The End of my First Gemology Module March 28, 2006
Posted by Martin in : Education, Thailand , trackbackToday I finally completed my first three months of my Gemology Diploma at AIGS. The course comprises of 4 modules, the first one ‘Classification of Gemstones’ has just finished and I am extremely relieved.
I’ve really enjoyed the course although it was no walk in the park. I’d signed up last November anticipating a very simple 6-month course. Although there is a strong implication that the course is between 9am until 12pm weekdays the course took up much more of my life than I’d really anticipated. There was a lot of unschedules practice required to get familiar with all the different stones available.
AIGS boasts the largest collection of coloured stones in the world! I think they have a collection of 7,000 stones. Whilst this is a credible and prestigous boast, it works against us if for our final exam we might be shown any ten of these stones for us to identify.
There were six of us in the class and we worked together daily, either in the classroom or in the lab. Myself, Ho Yu and Pascal are all around the same age, and Paul, Katsu and Valentina a few years older. Pascal is already a quite expereinced gemologist who’s come here for the diploma qualification despite having studied gemology in Belgium for the last 2 years part-time. Ho Yu is a Malaysian from Australia who has come to Thailand purely for a new career direction. Paul is from New Zealand, Valentina from Russia although she has lived in Bangkok for some time and Katsu is Japanese and lives and works here exporting clothes and, (in the future), gemstones. In many respects we’re quite a mixed bunch, most of us are from quite unique backgrounds which would never have brought us together away from the course.
We’ve had some fun days away from the classroom together and a number of fun evenings out. These were nort part of the course but we arranged extra-curricular activities as the course progressed and we got more comfortable with each other. We had a very fun (and messy) day fishing for catfish just on the outskirts of Bangkok. We had a daytrip to Kantebury to visit their sapphire mines and have met a few evenings for dinner, movies, bowling and drinks.
My attitude to gemstones since begining the course has changed a lot. Very few gemologists and gemology teachers seem to wear jewelry which fascinated me when I began the course. If anything I’ve developed much more contempt for people who buy expensive stones to wear now that I understand the practicality and value of synthetic (and even imitation) stones.
A typical week comprised of classroom work mondays wednesdays and friday mornings and we spent the other days and afternoons working independently in the lab. The classwork was gruelling and perhaps too detailed to really maintain my interest and enthusiasm for the entire three months. We were expected to digest scientific reasons as to why certain gems were certain colours, how equipment worked, theories of reflection, absorbsion and refraction of light, atomic bonding and a whole lot more.
The coursebook was not especially well organized and there were many occassions when I needed to find other books and internet sources to really understand the material satisfactorally. The materials had a lot of redundancy and repetition in it and we often shot through over 100 A4 pages, much of which was full of unfamiliar science jargon in merely one three hour class!
It seemed to be taken for granted that we would already be familiar with many of the stones that were popular in the course. I had some small knowledge of Rubies, Sapphires and diamond when the course began and little more. Other students too had quite a learning curve to get through but things began to come together a few weeks before the final exams.
Our lab work was more fun although spending time day-in-day-out looking at stones lots a lot of it’s novelty about 7 weeks into the course and it was hard to keep my motivation after that time. Most often we’d take a box of 10 stones and spend about 2-3 hours conducting various tests to determine the stones specific gravity, optical properties, refractive index and internal features. On noting these attributes we used our lab-manual to whittle down our list to determine exactly what stone we were looking at and whether it was natural or synthetic.
I remember giving Ying a tour of our lab towards the end of our course and explaining to her the routine we perform when trying to identify a stone. I received a look from her which was that of “why on earth would anybody choose to do something like that?”. “Yeah” I though, “what really is the point?
The lab-manual needed a lot of correcting. There was a number of important errors which really could cause somebody problems however by being aware that there were problems gave the students a little more confidence to question everything we read, and gave us a lot of satisfaction knowing that we were often more correct than the official notes.
Being colorblind is a huge frustration when trying to classify stones. I readily acknowledge that I am prescribed as red-green colorblind and I’d say that because people are so ready to dismiss somebody elses colour-judgement if they know that person is colorblind with ANY colors it’s left me color-shy. In many instances I do correctly see a color but will readily change my opinion of it if anybody else tells me otherwise. For that reason a few years ago I quite readily cycled throughout Sammakorn Village on Sue’s pink bike on her insistance that it was actually purple. Being colorblind does cause a problem for Gem ID because the most useful tables listing stones and their propertis are sorted primarily by color. I had to extend many lists to include confusable colors just so I didn’t exclude a stone from a query becaus I’d misjudged a bright yellow stone for a bright orange one, or a red stone or a pink one.
Many students wasted their first month in the lab as we were not really given any guidance other than to look at stones. What would have been much more useful would have been to have advised us to make notes on each stone we saw, what stones we confused or might have confused it with and features we considered significant. Once this strategy made sense I had a lot of catching up to do to make certain I’d seen a sample of every differnt stone at least once.
The practical test came first. This was stressful because we had to correctly identify all ten stones we were given in 3 hours and also (where applicable) to identify if they were natural or synthetic. We were given no margin for error and 10/10 was the only acceptable score to pass. Of the six students only one person passed first time. Students from other classes agree that the first test is not really intended for us all to pass. It’s designed to seperate the top performers from the average performers and it was expected that only a small number would pass first time. For those that failed we re-took the exam a second time round with other stones and all passed without problem.
The theory exam was less stressful for me, although the required revision was far from fun. We were fortunatel that many questions from our pre-test were included in the final test. We were expected to remember details of stones which we’d never need to know in practice. I took a weekend to memorize about 25 stones with upto 4 3-digit numbers relating to their specific gravity and refractive index readings, the type of crystal system they formed in, countries where they are found and other trivia which left my brain a few seconds after the test finished.
All but one student passed the theory test. Most questions were multiple-choice and took less than an hour to complete.
Many of us went out to Oishi buffet and then to Vertigo bar in Bangkok to celebrate our release from the forst of our courses. We have certainly broken the back of egemology and nobody is worried about the futire courses now. I’m personally delighted that this course is over as I now have a 6-week holiday to look forward to.
I am missing the next module “Natural v’s Synthetic Stones” throughout April and will return to class in May. I will still comlete the entire diploma but will complete my missed module in July when my classmates will have already graduated.
I think it is unlikely that I will continue after my course to continue a career in gemology. I think the industry is horrifically false where values of stones are attributed arbitaraily and I’d likely need to gain experience as an employee before working solo. I’m also not espesially stimulated by gemologists relating tales of when they saw a nearly flawless natural corrundum etc. so gemology will most likely be a hobby for me in the future.
There are still many positive things I’ve gained from the course. I like to think that I’ve gained a new James-Bond skill whereby I can see myself at a party and fascinating all the ladies there with my sincere appreciation of their decorations. I think that my knowledge of stones will give me something else to explore when I travel so that when I arrive in a new country I can visit their attractions, eat the local foods and inspect their local stones. I hope also that being a qualified gemologist will make people assume that when I buy jewelry for them they will naturally assume it’s good quality and valuable
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