Alexander: Homewood tutor

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I have always loved learning. My entire life, when I have had a question, I have attempted to investigate the answer myself. To me, chemistry has always had the most sufficient answers, the answers that leave out the least detail. Chemistry is what I enjoy most as a student, and has always felt like something I could enjoy professionally. I could reason through phenomena and stretch my own understanding, not follow a set of steps or memorize dates. As a teenager, I would say I enjoyed chemistry and everyone told me that it's a good field, I'll probably do research, and that I will need to get a PhD. So, I took that at face value. I love learning and chemistry, which makes chemical research an ideal career and my choice of degree simple. Standing at the end of my undergraduate education, I am making the decision to pursue a PhD, consciously, out of a love for understanding how and why light interacts with matter and what we can do with and learn from each different interaction. I can't imagine any better way to spend the rest of my days than learning about the world around me, and earning a PhD.
This resolution of motivation for my graduate studies went alongside one of the best experiences of my life: the University of Cincinnati Summer REU in 2023. I worked for ten weeks under Dr. Lyndsay Kissell in Pietro Strobbia's lab and, for the first time, I was answering questions using chemistry. I was closely guided, of course, but I was constantly learning and encouraged to do so. If I was told to do something, I could reason through why with my mentors and learn about how you design experiments to build towards your final goal. If there was a concept I did not understand, we discussed it and I was given literature so I could come in the next day with more refined questions. By the end of the summer, I had also gained a profound sense of what the upper limit was for a scientist; how much of an expert I could become. Each member of the Strobbia lab had physical intuition, concrete understanding of theory, and hard skills that were beyond what I could comprehend at that point.
In retrospect, I am surprised I wasn't terrified of the distance between where I was and where I wanted to be. I think I had simply known better than to think of it as one long road after going through the REU. Science is iterative. You try something, learn from it, and try something different. In the Strobbia group, I had made mistakes, I had asked questions with obvious answers I could not see, and it genuinely took me about six of the ten weeks to finally understand exactly why the research I was doing was novel and important. In the end, those six weeks of trying to get exactly why our work was novel is how I was able to give award winning presentations on this research. Learning from my mistakes and returning to an experiment with more knowledge is why I could complete this project and get the data published. In a PhD, I will do the same: I will fail, but I will keep asking questions and learning and trying.
With the Strobbia lab, I had gained a better appreciation of what a PhD really was and became sure I wanted to earn one, but I had also learned what spectroscopy and physical chemistry were. The research I had conducted was concerned with Raman spectroscopy and its medical applications, but at this point in my education, I had not yet taken a physical chemistry course or lab. I was thrown into a world of quantum mechanics, electronic and vibrational states, light scattering and as much as I struggled to wrap my head around it, it was endlessly fascinating. Between oscillating surface electrons on gold nanoparticles and aiming for an electronic excitation with our laser energy, an extremely unlikely scattering interaction between light and molecules can get greatly enhanced, and we can perform trace analysis.
The fall after I completed my work with the Strobbia lab, I would go on to take my first quantum course with Dr. Ignacio Franco and it was everything I could have hoped for. I still remember him walking us through early quantum mechanical breakthroughs from the UV catastrophe to the photoelectric effect. Each example we were shown was someone thinking critically about a physics problem, data, and classical mechanics, yet fantastic leaps in understanding were made. Marvelous is the only word that accurately describes it. I thought I couldn't be more blown away and that the rest of the course would simply be grinding through difficult calculus until we discussed spectroscopy. Of course, I did not recognize it was spectroscopy at first. Instead, I only recognized orbital energies, rigid rotors, and balls and springs.
As the course pieced together each of these types of energies that exists in a molecule and the quantum mechanics that governs them, we also put together exactly why each type of spectroscopy I had done up until that point worked. Every IR spectra I had taken was built by exciting molecules to particular vibrational states and keeping track of the light that was absorbed to make those excitations. This tool I had taken for granted for the past three years was turned into a fantastically clever piece of equipment that used light matter interactions to ingeniously determine structural features of a molecule. A whole new world of chemistry has opened up to me since this course, and I want to keep exploring it for as long as I can.