What this is
Coming back to chemistry. Not a specialisation yet — the honest state of it is that I know more than I did and less than I used to think I knew, and I want the first fixed before I pick the second.
So the order is: go through the basics, find out which parts are actually gone, and only then decide what to go deep into. I do not know yet what that will be, and picking something now would be picking it without knowing what I am picking from.
The three numbers on the panel
Three areas, rated separately, because they are three different things and one blended number would hide that.
General is furthest along, and it is furthest along because I have already been through it once. What has gone is not the coverage — it is the detail. I remember the shape of the thing and not what is inside it, which is a different problem from never having met it, and a much easier one to fix.
Research is the one I have the least of. I know what research looks like from the outside and have not done any, and I am not sure yet whether that is the area I actually want or just the one I happen to be furthest from.
Computational starts from the one genuinely adjacent thing I have, which is programming. That is not chemistry, and the panel is careful not to pretend it is, but it is also not nothing to build on.
How the scale works
Four bands, and each one is a question: how far into this have I actually got?
- aware — know it exists; could read about it, haven’t
- studying — actively working through it
- worked in it — done something real with it, no supervision
- independent — produced something original; would be the person asked
It is how far I have got, not what I can do. That is deliberate — a scale of what you can do ends up rating a student who has never done research higher than someone who does research, which is not a useful thing for a panel to say.
Four bands rather than ten because ten would be a claim about fine distinctions I cannot actually feel.
What comes after
Biology, eventually, and probably by way of whichever part of chemistry I end up going deepest in. I am keeping that open rather than writing it in as a plan, because if chemistry turns out to be the thing I keep coming back to for years, that is also a fine outcome and the page should not have said otherwise.
Nothing here is measured by anything. Every figure on the panel is my own read, and the Check-ins are things I noticed and wrote down, not hours or paper counts — I would rather record what changed than how long it took.