Wisely selecting an undergraduate research project for a student who wishes to concentrate in organic chemistry can motivate him or her to proceed to further studies in chemistry. This is my goal in this blog.
It would be good if at the end of the assigned period the student could see that (s)he had made a small but significant contribution to the ever growing body of science knowledge but this is not so easy. Research projects that end up bearing the words “an attempt….” or “the future steps required to complete this work….” do not provide the inspiration I have in mind; however, many prospective projects that would actually add to the overall body of knowledge either end up taking too much of a supervisor’s time, lead into unmanageable complexity, end up competing with experienced researchers, or are so narrowly focussed that any result is disappointingly inconsequential.
A problem particular to organic chemical synthesis is that too much of a project is taken up in the library working on route selection, for example, and too little time with experimentation in the laboratory. Since the whole object is to provide the student that initial feel for the hands-on research experience, this cannot lead to a successful project outcome.
Finally, if the student’s work can actually be worthy of publication; even if only online, the student will obtain a psychological boost that may be career defining.
How I Propose to Do It
Before retiring, most of my career was as an industrial pharmaceutical chemist. After retiring, I became a blog author. I authored the blog, Kilomentor, which aimed at teaching the fundamentals of organic chemistry process development and scale-up. While writing these articles I found out that there was very little published experimental work focussed on rugged isolation and purification methods that could be applied for preparative and large scale synthesis. Neither industrial nor academic researchers are interested in teaching the best methods for separation and purification of physically significant amounts of product. This is because industrial chemists don’t want to reveal more than a patent demands while academics don’t work in areas where peer-reviewed journals won’t publish.
As a consequence, in many of my blog articles I note that experimental work needs to be done to actually show that such and such a technique works and will have the advantages that I maintain possible.
I think the studies that are needed will be largely experimental. They are limited; not likely to lead to overwhelming complexity; and less likely to require a supervisor’s repeated intervention.
Finally if the outcome is successful it can be published on-line and if it is not successful, mention in the comment section of the applicable article at Kilomentor, preferably with a link to your work, will be valuable for my world-wide readership.
No comments:
Post a Comment