>>12544147When it comes to picking a mentor and PI for grad school, techniques should be last on your list. Hell, grad school starts with learning to identify a problem, ask the right questions. That said, you still need to be cognizant of what you want to do with your career and where you want to go. I think that should steer you towards a general discipline/sub-discipline.
I'll echo what I said in the other thread: for someone with interests in biochemistry, I recommend a chemical biology PhD. More employable, reason is that industry would rather outsource synthetic chemistry and keep target identification/validation/quantification in-house. This is not to say that synthetic chemists don't get jobs, because they certainly do, especially in big pharma and in CROs, but small and midsize biotech/biopharma shops do a fair amount of outsourcing. Still, they'll need a director or VP of chemistry to oversee CRO work, so I don't think chemists will be out of work anytime soon.
Chemical biology is a pretty broad field, and it's fluid. My PhD was in biophysics, but I did some chemical biology in assay development. Chem bio PhDs can span everything from some peptide synthesis, to x-ray crystallography and protein-NMR (more biophysics-y side, I'd say that's "Big C" chemical biology), to cell-based studies, i.e. testing chemical probe compounds in cells. That's "Big B" chemical biology. I think, entering grad school, having an idea of your career goals and your field of interest is much more important that seeking out particular skills; those will come, especially if you're already set course in a field with a strong outlook.
Medicinal chemistry could be another field. More and more med chem PhD programs seem to have a synthetic med track and a chem bio track, whereas the hardcore synthetic chemists come from traditional organic chemistry programs. That could be suitable if you're interested in "Big C" chemical biology.
