Research interests

With my arrival in Berkeley just a few months away, I've been thinking about my research interests. I feel like they are poorly defined. I can't point to specific questions I'm interested in addressing, or to subfields of chemistry that I have a long-standing interest in wanting to explore more deeply.

Last week, I sent a brief statement to Berkeley so they could match me with a first-year academic adviser. They wanted to know what my research interests were. I wrote something kind of vague describing how I want to approach my research, and what areas of chemistry I find interesting generally, but in the end, it ended up looking pretty bland and nonspecific.

The problem is that my research interests are being externally defined. The way I approach thinking about what I want to work on in graduate school is to look at what the faculty are doing, look for something I find interesting, and then sort of latch on to it. Someone's doing femtosecond spectrosopy? Sounds difficult and mathy. Someone's solving protein crystal structures? I think I would get bored. Someone's manipulating quantum dots? Maybe I could do that, too!

Ideally, my research interests would grow out of what I genuinely want to pursue, and then I would find a faculty adviser who seems knowledgeable and capable of helping me do my research. (I have the impression that this is how things tend to work more in the humanities and social sciences: a graduate student is on their own a lot, and relies on an adviser for direction. From what I've seen in the sciences, though, there is a lot more top-down delegation, whether it's in large physics projects like CERN or individual chemistry groups in which ten people are addressing a complicated problem from different angles.) But even if I were given the space to define my own goals and pursue them, I wouldn't know what to do. I think in chemistry, this is a result of the heirarchical nature of the research. There is a lot of background to know before getting to the cutting edge of the field, and for the last four years I've been building that base of knowledge. But I don't know much about where the frontiers of chemistry lie. Organic chemistry made me fall in love with chemistry, but on a fundamental level, there doesn't seem to be very much left to figure out. The physical organic chemistry done, I believe, in the 60s, 70s, and 80s gave us very good models for how organic chemistry works. I couldn't take a few organic chemistry classes and then go to graduate school and study electrophilic aromatic substitution (a basic type of reaction that people often learn about in their first or second semester), because all of that stuff is already worked out. And this is true not only of undergraduate organic chemistry, but most of the chemistry I have learned as an undergraduate--I learned about things that are well-known and uncontroversial, and was not exposed, in a broad sense, to where the frontiers of chemistry currently lie.

The transition from studying well-known phenomena to figuring out where on the boundaries of chemistry I want to be is a little confusing. I loved organic chemistry, but I would not want to spend my graduate school career doing natural products synthesis. I wasn't so excited about what we learned in my biochemistry class, but I still find biology fascinating.

In chemistry, if I do narrow something down slightly, there are still thousands of subfields, only a handful of which I am familiar with. Take my above statement--"I still find biology fasinating." What does that mean I want to study? Protein biochemistry from a mechanistic perspective? Prebiotic chemistry? Cellular imaging? Signal transduction networks? X-ray crystallography of membrane proteins? (And I'm limiting myself to biologial studies that are done in chemistry departments, here.) There are so many subfields of which I have so little knowledge that it's very difficult for me to define a personal research interest.

The only solution I currently see to all of this is to plow through and read about what happens to strike my fancy at the time. By learning more about where chemistry currently lies as a field, I should be able to formulate my own ideas on where it could go. But this is a very slow approach. In some sense, I feel like I've been duped: there is chemistry that people actually do, and then there is chemistry that undergraduates learn. And obviously, you need the latter to understand the former, but it's jarring to realize that I actually know very little about chemistry. I feel unprepared. In trying to navigate the world of modern chemistry research, I feel like I'm trying to learn a whole new discipline from scratch.