mushaboom

Thank you for the comforting replies everyone. As far as my degree plan goes, I'm on track and I'll be able to get all my courses done in 4 years with room to take other classes of interest (barring any other changes of heart). I think I'm just frustrated because I've been used to knowing exactly what I wanted to do and how to get there. With the PA route, I had to get a ton of patient care experience, shadow PA's, keep my grades up, and I was set. I'm not saying that those are small feats by any means, but they're more, for lack of a better word, straightforward. Research is a whole different ballgame where you have to be innovative and up to date as you're responsible for producing new knowledge. These are some things I definitely need to get exposed to. Then if I do choose to go the research route, there's the issue of having enough experience/publications to get into a good graduate program which I know takes a lot of time. For those reasons, I have been feeling behind. Typing all this up, I do feel that I'm overreacting a bit, haha. I think you all, particularly daniele, hit the nail on the head when you said that I should just focus more on finding other research opportunities and less on what I could have done differently in the past.

I'm currently a sophomore at UT Austin, a pretty great research university. For years I was sure I wanted to be a physician assistant. However, this past semester I finally realized and accepted that biology/health just really don't interest me that much. What I instead developed a love for is organic chemistry. I enjoyed the class immensely and talked to my professor during office hours about his research. Unfortunately by the time I got around to asking him for a research assistant position, he was unable to find a spot for me in his lab. I'm just a bit stressed and frustrated because I feel like I'm behind everyone else here. UT offers a lot of great research initiatives for freshmen and I passed them up because I was so focused on becoming a PA. I have perfect grades (for the time being), but absolutely no research experience. I plan on contacting other professors after break, but it seems kind of bleak with all of these other experienced undergrads around. I was really hoping to get started on research right away so I could a) figure out if I'm willing to commit the rest of my life to chemistry and get into a good grad school if a) is a 'yes.' Those are my concerns as of now... I'm sorry that I don't have any concrete questions; I just felt like I needed to get that out of my system. If anyone has any tips, insight, personal experiences, etc. that they'd be willing to share, I would greatly appreciate it!