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I didn't study chemistry at grade 12 (equivalent to A-level) in high school, as I was not interested, but had to take it as part of a first year university level course in physics. I was a bit worried about failing as most students had taken it at more advanced levels and so I studied. After doing well, I decided to give it another chance in 2nd year, and took organic chemistry, which I enjoyed as the focus on structure and reactivity was completely different than all the other subjects I had ever taken. 

Professor Richard Langler was my organic chemistry instructor at Mount Allison University, which is a small undergraduate university. He had an incredibly dry sense of humour and published over 100 papers, most of those on organosulfur chemistry where the work was done by undergraduate researchers working 7pm to midnight on Fridays – afterwards he'd take us out for pizza or something, and we'd get all kinds of looks because we usually smelled quite bad. Before he died in 2014, he was writing an organic chemistry textbook in Esperanto.

Choose a good research problem, and ideally not the same problem that everyone else is going after – unless of course you have a really good idea how to address that problem.

Although people have been working on synthetic non-equilibrium systems for a while now, there have been some really exciting recent advances, and there are some really good younger research groups looking to make fuel driven systems – and I think it’s going to lead to a lot of tremendously interesting chemistry in the near future.

When people help each other just for the sake of helping each other.

I think teamwork is good in science the same way families are good or having friends is good. It’s just plain good to have people around to share highs and lows with, and to help each other and to bounce ideas off. Plus it is probably a lot more efficient, especially if you can get help with some of the more mundane things, so you can get back to worrying about something interesting.