SOP draft-Chemistry
I'm sort of unsure exactly how one of these should go, so I just sat down and typed for a bit and this is what came out. It's about 800 words right now, and I plan on adding 200 words that are specific to each school I'm applying to at the end.
I first considered graduate school fall semester of my sophomore year at SMALL LIBERAL ARTS COLLEGE, when I realized I liked chemistry a lot and wanted to major in it. I was able to join the lab of my organic chemistry professor, RECOMMENDER 1, in January of 2009 doing organic synthesis. It was a short, three-week experience, but it helped confirm I was moving in the right direction. Much as I had always enjoyed labs for class, it was much more exciting to be running reactions no one else had done before for an unexplored purpose. I liked not knowing whether or not a reaction would work or whether a simple column would purify the product. It made it all the more exciting when it did, and presented an interesting challenge to work on if it didn’t. I was excited to get up every morning and see what progress I could make that day. Beyond learning that I liked research, I also learned the basic techniques of organic synthetic work that go beyond introductory organic lab.
RECOMMENDER 1’s lab was full for the next semester and summer, so I looked into other places to do research for the summer. I ended up at BIG RESEARCH UNIVERSITY in the COOL NAME summer research program. At this point, I thought I wanted to do biochemistry research, so I ended up being placed in RECOMMENDER 2’s bioinorganic lab developing Fe3O4@Au core-shell nanoparticle systems to be used as MRI contrast agents. It was completely different research than what I had expected, but I loved it. I found that the unique magnetic and plasmonic properties of the metals we used were more interesting to me than the properties of the organic compounds I had made previously.
Once the summer was over, I knew I wanted to keep doing inorganic chemistry. I wanted something longer-term so I could really get a feel for the kind of research I would be doing in graduate school. I contacted RECOMMENDER 3, who does organometallic synthesis here at SMALL LIBERAL ARTS COLLEGE. He was just coming back from a year-long sabbatical at University of California-Berkeley, so he had no other students in his lab and allowed me to join. His current project was an investigation of a heterobimetallic effect upon reaction of organometallic compounds with organic radicals.
I spent the fall semester of 2009 basically relearning how to do chemistry. All of the compounds we worked with were air and moisture sensitive, so we employed basic Schlenk line and glove box techniques to run all of our reactions under argon. By the end of the semester, I had made one of the previously unsynthesized heterobimetallics. During January and spring of 2010, I finished the synthesis of all six of the target organometallic compounds and reacted the compounds with our radical sources. I characterized and quantified the product of interest via gas chromatography/mass spectrometry using a procedure I developed myself.
I was able to present the preliminary results of this research as well as the research from the BIG RESEARCH UNIVERSITY as posters at the American Chemical Society meeting in San Francisco in March 2010. I also gave a talk at the NAME Symposium of the STATE Academy of Sciences, which was awarded best in session. The project was completely finished earlier this summer; we wrote up what we found and submitted the paper to Organometallics, where it is now published with me as second author (DOI: XXX). I’ll also be writing up an in-depth section from the paper as an honors project, which involves a written thesis, an hour-long talk, and a thesis defense. In addition, the BIG RESEARCH UNIVERSITY project is currently submitted to the Journal of the American Chemical Society with me as second author again.
I am planning to finish up my undergraduate studies and honors project a semester early to graduate in December 2010. In the spring, I will be working full-time as a lab tech in RECOMMENDER 3’s lab. We have already started new work on a boron-based ligand and that is the project I will continue until I leave for graduate school.
With all of the research I have done, I am confident that I want to continue doing inorganic or organometallic chemistry research as my career. Whether that is in an academic or industrial setting, I am still undecided. But either way, a PhD in chemistry will be necessary to gain the proper skills and background training. With my extensive and varied research experience, I feel ready to enter a program next year, as soon as I am finished with my undergraduate degree.
...
Any and all constructive comments are greatly appreciated. Thanks!
I first considered graduate school fall semester of my sophomore year at SMALL LIBERAL ARTS COLLEGE, when I realized I liked chemistry a lot and wanted to major in it. I was able to join the lab of my organic chemistry professor, RECOMMENDER 1, in January of 2009 doing organic synthesis. It was a short, three-week experience, but it helped confirm I was moving in the right direction. Much as I had always enjoyed labs for class, it was much more exciting to be running reactions no one else had done before for an unexplored purpose. I liked not knowing whether or not a reaction would work or whether a simple column would purify the product. It made it all the more exciting when it did, and presented an interesting challenge to work on if it didn’t. I was excited to get up every morning and see what progress I could make that day. Beyond learning that I liked research, I also learned the basic techniques of organic synthetic work that go beyond introductory organic lab.
RECOMMENDER 1’s lab was full for the next semester and summer, so I looked into other places to do research for the summer. I ended up at BIG RESEARCH UNIVERSITY in the COOL NAME summer research program. At this point, I thought I wanted to do biochemistry research, so I ended up being placed in RECOMMENDER 2’s bioinorganic lab developing Fe3O4@Au core-shell nanoparticle systems to be used as MRI contrast agents. It was completely different research than what I had expected, but I loved it. I found that the unique magnetic and plasmonic properties of the metals we used were more interesting to me than the properties of the organic compounds I had made previously.
Once the summer was over, I knew I wanted to keep doing inorganic chemistry. I wanted something longer-term so I could really get a feel for the kind of research I would be doing in graduate school. I contacted RECOMMENDER 3, who does organometallic synthesis here at SMALL LIBERAL ARTS COLLEGE. He was just coming back from a year-long sabbatical at University of California-Berkeley, so he had no other students in his lab and allowed me to join. His current project was an investigation of a heterobimetallic effect upon reaction of organometallic compounds with organic radicals.
I spent the fall semester of 2009 basically relearning how to do chemistry. All of the compounds we worked with were air and moisture sensitive, so we employed basic Schlenk line and glove box techniques to run all of our reactions under argon. By the end of the semester, I had made one of the previously unsynthesized heterobimetallics. During January and spring of 2010, I finished the synthesis of all six of the target organometallic compounds and reacted the compounds with our radical sources. I characterized and quantified the product of interest via gas chromatography/mass spectrometry using a procedure I developed myself.
I was able to present the preliminary results of this research as well as the research from the BIG RESEARCH UNIVERSITY as posters at the American Chemical Society meeting in San Francisco in March 2010. I also gave a talk at the NAME Symposium of the STATE Academy of Sciences, which was awarded best in session. The project was completely finished earlier this summer; we wrote up what we found and submitted the paper to Organometallics, where it is now published with me as second author (DOI: XXX). I’ll also be writing up an in-depth section from the paper as an honors project, which involves a written thesis, an hour-long talk, and a thesis defense. In addition, the BIG RESEARCH UNIVERSITY project is currently submitted to the Journal of the American Chemical Society with me as second author again.
I am planning to finish up my undergraduate studies and honors project a semester early to graduate in December 2010. In the spring, I will be working full-time as a lab tech in RECOMMENDER 3’s lab. We have already started new work on a boron-based ligand and that is the project I will continue until I leave for graduate school.
With all of the research I have done, I am confident that I want to continue doing inorganic or organometallic chemistry research as my career. Whether that is in an academic or industrial setting, I am still undecided. But either way, a PhD in chemistry will be necessary to gain the proper skills and background training. With my extensive and varied research experience, I feel ready to enter a program next year, as soon as I am finished with my undergraduate degree.
...
Any and all constructive comments are greatly appreciated. Thanks!