Page 18 - To Dragma November 1924

1-1 TO DRAG MA OF ALPHA OMICRON PI

these you will get much more pleasure out of your work, and
you can make yourself invaluable to the man or woman for
whom you work. These characteristics are fully as important
as the scientific work you take in college, for the chances are that
you will have to learn an entirely new and specialized technique.
Of course, in order to do this intelligently, you must have a good
foundation to work on, but not necessarily a specific one. M y
first work, f o r instance, was in a field about which I knew noth-
ing,—that of radium therapy. I wasn't expected to know any-
thing about it, but I was expected to have a working knowledge
of physics, chemistry, and biology so that I could grasp the idea
of our problems and take an intelligent interest i n their solution.
Make your science courses in college a foundation f o r future
work,—don't expect to become a specialist after four years of
preparation. The important thing to remember is that into what-
ever field of research you go, you will have need of many other
sciences, so plan your course so that you will have plenty of
chemistry, physics, biology and mathematics, and a reading
knowledge of scientific French and German. Don't concentrate
too closely on any one of these unless you know exactly what
you are going to do. The broader your foundation, the broader
will be your future development.

I do not want to misrepresent the work and make you think
it is all sunshine. Y o u will have your hours and possibly weeks
of discouragement when nothing seems to go right with your ex-
periments, or you may get bored with certain routine methods
that accompany your work. But these are all part of the whole
problem and make good results all the more interesting. I f you
lack the patience to carry you through such periods as these I
certainly advise you not to go into research. Patience and a
sense of humor are vitally important.

The salaries paid to technicians and research workers are not

large. I n an academic institution you would begin at about one

thousand dollars and work up to fifteen or eighteen hundred or

possibly two thousand. I n an industrial concern the scale would

be somewhat higher, but the environment would probably not be

so pleasant. Y o u have with either of these, a vacation of three or

four weeks instead of the long, free summers that teachers have,

but unlike them, you have all your evenings free.