January 19, 2010.  We unpacked our new Agilent GCMS today. It comes with a container of fine alumina abrasive. I’ve never had to maintain one before so this has been an education. It has a triple MSD (mass selective detector) on it for what amounts to a noise cancellation feature. This increases the signal to noise ratio of the output substantially. I never realized that the MSD was off-axis relative to the quadrapole electrodes. The ion beam is steered 90 degrees into the MSD by a 10 kV post that also accelerates the beam.

Oh yes, the abrasive is for polishing the metal surface that sits against the high vacuum seal of the mass analyzer chamber. It struck me as amusing that a mass spec comes with a supply of abrasives. Now it makes sense.

Perhaps one solution to the problem of excess chemistry PhD production by our institutions is to take a step away from the path of pure scholarship into the applied sciences. That is, a chemistry program wherein chemical science is integrated with economics and business.  The goal is to support the industrial part of our civilization with scientifically educated people who desire to apply their knowledge to the industrial arts, i.e., manufacturing, sales, management, and distribution. 

I’m suggesting that chemical education could be split into two streams- scholarship and applied science- because that is where the grads go anyway.  Presently, the scholarly route supplies the entire supply of chemistry graduates.  I think there are several reasons for this. Faculty produce graduates along the manner in which they were schooled. Another reason  for this singular path is the effect of the ACS standardized curriculum.  Most chemistry departments struggle to maintain their ACS certification as a validation stamp for their program .  It also serves as a foil for deans who want to gut the chemistry budget because it is typically very costly.  The ACS program has basic requirements and that is that.

An applied science program would require a modification to the usual faculty profile. Instead of having a faculty of stellar Harvard , MIT, and Stanford graduates, the faculty would have a few from Dow, DuPont, Air Products, etc.

An applied chemical science program could include coursework on the manufacturing processes of petroleum feedstocks from crude oil to BTX, polyolefins, and maybe into some fine chemicals or extractive metallurgy.  It would cover the regulatory environment and give students familiarity with EPA and OSHA regulations as well as those regs governing transportation of hazardous goods. 

At some point there should be coursework in basic accounting, marketing, law, and finance. A business minor would be very useful.  A student should know how to calculate the manufacturing cost of a product based labor & overhead as well as the cost of raw materials.  There are many possibilities here to use real life examples. Y ou never know what will happen to a student once they understand how to get a product to market. The just might want to go do it themselves.

It is not inconceivable that a program along these outlines and with the right faculty could produce graduates who are inclined to do a startup. Once you know something about what is required to get a product out the door, it is natural to begin to dream about doing it yourself. 

American chemistry lacks a culture of strong entrepreneurship among chemists. This is not quite as true for chemical engineers, though. Chemists are afraid to start a company because they have not been exposed to much of the business environment because they are partitioned in the lab. They do not know what the issues are or how to attract resources to get the thing started.

I was on the phone with a professor the other day who has $$ in his eyes. He has a customer who wants x kg of his compound and he thinks that he is going to staff a small production campaign with students in a rental space. He admitted he had no idea of what is required once you have employees doing hazardous activities. He had no idea of what workmans compensation insurance was. 

 His business model was simply a larger version of his research lab. The university would pay his students a stipend and he would have them laboring off campus making some stuff that is too nasty for use on campus.  It is much like gold fever.  Otherwise rational people become greedy and foolish when they think there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

The over arching goal of an applied science degree program is to produce graduates who have a better understanding of our industrial culture and are prepared to strengthen it by a lifetime of effort in making better things for better living.  The future holds the inevitable confrontation with scarcity. We need a layer of educated industrialists who can help fashion a good life in the US with smarter manufacturing that can accomodate reduced energy and materials consumption.

I used to work with a sales consultant who would say smart things now and then. As sales manager, consultants were usually the bane of my existance. Not because they were no good- often they were quite competent- but because they were problematic. Management brought them in because, with its all seeing eye, it believed that we foot soldiers were unable to make certain changes.

So when a consultant arrived we had to bring them up to speed and then watch them slowly fail to make the changes. They nearly always failed. Management was looking for change in the lower eschelons but never considered that change at the top was necessary. Ever. One day we’d hear that so-and-so had moved on to other things.

Working for a corporation is very one-sided unless you are at the very top. Employees are expected to be loyal and hard working no matter how outrageous the working environment and no matter how incompetent the management. Fail to impress management and you’ll face the prospect of job hunting without good references.

But I’ve gotten off track. The Great Gondini (I’ve scrambled the letters in his name) used to say this-

Never work for a company as a chemist if chemistry is not their main activity.

He spent much of his career with IBM and later, Lexmark, involved in magnetic coatings for disk drives, charge transfer agents and other xerography chemicals, and toners. IBM and Lexmark are not chemical companies.

The point my friend was trying to make was that professional isolation within a company has consequences. One consequence is that promotion to upper management is difficult owing to the lack of participation in the management of core projects.  It is understood that there are exceptions.

There are benefits to isolation. You get to be the company wizard. Often management is loath to mess with you because, while they know that you do something important, they aren’t really sure what it is. I experienced this phenomenon when I was a chemist in a dairy lab. It can be quite amusing.

The isolation issue exists even for chemists in chemical companies. Your ascendency to upper level positions is stunted if you have not been involved in the major company projects in a significant way. If you’re running an small lab somewhere in the organization, especially if you’re in a service role, it is hard for management to promote you to VP of Chemistry over that project manager whose successful project went to market on time and on budget.

If you’re not interested in this kind of advancement, then it is a moot point.

Some chemist friends have mentioned to me that I make sweeping generalizations and this is surely true. There are exceptions to all but the most specific statements, eg., x = 3 (wait a minute, doesn’t x = 4 as well !!??).  Generalizing is a rhetorical technique. The view from 50,000 feet is meant to show the overall topography.

Chemists love details and, like a pig in shit, we love to roll around in the data. And for some, no detail is too small to bring the show to a complete halt while they wrestle with details. I’ve seen this many times. This makes it difficult for some chemists to make the transition to other job descriptions. It is a simple fact that we sometimes have to move forward with an incomplete picture.

Having interviewed numerous bachelors degree job candidates recently, I’m beginning to question some fundamental assumptions about the value of a BA/BS chemistry degree to industry.  Let me say from the outset that I wasn’t interested in hiring an analyst. There are plenty of analysts out there in the market, especially in the temp agencies. I’d been looking for someone to do synthesis. Both organic and inorganic.

Just to be clear, the slot has been filled, so don’t send your resume to me. Sorry.

I had the experience of interviewing a fresh BS chemist from a good- dare I say “elite”- school this week.  He had fulfilled the requirements for graduation and was sitting there at the table beaming at me with great confidence.  This fellow fared poorly on our application chemistry test, but was undeterred.

When asked as to the length and breadth of his organic synthetic experience in school, he admitted that it was limited to that obtained in sophomore organic chemistry.  He did have a trifle of inorganic synthesis experience- he made ferrocene once.  That being said, his interpretation of the NMR spectrum on the test was wrong, his understanding of carbocation stability trends was wrong, and he couldn’t calculate his way out of a paper bag.

This is not so unsual.

So here is what I have observed in the past 6 or 7 years interviewing BS chemists. Precious few of them had any demonstrable interest in organic chemistry or synthesis. It is not because they were lacking ability- they had not had the opportunity to practice the art. They might have been involved in some kind of research in their senior year, but very often it is involved in some highly specialized work with a very narrow scope. OK. That is the nature of research. It’s specialized.  I believe the college chemistry curriculum and the shifting interests of faculty to ultra specialized research are failing students.

I’m glad to hear that students at the local university have experience in operating a tunneling microscope or picosecond  laser equipment. But what about experience in basic synthetic transformations in actual glassware? How about a reduction of an ester or an amide with LAH? What about a catalytic hydrogenation or running a reaction with a Grignard reagent?  Are students limited to the microscale experience? Do chem majors get to handle greater than 100 mg of reagents? Do they learn to handle hazardous materials in a smart way, other than just learning tofear them?

This graduate that I interviewed had experience in some kind of nanoscience, but couldn’t say much at all about basic synthesis. When asked about Grignard reagents, he could not recall having heard of it.  What the hell good did the professor do for this kid?? The kid burned up his senior year doing deep-niche chemistry with skills of questionable transferability. He should have been doing distillations and crystallizations until he could coax pure subtsances out of a mixture that he/she made. That is what an undergrad should be doing.  An undergrad should be refining basic manipulation skills and accumulation experience in running diverse reactions.  Experience is proportional to the number of experiments run.

I have no reason to believe other than undergraduate chemistry education is failing to prepare bachelors students for the practice of the synthetic arts.  It has been my experience- perhaps yours is different- that students with an interest in synthesis go to grad school.  The problem with that is that it immediately doubles the cost of doing synthetic chemistry per unit chemist in society at large.

So, who is best served today in undergraduate education? The students or the institutions? Chemistry departments are faced with rising costs and diminishing funding, especially in public institutions. Faculty do what they know how to do. They promulgate scholarship. That is the comfort zone. And they develop strong opinions about who should join their ranks- people of like mind for the most part.

The pressure to minimize waste streams in undergraduate labs enabled the transition to microscale lab equipment. The development of computer technology has enabled the accumulation and treatment of data by semi-automated data collection tools and spreadsheets. Some of this is good- drudgery for its own sake is dumb. But we are removing students from contact with the very materials they study.  This is not how to accumulate expertise. This is expertise in automation and not automatically in chemistry. 

These graduates move into important roles in industry. Industry, contrary to a popular academic sentiment, isn’t merely a big sack of tedious details. It is a colossal part of our culture. We’re tool users and chemistry is one of the things that tool-using citizens do to improve our lot in life.  The synthetic arts in the USA are somewhat in decline as industry continues to outsource manufacturing and R&D (!!?) to India and China. The USA needs affordable labor to do synthetic chemistry. Continuing to stamp out PhD’s is not the answer. PhD’s are very expensive to have around, and while perhaps they do most of the critical discovery work, the costs are prohibitive. Just look around.

The USA needs a new cultural paradigm. We need a chemistry labor pool that consists of workers of high and medium skill to bring affordable and competitive products to market. Unless we figure this out we are headed for that realm of self-satisfied mediocrity that some of our neighbors across the Atlantic find themselves in. There are many examples of fallen empire around the world and the US is slouching in that direction.