Interviews and peat bogs

I had an interview this week, and I suspect it went slightly poorly. This is due to peat bogs, and my free will.

Old readers may remember my blogpost on ammonia from almost a year ago. It's the first time I ever decided to write about chemistry on this blog, and was very proud to have written it. Since then, my stance on it has soured, and I believe I've written better blogposts recently; my mistake, however, was to discuss my research on the effects of ammonia on peat bogs.

Here was my line of reasoning:

ammonia → used in fertilisers → can destroy peat bogs if overused

This seemed reasonable to me. I didn't expect this brief sentence to control my interview as much as it did, however; I was questioned on the peat bog line, and I reiterated my opinion, trying to make sure it didn't swerve into my personal opinions on fertiliser usage. 

At the time, I felt lost because I wasn't that knowledgeable on how peat bogs functioned, and after the interview, I feel defeated. It seems like fertilisers alone don't destroy peat bogs - rather, it's agriculture becoming more prevalent in these areas that has destroyed peat bogs. I got the fertiliser and farming arguably the wrong way around, and whilst fertilisers can certainly destroy soil by affecting its pH levels, it looks like damaging peat bogs isn't one of them.

I think I got peat bogs mixed up with eutrophication. In eutrophication, fertilisers run off into a pond, and provide the nutrients needed for algae to grow and form large algal blooms. They block off access to oxygen, so pondlife end up dying, and the remnants of life in the pond are the swathes of algae. That's a legitimate argument against fertilisers, not my pathetic claim about peat bogs.

And yet I wrote this in my personal statement. I've edited it so that my actual line isn't copied by someone, and potentially gets them flagged by a plagiarism bot in a dystopian future:

mass-producing ammonia [causes] a greater abundance of fertilisers, enabling us to live longer and healthier lives, yet also endangers local ecosystems through the destruction of peat bogs

So clearly the universities didn't mind this oversight. Maybe the interviewers don't actually care. Yet I do. I care a lot. I've been wrong, and before I could realise it, I made a costly mistake. 

Unless the Royal Society of Chemistry can back me up. I cited them in my blogpost on ammonia, with a small excerpt from a 76 page long report saying this:

Certain species and habitats are particularly susceptible to ammonia pollution. Bog and peatland habitats are made up of sensitive lichen and mosses which can be damaged by even low concentrations of ammonia.

Yet only a few lines later, the report reads as so:

However, much of the wider evidence on biodiversity impacts relates to all nitrogen pollution, rather than just ammonia. There is far less evidence on the impact of ammonia, and nitrogen more generally, on animal species and the wider ecosystem.

So I might be right, it's just there isn't that big a consensus on ammonia than there is on nitrogen regarding their effects on pollution.

So I am thus torn - I reckon I showed my reasoning well, and proved that I like chemistry. Yet by discussing not only something that might be wrong, even mentioning biology, could cost me a place at the university. I know that this isn't the end, and I probably won't hear back from them anytime soon, but I reckon getting your facts muddled up is a good sign it's over.

The worst aspect, though, is knowing that a blogpost could be incorrect, and so for over a year, I have claimed to an, albeit small, audience that ammonia destroys peat bogs. That could be true, but the science isn't as conclusive as I'd have hoped. As a result, my free will may have closed off another door, all due to an oversight which got into a personal statement which was discussed by me in an interview.

Perhaps the interviewers are reading this blogpost, in which case I hope I didn't come off as foolish. It was a sincere error, one I didn't intend to make. Or it was completely true, in which case I hope I didn't come off as too confusing. 

I know I'm likely overreacting, and I know the world will keep on spinning even if I didn't pass the interview. Yet I do want to get this off my chest, simply because I can move on from the experience.

Bog-like puddle in South Norwood