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My husband used to love chemistry. I still remember first meeting him when he was an arrogant college senior. One would almost think he believed himself capable of walking on water simply because he understood its composition. Chemistry was the only subject worth studying. Biology was too superficial, physics was too abstract. Mathematics? Well, chemists know everything about math, so they're better than mathematicians. And the humanities? Contemptible!

I feared and to some extent, hoped that graduate school would bring him down to earth as he met his intellectual equals. Though he graduated from the little college where I met him with a 4.0 g.p.a., surely he would be cut down to size in a Ph.D. program. I was spectacularly wrong about this.

He passed his qualifying exams in record time, earned A's in every course, and though research is never without setbacks, he did quality lab work and wrote an excellent dissertation. Graduate school had taught him some small measure of humility. He now saw that although he himself was talented, most chemists were less than impressive. None had his math skills. Very few showed his ability to devise experiments, and none could analyze data with the depth and insight that came so naturally to him.

It was not graduate school, but the corporate world that would shatter his illusions about meritocracy and his place in it. Initially, he flourished under the tutelage of his immediate supervisor, a physical chemist who wrote a book my husband admired and a computer program he has labored to perfect. He checked out stacks of books from the library, eager to fill any gaps in his education in order to excel at his job. He struggled with a difficult woman he was asked to supervise. She had severe psychiatric problems and was eventually "laid off" in a round of corporate housekeeping. He had a string of oddball underlings and at first he had difficulty communicating with clients.

He rose to the challenge. The corporate world taught him the humility and compassion that academia could not. He learned to work around others' failings and to communicate with clients on their level. Secure in the true superiority of his knowledge, he felt no need to lord it over others. No longer the stereotypical angry outcast, he had become what I always hoped he could be; a scholar and teacher, an ambassador of whom chemists could be proud.

It got him nowhere. After his immediate supervisor left, he was placed

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