I minored in chemistry in college. 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.

It was by accident that I came to appreciate the methodology 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.

It didn't come easy. It took time to understand co-signs and accelerated algebra. 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. 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.

I wasn't the most popular kid -- but so what? I had a sense, even then, that popularity, like fame, was a passing thing. Yeah, I missed out on a lot of down time, a lot of hanging around time. 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.

When your brain starts to see the world in terms of molecular recombinations, it's only natural to start drifting towards the philosophical. Why did I opt to minor and major in chemistry if it meant so much to me? 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.