subject: Nerds, Lab Equipment, And Me [print this page] We chemistry majors never get a breakWe chemistry majors never get a break. When I tell people I majored in chemistry in college, their eyes tend to glaze over and the topic of conversation quickly shifts to anything else. They don't care to jack their jaws about molecular bonding, covelance, or lab equipment. They would rather talk about anything else other than Bunsen burners, vials, test tubes and beakers galore.
They don't care to talk about how I came to appreciate the sweet, steady methodology of science. The fact that I was suddenly hip to the step-by-step rigor of the scientific method doesn't impress them one bit. Which is a shame. I was keen on unlocking the mysteries of the entire unknown world ebbing and flowing around my small North Texas town. Molecular bonds and atomic weights could tell me things shop class and art appreciation couldn't.
The imagined world was less appealing to me than the scientific. I was less interested in imagining myself in a better town with a better family than I was with finding a way to recombine the atomic bonds on my life. It some time for me to understand co-signs and accelerated algebra. This meant I spent a good deal of time in the lab, fogging up my goggles, weighing, measuring, observing, and noting one reaction after another after another.
Even as a kid, I had a sense that fame and popularity were fleeting things. I missed out on a lot of down time, a lot of hanging around time. Chemistry, on the other hand -- now that was the stuff of the universe, the stuff that mattered. With enough application, graph paper, and pencil, I could understand covalent relationships and the acids that break them.
When your brain starts to see the world in terms of molecular recombinations, it's only natural to start drifting towards the philosophical. Why did I opt to minor and major in chemistry if it meant so much to me? Hegel, Kant, Sartre started to mean as much to me as Newton, Descartes, and Pauling. I would recommend either subject, either as a dual major or in any combination of major or minor field of study.
