Life plans

I've been thinking more and more about graduate school lately, and I'm pretty into the idea of going. I've spent a lot of time not marrying myself to the idea due to a lot of reasons (mostly including self-doubt, a low GPA, a keen awareness of how competitive the world is, and a certain resistance to the idea of doing something just because it's what you are "supposed" to do) and trying to convince myself it's not what I necessarily want, or that I shouldn't close myself off to other options in life or to the idea of not doing it. But when it comes down to it, I want to do science at that level eventually and I know that, and have basically been becoming more and more sure that I love science, I can handle being pushed to my limits with work emotionally, and that I have the drive to work on the sort of project a PhD would be. And while I'm not the best test taker, I have strong skills in other areas. I'm good in the lab, I'm good at communicating ideas face-to-face, I know how to retrieve I don't know quickly on the internet, I can talk about science cogently, I know how to digest the primary lit. I know professors who can attest to these skills.

But then I try to take things in perspective. I'm studying the hard sciences at a hard school. I know several profs who could write me good recommendations. I have a lot of research experience. And a really broad scientific background with a solid academic program. These things all matter too, right? Perhaps matter more than my GPA?

I don't know. It's hard not to worry, but I spend so much time consoling other people that I'm starting to believe my consolations. It is scary. We have this giant recession and everything worth doing, or so it seems, is incredibly competitive. Medicine and law and grad school in most other fields are more competitive, it seems, so maybe I should count my blessings.

But off of this "woe is me, can I hack it?" shit, I think I've finally figured out what I want to study, broadly. Basically, synthetic organic heavy-yet-still-interdisciplinary chemical biology. I want to do something more at the interface of chemistry and biology. The ideal program would be something like (ha! ha! ha! after talking about all this GPA woe) UCSF's Chemistry & Chemical Biology program. As far as I can tell, a lot of this interdisciplinary stuff is under all different labels, so my actual PhD could be in any number of things (including biophysics), it all depends on the individual labs I am interested in. I should start keeping lists of labs that are publishing projects I'm interested in that I come across in the lit.

So this is the plan right now: finish off this year (my junior year) strong, get a another summer of research this next summer (and prep for the GREs), take the GREs next year, then take a year off and apply to grad school during that year, and tech. I've also seriously thought about moving to the Bay Area after Reed, although possibly staying around Portland and trying to get a job at OHSU.

Okay, this moving to the Bay area thing is a recent idea, related to this whole actually I kind of want to go to grad school thing. I visited some friends there who were in biophysics programs at UCSF and Berkeley. Which basically was what made me come to believe that these were the sort of people I wanted to be around and the sort of environment I wanted to be in. We talked about science! Even when we were in the bar! And more science! Some people think this is sad and indicative of an utter lack of ability to fit in socially. Perhaps, but I want to be able to talk about science with my buddies when drunk. The facilities at UCSF blew me away, and the projects they were doing where just so spectacular. The sort of stuff you read about in Nature, but at a small liberal arts school, we just don't even have close to the facilities to do.

But oh yes, I was talking about why I want to move to the Bay after Reed. It's a bigger city than Portland, but one I have ties to. A lot of people I go to school with grew up there, but there are also a lot of Reed alumni who move there for work or grad school, and so there's the sort of safety net of being around Reedies, but the novelty of being in a new city. In addition, I was born there and lived there until I was 2 and a half, and my parents have a lot of family friends who live there, some of their oldest friends from before they were married. There are even a couple friends from high school who went to school out there who might be around. It's not totally restablishing myself in a new city as much as moving other places would be.

Also, as far as I can tell, The Bay area and Boston are the place to be for the biological sciences. There's just such a neat relationship between the academic powerhouses and the biotech industry in those locations that I don't think exists to the same degree elsewhere. I could probably find a job as a tech, people seem to, at least. So at least I could be connected to the science, because I think I would be really unhappy in a situation where I wouldn't be doing science to some degree. Also, San Francisco rocks! The city is gorgeous, the climate is great, there's plenty of hipster culture and coffee snobbery and all that stuff. It's still the Pacific Northwest, which I love. I love the West Coast, and I don't really want to move back to the Midwest or East Coast. It's just a vibes and personality mesh thing. The only concern is that it's expensive to live there and rent is expensive. On the other hand, it's just for a year, maybe 2; I just need to sustain myself, and I'm not looking to save money. I can live reasonably cheaply, and I don't want to live in someplace boring just because it's cheap to live there.

I love Portland. Portland is a neat place to live, and I only got tastes of what it is like to be a person in Portland and not a student who spends her whole life between the library and lab during the school year, but I spent a summer there and got a feel for it, and I really do like the city a lot. It's been good, but after 4 years it's time to see more of the world. The argument to stay in Portland is that I really do have a lot of friends out there and possible employment prospects. It's sort of a comfort zone thing. Also, it's really cheap to live in Portland, and Portland is far from boring, unlike a lot of other cheap places to live. Portland is a great place to be a 20something.

So anyway, that's my current life plan. Finish undergrad, take a year off in the Bay Area, go for the PhD. Narrowing down what exactly I mean by "synthetic organic heavy chemical biology" might be good too. Figuring out if those projects are in Chemistry & Chemical Biology programs, Chemistry programs, Biochemistry programs, Pharmacology programs...

What comes after the PhD? Academia, I think, although industry and a number of other paths aren't out of the picture either. This is a little more hazy. But seriously, I think academia is more my style. My friend and I have a running joke that if we decide in ~10 years and/or during our post-docs that if we're not feeling the academic route, then we're starting up a biotech company together; he thinks there's a 10% chance of that happening. So maybe it's making the big bucks in biotech. In any case, it's something, although I'm not quite sure what.