angst

I'm starting my last year of college in the fall, and this is causing me more mental angst that it probably should. It stems from feeling unprepared for dealing with What Comes Next.

Senior year at Reed is a pretty hyped process. Everyone needs to write a senior thesis and the science seniors lock themselves in the lab and look haggard and depressed by shit not working and start prematurely behaving like grad students. They keep odd hours and are totally devoted to their thesis at the exclusion of everything else and thus whine-a-thon culture is encouraged by the culture of the school. At the end you need to give an oral defense and (in the chemistry department) an oral presentation to your classmates during one of the seminar days.

I have a lot of plans for next year, perhaps too many. I got in contact with a professor at a neighboring institution who works on polyketide biosynthesis so I can continue work in the area that I'm doing this summer because it fascinates me. I'm excited, but I have no idea what to expect and whether I've cut out more work than is strictly necessary in facilitating this project that involves a Reed advisor and an advisor from this neighboring institution. Hopefully I'll manage to arrange a project where I can have a Reed lab setup for instead of having to commute to the neighboring instution to do my labwork (I don't have a car) so that I don't loose time constantly, although I'm worried that our instrumentation is not adequate.

I'm also tentatively trying to organize a journal club starting in the fall, and trying to organize an independent study project in the spring on biomimetic synthesis. My rationale for the independent study (not a lab independent study, but a reading papers and writing a review-style document at the end sort of independent study) is that it's more interesting to me than taking a structured course and probably just as much work. I don't really like taking exams much, and I read papers all the time anyway, and it's in a subject that's not really related to what I'm probably going to do my thesis in (thus a bit of a mental break from that), but in a subject that I have a lot of interest in. But I suppose I might feel differently about it at the end of next year.

And I'm trying to figure out this whole grad school shit, while angsting about it and paging through professors' webpages and sending emails instead of hammering through GRE problems. I mean, I've little bit of GRE prep, but not a sufficient amount, and as the days crawl closer and closer to the academic school year, this is starting to stress me out more and more. The problem being, I guess, that I'm pretty caught up in my labwork here. Studying for standardized tests is boring, whereas labwork and paper reading is engaging. I fear this problem will be the exact same one I'll face in the fall. I also have to take a stupid analytical chemistry course that I know I'm going to abhor that will probably get pushed to the last priority.