On January 20th at their campus in Begumpet, The Department of Chemistry at St. Francis Degree College for Women organised an Inter college fest called Graphene 2K17. Hundreds of students from colleges across the city participated in this one of its kind event. The best was a competition titled Chemistry Idol.
The auditions for this bizarre contest were held a few days ahead of the main event. Excited science students performed on songs, karaoke using concepts and words related to chemistry.
One of them was The Chemistry Song, by Bejugam Venkatesh: Today I feel like learning some chemistry. I just wanna study bonding. Don’t show me solubility or periodic properties, because today I feel like learning about bonding. Gonna take my textbook and turn to chapter eight, see a picture of potassium dichromate (sic).
Student Samar Vinjamuri sang: My heart stays as strong as platinum but my mouth stays as weak as mercury. When I’m beside your shadow helium, argon, krypton, xenon and radon all these noble gasses, they don’t stay as noble as I am (sic).
Students cheered on while the participants sang. “Graphene was the first chemistry event to be hosted in our college. The success of this fest proved that our hard work of two months was worth it. The best part about this fest was that it brought out the hidden abilities of science students. Otherwise we are generally judged to be no-fun introverts! Careful planning was done to ensure that everything was fun-based and not just another boring, studious event,” said Mariya Nageen, a student at the fest.
V. Chinmaiy, another student, added, “Graphene was much more successful than what we expected. And the presence of scientists was the highlight of the fest. So we surely had a lot of fun and also got to learn so much.”
“It was super fun to participate in the competition. Often when you talk about chemistry, people say it’s boring... But this was a twist to regular chemistry,” said N. Sai Amrutha, a participant.
“Sci-fi tambola was the most innovative and exciting event conducted and around 140 students from different colleges participated in this event. We enjoyed a lot,” said student Pratibha.
The chief guest for the event was Dr Sunil Jai Kumar, Head, National Centre for Compositional Characterisation of Materials (NCCCM), Baba Atomic Research Centre in Hyderabad.
