If not this, then what?

When 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.)

[a silly little poem about apples]

Have you ever noticed how even the most mundane,
most everyday of objects, contain stars?
Not stardust -- nothing so prosaic, nor so plain --
(for after all we're every one first born in hearts of flame)
but stars: pointed, bright, and sharp.
They hang heavy on the branches of
a tree that patient grows
at the bottom of
the garden of my childhood.
Don't believe me?
Take an apple. Cut in half--
no, not longitudinal--
along the equator--

(An apple is an oblate sphere,
or close enough,
with skin and flesh and core,
just as the Earth from which it grew
has core and mantle, crust--
the symmetry brings heavens to our grasp.)

and gentle carve away the fruit
from twixt the branching seeds
and see: a star lies in your palm.