I certainly had no idea what a life in science meant when I was an undergraduate. There may be people who knew all their lives that they wanted to be scientists. I am not one of them. I became interested in Chemistry my last year of secondary school as the result of an excellent teacher named Mr. Cruishank. An interest in chemistry is not the same as knowing one wants to be a scientist.
As I say often to students, science at the secondary school level is taught as a collection of facts which can be learned. If you read the book, study hard, and have a good memory and decent math skills you can do well. This is just the foundation. Your teachers are trying to teach you the language of science. Because you know a language, doesn't mean you can write concise essays or decent poetry.
So it is with science. At the University level we try to introduce you to science as it is practiced. Rather than being a collection of facts for memorization, science is an investigation of the unknown. When you are increasing the total of what we know about the physical world around us, you have started being a scientist. As you go through the University, the level of abstraction increases. For example, we know a lot about lead contamination of the environment. But, we may know nothing about the amount of lead in YOUR tap water. This is a good short project for an undergraduate student. By the end of second year analytical, you should have no difficulty doing this measurement. But clearly, this would be insufficient to give you a Ph. D. What determines the difference between you measuring lead in your own tap and a Ph. D. is the level of generality and the level of abstraction.
The problem with studying the unknown is that it is unknown. This is a BIG problem. First, since it is unknown, by definition you don't know necessarily what to do, you do not know what you will find, you do not know if your experiment will work. This means spending a lot of time feeling your way around in the dark. What is more, the more interesting the knowledge, the less is known. For example, at a fundamental level, science really does not know how consciousness works. We are so much in the dark with our knowledge that people can say that it ma not be possible to know how consciousness works. This means we haven't got a clue how to go about studying it. Lots of bumping around in the dark left to go.
When I first encountered chemistry, I had no idea that a career in science might include spending most of my time a bit confused, unsure, and having experiments not work right. Rather, my idea was that science would consist of progressively thicker books full of interesting facts, describing how I could do increasingly more complex experiments in support of those facts. The concept of designing an experiment that would show something NEW didn't get into my head until far along in my undergraduate education.
At the end of my undergraduate education, I never wanted to sit in a classroom. I was tired of exams, hurried reading, and cramming information into my head (sound familiar). It wasn't until later that I realized all of that effort was just the background allowing a person to recognize the gap between the known and the unknown. It was then that I knew I wanted to be a scientist.
The purpose here is to try to clarify one aspect of the nature of science. Science is the investigation of the unknown. Once it is known, it may become interesting to all sorts of people, but the scientist has to move on. Understanding this point will make your transition to advanced study in science easier and better enable you to decide what you want to do after you finish your degree.
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