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Comment by coderatlarge | Hacker News Reader

my daughter loves chemistry and says she wants to be a chemist. she does great ai it at school. so mom and dad helped her find an unpaid spot in an actual lab. so far she loves it but has also learned that it means working all day at 18 degrees c and constantly smelling her colleagues’ lab animal feed. we’ll find out soon if that was too much reality too soon. i hope it will lead her to double-down with the full reality in sight.

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> working all day at 18 degrees c and constantly smelling her colleagues’ lab animal feed

That sounds more like biomedical research than chemistry? At the risk of stating the overly obvious to you do keep in mind how great the differences are between subfields. Synthetic organic versus materials science labs will look like entirely different professions from the perspective of a layman glancing in the window (which they are I suppose).

fair point - yes this is a biochemistry lab but her part is specifically to do with analysis of lab data collected from someone’s specific experiment. so she’s learning practical things having to do with actually doing new science in a real environment though she’ll need to generalize a bit in her mind (hopefully correctly but then developing intuition and imagination matters too) to the pure chemistry aspect of it. she’s generally excited to meet actual professionals in their day-to-day work who have specific performance expectations of her and who really care that her part is done correctly and can be thoroughly audited and verified for accuracy. this time she’s not getting her hands on actual lab instruments and things like that (she does that at school and hopefully in next summer’s internship if she can can get one and is still interested by then); but she’s seeing how data comes from each of those physical world manipulations and what is done with it afterwards.

I always thought it would be so much fun to work in a lab with monkeys until Chris Kattan unpacked that one for me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QV2kaJ5_8PU

Weird, 18c is the sweet spot, like ideal perfect temperature for me.

that’s what my wood shop teacher used to say to the whole class who were wearing heavy sweaters.

is this also an early experience at a job whether paid or unpaid? if so there could be some noise in the signal from that.

yes first time in a work-like environment. she’s mostly excited about it though we realize in retrospect it might be a bit of a risk to a fledgling interest. fortunately it seems to be a supportive environment (got lucky).

in my opinion this is a high stakes combination with little grey area for outcomes, as in I predict based on the tiny shred of info I have that she'll come out of it knowing whether or not it is something that she wants to pursue. good luck

thanks! yes we sort of saw it as “if it’s not for her better that she know early on”. we don’t want to talk her out of it (quite the contrary), yet we know many others who pursued lab bench science for a decade+ before realizing it was not for them for one of many practical reasons and we thought it best to give her a preview… there are many fields she was happy to rule out after simple conversations but there is a small handful that she finds compelling as stories or narratives but don’t survive the first level of unpacking (math, software, cybersecurity). fortunately the central science has stood up to actual challenges so far…

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