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.

Summer in Germany; Polyketide Biosynthesis

As I may or may not have posted before, this summer I'm going to do a lab internship in Jena Germany at the Hans Knoll Institute: Leibniz Institute for Natural Products Research and Infection Biology in the department of biomolecular chemistry in Christian Hertweck's group.

The story of how this works is the following: I was writing a paper for my biochemistry seminar which focused on chemical biology and I stumbled upon work he was doing with polyketide biosynthetic enzymes in the aureothin (a Streptomyces thioluteus polyketide) pathway. Specifically, AurH, an enzyme catalyzes the chiral oxidation of a THF ring. This paper caught my attention as a mechanistic paper that dissected how the enzyme worked to act as a catalyst and this paper* used the enzyme in a stereospecific total chemoenzymatic synthesis. I read about how they figured which enzyme did the oxidation using molecular biology methods, along with how they figured out how the enzyme worked with biochemical methods, and then their application synthetically. It intrigued me because it was basically exactly the sort of research I want to be doing. It seamlessly integrates biology and chemistry. It relies on both synthetic organic chemistry and molecular biology. Dissecting mechanistically interesting biosynthetic steps that are difficult to mimic with classical reagents is just a really fascinating area of study to me. So I wrote a review paper for my class about research from his lab.

So one day, kind of on a whim I emailed Christian Hertweck, the PI with my CV. He was impressed with my background and my strong desire to do interdisciplinary science and offered me a summer internship at the HKI. I've been in correspondance all year working out the details. So I will be in Germany this summer doing chemical biology research.

It hasn't really hit me that I will be in Germany this summer doing exactly the sort of science I want to be doing. It seems like such a lucky shot in the dark.

I'm so pumped for this summer and next year. I like learning, so classes are alright, but what I really like is doing research. It reminds me "oh yes, this is why I study science."

Also, this will be my fourth consecutive summer in a lab, along with doing research in my prof's lab during the year for a bit and an undergraduate thesis. Although not my motivation for wanting to be in the lab in the summer, that's gotta look attractive to graduate schools, right?

*As a tangent, I also really like the journal ChemBioChem, which is a European chemical biology journal published by Wiley. ACS Chemical Biology puts out a few interesting articles, but it feels uninspiring a lot of the time (and virtually indistinguishable from what goes into ACS Biochemistry), and Nature Chemical Biology seems differently focused. There is some interesting bioorganic work being done here but the the mentality seems different somehow. It seems like the organic community is more seemlessly integrated in this European journal. More on this later.