My Personal Statement

I was waiting for the completion of my application cycle to post my personal statement. The decision from Indiana completed my cycle. Here is my personal statement.

Dr. John Fenn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry during my first semester at VCU. During his press conference, he confessed that he had not set out to revolutionize mass spectrometry with his development of electrospray ionization. He found an interesting problem and performed a few experiments to see if he could solve it. He characterized this process as kicking over a rock and finding something interesting underneath it. I was just beginning my Ph.D. research, and the suggestion that such a significant development was due to a fortunate accident clashed with my conception of how revolutionary discoveries are made. Seven years later, I know Dr. Fenn described the process perfectly.

My initial attempts to kick over a rock resulted in more stubbed toes than interesting discoveries. It was not until I began to concentrate on making the smallest details of my experiment the same from one trial to the next that I started to make progress. One point at a time, a small peak began to appear in my data processing software. It did not look like much, but our analysis revealed that the origin of the peak was a metal ion that my advisor and I had added to the system. We had been curious to see if the metal ion would change the system, but we did not know what effect, if any, it would have when we began the experiments. While working on the paper describing our discovery, I realized that I had kicked over my first rock.

Other discoveries followed that first success. Initially, I felt fortunate to be performing experiments that were leading to publications, but each experiment gave me a greater appreciation for the process of observation and engagement with the data that directs a research project to unexpected insights and discoveries. When we took a closer look at what we initially thought were background signals, we gained new insights into the properties of an important material. We observed an unexpected phenomenon when we tried a new experiment on our electropolymerized porphyrin films. The experiments were not part of a carefully planned strategy that we were sure would lead to interesting discoveries. We were simply looking at our data very closely and probing our materials with interesting experiments. We were kicking over rocks with something interesting underneath them.

To a novice researcher like me, Dr. Fenn’s comments made it sound like he had just been lucky. My graduate school experience has taught me the wisdom of his words. Discoveries are made when we challenge our understanding of a system. We may have an idea of what we will see, but the only way we will ever know if we are correct is to perform the experiment. Sometimes nothing interesting will happen, but every now and then, challenging an assumption or taking a second look at some data might lead to a surprising discovery. We just have to kick over the rock.