Sunday, October 29, 2006
I have an organic chemistry midterm on Wednesday, and once again I feel like a second-rate overachiever. Deducing structures, developing syntheses and proposing mechanisms are all wonderful intellectual challenges, demanding a combination of chemical knowledge, logic, spatial reasoning, intuition, experience and persistence - which is all very intoxicating on a good day.
But right now, my syntheses look half-baked, my mechanisms hopelessly arbitrary, and I haven't started on revising spectroscopy yet. And this is just introductory organic chemistry, damn it. As one of my chemistry professors quipped, what we are learning is analogous to 'See Tom run,' while
he has the equivalent of Dante's
Inferno on his shelf.
... don't look at me like that. Academic ambition drives my entire existence. There's big money staked on my being academically brilliant. Thanks to acceleration, I have the semester standing of a junior (3rd year undergrad) now, along with all the associated academic expectations. Hell, I'm already preparing for my senior's thesis.
So why am I getting stuck on sophomore-level problems? This is
unacceptable.
words were spilled on Sunday, October 29, 2006
