Job!

While I may not have been accepted by any universities for graduate programs, I have been hired on as a quality control chemist right out of college. This is, more or less, a good thing. So far everyone is dorky, which means we get along, and while I've had to read a bajillion and have a Megabajillion more little papers and procedures to read, I'll actually be doing chemistry to support myself. This should include, in the main, wet lab techniques and HPLC. This also means that I'll have the opportunity to really hone my lab skills to perfection, including lab notebook keeping techniques. While I'm good with theory and have an ability to communicate complex ideas, I've always been a little. . . disorganized. Here, that is not an option, and since I like the idea of remaining employed, I'll actually work on that rather than simply say, "I should, but haven't yet"

Also, they have an R&D department in house, so there's opportunity to move into research, eventually. Great news!

Graduate School

I finished up the GRE this past weekend, and the preliminary results look good. After having paid for the GRE, however, the capital necessary to finance the application process is lacking. Seriously, this shit is bookoo expensive. As such, plans include:

1) Decrease the number of schools to which I'm applying. Shame, since I had researched several

2) Call the schools this week and beg them to waive the application fee

if not 2, then 3) Don't apply, but move to favorite graduate school area, take a class next year, and solicit myself in person for one year.


Option three actually doesn't look too bad from my vantage point, since having a year of not-school would likely increase my motivation going in. Not that I have major motivational problems at the moment, I just figure that it would have this effect. Option three is bad, however, in that I know I'll forget a lot of information in that year, and would be playing catch-up for the first semester rather than coming in fresh.

Seriously, how do people find the money for this? It's ridiculous that the "standard" bill shelled out (advice says to pick ~5 schools), including the GRE, is approximately 500-1000 dollars (depending on how many schools you apply to) just to hear "Yes" or "No" back from the school.

ACS Conference

My poster was admitted to the regional ACS conference this coming October! Results are pending on a single experiment (it was done once, but the data was difficult to interpret so we're subbing some expensive taq for the not-as-expensive taq we used initially), but they looked promising from the first run. Either way, my undergraduate research requirement will be satisfied, and if the results are positive then they should be publishable.

Which brings me to a point I often question about the scientific process: Why don't negative results get publishing, at least, more often? I'm assuming that it's more of a principle of parsimony in publishing than a fascination with positive results, but sometimes I wonder... is there a database where one could at least throw up negative results? Maybe it wouldn't count as publishing, but something like this would be great because... well, it could potentially stop other research groups from traveling down the same avenue, thereby limiting the amount of resources wasted on the same question. This, at least on its face, sounds like a good thing.