So I'm a chem major that's going to be applying to PhD programs in the fall...

So I'm a chem major that's going to be applying to PhD programs in the fall. Need some evaluation of my application so I know what level of school I should be applying to.

GPA: 3.82 cum, 3.91 in major (including Advanced Organic Chemistry)

GRE: 162 verbal 165 quantitative, waiting on essay

Research: 3 years total including summers by the time I graduate, last 2 years will be in the same group on the same project

Teaching: two semesters of 'mentoring' (glorified proctor/grader) and this fall will be full TA

Letters of Rec: Will have one really strong one from my PI, no idea what to do about the other two

Will be doing a poster presentation at an international conference in two weeks

Extracurriculars: Captain of a club sport team for a year and president of a club for a year

Is this enough to get me to interviews at top 10 schools? I feel like if I can make it to interviews I can present well enough to get in. Won't have a publication before applications are due unless some some miracle occurs and my reactions speed up from 20-50 hrs to 2-5 hrs each. My biggest issue is having no idea who would be good to ask for letters of rec. Possibly one of my professors for one letter but at a loss for the third one unless I hit it off really well in the first month of TA'ing in the fall.

Great stuff. That's really neat. You possess the knowledge to efficiently gas yourself. I suggest you don't wait around and get to it.

That would be Plan B

It should really be your top priority. If that fails you may as well do all the other faggy shit you plan on doing.

but what's your IQ?

Meh, at that point its making as much LSD as I can before the DEA catches on

potato

What your showing me here Buddy is the average Portfolio of a Pre Med student.

Apply to all Possible schools you will definitely get into more than one of top 10, schools love Nibbas like you.

> Is this enough to get me to interviews at top 10 schools?

Probably. Is programming/scripting important for organic chemists? I would ask for information about how adaptable you are to modern chemistry.

> I feel like if I can make it to interviews I can present well enough to get in.

What are your answers to these questions gonna be:

At , what specifically do you want to work on?

At , do you have professors you already know you want to be on your advisory panel?

What prior experience do you have that meshes with what we're doing at ?

> My biggest issue is having no idea who would be good to ask for letters of rec. Possibly one of my professors for one letter but at a loss for the third one unless I hit it off really well in the first month of TA'ing in the fall.

You need to start hanging around at office hours more. Ask your TAship supervisor, the professor in whichever lab you're running your reactions, and the professor with whom you have the most in class rapport.

Worst happens is a professor rejects your LoR request. Just get that out of the way ASAP so you can ask someone else. LoRs are a way bigger presence in your mind than they are in your professor's. Just ask.

What the hell is a Nibba?

If this is OP then just you not knowing what Nibba is lets me know he doesnt waste his time.

Nope, programming and scripting would be important for physical or computational chemists. Organic is still all lab time.

Specifically is going to be based on me looking into what research professors are doing and trying to find one that sounds interesting to me, but more generally synthetic organic chemistry, either small molecule or polymer.

Prior experience is pretty limited to the polymer lab I'm in. Probably don't want to mention spending high school making every high explosive I could find the reagents for.

I'll try to start asking for letters of rec as soon as the semester starts then.

>on b
>don't waste my time

Chemist here, what school do you attend currently. You have all the right stuff but if you are at some small BS school kiss top 10 goodby. If your at Stanford the world's your oyster.

RPI. Fairly well ranked engineering college / research institute. Way better known for its engineering than its science though

Sorry, I'm not familiar with RPI, I went to UCLA

>Advanced Organic Chemistry
What exactly is the difference from regular Organic?

Just Ace'd Organic 1 & 2 over the past two semesters, it basically just consisted of memorization and mechanisms

Its ranked at 39 nationally by usnews if that means anything. Wish I would have gone to UCLA, they have a pretty strong chem program there don't they? Did you go to grad school or jumped straight into industry?

Its just a graduate level course. Tried to generalize a bit towards predicting mechanisms and getting into reaction geometry

I went and got a masters in public health, and then got into industry. I am in the cosmetic industry and am now a lab director at a billion dollar company and make pretty good money. Grad school was a bit of a waste. Don't get a PhD unless you want to stay in academics.

I was interested in moving to industry, but was told that a PhD was necessary for being put in charge of a research lab if I didn't want to spend 30 years working first

Lol, who told you that? It really depends on what kind of research... The closer you get to finished consumer good, the more money you will get. Pharma is pretty good bank, but the work is super tedious and frustrating when it goes nowhere. I am 32 and run my own lab with 5 chemists under me.

this.
do you want to work or teach? if you're not interested in academia just get a master's.

Another option is get into Chemical Engineering masters program. Oil companies pay big bucks 200k+ for hazard pay in foreign countries with oil.

Currently more interested in basic research, more due to ignorance of current industry R&D than anything. Was told by a professor that worked in industry for 20 years before returning to academia that a master's overqualified you for entry level but didn't qualify you enough for the better positions. PhD or bust.

Then I would have to work in foreign countries with oil. Also already have some idea of what Chem Eng is like because thats what my dad has done for the past 30+ years, not interested.

Fair enough on the Chem E. My biggest recommendation is to call arround some facilities and take tours/shadow some chemists. Literally Google Maps "formulation labs" and call a few to check it out. At least you will find out a bit more.

Well you could do analytical chem, usually most people only have B.Sc.'s there, but it's not a huge amount of research in the end since it's mostly adapting to government regulations.
That's what I'm currently doing, but it's kind of boring work and navigating hundreds of government documents and memorizing standards can be annoying.

>overqualified you for entry level but didn't qualify you enough for the better positions.
to be fair, that does kind of suck. but, if you really are qualified and competent you can just crush all of your peers and advance anyways. that's what i did in the telecom field.

May be able to get a tour of a commercial lab in the area next year depending on what the department here decides to follow through on. Will look into it, thanks,

My older brother works in an analytical lab doing quality control for Bayer. Seems tedious as fuck and would not want to get stuck in it.

Seems like my best bet may be sticking in academia then. National labs are a bit harder to end up at I'm guessing because that could be an option

If you're white you'll go to a state school. If you're a nigger AA will get you into MIT.

Analytical is a pretty boring job, you mostly get stuck doing QC work. If you are really good you can start your own business after about 10-15 years ( mostly spent on building contacts).

I enjoy formulating. It's pretty good money and I consult on the side ($275/hr).

Another option is to look at business school. In the end being able to sell the value of a lab to companies is where the real money is.

>My older brother works in an analytical lab doing quality control for Bayer. Seems tedious as fuck and would not want to get stuck in it.
It can be kind of tedious but if you like statistics it's kind of interesting. The actual lab portions of it are boring though. Where I work most of the work is basically glorified line workers. We hire student interns and they do a single step in the process each basically lol

You have to abide by government regulations and there's also standards organizations that you usually follow. Most of the 'research' will be done above the lab level of things and is just about dealing with statistical inaccuracies in the procedures and such. It's not quite like traditional chemical research.

Implying I should undersell myself and not fight for every scrap of advantage I can

I'll definitely look into formulating. While I do want to make a comfortable living, I'm in it more for the interest than the money.

Is the industry doing well? Thought it was downsizing a bit with all the big pharma mergers going on, leaving fewer positions than before

Well I know in Canada with the collapse of the oil industry a lot of the oil labs have been shutting down. Much of the people they hired were simply chem techs though which don't really do research, they just operate the analytical equipment.
I work in environmental which is alright. I think I'd like to pursue my masters though since the work is kind of boring plus it's mostly just client care and explaining test results to them. I really need to improve my marks though I think. Plus I never did original research while in university, just those shitty research internships helping profs which really accomplishes nothing for you personally though lol
I know Gilead Sciences here is always hiring, but it seems like they're very picky about who they hire. They can afford to withhold hiring to wait for the perfect person with a phd and a ton of research behind them.

Not true about the small school. The girl who taught me in my lab is going to Yale and we are the smallest university in FL.

Older RPIfag here. Prob good for top10, but top10 is less important than your PhD advisor's rep, and how much you publish under them. Find a few research papers that make you go "fuck yeah, I wanna do this", and then find out what labs published them. Go from there. Insofar programming/scripting, very nice bonus to have, and opens doors in adjacent fields. Synthetic chemists are fairly multidisciplinary in the real world, and most all industrial (and even academic) will use compchem tools as another tool in the toolbox. You don't need full blown programming, but if you can take a compchem course to get exposure to the tools/techniques, I'd do so.

That's I figured I would need a PhD for a good position with some security

Didn't expect to run into an alumni, but probably shouldn't be too surprised. I have some free electives for my senior year and was considering doing some basic comp sci just to get exposure to coding.

Finding papers is a bit tough, whole lot of literature out there. Will see if I can get the latest copies of some journals and flip through. Just figured a top 10 would have the best connections / recognition for figuring out what to do with myself afterwards.

Materials science

Took an intro level course and spent a few weeks in a mat sci lab that was making nano particles, was pretty boring with a lot of analysis and little lab work. Would probably work on a multidisciplinary project that included polymer synthesis, but otherwise not a fan of the large amount of mathematics involved in the characterizations.

>That's I figured I would need a PhD for a good position with some security
It more depends on what you want to do.
With a B.Sc. alone you may end up in a more broad field, just science related. But it's often easier to get employment due to that.
With a Phd it can sometimes be difficult because your research has to match up specifically to what companies want because at the salary they are paying they don't have time to let you learn how to reorganize your education toward what they want.

At least that's what I've seen in my experience. Our company is predominantly B.Sc.'s, and most get their M.Sc.'s in things like environmental policy which is kind of generic, and Phd's are pretty rare for analytical work and generally don't help a ton and your wage doesn't drastically increase anyway. Most of our Phds and MScs don't get paid any more than the BScs in equivalent positions.
When our company wants specific research they appoint an internal crew to be a liaison to a research council at a university rather than specifically hiring teams of Phds to do research.

It happens. :)
For research papers, I usually just trawl through something like pubs.acs.org until I find something interesting, and use google scholar to back out research groups/areas of interest.

Regarding the networking, that is true, but you can get a head-start at RPI to see where everyone's getting money, and who're they collaborating with outside.

>all this college talk
I didn't go. Did I miss out on anything?

First off, if you're a chem major kill yourself now. The job market is absolutely trash. If you think having a PhD matters you're in for a surprise.

Also, if you have one letter and no publications you're probably going to struggle. Grad schools are saturated. If you went to a school with a reputable chemistry program as an undergrad, labs will wonder why your school didn't convince you to stay. Good programs bend over backwards to retain promising undergraduates and will give them every preference.

Also, if you do manage to get your shitty degree in a shitty field, you'll have to choose between working as a 25/hr temp or cooking for a Dutch MDA lab.

Pick related, the right choice

Meh, depends what you want to do

However most people I know with phds right now are barely making it.

>Also, if you do manage to get your shitty degree in a shitty field, you'll have to choose between working as a 25/hr temp or cooking for a Dutch MDA lab.

He thinks he can make LSD he posted earlier

>However most people I know with phds right now are barely making it.
That's kind of sad, I have friends who are at college right now and they're always so stressed out, but that's probably because they weren't prepared for it I guess.
You guys work really hard, and I just never know what for.

I respect good students on good programs, it shows a real level of dedication, which is a great thing.

Sounds like I need to avoid analytical or stay in academia then

Will try that when I have downtime in the lab. How would you recommend figuring out collaboration and funding? Just asking? I'm familiar with my groups collaborations and grants, we actually have some good ties to industry.

Driving yourself to alcoholism from lack of sleep and stressful courseloads if you're a high achiever, partying and tons of opportunities to just hang out with friends and have a good time if not.

School is trying to convince me to stay. I'm in the accelerated BS-PhD program to get a higher research stipend over the summers and guaranteed research, but noping the fuck out because I'm not a huge fan of most of the professors and the administration is really fucking the school over.

We have pretty good placement for grad students. Last few years we had people getting into Northwestern for inorganic and Princeton and Yale for organic. I don't think any of them had publications either.

How hard is it to learn german?

It's probably not that difficult to produce these days. Lysergamides are used for cluster headaches and inducing contractions during birth for certain veterinary medicines. Probably quite a few other things as well I'd imagine.
There's been like 40+ species of bacteria discovered that produce lysergamides and it is a mass produced industrialized process these days.
Going from lysergamides to lsd is easy enough. Would be hardly surprising for someone to setup a lab to do it. However making money would be an issue given that most people are used to paying dirt cheap prices for fake stuff.

>Probably don't want to mention spending high school making every high explosive I could find the reagents for.

Wrong!
I think it was my story about making Nitroglycerin when I was 13 that helped get me into MIT.

>partying and tons of opportunities to just hang out with friends and have a good time if not.

That doesn't sound fun
>temporarily have a good time
>delude yourself into thinking what you're going is good and fun
>grade reports come back
>in debt
Yeah I'll pass.

Yep. Easiest way is to ask. Also Ron (if he's still there), Freddy, or Curt should know who's working with who and how they're all paid.

... whats your GRE in chem...

Actually it's not hard with peptide coupling. LSD isn't cost effective compared to stuff like psychedelic amphetamines.

My boss Vladimir let's me make nice things sometimes. Did this today, but needs recrystallizing.

I don't mean to be a dick OP, but you should really be discussing this with your undergraduate advisors and professors (especially) whom you respect.

If you want to compete for top 10 programs, there are a few things you need to do (GPA is great, by the way).

You need to do better on the quantitative portion of the GRE (at the very least 168) 89th percentile is not going to cut it.

Additionally, virtually every top science program requires a GRE subject test in that field.

The research experience means little without publications, try to find opportunities to slide into an authorship on a paper. The poster presentation is fantastic though. TRY TO NETWORK AT THE CONFERENCE!!!!

Finally, letters of recommendation matter more who they are coming from, not what they say about you. This isn't as essential as the other factors as many applicants can't work with high profile faculty, but is still a HUGE plus.

To be honest though, it sounds like you're interested in going into industry, not academia, so a top 10 program isn't essential for that.

>Sounds like I need to avoid analytical or stay in academia then
You make the same amount of money essentially. Once you're up there as project managers and such it's still six figure wages
You have to be pretty careful with graduate work. The more specific you get with it the less likely you'll be to land work in the private industries.

Even companies like Gilead Sciences still hire BSc's fairly often and just promote internally. A lot of private companies outsource research.
You'll notice when applying for companies things like "BSc with 4 years experience or MSc with 2 years" and such is a fairly common thing.

could always go back to the old fashioned ergot farm if the industrialized strains are too hard to get a hold of.

hm, talking about making azides from pool chlorinator and urea may be worth a shot then.

None of those names are familiar, are those grad students or faculty?

not sure if this was directed towards me, but haven't taken it yet. Thats in september.

I am, just like getting a perspective from outside the bubble of my university even if i have to wade through the shit.

did not want to have to pay for another GRE, may just set my sights a bit lower. Although I've been told that grad schools are putting less weight in the GRE and many don't even require the subject test.

If my project speeds up a bit there's a slight chance of publishing at the end of the spring semester, but that seems too far out to matter. The conference is in Japan, networking is going to be hard. Will try and spend the time there schmuzing about. Maybe find an invited speakers or guest list to pick targets from.

I've been told to aim for more senior faculty and avoid adjuncts if possible for letters of rec.

as far as industry vs academia, I'm a bit wish washy and sorting that out still. Just don't like the idea of fighting for grants and tenure.

Bailey (assoc head), Colon(head), Breneman (dean).

Ah, yep they're all still kicking. Was actually considering asking Bailey for a letter of rec. thanks for the advice

They're hard to grow and cultures don't store well. It's a nightmare to prevent contamination.

You can get lysergic acid amide more easily and hydrolyze it to the acid in order to do peptide coupling. Hydrolyzing with a base produces inactive enantiomers.

LSD is just a pain. As soon as the boomer hippies die off it will just be replaced by other drugs.

Can't say I'm too familiar with drugs in general. Figured that going through ergotamine was still the most accessible pathway. Enantiomer separation sounds like a massive pain in the ass. I'm guessing there's a new generation of psychedelics with more streamlined processes these days then?

I sound really impressive on paper just like you, and here i am working overnight in a wastewater treatment plant.
Its actually pretty lit, fuck grad school

Yea ultra potent n-benzyl/anisole derivatives of phenethylamines are huge. They suck compared to LSD and are cardiotoxic but they're exponentially more cost effective. Not fun to make though, they pass through the skin pretty easily as bases.

IDK man, grad school made be a terrible person. Sounds like you have your shit together though. The job market is really bad for chemistry though. I know really talented chemists with amazing CVs who have no job security.

It's something to investigate before going to grad school. Not saying you can't have a great career, but I think it is worth while to know what you're getting into.

I was always super depressed in university and slacked off a ton, ended up with shitty grades and no research. It sucks but actually I got out into the private industry and it's a lot different. I've enjoyed it quite a bit.
I've enjoyed it but I still kind of want to head to grad school cause I feel like I'm going to hold back my life somehow but I probably need a way to actually improve my chem classwork while still working.

I'm pretty torn though. Academia seems like shit and that seems to be where most MScs and Phds go otherwise you just have to hope a private company notices your research and contacts you.

Well OP is off to bed. Thanks for the recommendations, advice, and reality check perspectives you glorious faggots.

Me too