I was talking to a friend who worked at Amagen this summer, and she told me that basically the people she was working with were saying that organic chemistry is a dying field--at least as to its usefulness in industry, and that small molecule drugs are pretty inefficient when comparing the cost of developing them to the coast of drugs developed with biochemical methods.

Which leads me to wonder, I guess. I came to college gun-ho about doing biology. Then freshman year I discovered that I really liked chemistry. So I decided to do the biochemistry & molecular biology major. Then sophomore year I fell in love with organic, and now I find myself more drawn to skimming websites like Totally Synthetic than reading about biology or biochemistry, and structural biology is interesting, but most interesting when you put funky artificial bases and peptides in there. My advanced synthetic class is my favorite class I have ever taken. So here I am, in some place, falling more and more in love with a "mature and dying field," as someone once put it? I guess as an academic there will always be room for synthetic chemists, but there's something really appealing about the idea of doing drug design. I mean, I still love detailed cellular mechanisms, and my animal physiology class is great. Molecular biology picks questions that I guess I find really interesting. Mostly, though, what I like about synthesis vs. molecular biology or biochem is that you are making things instead of breaking them apart to see how they work. It's a whole different set of problem solving.

I think I might take the GRE chemistry subject test next year, though instead of the biochem/ mol. bio one because I really do think I want to go to some sort of chemistry grad school. But I almost definitely don't want to go to grad school right after undergrad. The world after this year is so incredibly uncertain. I don't even know what discipline I want to do my senior thesis in.