Thanks alot for sharing, I really appreciate it! I also plan on doing research, in Organic chemistry though.
When I was first looking in to doing research I though I wanted to Organic as well because I was good at it.
In my research I did some organic syntheses to make starting materials to use to make inorganic-organic hybrid materials (basically fancy crystals or crystalline powder if everything went well). Half the time I ended up with a orange, smelly, gooey, thick gel that would not recystallize into anything usable.
And that was a quite basic reaction. Now the grad student who worked in my lab had even more issues to figure out. Water sensitive reactions and light sensitive reactions and what he wanted to do would not always work the way he wanted. And the reactions took so many steps.
I realized then that I did not want to go to grad school and do organic chemistry research. Granted, things don't work always when you are doing novel syntheses but organic seemed way more variable/unpredictable than my materials.
But some people are cut out for organic chemistry research, just not me.
Now the other good thing about inorganic research is that getting publishable results is faster so that means more publications. At least that was how it worked in my lab. Apparently it is the opposite in fields like Biochem (Haven't done biochem research but this is what others have told me). One grad student got to patent a material that they made and researched.
On the other hand, the publications were in less presigious journals focused on Inorganic Chemistry and Materials. Half of what I did was for the sake of doing it under the gise of trying to solve one particular problem. I was trying to make a material that could increase the gas barrier properties of PET with potential applications in bottle manufacturing and tire manufacturing. Did anything I make actually help that problem...no, perhaps it might with years and years of research. But it did provide me a reason for doing it and my materials I made did have desirable qualities for that particular application.
Thats just my two cents anyway.
However, I do wish that I had done a little more research related to the field of medicine/biology but at the time I was more interested in attending grad school than med school.
