I am going to have an honest appraisal of my scientific strengths and weaknesses. Let’s start with the negative:

• I have trouble with school. I’m not an abysmal student, but I’m not an exceptional one either. I have trouble with exams, and you’ve probably seen this whine before. For whatever reason, I have difficulty presenting information on a page that is demonstrative of my conceptual understanding of material—and all of my professors have commented on this. My current boss, actually, who is a brilliant PI, claims to have had similar problems as a student. He is extremely creative, has an encyclopedic knowledge of his field, is able to pull the right people together to manage a productive lab dynamic, is able to follow over 30 people’s projects (many of whom have multiple projects), and is able to publish in great journals in part due to his great sense of presentation and his ability to spin results into narrative stories. He tells us that he wanted to study biochemistry in university but his grades were too bad so he had to study chemistry instead (he’s German, so there you have to choose your field of study before you start), and that for whatever reason he just didn’t fit in the mold that school expects from you. My professors keep telling me that this will really only be a problem that will persist through my first two years of graduate school, and that it’s unfortunate, but wouldn’t it be worse if it were the opposite—I flew through my coursework and then I crashed and burned in a research project? I suppose that’s true, but it also makes getting into a decent program more of a crapshoot.
• I’m a little bit messy and spacey and I have difficulty with attention to detail. I’m just not a meticulous person by nature, and I tend to do spacey shit like letting something go on the rotovap for ten minutes before I realize that I forgot to shut the vacuum every now and then. In written work, I have difficulty with catching typos and small but stupid chemical errors like dropped carbons. Usually, at least in lab, when it’s really important I can focus, but sometimes…sometimes shit happens.
• I have a really shitty math background. Math has never been my strong suite, and I’m in a program that let me get away with taking very little math due to the way math is taught at our school (i.e. for mathematics students, we don’t have applied math classes for science students since it’s not the liberal arts “way”). Of course, I needed to get through physics and physical chemistry, which means I have some basic competence with algebra and calculus, but I imagine that if I ever need to take stat mech or biophysics or biophysical chemistry or anything like that in grad school, it’s going to be a fight. I just tend to look at scientific concepts in more pictorial terms.
• Adding to the "messy and inattentive to details" bit, at times I will cut corners that I maybe shouldn't cut when I'm under a time crunch. My lab notebook, for example, gets progressively worse the more I work on a project. Again, I think this is normal.
• I really can't handle extremely aggressive people. A lot of the cutthroat competitive behavior I find pretty distasteful and I'm generally pretty intolerant of that kind of BS. It strikes me that there are a lot of these type of people in science--especially science at a high level--and I need to learn how to deal with them.
  

Okay, the positive:

• I’m always praised on my creativity and the degree of sophistication that I have in putting together scientific concepts, and this has come from professors, my current boss, and the PhD students that I work with currently.
• I’m always praised on my ability to process the concepts and link them up to what I am physically doing in lab. One of my supervisors told me that I have such a high understanding of the theory that it’s often difficult for her to remember how much help I need with the little lab things that only come with experience, one example being how much trouble I had figuring out the right way to set up my first sephedex column. I had done many silica columns, but there are a few tricks that you need to do with sephedex columns that I just didn’t know. But she says that there are many undergraduates who come in and they don’t really have the big picture of what they are doing and why they are doing it.
• I’m very good at processing the literature. I know how to find papers and how to mine them for information. I also can competently read organic chemistry (synthetic, mechanistic, and natural products), biochemistry, and molecular biology papers. I’ve also been told that I know how to write about/talk about/communicate science in a story after reading papers/seeing talks/working on a project. At least profs tell me positive things when I turn in term papers.
• Sort of combining all of the above points together, I noticed that people tend to give me more autonomy in lab after I chat with them about science a bit. This is kind of strange, because just because I have the conceptual framework in my head doesn’t mean I need any less help getting the wet work to work. But I think there’s a psychological component with people where they are more likely to treat you like a colleague when your ideas are in place. That comment isn’t meant to under-value good lab skills, though.
• I have the obsessive sort of personality that once I get started on a project, I get completely and totally into it and don’t want to stop. I can be a bit of an obsessive work-a-holic from time to time. It’s difficult for me to disengage and I’m either completely into it or not into it at all. I suppose this is a good quality to have as a research scientist.
• I really like working with my hands in lab. Doing office work all the time is boring, and I think physically doing things with ones hands is sort of relaxing (sometimes; unless it's annoying).
• I have a good intuition for organic chemistry and bioorganic chemistry in terms of structure and reactivity. I just sort of know what reactions are reasonable, what structures are unstable, and have a solid sense of this in my head.
• I’m pretty good at spectroscopy, especially NMR. I’ve got a lot of chemical shifts, j-values, and solvent peaks for proton and carbon (well not j-values, but whatevs) in my head from doing a lot of synthetic organic chemistry, and correlations make sense to me. It’s the sort of visual puzzle that I’m good at, and I have a fair bit of experience with it. I’m also decent with MS, UV, and IR.
• I’ve got a decent knowledge base in a variety of fields. Along with knowing organic chemistry, I also know a fair amount of biochemistry and molecular biology, both the theory and the lab techniques. I’m kind of one of those hybrid interdisciplinary scientists, and this is just because I really do like it all.
• I'm pretty used to the idea that shit doesn't work most of the time in science. I guess I've spent enough time in labs to figure that out. Having shit not work doesn't really bother me that much--you just need to keep trying and hope that with hard work and a bit of luck it will all work out.
• It's pretty drilled into me to write everything in my lab notebook and label everything. One of my profs said that it was very easy to repeat reactions that I did and to keep up the good work. But my synthetic organic lab notebooks are a lot better than, say, the project I'm doing now where I'm never sure how much to include and there's a lot of "continued on page XXX" and MS spectra after MS spectra. My molecular biology lab notebooks are the worst, especially when I'm using a lot of kits.