Interview with Dr. Larry Gulberg

How and Why did you become interested in chemistry?
Well, let's see. I remember when I was a kid, I really wanted a chemistry set, and I never got it. They were like eight bucks. I don't know why I was interested in chemistry, but I really was. And then in high school, I think it was my junior year, and I remember helping this guy in class, this one guy named Bob Walker. He got a B, he was a year older than I was, and he got a B because I helped him through the year. And just looking back on it I'm thinking, "Wow, he just really leaned on me." But I really liked it [chemistry], and when I took physics my senior year I loved that, and it was great, but I kinda... I could've gone either way I suppose. When I got in college, again I really felt like I needed chemistry, I really liked it, and it was just kind of, "Well, I love this stuff, I'll just continue on in it, and I don't know what's going to happen."

What kind of education did you recieve?
When I was at Stanford, I took a year of the chemistry, and didn't study real hard and got B's... B+'s and B's... and sphomore year I went overseas to study there and junior year I came back and took O-chem (organic chemistry), and found out that without studying, and without memorizing a LOT of structures and names, and mechanisms, it doesn't work very well. And I ended up getting a B, a C, and a Pass my junior year. And my third quarter junior year was when all the protests hit the college campus, and I spent a lot of time not going to class because there were three protestors sitting on the steps of the chemistry building, blocking the entrance. So that quarter I got a Pass, and I was lucky. I just didn't study. And then senior year I took [unintelligable word], and that went pretty well, I got a [unintelligable word] and studied with a couple fraternity guys, and again, I felt like I did okay, but I didn't really learn it. After I started Teaching, I started into grad. school three years after I began teaching, and then I started to re-learn while I was TAing chemistry courses at the University of Washington, and I would study four hours a day... and what a difference it made. It was like, "Wow. I understand this. I'm doing great! Wow." And so, you really learn something after you start teaching and then go back to school with a little bit different motivation.

Please describe your job:
Teaching at Woodinville High School... This job, at 5:00 AM it sucks, but once you get here, and you get into the accelerated chemistry class or the AP chem. class, it's fun. I've got a lot of motivated students who want to go to college and they want to learn as much as they can. Some days. So you get here early and you prepare your stuff... take care of your paperwork. The paperwork is sometimes overwhelming. You find ways to not spend hours a day doing paperwork. I might collect ninety papers on one day and I try to plunge through them, and I go home at night and I lay down on my floor, by my bed, and with the ball game on, and I look at my notes for the next day and I think, "let's see, we're studying K_sps the next day, how can I do the K_sps?" So I think about the things I want to show them, the students, and the questions I want to ask them. So I just go home thinking about that stuff. It's a lot of energy, this current job. The end of the day you're just kinda "Whoa... over a hundred and fifty kids and they're all off the wall..." I don't know. It's pretty draining.

How long have you been teaching?
I started teaching in 1972, and between then and now, it's been twenty-eight years. I've had five years off for different things.

How much and what kinds of chemistry do you typically use in a day?
During the summer while I'm home I think about what I put in my lake. I've got some hydrochloric acid that I use to clean concrete bricks with... But I don't know how to answer that question. I'm always thinking scientifically about what's going on. When I'm driving in my car with my hand out the window, I feel the aerodynamics and I'm thinking science, but not necessarily chemistry.

Any favorite kinds of chemistry? Least favorite?
Well, in college, my favorite chemistry was probably the instrumental analysis and analytical chemistry. I look back a my college notes and think, "Oh, I measured the dipole movement of SO₂. Wow." Then when I was teaching at SPU back in 1997 I remember cranking up the GC that they hadn't had working for two years and optimizing it and getting the gas flowage correct, and then running an experiment on it and having the results come out perfect. That was fun. I liked all kinds of chemistry once I learned them. The first time through organic chemistry I didn't like it, but I didn't know much. But as I got through it I understood it, and as I understood it, I liked it. But I like all kinds of chemistry.

Why is what you do important for the world, and how does chemistry help you do it?
That's a good question. When I was working for the Fisher Scientific Company, I quit teaching to do it. I thought it would be really exciting, and it was, I was traveling to different labs every day, and I was traveling to Montana to work with one rep we had over there. Traveling to Portland, Oregon, for another rep, selling ten-thousand dollar titrators, five-thousand dollar spectrometers, and showing people how to use the pH meter to it's full effect. I really liked it. But when I quit that job and came back to the high school I realized that if someone can teach they should. Because, there are millions of students out there, and there are hundreds of thousands of teachers for those millions of students, and not everybody lasts in teaching. If you can get through the tough first few years of trying to learn how students think, and trying to not worry about the trivia like "no, you can't go to the bathroom, I let you out of class yesterday to go to the bathroom," and you can stop worrying about that, which takes a few years, and worry about the important stuff, and are able to get across the concepts of chemistry, then you should do it. Because students, motivated students, have a real desire to get as much as they can, and you can help them do that. Unmotivated students, hopefully you can do a lot to help them to start caring about this stuff. And so if you are able to have some success at that, I think that you should take advantage of that ability. When I was working for Fisher Scientific Company, I felt like, "Anybody could do this job. If I don't sell this spectrometer today, they'll buy it from somebody else. Big deal. My company won't make the bucks." I felt like I really didn't really have a purpose in the world doing that. And I thought "If you're going to have a job, you should feel like if you don't do it, it's not going to get done... as well." And I also think that character development, and also spiritual matters are important. In a high school setting I feel like I could have some kind of influence and I think that my Christian faith is probably is able to be used more when you interact with people. And when you get a student who believes similarly, you can support that student. But you try to support all students equally.

Do you know of one particularly important or rewarding thing you've done as a professional with your knowledge of chemistry?
In 1981 I worked for the summer for Georgia Pacific up in Bellingham. They gave me a box and said that "this is part of a 'coulomb meter', a coulombmetric titrator. So I researched the Carl Fischer titration, and I took this box and designed with the help of an electronic engineer, a system whereby if you push a bottom, this thing would automatically titrate the water in non-aqueous solvents. And it would automatically shut itself off when the endpoint was reached. And between me and him, it felt like "Wow, that was a great accomplishment. We got an actual working titrator from scratch. We went to Radio Shack to buy the parts and I told him here's what we need here, and we need this much current, here's what we need here, and he put together the electronics. It was really satisfying.

Were you interested in other sciences or subjects throughout your high school or college education?
Yeah, I was interested in math, science, all the sciences... actually not biology that much. Sophomore year biology I learned the stuff just fine, but it just wasn't that stimulating. Physics and chemistry was more problem solving, it was presenting the problem and then figuring out how to solve it. Biology was more learning and memorizing stuff, but not solving problems. Maybe it was just the nature of biology, because I know in biochemistry is a lot of problem solving, and lots of analytical thinking. But I liked the analytical thinking part. In math, my high school didn't offer calculus, so when I went to college and I took calculus, I didn't know at the time that I was one of only 20% of the students that had never had calculus. So I was in this class, just lost, and most people in calculus realized the triviality of the idea that the integral of dx was x. Trivial in calculus. But I didn't understand that until the end of the first quarter, and I was getting a D in there, and then on the final, something clicked and I started getting it. I got an A on the final and ended up getting a B for the course. But I was a little behind the math because of that experience. So I just stayed with chemistry and mostly it was the sciences that interested me. I liked foreign languages, because I liked to go over there and communicate with folks, and it's good to go to a country and know the language. But the sciences were the most intellectually stimulating.

What would be your recommendation to a young person interested in chemistry as a profession?
There's lots of ways to use the chemistry that you don't realize. Many of us people with Fisher Scientific Company were science majors, and if you could major in chemistry and go to a science company and pharmaceutical sales, you'd have to use your knowledge. It's kind of a fun job, I mean it's a really fun job when they give you a car and an expense account, and then you are twenty-five years old and you're making forty grand a year. That's pretty fun. If you're teaching and you're twenty-five years old you make considerably less than that. Teaching is a rough job, but if you can do it it's worthwhile. I have a friend who's a Boeing chemical engineer, and the chemical engineering degree gave him a ticket to Boeing, but he's not doing chemical engineering in Boeing. He's doing stuff on computers and solving some other problems, but the degree opened the door for him, and I'd say of all the Chem.-E's that Boeing hires, fewer than half use their degree. Most of them, Boeing hired them because they knew they were smart enough to do something else. So I think a chem. degree can go a lot of different directions whether you use it in engineering or computer things. But if you're going to get a chem. degree, and you want to work in a lab somewhere, or if you want to use it to go on to more advanced degrees, I don't know. There's not a lot of people who want to work in a lab for the rest of their life, but there's some.

50 points if you can tell us the dissociation constant for perchloric acid (HClO₄) in water right off the top of your head.
It's too large to mention. It's infinity.

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