If not this, then what?
Dec. 8th, 2013 11:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaberettWhen I was seventeen and applying to universities, I thought I was an organic chemist. I fell instantly head-over-heels in love with the allotropes of carbon when I was fifteen. Everywhere but Cambridge, I applied for chemistry, with variants - chemistry with a year in Germany; chemistry with molecular physics; chemistry. Cambridge doesn't offer single sciences, though: you apply to a course titled Natural Sciences, and in your first year you take three options plus a maths course.
The summer after I turned eighteen, I was hiking in the Alps with my mother when she formally introduced me to a glacier; and then we rummaged in its morraines, its till, and we brought home handfuls of garnets. And I decided that in addition to chemistry, I was definitely going to take geology, and that just left me to choose between physics and materials science as my third option.
(After a certain amount of tears and a lot of people pushing me towards physics, I ended up in MatSci and actually mostly really enjoyed it.)
-- and as it turns out: while I still love chemistry and I especially love total organic synthesis (I am really good at organic chemistry; and I want to qualify that statement by pointing out that if you've been hanging around here for any time at all you've probably noticed how massively insecure I am about my capabilities in general), I also really like rocks.
There's an alternate-universe me, though, who decided that essays were too difficult and rocks were too challenging; who decided to play it safe and stick with the thing I knew I could excel at. Alternate-universe me might be doing a PhD, but there's also a high chance they'd be contemplating working in R&D for a big pharma company, because we the both of us consider chemical industry less outright evil than oil & mining.
And if not that... well, my current big question is whether to stay in academia or train as a counsellor. I like rummaging in people's heads and finding out how things slot together; I like improving my understandings of how my own head works. I think I consider helping people to sort out their brains very similar to teaching my undergraduates - it all boils down, for me, to giving people tools and encouraging them to work out how to apply them most effectively. And would I want to do research as well as practice? Well, probably, because I seem to be - in many respects - An Academic; but those are the paths I've had mapped out, at one time or another.
(The positive ones, at any rate. I've walked the valley of the shadow of death, too; but I don't particularly feel moved to share that cartography.)
The summer after I turned eighteen, I was hiking in the Alps with my mother when she formally introduced me to a glacier; and then we rummaged in its morraines, its till, and we brought home handfuls of garnets. And I decided that in addition to chemistry, I was definitely going to take geology, and that just left me to choose between physics and materials science as my third option.
(After a certain amount of tears and a lot of people pushing me towards physics, I ended up in MatSci and actually mostly really enjoyed it.)
-- and as it turns out: while I still love chemistry and I especially love total organic synthesis (I am really good at organic chemistry; and I want to qualify that statement by pointing out that if you've been hanging around here for any time at all you've probably noticed how massively insecure I am about my capabilities in general), I also really like rocks.
There's an alternate-universe me, though, who decided that essays were too difficult and rocks were too challenging; who decided to play it safe and stick with the thing I knew I could excel at. Alternate-universe me might be doing a PhD, but there's also a high chance they'd be contemplating working in R&D for a big pharma company, because we the both of us consider chemical industry less outright evil than oil & mining.
And if not that... well, my current big question is whether to stay in academia or train as a counsellor. I like rummaging in people's heads and finding out how things slot together; I like improving my understandings of how my own head works. I think I consider helping people to sort out their brains very similar to teaching my undergraduates - it all boils down, for me, to giving people tools and encouraging them to work out how to apply them most effectively. And would I want to do research as well as practice? Well, probably, because I seem to be - in many respects - An Academic; but those are the paths I've had mapped out, at one time or another.
(The positive ones, at any rate. I've walked the valley of the shadow of death, too; but I don't particularly feel moved to share that cartography.)
(no subject)
Date: 2013-12-08 06:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-12-08 08:46 pm (UTC)And so, while the trade unionist has suddenly discovered a career path, the writer and the priest are very much with me, more so than when I was unhappy and dead-endish. The writer is still writing, and I am half-expecting the priest to clear her throat, perhaps fifteen years from now, and say, Now we're ready. Or perhaps it's all going to turn into part of being a trade unionist. Or vice versa. I don't know. I can't follow all of them all the way to to top, or even to the end, but I don't lose any of them, because they're all me.
(By which I am trying to say that what you wrote makes an awful lot of sense to me.)
(no subject)
Date: 2013-12-09 12:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-12-09 05:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-12-09 10:52 pm (UTC)Hurrah for electron microscopes :D
(no subject)
Date: 2013-12-10 12:09 am (UTC)Yup, I'm in that second camp. I admire it from afar and try not to sniff the solvents. I suppose you've found Derek Lowe's science blog? Good stuff.
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