Had a pretty fruitful day today as I sat through most of the Singapore-India Collaborative and Cooperative Chemistry Symposium. The morning session was pretty boring as it was mainly on some surface chemistry and physical chemistry stuff. I think I only understand 20% of it. Lunch time was spent discussing coordination chemistry project with Zhijie and Kamal. The afternoon sessions was more fruitful as it was mainly on organic stuff :) At least no matter how alien the stuff was, I'll be able to understand at least 60% of it. Learnt some new reactions today and they include Meerwein-Ponndorf-Verley (MPV) reduction and Cadiot Chodkiewicz coupling.

Dr. Tan presented on his work on his initial 2.5 years in NUS - chiral guanidine catalyzed enantioselective reactions. He published 2 papers on that work; the presentation was fair as he appeared nervous and the Indian professors were raining questions at him at the end of the session.

During the afternoon coffee break, Prof. Hor (the head of chemistry) came and had a short chat with me. He asked me why didn't I ask any Q since the afternoon talk were all organic-related stuff. He said that students should ask more Q. o_O I told him that I felt that it's kinda rude to ask at times and many a times, the presenter flashed the slides so fast that before I could take note, it's gone. He said that's a common problem in symposium but there's no solution since the slides are copyrighted. Honestly, if one is really good in organic, he'll need some time to assimilate the information and no one knows every reactions. It came as a surprise that he remembers that my field is organic chemistry (guess so since he just wrote a recommendation letter for me) and bothers to talk to student (anyway it's always his style).