The 10 Levels of Being a Chemist

You are nineteen years old, standing at bench 14 with borrowed goggles and a $41 secondhand lab coat, waiting four hours for crystals that should have taken forty minutes. This is your life as a chemist — all ten levels, from your first failed recrystallization to the last notebook in a garage in New Jersey. Six years of PhD. 140,000 words of thesis. Two grams of material. Forty-one faculty applications and zero offers. Eleven years and $380 million on a compound that died in a conference room on a Wednesday in November. And one paper, published in 2014 because nobody wanted it, that somebody else read. Watch to the end. The last thirty seconds are the whole video. 00:00 Level 1 — The Undergraduate 02:45 Level 2 — The Graduate Student 05:11 Level 3 — The Candidate 07:45 Level 4 — The Postdoc 10:05 Level 5 — The Hire 12:48 Level 6 — The Lead 15:11 Level 7 — The Trial 17:52 Level 8 — The Cut 20:14 Level 9 — The Contractor 22:41 Level 10 — The Name Subscribe for a new POV every week. #chemist #chemistry #POV