[jgamman]

my sincere advice (as an ex-chemist) is - don't. i suspect you'll want to do something 'fun' and 'fun chemistry' can go very bad, very quick. go fast and break things has never, never been a motto in a chemistry lab (even the dragon tail stories in the manhattan project were despite advice to the contrary).

most of a senior/PG chemistry degree is about learning how to work with this stuff and it's not book learnin' so much as translating what should happen, into what could happen and then what shouldn't ever ever ever happen. this is best done in a practical mentor-tutor fashion. even saying that, most uni's are really crap at protecting their chemistry students. I damn near killed myself _after_ getting my PhD and didn't really learn how to analyse the risks until i worked in industry (which leveraged 8+ years of theory)...