1. What made you want to be a chemist? The serious but predictable answer is a couple of really good science teachers, so thanks should go to the inspirational Andrew Munro and Jeremy Bushrod. The fun answer is John Nettles....
Until now, it was usually thought that colliding molecules get the shakes as the result of energy transfer solely from the smashing of the molecules, but some new research adds a second means by which colliding molecules become vibrationally excited--it is being called the "Tug o' War Mechanism". The new experiment, transforming the textbook story, waccording toformed in the lab of Richard Zare, chair of the Department of Chemistry at Stanford University. This work on energy transferring, or inelastic, collisions is featured in the July 3, 2008 issue of the journal Nature........ 
HOUSTON -- June 30, 2008 -- Nearly a century after Danish physicist Niels Bohr offered his planet-like model of the hydrogen atom, a Rice University-led team of physicists has created giant, millimeter-sized atoms that resemble it more closely than any other experimental realization yet achieved. The research is available online in Physical Review Letters....... Literature and editorials in popular journals on the subject of ethics have sparked tremendous debate about the ethical behavior of our peers and some have suggested implementation of ethics courses, computational techniques to root out fraud and even oaths to promote ethical behavior amongst newly minted scientists. While, at least in the case of the “Toronto Oath” vanity may be playing a larger part than practicality, it nevertheless establishes that high level debates are transforming into action on college campuses. Before people expand on this concept of an “oath” or other silly contrite devices which appear to be ineffective (at least for lawyers in any regard), it may be worthwhile to contemplate the issue in a far more philosophical context. Firstly, we must ask ourselves if loose ethics is a new phenomenon or if it is simply a constant which is just being promulgated by blogs (of which I would take some blame) and other traditional media in a flavor-of-the-week news cycle. While the tools may not exist to establish that fact, it may be worth considering that overzealousness on behalf of some bloggers and journal editors will only create problems and exasperate the lean patients of reviewers and readers alike. Thus, it is within this context that a division of ethical behavior by magnitude of import is devised, just as a division of moral transgressions was formed by the Catholic Church. Establishment of the Seven Deadly Sins in the Catholic tradition traces its roots to the 4th century where, at some point, it became necessary to distinguish sins which were trivial (venial) from those which were grave or mortal sins. The need for a distinction between being bad and being really, really bad seems odd given that in science, as well as (presumably) matters of the soul, we all strive to be perfect and any infraction is serious. Thus, just as it wasn’t the intent of Pope Gregory I to create two types of sin, one more permissible then the other, so it isn’t my intent to suggest that there exists a permissible type of fraud. There are cases, of course, where forgiveness may come easily and cases where forgiveness may not come at all. It also helps to put many people’s mind at ease that when they read documents most people will not have committed one of these more egregious transgressions and thus we, as readers, needn’t worry about questioning the truthfulness of the data but, rather, the competence of the scientist.
First, let me propose the Seven Deadly Sins of Science:
Plagiarism: The copying of other’s work and ideas as your own with the intent to deceive. Further defined as the intellectual theft of the ideas of others, even though they have not been published and publishing them as your own idea be they lifted from a conference, grant proposal or paper which you have been given to review. Additionally, the copying of one’s own work with the intent to provide the spurious impression of an extensive publication record is an egregious sin.
Fabrication: Inventing data which does not exist or suggesting procedures and experiments were preformed when they were not
Falsification: Altering, manipulating, distorting or skewing data. Disregarding data which conflicts with other data or not reporting data which might lead other’s to reasonably believe your conclusion is incorrect
Suppression: Not reporting or publishing data which may contradict your previous findings, assertions and assumptions.
Negligence: Failing in due diligence to ensure truthful and accurate reporting from subordinates or taking data and results from others known to have insufficient qualifications, suspicious motives or are known incompetent even though their results substantiate or further your claims.
Inhumanity: Performing experiments on living subjects which are not within the scope of sound science, do not have in place rigorous controls, have not been authorized by a veterinarian when necessary. More egregiously: from patients which have not given their express consent or from human subjects which cannot be reasonably expected to provide consent because they are subordinates, minors or mentally unfit. Most egregiously: publishing, acting upon, or providing easy access to those who would wish to use results for the sole purpose and intent to kill others.
Sabotage: Purposefully destroying others’ work, providing low grant application scores without merit, rejecting papers as a reviewer for trivial reasons, in an effort to slow or impede the work of others in your field.
In each of these cases, the intent is malicious or self promoting and ultimately results in the propagation of misinformation, harm to someone else’s career so that one’s own career may be advanced or deliberate cruelty, likely out of revenge. Violation of these boundaries are considered the most severe and violating them is almost certainly done willfully. Take a rather notorious case in point: Hwang Woo-Suk, who is guilty of multiple infractions: willful misrepresentation, fabrication, falsification and using ova from female subordinates are all cardinal sins and such gross levels of fraud are rare. Who could also forget Ms. Bengu Sezen, who’s obvious falsification and fabrication of data resulted in a stunning seven retractions by the group of Dalibor Sames, who himself has been accused of being complicit in his own willful negligence by failing to dutifully follow up when other researchers were piling on evidence that her results were not reproducible.
But it is with Dr. Sames I have drawn the line. As I have argued here before, I am neither convinced nor compelled to believe that Sames’ actions were indeed cardinal ethics violations but rather, a combination of his ego, youth and well played deception on the part of Bengu Sezen. Does that let him off too easily? And if so, what are the consequences of letting someone off easily? After all, punishing someone serves one of two basic functions: to correct and prevent behavior and/or to obtain a sense of revenge. If punishing someone only serves to make ourselves feel better (and thus has no higher purpose) then it’s merely revenge and a wasted effort. If anyone thought Sames were stupid enough to make the same mistake twice, maybe a serious consideration by granting agencies and the Office of Research Integrity would be in order. Then there is Leo Paquette who, by his own account inadvertently plagiarized material from two different sources on two different occasions. Such actions being unintentional yet repeated seems unlikely to an absurd degree, yet Dr. Paquette’s contributions to the field have been tremendous and, in light of that, even committing a cardinal ethical transgression such as blatant plagiarism can be forgiven though never really forgotten. Now, had Dr. Paquette fabricated the data (something that even very senior and respected scientists have been caught doing) then forgiveness may not have come at all. Thus, even within this series of seven transgressions, there are still shades of grayness.
[to be continued...]
Facilities and instrumentation:
We are rather instrument rich. There is only an infrequent line for the NMR and only if you choose not to be trained on both Bruker and Varian instruments. With 8 instruments ranging from 300 - 800 MHz, there’s no excuse to not have access to one or have a need for a higher field instrument. The only place (as far as I know) that has more and with any higher field is Wisconsin, and that’s a national lab. There are three X-ray diffractometers available for general use, which I believe is also a regional high, a kappa, a 3 circle and a powder. (There are something on the order of 7 diffractometers in the building, but most of them belong to specific groups.) The guy that runs the place, Bruce Noll, is something of a hard ass, but a generally excellent teacher. He was trained by the same guy at UK, who is also a reputed crystallographic master. Dunno much more than that. The mass spec facility is in the process of obtaining 3 new instruments after being awarded a rather huge NSF grant for the purchase of large instruments(?). The current new kid is a MALDI-TOF that has isotopic resolution all the way up to 4000 daltons and can give you low res up to 10,000 daltons. But I’m not a mass spec person, so I’ll only say that the two new instruments are supposed to be even better. Turn-around time is less than 24 hours in most cases, depending upon what you need done. The present workhorse is a 16 year old turd, so when it’s replaced, the place will obtain mini rockstar status next to UIUC. The department is also part of a new Imaging consortium funded with about 6 million bucks that will provide general access (in addition to the labs that already have them) confocal microscopy, animal imaging facilities, SEM, TEM, AFM, so on an so forth for pretty cheap user fees. We also have, as general access instrumentation, several Van de Graaff and a pretty tight linear accelerator in our DOE lab, which is next door. Indeed, I can’t think of a single instrument that isn’t available on this campus with the exception of a cyclotron, which is an hour away at Argonne.
The buildings these fine instruments are housed in are ugly, but their rather unattractive nature doesn’t appear to affect their function, so if “ugly” is the worst thing I can say about the place, it’s not doing too bad. In any regard, it’s something that paint could fix, should some administrator take notice that they do, indeed, work in a building where each floor is colored with a unique shade of vomit.
Faculty
The faculty are generally strong. Mobashery, Miller, Sevov, Castellino, Smith, Taylor and Wiest are all probably at the top of their game and produce some very interesting chemistry, even though I’m not overly qualified to comment on some of them. I suppose they’ve hired a new faculty member here every 3 years or so, thus it’s hard to say how many of them will turn out. I have no idea, honestly, how we rank in individual programs. I can clearly see that we are ranked abysmally in US News and World Report but the amount of peer reviewed grant money that we get is oddly in contrast to where we stand. It would leave me to assume that we are either unranked in the individual programs or ranked rather poorly. I have only this to say about the situation: I don’t really care. I don’t know what goes into the ranking, I don’t know how people arrive at their conclusions, but from all the available data, it appears as though ND is a very good department with no limitations and, as sad as it may be, these “rankings” serve only to worsen the quality of incoming students.
Location
South Bend is not the highlight of the midwest, but for $12 you can hop a train (that allows you to drink beer openly) to Chicago. Indianapolis is 2 hours south and the airport here is always good for getting you out. There is a bus that stops on campus that takes you directly to Chicago’s O’Hare, so transportation isn’t an issue. In the grand scheme of things, I’m in the lab 10 hours a day, so whatever awesome existence that exists outside (or doesn’t exist) I’d not know of it. I can eat pretty much whatever I want and there has been a recent profusion of high end Jazz clubs and the Fiddler’s Hearth is possibly one of the sweetest Irish Pubs I’ve ever been to. They serve Guinness for, like, $3 a pint because everything is cheap as hell out here. The little stipend they hand out is enough to live by yourself in a two bedroom apartment whilst eating out most nights because you’re too lazy to cook for yourself. A buck goes far in The Bend.
The whole “Catholic thing”
Here’s a section that’s probably not included in a lot of reviews, but it should be mentioned: The department is secular. This is because science is secular. This university understands that and respects that. The Catholic backdrop adds more kitsch to the place with its “touchdown jesus” and potentially trademarked phrase “Catholic Character” and the annual planting of the crosses for the unborn (and semiannual vandalism of said event by those rabble rousing libruls) then it adds any sense of Christian mores, but it does attract a lot of lectures on morality and ethics in science and, I think, if this place were smart, they would capitalize on that like Tuskegee did. Those lectures are actually very interesting and not available with such frequency and debate at most schools. So, Catholic kitsch and interesting lectures are the only observable outcome of Catholicism here. It’s a small price to pay. If you’re Catholic, of course, it’s gotta be like a Jesus themed Disneyland or something.
In one of the more spectacular examples of recent photochromic research, Jiro Abe and Co., in a very recent Organic Letters ASAP (doi: 10.1021/ol801135g), have demonstrated the very rapid formation and disappearance of a “green shit colored chromophore” upon shining UV light into a tube filled with a hexaarylbiimidazole derivative (vide infra, bitch).
The reaction is rapid and, most interestingly, rapidly reversible, which means that the formation of the green colored product is short lived and the color disappears, most notably faster than the diffusion forces can dissipate the greenish cloud. While the technology isn’t quite new, I’d have to say this is actually published in the incorrect journal. This is potential JACS and/or Angew material, given the rate of reversal and the demonstrable theatrics. Org Lett is an interesting journal and I don’t wince at publishing there, but “greener” pastures should have been waiting for this little idea. For example, if you own a pair of transition lenses, perhaps “green shit color” isn’t quite the tint you’re going for, but you’d be happy to know that formation of that tinge would be instantaneous upon exposure to UV light and its disappearances just as instantaneous. That beats unwittingly walking into a stairwell without realizing it because your goddamn glasses are still tinted from being outside.
To be sure you are as amazed as me, here is a YouToube from a movie in the SI:
“Posted with permission from Org. Lett., ASAP Article, 10.1021/ol801135g, Web Release Date: June 19, 2008.
Copyright © 2008 American Chemical Society.”
Obviously pretty fucking wicked. The visual splendor may not be sufficient, but the paper goes to great lengths to explain and characterize this process and does so in excellent fashion.
Facilities:
The Chevron Science Center at Pitt is home to the largest division of the School of arts and Sciences. This is readily apparent, as Chevron is one of the most notably large buildings on the entire campus next to the cathedral of learning. When completed in the mid 70’s Chevron was noted as runner up to the most outstanding chemistry facility in the country. Since that time, the building has seen some of the inevitable effects of age set in, most notably in the undergraduate labs. As such, the university has attributed a large sum of money to the building for renovation. As of now, major construction is occurring in the brand new undergraduate labs, and a renovation of the entire building starting on the 14th floor down is underway. It is exciting to be in the department at this time, and I personally look forward to teaching in the new labs.
Directly behind the main building, rests a second building of the department, Eberly hall. Eberly is home to the chemistry library, a number of computational and physical groups, as well as the mass specs, HPLC/MS, IR’s, polarimeters, etc. In addition, many classrooms are located in this building. In terms of the classrooms, each are equipped with multimedia: speakers, projectors for computers, etc., which makes both learning and teaching an especially convenient and enjoyable experience. A research stockroom provides chemicals, equipment, and glassware. The university has a full time glass-blower, electronics shop, and machine shop available five days a week. It really is a self sustaining community, and at times wish they had a cafeteria and a lot of couches so I could just move in.
Instrumentation:
The building is home to every possible instrumentation which defines a world-class research institute. Included for every-day use is four 300MHz and a 500 MHz NMR’s. IR’s, polarimeters, MS, HPLC/MS, an XRD, and everything else you need for purification and structure elucidation/confirmation. Many groups have their own instrumentations, but these are available to any student with the proper level of training.
Faculty:
The organic division dominated the department. Home to many synthetic groups (The Wipf, Koide, Curran, Nelson, and Brummond groups to name a few). Especially exciting is the recent synthesis of FR901464 by the Koide group and their highly potent analogue, meayamycin. The Curran group has a number of exciting project that include fluorous and radical chemistry. The Wipf group is the largest, with professor Wipf himself teaching a notoriously difficult and stimulating advanced synthesis course. In terms of rankings, the last time an extended list was available from US News, the Organic division was ranked either 15th or 13th overall. This does make for a highly competitive environment, however, and typical work days in the synthetic groups are 12+ hours a day six days a week.
Pittsburgh:
Is a great town to live. Cheap cost of living, a great sports city, and plenty of fun things to do on a graduate student’s income. I am especially proud of this institution and happy of the choice I made to come here. This department is highly recommended, and especially enticing to consider because of some of the rising stars in the department, and new facilities.
Facilities:
UNC is currently “building for the future”, which means there will be active construction projects going on here for the next decade or so while each scientific department gets a new home base. For instance, Chapman Labs (Phys Chem, Physics, ChemE) is a brand-new (2006) building where may of the Chem visiting speakers are hosted in the cozy new Eastman seminar room with wood paneling and touchscreen monitors / projectors. Caudill Labs is also new (2007) which is where bench chemists (org, inorg) and laser chemists (pchem, analytical) have most of their labs. It has huge floor-to-ceiling windows, lots of hoods (which sometimes depressurize the building!), and a decent set of desks with ethernet and power strips.
Instrumentation:
We have NMRs enough to support ourselves, the local small companies in RTP, and several small schools and high schools in the area. Bruker 300, Bruker 400 (2), and Bruker 500MHz compliment a Varian 600, which can all be reserved by anyone after mandatory training on changing probes, shimming, etc. Many organic groups have their own HPLC / SFC, GCs, chiral GCs, and IR / polarimeter, along with 1-2 gloveboxes for each inorganic group. We have a staffed MS facility that can do HRMS on demand and even 24-hr turnaround, if you feel like dropping a full grant on one spectrum. I’m not as familiar with the equipment for the analytical and PChem labs, but I know we have EPR, Ar lasers, cap. electrophoresis, and a few labs that take apart and upgrade MS and uPLC to actually design new instrumentation.
Rankings Comparison:
Last I checked, we were something like tied for 16th overall, which I think is pretty accurate. The analytical people know their stuff, and it’s a great department if you want to be an instrumental person at a big pharma or chemical concern (Dow, DuPont, etc). Inorganic has folks dabbling in alternative energy, metal-organic frameworks, alkane metathesis, and organometallic synthesis. Organic has both a strong TS presence as well as 2-3 methods / catalysis groups, and a strong (young) biochem / materials background. We have something like 150-200 grad students, if department size matters to you.
Faculty:
Near as I can tell, everyone gets along. I haven’t heard about any longstanding grudges or vicious barfights, and assistant profs mingle with Chaired professors at beer socials and seminars. Everyone maintains an “open-door” policy, which means if I have a question about materials or polymers, I can just go up to a prof’s office and tap on the door, and ask away. Many groups go out to lunch on Franklin St. weekly, sometimes with their boss in tow!
Summary:
It’s a good place to work, if you don’t mind the intense summer heat or occasional lines for NMRs. It’s fairly laid-back, but most people still end up with 2-3 good papers to graduate on.
Department: Stratingh Institute for Chemistry
University: University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Before I start off, let me explain a few things. First of all, I’ve chosen to submit this anonymously. This is not because I deliberately want to say bad things about certain aspects of my department. I just want to be able to be fully honest and, as most of you probably know, people in highly placed positions can freak out when they read honest things (even if these things are facts). Secondly, Engrish is not my first language, so please bear with me despite any poor grammar that you might encounter. Finally, introducing myself, I’ve been working here as a graduate student in the field of organic chemistry for a few years, so I like to believe that I’ve had the time to get to know my department.
Faculty: The department consists of lots of people and lots of research areas. The biggest is Prof. Feringa’s group, which consists of roughly 60 (under)graduate students and postdocs, and which focuses on quite a few different areas (asymmetric catalysis, molecular switching, motors, organogels, and more). The group of Prof. Hummelen is somewhat smaller (can’t find a number right now) and focuses on organic materials and devices. Finally, the inorganic part of the department consists of roughly 15 people who focus on reactivity/catalysis and switchable coordination compounds. Professor Hessen left this group not too long ago, and I believe they are currently looking for a replacement. There is a lot of cooperation between the groups inside the department, as well as with groups outside the department (like, for example, a few physics groups which reside in the same building). The research itself is exciting and lots of different things are happening in the different groups, which is nice, as you get to learn about many different kinds of chemistry. And everyone seems to be able to get along which each other, at least, I haven’t heard of any serious problems between people. So, the mood is generally good.
Work: I heard that graduate students and postdocs in the US (and also in a lot of other countries) generally are expected to work 6 days a week, or at least five days + a few evenings. In our department, this is not expected; if you punch in at half past eight and punch out around six, your professor will be contend with you, provided of course that you are productive between those times. Some students, especially people who just came from abroad and who don’t really know what to do in their spare time as they don’t really know their way around the city, choose to also work in the evenings and/or weekend. And that’s OK of course, though some of the senior staff members here insist you take at least the whole weekend off. (A supervisor telling you to take the weekend off, how cool/odd is that?) Postdocs usually work a bit more than graduate students, especially if they play an important role in the group. Regarding the work itself, most of it of course is labwork. As a graduate student, you might have some teaching duties, depending on what kind of position you have (more on this later). There are quite a few meetings, to name a few: group meetings, subgroup meetings, research updates, organic synthesis problem/practice sessions (not compulsory, by the way). I sometimes get a bit fed up with attending all of them. Just let me work, OK?
Jobs: Recently, the university decided that in order to save money, they would offer less ‘normal’ graduate student positions and instead introduce a new position called the ‘bursaal’ (no idea how this translates to English). Basically, these bursaal positions have a lower salary in order to save the university money. However, as the income taxes in The Netherlands are regarded as ‘pretty high’ (I don’t exactly know how they compare to other countries), this would mean a bursaal would hardly make any money. What the university has therefore done, or what I at least understand of it, is that they have made a deal with the government so that bursaals don’t pay any income taxes. Therefore, normal gruadate students and bursaals have the same net salary. Sounds fair, right?
Well, it isn’t. Not paying any taxes because of some weird university-government deal means that some agencies see you as unemployed (the bursaal position technically doesn’t exist). I have a colleague who is from abroad and who can’t get health insurance because of this (whereas having health insurance is compulsory by law). Not paying taxes also means you don’t build up a pension. And if your four years of graduate research are up, you have to find a new job or leave, because you can’t get money from the state if you stay unemployed (as the bursaal position doesn’t exist, you never had a job in the first place, so you cannot be unemployed; after all, you can’t loose a job you don’t have). Being a bursaal, you also don’t have any teaching duties, otherwise you would have a real job and the university would have to pay you the salary of a normal graduate student. So, no teaching duties, which means you don’t get any experience in this field. Just to name a few drawbacks of this position.
Whether you’re offered a bursaal position or a ‘normal’ graduate student position depends on who you get to work for, and what you will be working on. Generally, professors prefer to hire graduate students as they need people who are allowed to teach, correct exams, supervise practical courses, etc. But they occasionally just have to hire a bursaal for an ‘unmanned’ research project.
Kyle wrote in his blogpost And then there were children: “You came to grad school to become a better chemist, not to give up on being a goddamn human being for 5 years.” Well, here’s what it boils down to: a bursaal position doesn’t stop you from being a human being, but it does make it way more complicated (to name one aspect: how are you supposed to support children with such a position?)
Facilities: The building we reside in is old and thus new buildings are being built. One of them is already finished, and consequently most of the facilities which are not closely tied to a single research group (such as the administration, most of the canteen, the library) have moved there. Which is a bit of a pain, having to put on your coat every time you want to look up something in the Encyclopedia of Reagents for Organic Synthesis. The guy that has all of the office equipment has also moved, so every time I’m out of sticky notes or someone steals my red stapler I have to walk to the other building. And for some strange reason this guy currently refuses to sell us credits for the photocopier, which means that if we’d like to Xerox anything, we have to pay out of our own wallets. Not very convenient, but transitions like this are never painless, so I won’t make a big deal out of it.
I always thought of a university as a school, even if there about as many graduate students/postdocs as undergraduate students (undergraduate students just follow courses for the first three years, then join one of the research groups for the final two years of their education). You might agree with me, until you see the prices of the food in our canteen. I’m not sure if they are very different from those in other universities, but the bottom line is that undergrads usually can’t afford to eat there every day, which I find ridiculous. The reason: the canteens of the University of Groningen aren’t owned by the university itself, and therefore want to make money. The food itself is not bad (though this is according to Dutch standards, and the Dutch are not exactly known for their fine ‘cuisine’), although it is lacking a bit in variety.
Computers are often quite irritating, by the way. We have a system called (translated): the university workplace. The operating system is installed locally on each computer, but your documents and settings are kept on a network drive. Initially, no applications are locally installed. Instead, they are kept on the network and are installed locally when you run them for the first time. Email goes through a web-based client, similar to Gmail or Hotmail, but you can set up Outlook Express or something similar to retrieve your mail for you if you like (IMAP, so it’s all kept on the server). In theory, this might sound like a good set-up, however, it is poorly implemented, because it is extremely slow. Logging in takes a few minutes, starting applications can take quite long, and the web-based mail client is so slow it’s irritating everyone. I’m not sure why this is the case; the network connections are certainly up to it, so I guess the servers are just too slow. Additionally, sometimes a server problem renders all computers inoperable for a few days, which is a real pain.
Equipment: We’ve got the lot. NMR machines range from 200 to 500 MHz, and there is also a 600 MHz which is usually used by the guys from the spectroscopy department, but I’m sure they can do a measurement for you if it is really necessary (never actually needed that many MHz’s). We can do IR, UV/vis, CD, mass, HPLC, GC(MS), AFM, STM, ellipsometry, you name it. Some of the machines, like the AFM, the STM and the ellipsometer, aren’t from our department, but this is where the good connections with other research groups/departments come in handy. Most machines are maintained really well. A few machines are old and might need to be convinced to do their job (we have a CD spectrometer and Optistat that often need to be kick-started), but once working, they produce reliable results. And from my personal experience, they are more reliable than some of the newer machines we have, which seem to break down more often (I’m looking at you, Büchi rotavaps).
The surrounding area: There is much I can say about Groningen, or the whole of The Netherlands for that matter, but I’m not that fond of tourism, so I’ll keep it concise. Groningen is located in the north of The Netherlands and is the biggest city there. By our standards, it’s pretty far from the much more densely populated west (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague), and consequently, the northern provinces of the Netherlands, and with it Groningen, are pretty isolated from the rest of The Netherlands and a completely different place altogether. There are a lot of schools in Groningen, which means a lot of students (roughly 45,000, against a total population of 185,000), which means that there is a lot of stuff that you can do in your spare time (as students have loads of it, which makes a nice business).
Summary: I really like it here in this department, and this city and I definitely can recommend you to come here as a graduate student, postdoc, or whatever. The research is good, the working environment is pleasant and the location is nice. But please, if you are looking for a position as a graduate student, be careful. Some don’t mind having a bursaal position, but some do, so if you’re offered a bursaal position think carefully about it.
I’ve begun my 4th year in the lab and ended my 2nd year of blogging. Well… more like 4th year and 4th month, actually. I’m pretty pleased with my progress. I’ve published two papers and am getting ready to submit another and have yet 3 more to write (one being, apparently, a totally unfashionable book chapter. Which I still think is more awesome than a review article. Since, at the very least, I can sell the free copy of the book I get for over $100. Try doing that with a copy of ChemComm. So suck it.) The work at the bench is essentially done, though I continue to toil there on my “pet projects” that I really want to get off the ground. One project in particular may well tickle the balls off my boss if it works… but I’m not going to tell him until I’m done and it worked (It will… the laws of physics are always on my side.)
I do, however, want to just give a shout out to how much blogging has helped me. That not only includes the other bloggers out there like Mitch and Excimer and Psi*Psi and TotSyn (just to name but a few) but also the commenters. It has also made me a part of a much larger community than my own department could offer and I’ve relied on a lot of them for help. I have to say, I wouldn’t have progressed this far if it weren’t for this blog - which is quite the antithesis of what my boss was concerned with when he found out about it. Far from taking time away from research, it has given me fresh perspective on it and provided a constant stream of the “state of the state of the art” of the most important aspect of any field - the people that are in it.
Now is about the time I start looking for that next step, I suppose, in my academic training - focus on writing my papers and pushing the people who have papers I’m supposed to be on into writing theirs. As far as the blog goes, I have one more year on the contract with the server I’m on and then it’s lights out! Like Dylan Stiles and Paul Bracher before me, these blogs are transient things and here too, I shall pass. Below the fold you’ll find references to all the lit reviews I’ve done in the preceding 12 months. Don’t be alarmed, it’s just for my own archiving.
I’d like to give you, dear and gentle reader, the opportunity to complement or criticize the blog and make suggestions as to what you like or dislike. I may or may not take them into consideration and, indeed, may well lash out at you, but at least I’ll read them all.
HE, Q., LUO, Y., CHEN, P. (2008). Elucidation of the mechanism of enzymatic browning inhibition by sodium chlorite. Food Chemistry, 110(4), 847-851. DOI: 10.1016/j.foodchem.2008.02.070
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(22 less then last year. Damn. )
University of Maryland, College Park.
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Facilities: The chemistry department is made up of five main wings, and there are a few biochemistry professors in a buliding that is a five minute walk away. Most of the wings are old and were built a long time ago. Probably during the time that Neil Gordon and Marker were here. Wing one gets real hot in the summers and real cold in the winters, so it’s not a very pleasant place to be in and to be doing research, especially if you’re on the top floor. The first wing and the biochemical wing (wing five) also get called out for having an unusual number of cokcroaches who became mutated by asbestos and mercury that accumulated there over the last 80 years. Wing one also has a population of wild mice and at least one bat in the basement beside the NMR room. While this can seem as a negative, I believe it frees up instrumentation for the less squeamish after dark. There are bats flying outside anyways all the time. You only don’t see them if you’re blind (they operate at night so you might have a valid excuse). If you don’t like bats, don’t come to Maryland. That said, we have a new wing that was built recently that is quite large and is everything you expect from a modern research facility. It’s a pleasure to do research in those labs. The fumehoods are large and outlets are abundant, and the temperature is controlled throughout the year. The building houses the lasers of our photochemists and physical chemists along with organic research labs and undergraduate organic teaching labs. The library is just a short walk away. The building has a beautiful lunch area as well that lets in a lot of natural light. It’s the perfect place to be in during the current heat wave.
Equipment: The equipment is awesome. Everything is available. Minor complaints are the really old EPR and FAB machines that keep breaking down. Otherwise, the Maldi and HPLC-ESI-MS are online most of the time (unless someone contaminates them) and you can use them if you’ve been trained not to break them. It doesn’t seem to help, but at least they get repaired fast enough. Most of the professors are happy to share the equipment, so you have access to Solvent purification systems, GC/MS, HPLC lasers, etc… that is stashed away in individual labs. We do have an X-Ray center with a Powder X-ray crystallographer and a really good spectroscopist who can solve a structure even if it’s completely different from what you think it is in record time. We have five NMRs. One 400 for general use and one automatic. Also a 400 with a very sensitive probe and a 500 (special heteronuclear probe) and 600 as well. The biochemist in the separate building also have a 600 or two I believe. Getting NMR time is not a problem. The person in charge has been in this department for 30 years and the whole facilty runs like a well oiled machine. It’s true that the training for each subsequent instrument is draconian, but as a plus the instruments are hardly off-line and you can do any experiment and any nucleus you want. From what I’ve heard, we have one of the best NMR situations in the country and it mostly has to do with the person in charge. There is been some very interesting host-guest chemistry that has only been possible because the guy in charge keeps up with the latest techniques and gets the latest probes. A bit of a minus is the large number of contract jobs that we get from NIH and biochemistry companies that are right beside us, so you actually might find that all the NMRs are booked. Crazy!
Faculty: I’m not a member of the faculty, but commenting as an outsider, it seems like a bit of a mixed bag that you would find at any other similar top 50 place. There are people who don’t care about getting grants and/or research. There are ambitious people who want to win a Nobel and/or become famous. Old profs who are easy going and old profs who are still slave-drivers and new profs who want to get tenure. The faculty page lists a lot of people who aren’t actually in the department (affiliate professors), but we are a large department and every discipline of chemistry is represented. There are people who hate each other, but it hasn’t come to much of a boil. They hired a new chair from the outside five years ago because the department was going downhill and was divided. This cannot be in a flagship campus with a top ten physics program, so they just threw a lot of money at us and we got out new chair. The new chair is clearly insane. He always talks about how we’re going to be in the top 10 soon and how it’s important to raise our productivity and multi task. He also keeps firing the business office staff on a regular basis for what appears to be no reason at all. But he also is very effective at what he does and he clearly go the job done. That’s why he got re-elected for a second term. The faculty is less divided and he got rid of some dead wood and we actually rose pretty high in the rankings in the last four years, which is what he wanted. It’s likely we’ll be in the top 20 in the next four years if things keep going the same way. The chair is very good at pulling in money and hiring away established people from other departments. It’s not really hard to become a top twenty school considering we have the best department in the Washington D.C. area, which isn’t saying much. Still, because NIH and a large concentration of biotech is right there, it seems logical that we should be able to pull it off. Some of the recent assistant prof hires haven’t produced that many papers, and the bar for tenure appears to have gotten pretty big around here in line with the grandiose visions (a person with an okay publication record for five years ago didn’t get tenure recently). So you may have to choose carefully if you would like to work with a new professor when you come here. We seem to be hiring a new person every year.
The Surrounding Area: Well, it’s D.C. You can choose to live in a far away suburb with a car. That makes it possible to afford the rent on your meagre stipend, but the car price might push you into poverty with gas and repairs. Or, you can choose to live in one of the most expensive housing markets in the country inside the Capitol Beltway on your meagre stipend. If you do this, you are foolish for having a car, the metro system is quite good if you live close to a stop. The rent will be astronomical, but at least it will be easier to budget. The university it situated in a dead suburb that has a few crappy bars. I usually go out to the city on the weekends. The bar scene is fantastic and is something that only the locals in DC know about it. Most tourists come for the Smithsonian and to see the White House and what-not. I did all that, and I still go to the National Arboretum regularly, but it’s the amazing outdoor restaurants and bars that keep me going back to the city on the weekends to relax. I also enjoy walking around Georgetown when it’s not too hot out. It’s a nice part of the city and the university is beautiful (even if their chemistry department is worse than ours). While I used to live in the ghetto area for a bit, I don’t recommend it as some days I came home from the lab to find a murder scene outside of my house. And it wasn’t the triple deaths during a shoot-out one block outside my apartment that forced me to move to College Park, it was the high rental price in the ghetto. How do they expect non-drug dealers to afford that? I guess they were looking for these people called ‘young professionals’. I recommend renting in College Park since it’s still the cheapest suburb and it’s right beside the university, and then going out to Silver Spring or Adams Morgan via metro on the weekends. As a plus, you can say to all your friends that you have lived inside the Beltway. As a minus, you can say to all your friends that you have lived inside the Beltway. Ultimately, DC is one of the most fun metropolitan areas in the country. It’s huge and there is something for everyone here. We even have great theater and classical music (free at the Kennedy Center!).
Sumary: We have a great program that is being dragged by force, sometimes against it’s will, upward in the rankings. We have great equipment and a great location. The stipend is getting bigger but still has trouble matching the cost of living in DC. We’re all poor here. The faculty is not automatically well recognized except for a couple of people, yet. We also have an uncertain situation in terms of how easy or hard it is to get tenure. I find about half the students apathetic and most are not as ambitious as they would be in a top ten place. While this is good in creating an easy-going atmosphere, this makes life harder for profs who want to get tenure or who want to win a Nobel. The state is cutting funding, but our chair seems to find the money somewhere. I don’t know if we’ll be top 20 in four years like he wants (this is why I commented earlier that he might be insane), but it’s hard to argue that we’re probably in the top 30 or 35 now. I realize rankings are stupid, but this feeling of trying to improve no matter what has sort of permeated the department a little bit, and for a grad student, that means that if you’re willing to work hard, success and top publications will be yours for the taking.
I remember in undergrad, the age of graduate students could be measured by the layers of bitterness, much in the same way (and as easily as) the age of layered rocks could be ascertained by the striation of color and texture in the Badlands. The bitterness wasn’t a veneer, like the haughty sense of supreme knowledge they had, it was something that came from the core. Nor was it just the arrogance and the self-righteousness they developed as a result of moving “up.” I wondered if that was the natural result of school and the dysfunctional relationships with advisers, awkward relationships with cohorts, or if it was trying, trying, trying so hard to appear so smart for so long in the face of daunting competition.
I mostly worked around TSers as an undergrad, that’s the limit of my experience, but I can’t imagine it’s a local phenomenon. I was made aware of the fact by my little old grandmother who, in her advanced years has come to dispense with niceties and preambles, told me that I had become so “angry and bitter.” The comment was precipitated by my disgust for my uncle’s misuse of antibiotics. I forcefully advocated that he should get very ill and end up in the hospital or go to prison for failing to complete not one but TWO regiments of antibiotics. She was probably reacting to the forcefulness of the way I put it, but it at least made me think. I’m about to start my 5th year and am about to start writing my thesis within a few months. I’m not a bitter 8th year with no publications. I think, when all is said and done, I’ll have what I would consider a “successful” graduate career with multiple ACS journal publications. Maybe I’m just horribly arrogant and it comes off as angry and bitter?! I’ve been accused of being cocky since I got here (it’s my nature) but never angry and never bitter.
When was the last time I had a vacation? December, probably. Maybe that’s what I need.
In the end, it seems as though the anger and bittnerness goes away, since the PhDs (at least in industry) were hardly ever bitter. Arrogant, but not angry and bitter - at least not at Eli Lilly. I’ve only worked with one post doc that I would consider “angry and bitter” but the last I checked he was working at Target as a cashier… with a PhD… the man had serious issues. So, it’s a transient thing that I’ve always chalked up to graduate school. I wish I knew what caused it and if I’m “coming down” with it. I need some serious introspection, I think.
By the by… I’ve gotten pretty much nothing for personal reviews of schools. Last time I had to stop the friggin flood of them and now I’ve gotten ONE. WTF happened? My stats clearly show NO decline in readership. Are you people just afraid to talk of the wonderful shit in your department or what?
Before the review, a few words about your reviewer so you can take note of my biases. I have completed my first year at NCSU’s chemical engineering graduate program. I came here immediately after college, which consisted of two years at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, IN, and two final years at Northwestern University. I have enjoyed my time at NCSU so far, I got the adviser and project I wanted, and the Man has yet to screw me in some sort of fashion. Nonetheless, I’ll attempt to keep this review as objective as possible.
Facilities: First, the website sucks. I know it, the students know it, the faculty knows it, and it’s being worked on. Our department occupies the first two floors of a three-year-old, three-story building (MatSci on top) on NCSU’s Centennial Campus. The Campus will eventually contain the entire engineering college, along with a number industrial labs and headquarters. “Eventually” is still a few years away, however, and there’s construction occurring year round. Conveniently, a library sits about a five minute walk away which houses many of the technical volumes you might need. You can obtain books from the main campus library through this satellite library, as well (on a daily basis). Despite having a new building, it’s apparent our department has already started to outgrow the available space. My office is actually a converted lab, which is unfortunate because my lab needs space for a number of instruments. I’m not sure how the designers over looked this constraint. There’s a parking deck next to the building that costs ~$280 a year for a permit.
You pronounce unionized as UN-ionized not union-ized.
When you hear the word mole, you don't think of an animal.
Milli is a prefix, not a girl's name.
In an earlier post I suggested there was a connection between ladies' corsets and Henry's Law. A general statement of Henry's Law is that the solubility of a gas in a liquid depends on the pressure of the gas above the liquid. An everyday example is soda. A can of soda is pressurized by exposing it to carbon dioxide having equivalent of about 2.5 times atmospheric pressure at room temperature. When you quickly lower the pressure of carbon dioxide over the liquid, say by opening the can, the solubility decreases and the gas adjusts by rapidly coming out of solution. Fizzing results (and eventually the soda goes flat).
Not that Ludwig B. - the other Ludwig B: Ludwig Boltzmann, an Austrian physicist. 
Responding to an earlier post on inert gases, a commenter wondered if buckminsterfullerene might act as an inhalation anesthetic - given that, like xenon, it's a large, polarizable ball of electron density. It might, if you could get enough to inhale. At room temperature, the vapor pressure is 5 x 10-6 torr. Very roughly, that's about a billionth of atmospheric pressure. For comparison's sake, the pressure of xenon necessary to induce anesthesia is about 500 torr, or 65% of normal atmospheric pressure. If you want higher pressures, you need higher temperatures: buckminsterfullerene sublimes (goes directly from the solid to the gas phase, like dry ice) just above 1000F. Not great to breathe...