Saturday 1:00am research

Relevant comic: Back to lab - PhD comics

I am now one semester away from leaving Cornell (hopefully forever). I am also less than three months away from having to apply to graduate schools.

And I'm starting to wonder...it was about1 AM and I needed a walk to clear up my head from Friday night (don't ask). Most of the campus was dead - no lights at any of the dorms and nobody outside. The weather being perfect and cool so I took my time thinking about things as one must when taking such walks.

My path eventually led me to Olin lab and I wondered in. Given this is Saturday night and it's past 1 in the morning, I assumed the place would be deserted. Instead a whole bunch of windows had lights on and a graduate student wearing blue nitrile gloves holding a beaker of something streamed passed me with a very intense expression on his face.

And the question drilled a whole in my head - can I be that grad student? To be successful you must work hard - that is a given. Maybe a year or two ago I thought I could stay up until 5 am doing important research for a living. But now...I'm not so sure. I've never been to China...I've never explored the surely beautiful coasts of France...etc...

To be honest I'm a bit scared. I want to be a productive member of society. I want to help humanity achieve something it has never achieved before whether it be terraforming Mars or creating a cure for HIV (big dreams right ;p ). But the risk*reward for that seems so small in comparison to say finding a steady 9-5, settling down with a family that knows you will always keep them comfortable and having spare time to explore this planet.

It seems that for research to pay off, you not only have to spend countless hours in the lab you also have to be lucky! What if I spent 1000's of hours trying to come up with some new chemical that another person then discovered purely by accident literally a few weeks before I finished?

So do I suck it up, stop being a lazy bum and dive head first into grad school? Will I be happy?

It's strangely relaxing sitting in lab at 2:07 AM with everyone else gone...knowing that there is somebody a couple of doors down working very hard maybe to help create a miracle drug, or maybe to simply get his PhD, get out and do something completely unrelated.

Sigh...