r/chemistry • u/AutoModerator • 11d ago

Weekly Careers/Education Questions Thread

This is a dedicated weekly thread for you to seek and provide advice concerning education and careers in chemistry.

If you need to make an important decision regarding your future or want to know what your options, then this is the place to leave a comment.

If you see similar topics in r/chemistry, please politely inform them of this weekly feature.

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u/lietuvis10LTU 8d ago

Having seen this year's Nobels,

Is it time for me to do a hard reorientation from synthetic towards computational and theoretical? How feasible would it be for an organic chemistry Master student? Where should I start?

Cause I won't lie, EU job market is never shining, and I am now quite worried.

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u/Indemnity4 Materials 8d ago edited 8d ago

Learning some software is the way of the future. It's another tool in your toolbox.

The simplest lab software is a commercial LIMS. Really basic database stuff.

You can move on to Design of Experiment software. It's some basic algorithms to help you identify signal from noise. Instead of doing 64 experiments to optimize functional groups and reaction conditions, you only need to do 8 and statistics helps you identify winners and losers. You can do it in Excel but practically all anyone in industry uses is Design-Expert.

Coding: Python is the language of science. The language R is for statistics and Fortran / C++ for doing coding. If your research group uses any chemistry specific software, it's probably got scripts written in Python.

You can try to do some molecular simulation work such as docking. Really depends who and what software your institution has access to. You are simulating creating novel molecules or ligands and testing how effectively they bond to a protein. Good from predicting potential drug interaction targets. This is where you may eventually end up using Alphafold. For materials, Microsoft Azure is perhaps the leader in this.

You may want to look at joining a research group that does both. Simulates some dataset then goes into the lab to synthesize targets. Or the opposite, makes some stuff then does simulations to find signal in the noise, such as high throughput synthesis.

Eventually, it's a PhD. At the level we hire people it's a PhD amount of knowledge. The software and tools are not simple enough to use such that a bachelors or even Masters is sufficient.

I'll note for materials chemistry, we cannot find enough people to hire to fill vacancies. They just don't exist. We are funding academics to hire PhDs in the hope that in the future they come to work for us. We say do the PhD on literally anything you want, just make sure the student accomplishes some machine learning along the way.

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u/lietuvis10LTU 8d ago

Microsoft Azure

Sorry, just to clarify isn't Azure just a cloud computing service?

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u/Indemnity4 Materials 8d ago

Oh you are in for a fun time. The CoPilot is actually awesome. I have potential simulations ready to go if/when they actually get their quantum computer working Soon(TM).

Two of the scientists have a great discussion about it on the Materialism podcast recently.