So one thing that I've run into lately in applying to graduate school and trying to decide where to go next year is that--because I'm interested in natural product biosynthesis, especially polyketides--this has made my search for a lab a lot more focused than many people in that in general, I'm looking at specific PIs and specific labs. None of the places I'm considering has more than one or two people who do what I want to do.

I find that I have to defend my interests a lot. "Are you really not going to get sick of polyketides?"

This weirds me out in some ways because really what fascinates me about science are the questions. Of course I like going in lab and trying to troubleshoot problems and I like working with my hands, but I don't feel wedded to techniques which I have always been able to pick up as they are required and which are constantly changing anyway. If I were to say "I'm sure I want to be a crystallographer" or "I'm sure I want to be a synthetic organic chemist" I don't think anyone would question me as much as people do right now. I want to do any techniques I can to explore the chemical/biochemical questions I'm interested in--which is how can nature effect such fantastic chemistry with such extreme stereocontrol from very simple molecules in a modular fashion? How are these small molecules that have captured organic chemists' fascination from the start synthesized? How can we learn the "rules" of biological catalysis for small molecules?

There's a lot of chemical biology out there that I think is just gimmicky crap. This is one of the areas of chemical biology that truly absolutely has to be interdisciplinary. It requires a solid understanding of the logic of organic chemistry and a working understanding of how biological systems work to do. It absolutely has to be that way, and there's no interdisciplinary for the sake of being interdisciplinary and capitalizing on chemistry-biology interface grants and nanogoldparticleconjugatedtocrapplusaclickreaction in cells. There are many many ways to approach these questions from synthesis to crystallography to genomics to isotope labeled feeding experiments to mass spec and on and on and on...endless applications of areas of chemistry that I like in their own right.

So anyway, I'm sick of defending myself on this front. I've been exploring various fields of chemistry and biology and working in different types of labs since I was 18 years old. I've wandered around in my coursework. And now I think I've finally settled on something that's right for me.