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People don’t necessarily take me for the scientific type. So, it comes as something of a shock when I tell them I minored in chemistry. This was the mid-Nineties, and I managed to get a full-ride at a state school in the panhandle of Texas. Nothing special, but I didn’t have to pay for room and board, not that either cost very much in a town like Lubbock. No, I had a knack for molecular bonding and laboratory equipment. That’s right: Bunsen burners, vials, test tubes and beakers galore.

Chemistry found me in the late Eighties, in middle school. Purely by accident I came to appreciate the methodical mechanisms of science. I was suddenly hip to the step-by-step rigor of the scientific method. I was keen on unlocking the mysteries of the entire unknown world ebbing and flowing around my small North Texas town. Molecular bonds, co-valence, and atomic weights could tell me things shop class and art appreciation couldn’t.

If I couldn’t read my way out of the confines of my life, I was sure I could molecularly recombine these barriers and find a way out. I was slow on the up-take. It took time to understand co-signs and accelerated algebra. This meant I spent a good deal of time in the lab, fogging up my goggles, weighing, measuring, observing, and noting one reaction after another after another.

Yeah, I missed out on a lot of social functions — a lot of dances and dates. I wasn’t the most popular kid — but so what? I had a sense, even then, that popularity, like fame, was a passing thing. Chemistry, on the other hand — now that was the stuff of the universe, the stuff that mattered. With enough application, graph paper, and pencil, I could understand covalent relationships and the acids that break them.

This begs the question: “Why did you just minor in chemistry if it meant so much to you?” When your brain starts to see the world in terms of molecular recombinations, it’s only natural to start drifting towards the philosophical. Hegel, Kant, Sartre started to mean as much to me as Newton, Descartes, and Pauling. I would recommend either subject, either as a dual major or in any combination of major or minor field of study.

It doesn’t take much to start a life of chemical study. You just need some common chemicals, a solid set of laboratory equipment, and a good mentor or teacher to give you some tips.