Aha

So in middle school and high school, I was involved in Science Olympiad in region 12 doing a variety of powder and chemical analysis events. I never really understood the chemistry of it until now. In O-Chem lab, we started integrating chemical analysis of substances with the normal IR, GC and NMR methods that we usually use, and it's all coming together. It's kind of sad that it took me until my second year of undergrad to understand why the things I did in 8th-12th grade worked, but let's not dwell on that. Kudos to David VanDyke for instructing middle schoolers in identification chemistry.