Please don't spill acid on me. 

Synthesis of Biodiesel...My friend snapped this photo while the lab assistant wasn't looking.

One of the benefits of an all-girls school was not being afraid of the safety shower strip. 

As a female engineering student, I know there are going to be times when I'm the only woman. The Biomedical Engineering department here at UT actually has a lot of women compared to the other engineering departments. After attending an all-girls high school, I'll admit that it's nice to still be surrounded by a lot of inspiring women. What wasn't so nice was discovering that I was the only girl in my first college chemistry lab. 

I actually felt completely fine with the situation except for one scenario: the safety shower. I first learned about this vital element of lab safety in ninth-grade Biology. We wouldn't really ever need it in that class, but it was still included in our lab safety quiz. In tenth-grade Chemistry, we watched a (what we though was pretty hilarious) movie on lab safety. In one of the most memorable scenes, one student spills acid all over his lab partner. As taught by his teacher, the student runs to the safety shower and starts frantically taking off his clothes. As a courtesy, the rest of the class is ushered out of the room to give the poor guy some privacy. The camera zooms out, and we see that the guy who spilled the acid is creepily staring as the student scrubs at his skin. 

While we never had any lab accidents at my all-girls high school, there was an unspoken pact among friends to hold up the fire blanket and look away if anyone needed to use the safety shower. Cut to my freshman year of college. People start trickling into the lab and claiming their station. Lab begins, and I'm clearly the only girl. We all laugh, and the guys promise that they're not awful. 

We always had a pretty good time in lab. But in the back of my mind, I was always praying that I would never need to use that safety shower. I was constantly hyper aware of what people were carrying around me, and I gave people plenty of space when they were working in the fume hood. If I ever did need to use the safety shower, I know my priority would have to be striping down as fast as possible not comfort and privacy. Either way, that lab definitely kept me on my toes.