 The people who come here and they come into these labs, they're sometimes not even knowing where they want to go, but what we do here gives them the opportunity to work that out and see where they can take their skills to help others and see what they can change. Hi I'm Vance Lawrence, I'm the Senior Technical Officer in Undergraduate Chemistry here at the Research School of Chemistry at the ANU. A lot of what we're doing here is trying to get the basic theory into people's understandings, a small amount of basic techniques as people progress through their technique base improves and the theory and the understanding is more what happens in the lectures. During laboratory classes we are in the labs. That's not always common with people in our position in other universities. We provide advice and some instruction on technique, particularly as we get to higher year levels and we're always keeping an eye out on safety. You have your head on a swivel as they say. The lab behind me, this is Fergie and theoretically this is the only lab that is always timetabled for chemistry. This is largely where the students will do their planning work. All of their actual work happens at the few hoods. One of the things I'm often doing is synthesizing materials that may be known to science but aren't known to commercial science. Quite simply because there's not the call for it. It's one of these rare research materials. It proves the point. It helps show the theory that they're trying to demonstrate but it's not a commercially viable thing. So what we've got here is trimethyl for nitrofenyl and final silane. So 50 milligrams of this retails for about $178. So when you add up how much of synthesize just to make sure that our third year class can actually do what it needs to do, technically that's about $146,000 worth. You can't spend that kind of money on undergraduates unfortunately. So what do we do? We synthesize it ourselves. Well today the students here, they're doing the final year catalytic chemistry course and they're actually making use of the silane that we made up previously. Well these labs are brilliant. The student interaction is the best part of our jobs. All the reward every day of seeing the students passing through and moving on. And that is seriously its own reward. I know it sounds a bit corny but for me it is.