alt Hacker Newsmy 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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DonHopkins • 08/01/2025
I always thought it would be so much fun to work in a lab with monkeys until Chris Kattan unpacked that one for me.
datameta • 08/01/2025
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.
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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).