I was about a year and a half into my role at DuPont when I started writing this on the back of a flight home. The company had hired a handful of chemists out of strong PhD programs in the previous cycle. Some of them did not last two years. They were not bad scientists. They were just badly prepared for what the job actually was. And as I watched them flame out, I started thinking about the students I had been tutoring on the side since grad school.
The first time I saw the pattern.
The summer after her sophomore year, Riley (name changed) came home from college and told her parents, close friends of mine, that she was thinking of dropping pre-med. She had failed organic chemistry I, and it had broken something in her conviction about what she wanted to do.
I sat with her at her parents' kitchen table for two hours. She had been hiring tutors. She had been studying. She was working harder than most students I had tutored over the years. The problem was not that she was not smart enough. The problem was that nobody had ever taught her how to think about mechanisms instead of memorizing them. The four tutors she had hired across two years had all coached her to the same dead end, because none of them had seen the underlying issue. They were paid by the session. They got her through individual exams. They never got her to understanding.
"I just want one person who actually knows me. I am tired of explaining the same thing to four people who don't talk to each other."
That statement really stuck with me, and I was never quite sure why until recently. It finally clicked: she had described the exact structural problem with how support is built for students heading toward demanding professional and graduate programs. Every transaction is independent. Every vendor optimizes for their own slice. The student is the only one carrying continuity from one to the next, and the student is the one with the least bandwidth to do that.
The DuPont side of the same problem.
At DuPont I sat on the hiring side of the equation. Strong PhD candidates would walk in with publication records, academic credentials, the right kind of resume. And then we would put them on a project, and roughly half of them would crash into the same wall: they had been trained to do science but not to think about science as a career.
They could not estimate cost trade-offs. They did not know how to argue for a project against a competing one. They did not know how to translate their research into a story that a non-chemist could decide to fund. These are not science skills. They are professional skills that were never taught alongside the science. And in the same way that the student-side support system breaks because it is fragmented, the chemistry training system breaks because it pretends professional development is somebody else's problem.
I started writing notes that summer. The notes were about what a unified support system would look like. One person across the science. Across the career conversation. Across the application or the job search. The bridge from student to professional, taught as a single integrated arc instead of three disconnected pieces.
The first MCM client.
I formalized My Chem Mentor in spring 2025. By that point I had spent time in industry across very different problem spaces, and I had watched the same fragmentation problem repeat in every one of them. The plan for MCM was straightforward: take the private tutoring I had been doing alongside industry since 2017, almost a decade of it, and turn it into a structured program that held the science, the career conversation, and the application as one integrated arc instead of three disconnected pieces. The first official client showed up within weeks.
Her name was different from Riley's, but the underlying situation was familiar. Sophomore. Strong work ethic. Failing orgo. Unsure whether she wanted to pursue chemistry or pre-pharmacy. We worked together for a quarter. The grade went from a C minus to a B plus inside three weeks. By the end of the semester, she was outscoring most of her cohort on practice problems that she had never seen before, because we had spent the time building the conceptual foundation that lets you predict mechanisms instead of recall them.
That was the easy part. Around week six, a different kind of conversation opened up. She mentioned, almost in passing, that she could not decide between a chemistry graduate program and a pharmacy program. We started talking through it: what life as a chemist actually looks like day to day, what mattered to her about her future work, and where the trade-offs sat. The questions I could not answer firsthand, I outsourced. I put her in touch with an active pharmacist who could speak to the things I had no business pretending to know. Over the next several months, we worked through the question together. She decided she wanted to be a pharmacist, and now she knew why it was the right choice. Earlier this year she was accepted to her top-pick pharmacy program (and her fallback), and she is now excitedly preparing to begin.
What I am trying to fix.
The system that produces students for demanding professional and graduate programs in the United States is good at filtering and bad at building. It is good at telling students "you need a 3.7 GPA and the right entrance exam score and meaningful research experience." It is bad at helping any individual student get there in a way that makes sense for who they actually are.
The result is predictable: roughly half of students who start STEM majors do not finish them. Of those who finish, a meaningful fraction get to year three or four of college and realize they should have asked the clarity question two years earlier. The financial cost of doing this kind of preparation fragmentarily is somewhere between $13,000 and $32,000 over four years, and most families do not even know they are spending that much because it goes to four different vendors.
My Chem Mentor is one attempt at fixing one piece of this. One mentor, one program, from prerequisite chemistry through the application or the job search. PhD-level science. Real career mentorship. Research placement when it is the right time. And the conversation that nobody else seems to want to have, which is whether this is actually the right path for you, asked early enough that the answer can change something.
What the program is now.
As of spring 2026, MCM is able to take on about two dozen students at a time across chemistry support and mentorship. Most students stay in the program for two or three years.
I keep a roster cap because the work is genuinely one-on-one and the integration only works if I am holding context for every student. The implication is that the program will not scale to thousands of students through me alone. The longer-term plan involves training other PhD chemists and educators in the framework, but that is a year or two away from being real.
For the moment, the program is small enough to be personal and big enough to be useful.
What I will not promise you.
I will not guarantee an acceptance to a professional or graduate program. The acceptance rate is not what I control. The preparation is. If your student is willing to engage with both the science and the career conversation, the preparation gets a lot better. If they are not, no amount of mentorship will paper over that.
I will tell you honestly what I see. If I do not think MCM is the right fit, I will say so on the consultation call. If I think there is a better resource for your situation, I will tell you what it is. The students and families I work with deserve straight talk more than they deserve a sales pitch.
Why I am still doing this.
Every year, capable students leave STEM not because they are not smart enough, but because the system around them is fragmented in exactly the way I have been describing. Most of them never get heard. They drop quietly. They tell themselves they were not cut out for it. The story they tell themselves is wrong, but nobody was around to tell them so.
I am still doing this because I have now sat across from enough of these students to know that the right intervention, at the right moment, with the right person, changes the trajectory of a life. The intervention is not flashy. It is one mentor. It is the time to actually understand the student. It is the willingness to ask the hard question. It is the network access that opens doors. It is the long view that compounds over years instead of resetting every semester.
If your student is somewhere in this story (failing orgo, doing fine but uncertain, ready to apply but lacking research) the path through it exists. It exists because the system can be repaired one student at a time, and repairing it is what I have decided to do with the rest of my professional life.
If you want to talk about whether MCM is right for your situation, the consultation is free. If it is not the right fit, I will tell you what is. And if it is, we will start where you are.
Dr. Eric Wolfson
Founder, My Chem Mentor
April 2026