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Anyone feel like they're "stuck"/How did you know this was what you wanted to do?

I'm well aware of the fact that this might not be the best place to ask this question, but I don't really know where else to turn--if anyone knows a better subreddit for me to ask this question, please let me know!

I just got hired as a undergrad in a lab that researches 2D materials. I am a rising sophomore, so from my understanding I got into research waayyy before most people do. I'm a Chem B.S. with a double major in something totally unrelated to Chem. After starting at the lab, I realized that I really don't react the same way others do to some things-like, my grad mentor will say "THIS IS SO COOL THIS EXPERIMENT WENT SO WELL" and I'm like "okay, yeah, it's cool, I guess, I don't really know what happened, I'm hungry." I feel like that in a lot of my classes too-I'm good at it, but the material is just....stuff to me. I know this field isn't what I'm most passionate about, but I've been raised for 18 years to be good at science and treat everything else as a hobby (read: distraction). I'm not gonna lie, my parents play a big part in my life-it's a culture thing (I'm Chinese-American).

I guess my question is, how did you know that you really wanted to do this? Is it like, I don't know, burning passion that never died out or did you start doing it because you didn't know what else to do and slowly developed a fondness for it later? Am I just jumping into things too early to really get a grasp of what's going on? I don't hate Chemistry, I just feel like I'm never going to do well because I don't love it as much as other people, or I don't get excited about Chemistry as much as I do another field.

Sorry that was so long. Any advice would be really appreciated.

Posted Jun 3, 2017, 4:48 PM UTC · edited

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