Up until his junior or senior year of high school Seth Martin was thinking of being a lawyer. Taking debate and forensics he found he had a knack for engaging in in-depth, serious conversations.
Somewhere in that time frame though, his ideas for his future career pursuits changed.
“I don’t even remember what made me decide to switch,” he said, during a recent conversation. “I think that is something I was just naturally good at. I can do that stuff well, but it wasn’t something I felt like I would enjoy doing day to day. That might have been what it was. It didn’t scratch the itch of wanting to learn about stuff.”
Martin graduated Parsons High School in 2005, and he attended the University of Kansas. His major initially upon enrollment was chemical engineering, but he took one of the engineering courses and found he did not enjoy it. He still enjoyed chemistry though and switched his major to focus specifically on that area of interest and completed his degree.
Bachelor of chemistry in hand, he went to work for a company called Critical Reference Laboratories in Lenexa. He remained there for a little over a year, working as a chemist, and then returned to his alma mater as a staff member working for the Environmental Health and Safety Department doing hazardous waste collection and disposal.
While there, he kept being pulled to do something more, which landed him in grad school at KU in 2016. He received his doctorate in chemistry in 2021, and then took a job as an assistant professor at the University of St. Mary teaching chemistry and physics and did that for two years.
“Then this past summer I took a job with Honeywell at the Kansas City National Security Campus,” he said.
He works as a chemist in research and development (R & D). Given the whole “national security” aspect of his work, he can’t provide many other details of what his work consists of, but he has finally landed in a position of doing something he finds gratifying.
“I just really enjoy the problem-solving aspect of R & D and the opportunity to pursue the parts of science I’m interested in. So, when something strikes my fancy as something I’m interested, that’s applicable to the stuff I’m working on, it’s fun to dig into that and learn more about it and use that to solve the problems I’m working on,” he said.
Martin has always been curious and when he found a topic that he was interested in, he’s always dove into whatever it was, so R & D was a natural fit.
“If something breaks, I’m the kind of person who takes it apart to try and figure out if I can fix it,” he said. “If not, I’m going to take it apart to figure out what made it tick to begin with.”
Thinking back to his childhood and growing up in Parsons and attending Parsons schools, Martin said his interest in science was always strong. The foundations were laid, long before debate captured his interest momentarily, lending thoughts of working in jurisprudence.
“Roger Duroni, I would say, was my fifth-grade math and science teacher and he was the one who got me started on being really interested in science. Then Peggy Brecheisen was my sixth-grade math and science teacher. … She was interested in different parts of science than I was, but her passion for the subjects showed me that if you find part of it you really like then it is something that can really drive you.”
“Then Jack Vance, who I had for chemistry and physics, I really enjoyed his classes and that got me interested in those specific topics,” Martin said.
“Chemistry is what makes things work, as far as the materials we interact with. That was really interesting to me. I also really liked physics, but I think until I went to grad school, or maybe it was the end of undergraduate, I didn’t really appreciate the mathematical modeling aspects of physics and physical chemistry,” he added. “Originally I was interested in the experimental aspects chemistry, As I got more into chemistry and started to see the more mathematical models that it used and what it could tell you about the world, I got a lot more interested the physical chemistry side and the underlying physics of chemistry.”
At some point, he said, he may go back to teaching, but not any time soon.
“The blend of chemistry and physics that I have fallen into and get to use is the stuff that I really enjoy. I mean, even when I’m not working, this stuff will pop up in my head, like, ‘I wonder if anybody has worked on something like this’ and I will dig into the literature. It’s one of those things where even outside of work it’s always sort of there, kind of as an itch I’ve got to scratch, just because I’ve got to know more,” he said.
He imagines other young people, now in elementary and secondary school, feel those same draws to something. If they find something they are interested in, Martin encourages them to dive into it and investigate. “But if you decided it’s not what you want to do, it’s okay to switch. Based on my path I followed, I thought after I graduated my undergraduate degree, ‘I’m done with school forever. I don’t ever want to go back,’ and then five or six years later I’m like, ‘I want to go back to grad school,’” he said. “It’s one of those things where I think there is a lot of pressure for them to pick a thing, but that thing that you pick now doesn’t have to define what you do forever.