who only by moving can balance

What I learned in this week's lecture: why atomic orbitals are referred to as s, p, d, and f (and others as appropriate): sharp, principal, diffuse and fundamental, from the series of atomic spectral lines identified in early spectroscopy.


What I relearned in this week's lecture: why (conceptually) the 4s orbital fills before the 3d orbital (because of probability density at the nucleus). Which wasn't even slightly in the lecture materials, but one of my students (there's a whole bunch of TAs, and we're each being sent off into a video conference breakout room with about five of the undergrads in breaks between chunks of lectures) asked the really good question of "is there a [comprehensible] reason for this, or do we just have to take it on trust?"

Rather to my embarrassment I had... completely forgotten the answer, and had to look it up myself, all the while knowing that I had been that student. I'm pretty sure I asked exactly that question, pretty stubbornly, until I got an answer I found satisfying, and then having got it I was happy to go on serenely accepting that that's just how the world worked, and now it's twelve or so years later and, when put on the spot, I had to go "... I'll look that up for you."

So that was dizzying.

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.)