“Butter fingers” Prof. S remarked rather acerbically (I thought) after I broke the nth piece of precious glassware in the lab. My heart shattered into Avogadro’s number.
“Ach ich bin ein Tollpatsch (clumsy creature)”, I used to say when I was a child in Germany. I managed to get a 6 (equivalent to an F) in art in the 4th grade, my penmanship caused untold misery to my teachers and yet, I found myself, several years later, in an experimental chemistry lab, all set to do a PhD. I felt like such an imposter, convinced that I didn’t deserve to be there, convinced that I was there only because of the grueling coaching classes that helped me crack the entrance exam and the interview, convinced that I lacked a natural scientific bent of mind unlike my peers. I spent most of the first semester feeling homesick. I was also convinced that my little brother, who had just turned 13, desperately needed me by his side to guide him gently through his turbulent teenage years (ask him if he felt the same!) and penned long, emotional letters to my best friend P telling her of all the ways I was failing him. Net result, I was at the bottom of the class at the end of the first semester and my parents weren’t happy. I decided to bluster my way through “I am 21, a full-grown adult, you have no say in my grades”. “As long as we are paying your fees Supri….”
Things improved after that. Prof. S asked me to work on the synthesis of gold, silver, palladium, and platinum nanoparticles and I delved into the world of the ultra-small. The Greek philosopher Democritus who coined the word atom got it right when he said, “to understand the very large, we must understand the very small”. It applies to every aspect of life.
The compact storage section (CS) of the library soon became my favorite place in the world. This housed old scientific journals, some over a 100 years old. I spent several blissful hours there marveling at the parchment texture of the papers, smiling at the use of archaic scientific terms. The CS was always dark and a little musty. Rows upon rows of metal racks filled with old journals lined the floor. The afternoon light filtered through the slats in the floor above creating the
most beautiful diffraction patterns on the wall and the floor.
I suppose this is where I crossed the border from being someone who felt like an imposter, to a woman who didn’t mind calling herself a scientist. A scientist who keeps it real with that old chestnut “to acquire a PhD you need to know more and more about less and less until you know everything about nothing!”
This article was written as a response to a prompt given by the lovely
and , our gurus at .
Hugs to our scientist writer who studied gold and became golden… My personal farmaish is this… please write more about science. Take us to your favourite atoms and molecules and other units of scientific wonder ❤️❤️