My Ph.D did many things, including increasing my alcohol consumption capacity, but the life lesson which has served me to this day, is teaching myself how to solve problems/think.

The stated problem in research chemistry is simple – I have a target chemical I want to make from my starting material – so how do I go from here to there? Being an experimental air-sensitive chemist, with a finite amount of starting material (which took you 3 weeks to prepare) means that you don’t have any room for mistakes.

So you plan – When you have an experiment which is going to have 6 stages and take weeks to perform, you don’t want to screw it up……so you:

• Do your research
  • Has anyone done something similar?
  • When you are writing up your research paper you will need references to prove you checked?
  • Has anyone created a cool technique which will help make you more efficient?
  • How do I break that bond and add that chemical?
  • etc
• You process the information and hypothesis on solutions to the problem
• Write up your plan and discuss with your boss (presenting your work, hypotheses and predictions)
• Make sure all materials are available
• Collaborate with your peers and see if they think you are being stupid or realistic
• Execute the experiment
• Document to procedure
• Document the results (Write a paper for your peers to use in their experiments later)

It is not that different from being a programmer and it forced me to become a lateral thinker.

There are many problem solving strategies but my favorite is TRIZ

Solving problems is what gets me out of bed in a morning and it forces me to learn which puts me to sleep happy.