Personal Statement

Had my synthesis reaction worked—yes or no? It was a simple question, but I had already spent

hours trying to answer it in vain. As much as I loved chemistry, my patience was wearing thin. Midnight had

come and gone three hours ago, and the long evening had taken its toll. With bleary eyes I pored over page

after page of cluttered data, trying to make sense of the results. Occasionally my heart would leap as I

chanced upon a promising tidbit, but no sooner would I get my hopes up than the morsel would reveal itself

as a false lead. I was at once eager to move forward yet hesitant to do so: the right judgment about a piece of

data could spring the analysis toward a conclusion, but the wrong judgment could push it just as far in the

opposite direction.

My inner pragmatist and inner perfectionist were duking it out to see who would decide my approach

to the problem. At this juncture, I honestly didn’t know which one to obey. The pragmatist dangled the

allure of compromise: if only I overlooked a few inconsistencies here and there, the remainder of the data

would fall neatly into place. Admittedly, the conclusion might not be entirely right, but neither would it be

entirely wrong. The perfectionist, on the other hand, insisted on rigor: if even one piece of data proved

incompatible with a theory, then I would have to reshape that theory to take it into account. To do anything

less would be an insult to science.

In principle, making sense of the results of nuclear magnetic resonance, or NMR, spectroscopy called

for the perfectionist’s approach. Even though the technology allowed chemists to deduce the structures of

unknown molecules with more precision than ever before, reaching that high-hanging fruit required one to

tease meaning from reams of data that bordered on the cryptic. Without going into detail, suffice it to say

that NMR spectroscopy uses the magic of physics to transform a molecule into a line on paper. This line,

called the NMR spectrum, forms a series of peaks and valleys and encodes all the information a chemist

needs to reconstruct that molecule’s structure.

The challenges of the interpretation process, however, meant that the pragmatist often held sway.

Although each peak corresponds to a specific feature of the molecule in theory, in practice an NMR spectrum

can look indecipherable: frenzied clusters of peaks vie for space and crowd each other out, producing
ambiguities that riddle every step of the analysis. In particularly nasty cases, a subtle difference between two

otherwise identical molecules can give rise to wildly different results. Likewise, two otherwise unlike

molecules might give similar results if they share a few key similarities. Scientific instruments can also

introduce artifacts—for example, by merging two separate peaks into one. Neglecting a small but telling

detail often spelled woe for the unwitting chemist; the intricate nature of the analysis practically invited

unwarranted assumptions.

I had bogged down in the process of deciding which features to consider relevant. If I chose to

ignore one detail, then the rest would form a plausible conclusion. If I chose to ignore a different detail,

however, the result might well be something entirely contrary. If reconciling such possibilities had seemed

like finding a needle in a haystack when I started, it now felt downright Sisyphean. The lack of progress was

all the more exasperating because I had foreseen the difficulties: despite starting early and budgeting extra

time, the work had still bloated into the wee hours. With each passing minute the pragmatist’s approach

looked more and more enticing.

The perfectionist, however, refused to give up. Just as I readied myself to take the easy way out,

instinct told me to keep working. I had come so far, it said, and all the work I had invested would go to

waste if I accepted a half-baked conclusion now. Reinvigorated by this new thirst for the answer, I drove

onward. Four o’clock, then five o’clock, melted away as I inched toward the truth. Several times I started to

stretch the facts, but each time I caught myself and forced my reasoning back onto solid ground. When the

last piece of the puzzle finally fell into place, I looked up and realized, almost surprised, that the seemingly

impossible task had come to an end. I checked my work one last time and knew, with great satisfaction, that

my synthesis reaction had worked. Despite all the false starts, the apparently intractable data, and the

conflicting data, my love of chemistry had prevailed.