SymmetryOfImperfection

organic synthesis is different from physical chemistry and chemical physics. in physical chemistry you use computers and math to plan experiments and design new materials and analytical methods. That is to say, if you have good insights, mathematical intuition and strong skills working with electronics and machinery, you can get stuff done much faster than people that do not have this sort of skill. organic chemistry, in my perspective, is putting in the hours of busy work and if you don't put in the hours you don't get results.

I am a graduate student in physics. Currently, I have a relatively heavy graduate courseload of 3 graduate level physics classes, along with TAing for 2 classes. I am also doing research which I've started over the winter break. How many hours should I be putting in at the lab?

chemE classes are challenging. you need to get through graduate level thermodynamics, transport phenomena, reaction engineering and math methods at most schools. none of that is a cakewalk. of course, some classes like graduate organic synthesis are so insanely hard (or so I've heard) that you'll think "ANYTHING is easier". here's what i recommend: buy a copy of the recommended textbooks and just flip through them. if you think "I can get through this with a bit of review/I can do it NOW" then go for it.

5 years is not too bad when you consider that physics is 6-7 years and bio seems pretty long too. Other similar fields like materials science are also around 5 years. I think average chem graduation times actually get dragged on longer by the organic and bio guys because lets face it its just simply hard to do synthesis.

no its me, i don't understand what the purpose of the project is. indeed, the other students also are having trouble understanding; my project is sort of a new spinoff that this other guy has been doing for a while and he's graduating in a few months. i'm leaving after the MS anyways so i just need to publish *something* to write a thesis.

thank you greatly. i've asked and he said something that i couldn't understand. whatever.

From what I know, for physics and chemistry it is necessary. The resumes I've seen in industry from PhD holders in these 2 fields always specified their concentration, as in "PhD in Condensed Matter Physics" or "PhD in Physics, concentration in optical physics" That is because skillsets in the different subfields are TOTALLY different. A organic chemist and a physical chemist have NOTHING in common. One is familiar with pipettes, reaction vessels, fluids, biological substances and synthesis strategy. Most organic chemists know very little math. The other is skilled with computer modeling, thermodynamics and nanoscale fabrication techniques using industrial machinery. Most physical chemists would be completely lost in an synthetic lab where they actually had to personally touch chemicals. Likewise, an astronomer and a condensed matter physicist have NOTHING in common; one is skilled in statistics, signal processing and general relativity, the other is skilled in solid state physics, nanoscale fabrication and electrical testing. If you just wrote "physics" or "chemistry" how do they know which one you are? If you apply to a finance job, they don't want to see your skill in nanofabrication and circuits; they want to see your applied math and statistics skills.

in science projects are so big that even PhDs are often just told what to do. This depends on professor. Some professors give students more independence. Some professors will not give you this independence.

just got done with my first semester. if it goes well this will be my thesis topic. there is no funding for this outside the school's internal funds, so I'm TAing at the same time. the professor is a tenured associate professor, has 3 students and hasn't had a grant since 2009. the thing is, i believe the direction my professor is going in has already been done. i have a paper from before that showed something very similar to his "big plan". i believe that it'll be repeating that paper's techniques for a different material.

My professor has given me a project related to magnetic nanostructures. I noticed, however, that these had applications in other fields and that we could utilize the magnetic properties to control other, seemingly unrelated properties of the material. There have been other articles written on this, and the field seems to have large potential in applications. My professor has emphasized before to not deviate from the "big plan" and to focus only on things we have the equipment to measure. I've done extensive reading to confirm that all materials and equipment are things we already have in the department. However, during the group meeting, when I presented my research proposal, the professor reacted rather cooly and said "Its true that when we read papers, there's alot that we can do, but we can't do everything." He kept emphasizing that "We have limited equipment, so you have to do a realistic project." I said that "I think that this research won't use any equipment we don't have, and it does not deviate from your previous research on magnetic nanostructures at all. Indeed it is just exploring another aspect of these structures that has strong application potential.“ He said "Ok, show me" so I drew a diagram but apologized for not drawing it correctly, there are better pictures in the papers. He said it was interesting; so then I said "I'll send you a copy of the papers I was talking about." So I wrote a brief summary of 2 papers that were important, attached the original papers, and sent it to him. No response so far. In undergrad the professor that I did research with encouraged me to first read articles, find those of mutual interest, and discuss what we could do. As long as the research did not deviate from the "big plan", we could pick our own target. For example in semiconducting polymers we could pick the specific nanostructures to test, and for which combination of properties, as long as it involved electrical properties. I'm not sure that I handled this correctly with my new professor. It seems that he doesn't really want students doing things that deviate, even a tiny bit, from his plan, and I'm afraid I offended him by thinking critically about the subject and offering my opinions. What should I do?

take an "easy" class to pad your GPA. There's no "easy" classes in grad school but some are easier than others. Also look into if your school allows you to take any undergrad classes for credit.

be brief when describing the professor's research and reserve that space for your own actions. I believe you do not need to go into too much detail; instead, emphasize transferable skills and techniques.

thank you... was this: 2. Which of the following will have highest density? ((Na,Al,Co,Si) A. Co a real question??? are you supposed to just "know" that transition metals are less dense than group 1/3 metals and semiconductors?

they say it to scare you. its part of the mind games. can't let them get into your head, know what I'm saying? lots of people post inflated stats in an effort to weed out competitors from the start. Its not just Asians; Europeans do extremely well on the GRE too. My professor is German and he said "when I first taught here, I used the questions I was given myself in Germany. It was an utter disaster, and I realized that the level of difficulty had to be adjusted to be more appropriate." That said, its important to do well on the GRE for nothing else if to prove "equivalence".

Don't compare to others, only compare to yourself，you are doing good. These schools will probably accept you.

got accepted to illinois and princeton already?

i believe this is good enough for most schools if you are not applying to the most top schools. respectable schools like Ohio State will be good.

+1 to the stay the hell away from bio viewpoint. Its saturated like hell. In my opinion, chemistry in the last 15 years has shifted VERY far away from traditional analytical, inorganic and physical chemistry and has strongly focused on bio/organic since that's where the dough was rolling in. This has also led to a severe decline in the math skills of chemists. Some schools even changed their curriculum to reflect that and deleted classes that weren't related to biotech and added multiple biotech related electives. That was very shortsighted. After all, one field can't keep making money forever, and just from its sheer fundamentals (high risk, high concentration of cost centers, reliance on policy for profit) pharmaceuticals just can't keep getting bigger. So now what you have is a total disconnect of the chemistry curriculum and what employers actually look for. Indeed I believe that chemistry departments have made a terrible mistake in the organization of the curriculum. Just as physicists don't take a 1 year upper division class called "Classical Physics" that tries to cram advanced mechanics and electrodynamics into a single class, why should chemists be forced to settle for a 1 year "physical chemistry" class with a one size fits all book, instead of a 4 semester series with separate books on the core of physical chemistry: quantum mechanics, molecular spectroscopy, statistical thermodynamics, and chemical kinetics? Gives the added bonus of giving deeper insight into analytical chemistry through a dedicated undergrad molecular spectroscopy class too. Guess where most chemists in industry are actually employed? Process, formulation or QC, not doing synthesis, and those 3 fields will NEED the extra depth. That's what employers are not liking about chemistry graduates - not enough depth in their undergrad studies. Note that the "biologization" of the chemistry curriculum has taken a toll even on biochemistry. Why shouldn't we change biochemistry from "one big book taken with bio majors" to 2 classes, one purely on physical biochemistry and one purely on "biological" biochemistry? Chemistry is after all supposed to be a quantitative physical science; you can't build physical intuition with a year of rushed presentations on vastly different topics. Instead chemists should be trained at the BS level on the very basics needed to get a job, then take electives for their specific direction. Remember, learning about DNA is useless to a guy working in a soap factory, but both DNA researchers and soap chemists benefit immensely from thermodynamics.

medChem is pretty narrow. the problem is that it prepares you for a single career in a single industry: synthetic organic chemist in the pharmaceutical industry. if this single industry has trouble, you're also in trouble. have you thought about switching to a general organic synthesis or inorganic synthesis program especially in things like polymer or inorganic materials synthesis? these are broader and let you work in more traditional chemical industries with a very similar set of skills to medicinal chem. I don't think you'll be interested in analytical or physical but just letting you know, at my school the analytical/physical guys all found jobs on graduation (in companies like Nanomix, Agilent and Intel) and only very few had to get a postdoc. These require a totally different skillset though.

most questions were 4-5 parts so there's no way I could tell. well I asked and it turns out that he's going to make every assignment worth the same amount of points and go by percentage; the points for each individual assignment are just for reference. what a relief.

I'm a MS student in condensed matter/materials physics. During my undergrad I was interested in materials science, so I took a class on solid state physics early; way too early for my own good. Expectedly I got an F. afterwards, due to having too many required classes and a schedule conflict I never got the chance to retake it. In other materials related classes like quantum mechanics, chemical thermodynamics and statistical physics I got A's. My current school was so nice to me and accepted me for materials physics research despite the F in solid state physics. Right now though I have a professor in that's so hard its physically painful doing his homework. The problem is, he's also teaching the solid state physics class. Next semester I have a full load of TAing along with the dreaded graduate electromagnetism class and a required electronics lab. I'm scared of taking solid state with the "hard" professor and having that class drag down my other 2 classes. I got an A in undergrad statistical physics, and I'm confident that I'll get an A in the grad version. The professor is also a very nice guy who has a good reputation. Its a required class also while solid state is simply my "elective" (but for my purposes it might as well be required). But if I do not take solid state immediately, the F will be a mark on my record when I apply for PhDs next year and it might put me at a severe disadvantage. Also, the solid state professor is going on sabbatical next year and there might be no other chance to take solid state physics before I graduate if no one else picks up the solid state course.

yep that's the problem; point values for each problem are not known in advanced, neither are homework total points. In fact we haven't had 2 homeworks with the same point value this entire semester, so it was basically a random number. In the past the lowest was 15 points for a 3 problem assignment, 30 points for a 5 problem assignment; seems fair, 5-6 points per problem. However this time it had 5 problems for a 50 point assignment, nearly double the points per problem of before. There was only one other case of 5 problems per assignment, most assignments were 4 problems. now that I think about it, the rent situation could've been much worse. thanks alot i feel better now. thank you so much, it gives me the confidence to ask. i mean, it won't lower my grade by asking, so might as well.

[rant] great news. i do well the entire semester and have a 87% in the assignments. the last assignment had a single more problem than the other assignments. it came on the heels of a huge test for another class that i simply did not have time to focus on it, so i didn't do one problem out of many on this single assignment. looks like the one single problem i didn't do was worth half the assignment. and this single assignment? worth more than 2 past assignments put together. usually each assignment is worth 15-25 points; this one was worth 50 points with half the points on a single problem. not doing this problem was worse than not turning in an entire assignment from the past. because of the extraordinarily disproportionate weight assigned to this assignment and the problem i didn't do my assignments grade dropped from 87% to 73%. my grade just dropped from contending for an A to nearing the B-C border. now that's just horse sh* for being punished so badly due to a single problem on a single assignment. i don't even know if i can speak to the professor about this. i think its totally unfair and wrong to assign such incredible weight to a single problem on a single assignment that it can literally make or break someone's stay in a graduate program. if that wasn't enough my rent just went up and I'm probably going to be forced to move over break. what a nice Christmas present.[/rant]

I brought a large library consisting of books on general physics, calculus, multivariable calculus, linear algebra, differential equations, 2 books on physical chemistry, 1 on semiconductor devices, electricity and magnetism, classical mechanics, mathematical physics + solutions, 2 books on quantum mechanics, 2 statistical physics books, 2 dover paperbacks on chemical thermodynamics, 3 books on solid state physics (2 on electromagnetic properties, 1 as a unified thermodynamic view of all materials), 2 books on structural mechanics and a practical guide to operating scanning probe microscopes. Just in case, you know?

hey if you have spare time you can do my physics homework for me =)