Chemistry Grad Discovers Success is about the Journey

Brandon Miller ’18 remembers the moment vividly.

"It was my sophomore year when I was taking organic chemistry when I really felt everything start to click," he says. "I found the material completely fascinating, and I couldn’t help but study for it all the time.

"I found myself wanting to become an organic chemist more than anything," he remembers.

At the time, he was a forensic science major, but his passion for chemistry led to him changing his major. Today, he is on the verge of starting a Ph.D. program in chemistry at Northeastern University.

"All of my experiences in and out of the classroom have really given me a solid foundation of leadership and teamwork skills and a sense of personal awareness that I believe will only help me in my personal and professional endeavors in graduate school as well as in my life in the real world," he said.

His time as a Charger, he says, also taught him to define success more by the journey than the outcome, an approach that dovetails perfectly with the guiding tenet of his field.

"Research can, at times, be frustrating. But it’s really the journey that makes it all worth it." Brandon Miller ’18

"Through the course of my research and my classes, I have worked very hard on some things and felt very good about them only for them to turn out not as well as I had hoped," he said. "Normally this would be seen as a failure, but I really think that everything is a success, in one way or another, because of the knowledge and the experiences you take away from it. That to me is truly what science and the scientific method is all about in the end.

"Research can, at times, be frustrating," he said. "But it’s really the journey that makes it all worth it."