networking...and other fun activities...

We're back!

San Francisco was amazing! We were able to see a pretty full spectrum of what you can do with chemistry. The ACS meeting was great for seeing what primary research is going on (my favorite presentation was on fluorescent nanodiamonds used for bioimaging. So cool!) and expanding our horizons with the sheer volume of experiments and studies that are being conducted by chemists.

We also had the opportunity to tour UC Berkeley and UCSF, giving us a taste of what grad school is like. Can I just say that Berkeley is incredible? The NMR room alone was awe-inspiring, let alone the 8 chemistry buildings of the college (not just department) of chemistry. Dream school? I think so. Many thanks to Dr. Woodfield for setting us up with a tour! And many thanks to Tyler for said tour! At UCSF we had the opportunity to tour the lab of Nobel laureate Stanley Prusiner (who won the award for his work with prions). The lab was completely self-sufficient, with two floors, only one entrance for safety/security reasons. They grow their own bacteria, antibodies, proteins, etc, and they have their own TEM. Let me say that again. Their own TEM. Just for their lab. For the pleasure of viewing all of that, we owe Dr. Bates much gratitude! And lots of thanks to JC (spelling?) for showing us around! We want BYU to hire you!

We also toured the biotech giant Genentech, giving us a look at careers in industry. We were able to see pretty much the entire process from drug design and modeling on computers to the synthesis labs to prepping drugs for human trials to packing the drug compound into pills. It was awesome! (and the cafeteria, as I've said before, was amazing...) Many thanks to Dr. Alex Andrus for setting this up for us!

Also, a huge thank you goes out to Dr. Andrus and Dr. Burt for driving out with us/driving back with us/flying out/flying back (it's a long story...Risk Management was not too happy with us before we left, we'll just leave it at that), taking so much time out of their busy schedules to help us out.

Even as we return back to our 391 papers and realize how much we've missed from a week of class, we are so grateful the department has allowed us this opportunity. It has been so eye-opening to see what is out there for ourselves, instead of just listening to people tell us what it's like. I'm really hoping we can do this again next year at the Spring 2011 ACS meeting in Anaheim. We've got more grad schools to tour, research to present, swag to collect (just kidding...sort of...), and fun to be had as we explore our options in chemistry.

Indecision

So, as you may have gathered from Katie's post, there are a lot of us down here in foggy SF for the ACS national conference. We have been attending meetings, listening to lectures, and tramping through chinatown (always a favorite in my book).

One of the major things that I have been doing here at the conference is trying to decide what I want to do with my life. More specifically, I have been trying to decide a) what I should study in graduate school, b) if I want to go into into industry or academia (or a government lab, which I recently discovered is about halfway in between) and c) what field of chemistry I want to go into after I graduate (which I also recently discovered can be a completely different question than a). To this end, I have been focusing on networking activities and career/grad school fairs, and trying to talk to professors and professionals in different disciplines; hopefully, I will be able get a feel for what professional chemists do with their lives. Unfortunately, all that this has done for me is make me more indecisive. While there are a couple of things that I know that I don't want to do, I have absolutely NO idea what I actually want to do. So, here are my random musings on this subject.

I know for sure that I don't want to go into analytical or physical chemistry. This is partially because I dislike math, and partially because I love reaction chemistry. That's all I really have to say about that.

My biggest fear is unintentionally closing doors. This is my worst-case-scenario: I go to graduate school in a subject that I think I like. After graduating, and working (in academia or industry) for a couple of years, I realize that I don't really like it, and I would like to do something else. Unfortunately, my current training/education has not prepared me for a career in that something else, and I either cannot enter that something else, or have to go back to school for another 6 years in order to do that.

Right now I'm leaning towards industry instead of academia, mainly because the one thing that I do know about what I want is that I want to make something cool. I don't know what it is or how to do it, but I know that I want to make it.

I'm currently working in an organic synthesis laboratory. I don't want to base any decisions from my current work to date, simply because I haven't been working in Dr. Castle's lab very long, and because, for a variety of reasons (schoolwork, appendicitis, etc.), I haven't be able to dedicate as much time to the lab as I have likes; that being said, I don't think I want to go into natural products synthesis. There are several reasons for this. First of all, I easily get frustrated working at the bleeding edge of a reaction, where things don't work more often than they do (I may be naive in hoping that this will be different in a different field). Second, most natural products are synthesized for their possible biological properties (mostly anti-cancer); quite frankly, I have no interest in biology and biochemistry, and so I have a hard making a connection with the products I've synthesized.

Organic methodology looks interesting. However, I say this with the admission that I really have absolutely no idea what is involved in methodology studies, or how it would be different than total synthesis.

Polymer chemistry looks really interesting. I talked to a polymer chemist from . . . I can't remember what grad school (don't worry, I kept all the SWAG, so I can find it after I empty out my backpack). What interest me about polymer chemistry is that you get to deal with both bulk properties and molecular-level theory.

Biofuels/alternate fuels also looks interesting. I'm doing a paper on bioethanol for my pchem class right now, and the things that I've learned about it are really cool. I just hope that there's more to bioethanol than thermodynamics, because, as I mentioned above, that would be a deal-breaker.

So there's my wheneverly brain-dump. Oh, I forgot to mention my dream job:

Hollywood science consultant- working with Hollywood movie producers to make sure that their movies won't make scientists cringe when they watch them (think Spiderman 2's idea of 'tritium').

The Deprotonators are here...

Greetings from San Francisco!!

Sara, Sam, Megan, Matt, Erin, Nate, David, and I are all here at the national meeting for the American Chemical Society, and oh man, has it been fun. Yesterday we arrived around 8:00 PM (after watching six episodes of "Avatar: the Last Airbender" while driving, woo!!) and hurried over to the undergraduate social for some "networking", food, and music, proudly wearing our Deprotonators t-shirts. Too bad the networking was actually just undergrads standing around awkwardly trying to dance while music was playing in the background. Good for us for dancing like spazzes anyway to "Tik Tok" (sort of fulfilling a lifelong dream to rock out with a bunch of chemists at a national chem convention in San Fran to that song. Ha.)

Today started out with free breakfast at the graduate school recruiting session. We greatly enjoyed collecting swag (highlights included awesome hand sanitizer from UCLA, flashdrives from Vanderbilt, and a chem theme shirt from Duquesne) and learning more about different grad programs. We spent the rest of the morning going to various presentations and enriching our chemical knowledge. Lunch was spent in Chinatown, afternoon spent at more presentations/poster sessions/expo/undergrad industrial chemists networking (actual networking was done here). Tonight Dave's presenting a poster at the Sci Mix poster session, so that will be fun for us to browse around.

Being here has really opened my eyes as to what is available in the field of chemistry. You can do anything with this major, which, not going to lie, is a little overwhelming. There is so much research going on in such depth on so many subjects by so many people. It's amazing.

Chemistry is awesome.
We want to come back in 2011 in Anaheim. We also all want to be presenting (fingers crossed).
Join us?