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- Year Of Graduation: 2024
- College/University: Purdue University
- Major: Physics
What do you do for a living? Can you share what a typical day at work looks like? Do you enjoy what you do?
I work at an animal pharmaceutical company as a formulation chemist. We don’t make the active pharmaceutical ingredients, also called API. That’s just a fancy word for pharmaceutical drugs by the way, like parasiticides, and anti-inflammatories for animals, like flea and tick medicines. When we receive the API I try to create a usable formulation to determine flow rate, solubility, and other things like that.
A typical day in my work would be testing out solubilities of the API, mixing different components together to determine how they dissolve, making presentations to share my data, and things like that. I’m currently working on using components to make pills for different types of animals. What I’m looking for is how they fall apart in water: how quickly they fall apart, how they don’t fall apart. From there, we restructure what type of formulation we want to use and then we add different things to it.
I really do enjoy what I do. It is a little bit offset from physics, but it is still within the science realm, which is what I like a lot. I get to use my brain a lot and I’m surrounded by really brilliant chemists and brilliant scientists. They help bring me up to speed and they share their research, and I get to play with a lot of really cool glassware and a lot of different chemicals.
Did you need any special certifications or higher education beyond an undergrad to get this role?
No, a bachelor’s degree would be fine in this field. Most entry-level science jobs like lab techs and analysts require a background in chemistry or another science field and they have to have two years minimum of lab experience. If you take chemistry classes in college, you can count that as lab experience because you’re taking a class in the lab. That’s what I did. I actually put my classes in my resume and I said what I learned in a specific class and what I did in the lab. That helped me get a lot of interviews.
I do plan to pursue a master’s degree in chemistry, though. This is mainly for my own purpose because I have a physics background, and I don’t have a lot of the chemistry that my peers do. So, I want to change that. I also want to climb up that corporate ladder a little bit more and if I want to get into a bigger position, I may need a little bit more education.
Why did you choose your undergraduate major? Do you feel your time spent in college was valuable? Why or why not?
I chose physics because I grew up watching a lot of movies and I really like the science in them, like the flying cars, and this makes me cringe, but the “quantum-powered battery” or “the dark matter ray” you know? That really encouraged me to go into science. I actually applied for a mechanical engineering degree at Purdue and then I got denied. That was my first choice, and physics wasn’t even my second. Math was my second, and then I heard rumors that math was completely terrible and it was going to crush my soul. A week before I started school, I made a rash decision to change to physics and I sailed from there. I was good at it, so I kept it.
Most of the things I learned in college were not worth it. It was very fascinating, don’t get me wrong, but the physics major is made for the people who want to get a PhD. It’s made for the people who always want to continuously do research. I’m not one of those people. I would say the last two years of college definitely didn’t help me anywhere in life but it was interesting learning.
Can you tell me about your experience finding a job after graduation? Are you happy with where your journey has led you thus far?
To be honest, I didn’t think about finding a job until after I graduated. I moved back with my parents and I found a job as a lifeguard for that summer to hold me over. While I was a lifeguard, I was applying to a lot of different jobs. They kind of told us a lie about physics during school. I was told if you get a physics degree, you can go apply to engineering and you can apply to all these different things, and you’ll have a good chance of getting it, but it’s not entirely true. There aren’t too many physics jobs around and you will need a PhD for a true physics job. I figured that out early on, so I just started applying to any lab job: biology, quality technicians, lab techs. Anywhere and everywhere.
Eventually, I applied to a contracting company called Pace® Life Sciences. Once they have your information, they can apply you to a lot of different laboratories across the US, and I’m sanctioned at a pharmaceutical company because of them. After I applied there, I got rejected for one of their jobs, but since they had my information on file, they called me back a week later and said, “Hey, this new job popped up. Would you like to interview for it?” And I said yes. That is the current job I am in right now.
If I asked you three years ago, what goals would you hope you’ve achieved, in life or career?
So I actually got a minor in astronomy because I wanted to be an astrophysicist. My cosmology class destroyed that, though. Absolutely destroyed it. But if I would ask myself then, I had my goal set to be an astrophysicist and I wanted to be researching dark matter and using telescopes to discover new black holes or gravitational waves and stuff like that.
How important is it to have a purpose-driven life? Why or why not? Do you think you’re on a path to do that? If not, what needs to change?
I think it’s very important to live a purpose-filled life because without it, I just kind of feel empty. I’ve actually had a lot of conversations with myself—I’m not crazy, I promise—but trying to discover what makes me happy in the world. The biggest thing that it always comes down to is being around my family. So for my job, I’ve tried to locate it around my family and then from this point of view, I didn’t really care where I worked. I just knew I kind of wanted to do something that involved science, which is why I didn’t mind if my major wasn’t mechanical engineering or math. That’s why I also don’t mind if I’m not doing physics work now.
Overall, in general, my biggest goal and purpose in life is to learn new things constantly, and science has always kind of checked that off. That’s probably one of my biggest purposes, like family and constantly learning and keeping life interesting. Science does that for me right now. I have a good job where I am surrounded by scientific learning, new research, and interesting people, so I definitely think I’m on the right path.
What’s your biggest struggle right now? What led to it? How are you moving forward?
The lack of chemistry background. My colleagues, they’re so smart. They will talk about an organic chemical and then will write the chemical out, like literally carbon-dash-carbon, then they’ll point and say, “If you see right here there’s this free hydrogen and then it interacts with this because…” Since I’m a physics background I do have a good base in science, but they are so engulfed in chemistry. I’m smart enough to learn it, but I’m definitely missing that gap just a little bit.
So, that’s my biggest issue right now, and I’m going to solve that by going back to school and taking some organic chemistry classes.
What interests/hobbies bring you the most happiness?
I like watching anime. That’s one of my hobbies. I also like yoga, and my husband and I just got a 3D printer! We haven’t taken that out of the box yet, but that’s going to be another one of my hobbies. I like to go to the Renaissance Fair too, so I like to do sewing projects, and I wouldn’t say cosplay, but making different items for the fair and other things like that.
What do you want to spend more time working on? What is stopping you?
I want to learn the violin. What’s stopping me is I don’t have a violin, but I also have a lot of other stuff going on in my life, so I just haven’t really found the time. I’m starting to feel burned out. I have all these interests, but I don’t really focus on them. I think my body knows that I’m going to start school again, so it’s like going into shutdown mode where it’s trying to conserve all the energy before I go back to school in August.
If we traveled three years into the future of your life, what do you want to achieve? What would you hope has changed?
Hopefully, at that point, I’d have my master’s degree. Also, I’m a contractor currently for the pharmaceutical company I talked about, and I think my goal is to be hired by them so I’m no longer doing contract work.
What’s the biggest lesson or piece of advice you wish you had known earlier?
I wish I would have looked a little bit more into the physics major because I think even in high school I heard physics was branded as the major where the one size fits all. Once you get it, you can go into anything, but to do that, most of the time you have to get a PhD. I spent a lot of my college career exploring different types of physics. I dabbled in quantum computing and I’ve actually studied dark matter. It was like my junior year when I figured out I didn’t really like astrophysics. I wish I had looked into that sooner so I could try to pivot more towards a different type of chemistry. But overall, it’s turning out pretty well.
Connect With Jessie:
- LinkedIn: @JessieL
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