Chemical Shift

Someone once said (I think, John Lennon) that: “Life is what happens when you are busy making plans.” How true that is.

I have a bunch of plans about a lot of things, but time just flows on by, and it seems that so little is happening sometimes. Progress is hard to see on the short term. Long range vision is required to be able to set real life goals.

I’ve learned though that those goals have to be flexible for what occurs in life. I am getting close now to finishing up my Ph.D. in Chemistry. It doesn’t seem that long ago, but it was over ten years ago when I graduated from high school without much plans in the world besides going to college somewhere, doing what I didn’t care. I got accepted to quite a few places, but my apathy at the time led me to UNF.

I took a few honors courses that were pretty much blah, and a little over a year into the computer science program, I decided to change my major to chemistry. It was probably the fact that I liked the material and professor that I had for two semesters of general chem and two of organic. Much more so than the programming courses I took at the same time.

One could say that chemistry “spoke to me” more than computer science/programming. I got complacent in doing just ok though. It wasn’t until a lot of my classmates had graduated that spurred me on to finish up my final year with minor greatness in ace-ing physical chemistry.

P. chem really clicked my last year and I sometimes felt I had a greater understanding of the universe than I ever had before. It was like I understood how thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, etc. really worked and I was able to explain it to others. Beyond this great connection, I didn’t see a future in it. At the time I didn’t see how I could earn a living at it and still enjoy it.

I graduated from UNF and spent my time looking for some kind of job. I thought about grad school and even took the GRE and GMAT exams, doing well in both, and trying to decide to get either a Ph.D. or an M.B.A. Either way, I had to get some relevant work experience, because my lack of caring and the resultant poor grades in comp sci courses had my GPA lower than average. To have a better shot at getting into some kind of graduate program I needed work experience.

I sent out a lot of resumes and had interviews at several places. Jacksonville, I thought was looking like a very poor site for someone with a B.S. in Chemistry. I started applying elsewhere, and eventually got a response from some NIH lab at RTP, NC. While progressing towards that idea, I found out about an opportunity in Jacksonville that wasn’t very far from my undergrad. I interviewed at the Mayo Clinic and soon after got the position of Research Technologist.

Wow, now I had a fancy title at a famous institution. A few months later, I met the woman who would two years later become my wife, Melissa. She instilled in me more life than I previously ever had.

After working at Mayo a year or so, I wanted to have some chance for advancement. The only real way to do that in my field was to get an M.S. or Ph.D. The higher the degree the better for advancement and positions with greater responsibility.

I applied to several programs either in or related to biomedical engineering, which was one of the areas I thought I would like to study. I was accepted to the program at UF, but was told that it was a new area for the school and I would also have to find my own funding. I was turned down at TAMU, but since I had a few friends going there, I asked TAMU’s chemistry department if they would review my application. They soon accepted me and said that they would pay tuition and provide a stipend.

Great, or so I thought. In a short span of time: Melissa and I got married, I finished up at Mayo, cut most of our ties to our relatives, moved to Texas, and I started grad school. I began coursework and talked to several professors who worked in fields that appealed to me. I chose to join the Harper research group, which had a very young professor who was able to get funding very well. Before I joined, I was informed that he might be getting an offer from another school, his alma mater, USC. Though it was a possibility, at the time it wasn’t a definite one.

Well, a year after joining the group he made his decision to accept USC’s offer and most of the group moved with him. So, in a little over a year: I got married, quit a job at the prestigious Mayo Clinic, moved from Jacksonville, FL to College Station, TX and then finally to Los Angeles, CA.

Projects that were supposed to be easy, or at least not too difficult, ended up not working. After a sequence of attempts at several things, I found a few that worked well. So now, here I am finishing up some work in lab and started writing my thesis. I am hoping to defend in December, and start having everyone call me doctor by next year.

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