Taking+Responsible+Risks

__Taking Responsible Risks__

__My Understanding of this Habit:__ To take responsible risks means that one should not approach experiments or concepts in a linear fashion, because the results would either be too dull or common to be able to allow one to arrive at new conclusions. But this also involves responsibility because safety is always of top priority.

__How I applied this to Chemistry:__ While working on the voltage cell lab, Philip and I were in charge of making sure the hot place was able to heat the solutions to a specific temperature. We estimated that it would take approximately 1-2 minutes for the hot place to "heat up," thereby providing us with enough time to prepare the solutions for the following trial. However, I remembered watching another group leave a hot plate on for too long, resulting in the "overheated" solution seeping through the slightly melted beaker glass. If this were to happen to my group, we would definitely be low on resources, preventing us from being able to conduct a necessary amount of trials for our experiment. Since 1-2 minutes is not a significant amount of time to leave a hot plate unattended to, we decided that this would qualify as a "responsible risk." Once we checked the solutions for the approximate temperature interval after 1-2 minutes, the readings were still quite low. This meant that leaving the hot plate for a longer period of time would likely cause no harm. But, we were able to make sure that the temperature maintained a constant increase by monitoring the solutions every few minutes. Here is a picture of a hot plate. The one in our experiment had two knobs though, one for adjusting the stirring speed, and the other for the temperature range.