I will be graduating this year and I have one advise to the subsequent quizzers: Prepare and overprepare. The pattern of the questions recurs every year and the instructors have a copy of them. Our fault is that we were too lenient with ourselves. We did not participate to win but only for the purpose of being there. As for me, I was too preoccupied with our thesis project left behind and too mindful of the expenses. I retained the feeling of being compelled to join the competition up to the competition itself, sulking over the fact that we cannot join the convention proper because nobody wants to pay our registration fee of 3,000. Not even us.
I admit that we did our best, but only the best of what we were able to prepare. We did not mark our ways with excellence, so success was not able to follow after us. That must have spelled the difference. Sad, probably but on the brighter side, I can always sleep.
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