And now we’re at Part 2 of The Shumate Guide To Graduate School. Part 1 was all about the orientation. That’s over, now it’s time to get researchin’!
If you fully believed that, go smack yourself with a two-by-four until you can’t hold the board anymore. Sure, there were a few gifted grad students who’d already found a lab and somehow managed to sneak in the time to do some research, but most of us were bogged down by a heavy class load.
Classes? In graduate school? Who’d have thought, right? But we had to take classes according to what field of chemistry we were going into. I was setting myself up to be a physical chemist, and that meant loads of classes that looked more like Calculus V than actual chemistry.
My first class sounded easy enough: Atoms and Molecules. Hey, didn’t we cover this on the first day of general chemistry? Heck, I knew about atoms and molecules in high school: atoms were itty bitty things, and they combined together like Legos to build bigger things, like ammonia, DNA and a dump truck. VROOOOOM this is gonna be so easy, I thought!
Then I got the book, and wondered if I’d suffered from spontaneous illiteracy. Sure, these words were English, at least they looked it: I just had no idea what the words actually meant. I had to assume my way through a lot of it.
I say “assume,” because that word appeared twenty times per page. We were assuming that two hydrogen atoms were in close proximity. We were assuming that ammonia was formed from its component atoms. We were assuming that the wave function of lithium could be approximated through its Hamiltonian. I assumed that none of this would earn me big bucks once I got my Ph.D., and I knew none of it would get me any of that fine, fine grad school lovin’*.
I still did the homework, took the ten-hour tests, and got out of that class with an A. The classes didn’t get any easier, though. I had a class in inorganic chemistry, and all I remember from it was that carbon can sometimes pi-bond through graphite stacks. I don’t even remember what pi-bonding is, though it didn’t involve any tasty, tasty sweets.
This whole process took eighteen months. I was tired of classes by this point. I had a dream I was beating my Electrical Designs partner in the head with a really big diode. I just wanted to get into the lab and do some research.
We had weekly seminars my first year, wherein each professor would give a long speech about their research, and why we’d all be the King Dog Studs of Chemistry if we joined their groups. Al this sounded nice, but dang it all if I didn’t have these classes!
I managed to find a research advisor during this time, but never got into the lab. That all changed during that fourth semester, with all classes done. I proudly stepped into the lab that summer and proclaimed, ‘I AM YOUR KING, LOWLY INSTRUMENTS! YOU SHALL BEND TO MY WILL!”
And then, of course, that dream got crapped on, too.
*Yes, I’m making that part up. All the hot science chicks went into biology.
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