This. As a chem major, I can tell you it gets a hell of a lot cooler in college (If you enjoy chem, that is.). Highschool is like, here's some 1x10^-1000 HCl, we're gonna titrate NaOH of the same concentration, and use phenopthalene (There's no way I spelled that right.) and watch the color change. Of course, I did quite a few of those in intro chem labs in college, but titration is a useful skill. I actually never did one in high school, cause my high school chem was really lame, and felt totally left out when everybody else knew what titration was.
You need to know the theory, what's actually happening, and have practical skills. Like I was making some ferrocene, and I threw some FeCl2 in some DMSO. The solution was just sitting there for a few minutes, and when I pick it up there's all this brown clumpy stuff. So I know it's iron oxides and I'm like fuuuuuuu, cause that won't work. So I ghetto rigged a nitrogen atmosphere with very limited air exposure to get it to work. That wasn't in the procedure. Gonna purify it by sublimation in a few hours.
