...picking up and reading The Organometallic Chemistry of the Transition Metals by R. H. Crabtree for the first time in a good few years. It's pretty much required reading for both undergraduates and graduate students. I've met the author a couple of times, and he's as mad as brush. What prompted it was having gone back into the university the last couple of days for two talks; yesterday by one of the PhD students in the lab I used to work in and then today by one of the MSc candidates. It was nice to sit and think chemistry for the first time in several months, rather than the usual diet of daytime TV or sports talk radio. Both their talks went well, with nice results; it was nice to see the end of the story as it were, since I've not seen or heard what they've been up to all that much since the Great Broken Ankle Drama got me out of the lab a couple of weeks earlier than planned.
It was nice to feel interested in the subject again. I came to be very bored with the daily grind of being in a lab. The amount of time doing interesting experiments and having eureka moments is a small fraction of the amount of the time consumed by washing up, cleaning apparatus, making starting materials for the seemingly thousandth time, making sure materials are pure and so on. I like results. Of course, if life had panned out with me as an academic by now, that would be the gig; me in the office, poring over results while the students have to do the ugly stuff I've spent 12 years doing. The 'what if' thoughts started rattling around the other week when I saw a couple of papers which were essentially a vindication of a research proposal I wrote almost five years ago for various research fellowships which I was rejected for, almost certainly because it wasn't 'sexy' enough. It was a good idea.
Harumph.
No comments:
Post a Comment