Listening 8 – Listen for specific words

I was a chemistry major in college, and I picked that because I had always been interested in science as a kid. I was really into volcanos and , dinosaurs and fossils, and stuff like that, and I used to read some pretty advanced books for my age on those .

Both of my parents have a science background – my dad was an , and my mom has a psychology degree – so they always encouraged me, and my dad would do these science experiments for me and my brother to see and learn some of the of chemistry and physics and whatnot.

Also in high school I had a wonderful chemistry teacher, she really made the subject fascinating, and not just like a boring list of chemical reactions and to memorize. We would have class with her, but we would also do lab work, you know, experiments and it was very hands-on. So when it came time to pick a major in college, it was a toss-up between chemistry and , but I eventually settled on chemistry.

I went to a pretty small college, and what was great about that is that I had the opportunity to use lab equipment that undergrads wouldn’t get a chance to use. We were trained to use some really sophisticated machinery and we were able to do research that is really quite to what we’d be doing if we continued into a career in chemistry.

And I absolutely loved the process of , of using what was already known to investigate things that were unknown. My area of specialization was marine natural products chemistry – so basically, studying sea creatures like sponges and algae, and trying to extract and some of the chemical compounds in them that had anti-bacterial and cancer-fighting properties, so that these could eventually be into new drugs and medicines.

Both during and after my college years I did a couple of internships in a pharmaceutical company, which was doing the same kind of work, and it was there that I started to second-guess myself and whether or not I really wanted to do this type of work for the rest of my life. Although the work was interesting, it was also very slow – it can take to make progress in this area – and it was also extremely, extremely specialized, which felt limiting because I have a really broad of interests.

So I decided not to continue – I turned down a scholarship to go to grad school – and it was a tough decision because I was basically turning my on a sure-fire career with a great starting salary, and instead choosing a path of uncertainty. But I know it was ultimately the decision.

Nowadays, now that people know me as an English teacher, they’re often pretty to hear that I have a degree in chemistry – but I actually think my science background has helped me in some ways. That ability to research and investigate means I’m always experimenting and testing to discover the best ways to help my students learn, and I’m always learning new things myself in the process.

Also, in college I did a lot of of my chemistry research, and so I learned how to communicate some very complicated concepts in layman’s terms, so that they would be clear and understandable to someone even if they didn’t have any knowledge of chemistry at all. And now it’s a fundamental of my teaching style, this ability to simplify what seems confusing and complex, and I can thank my experience in the of chemistry for that, too.