I never went to college, but I want to become a chemist

No, what you want to be, my dear, is an alchemist.

Good luck. Enjoy blowing yourself up.

Chem grad here.
Don't do it. Don't choose chemistry
ACS has monopolized publications, and good luck getting funding without publishing. Plus, anything not petroleum/pharmaceuticals/catalysis is basically nonexistent. It took me until last year to realize all this, now working towards neurology. Thank go this is only a masters and not a PhD program.
If you want to do drug design it's pure organic/inorganic/computational Chem, where youll be other peoples bitch forever.
and if you want nuclear fusion you're better off doing nuclear and particle physics.
But none of what you posted can happen without minimum 8 years' work. A bachelor's is meaningless in STEM nowadays.

If you want to build a reactor you can prolly just look up a guide on how to do it. You don't need to know nuclear physics to put something together. As far as learning the chemistry you can do it op. I'll assume you have a descent understanding of math( let's say up to calculus) then start with a general chem textbook. Go through that. After that you can specialize. If you want to do drug research get a textbook in organic chem and in biochem. Study those. Then look at research papers and stuff. Everyone here saying you need 12 years is full of shit. If you want to actually do experiments at home safely it will be expensive though. Glassware alone is expensive and you really want to take safety precautions because small slip ups can kill you if you are working with dangerous chemicals. If you want to see good lab work I can recommend the YouTube channel Nile Red. Anyway if you really want this it's going to be a lot of work and it's not going to be fun but after you've finished its very rewarding. Like I hate studying but I'm happy I've studied if that makes sense. Good luck op

It would probably take two years to get good at a very specific niche, and maybe eight for a broader understanding. Mentorship would help, but it can be overrated. This would probably never work though, because you'll never be able to get ahold of reagents and equipment.

post the picture of that guy who built a nuclear reactor, wsa arrested, then built one again after he got out of jail and looks like a meth head because of the radiation sickness

Not OP, but suppose I wanted to attach a hydroxide group where the red circle is.

A: Is there a way to calculate the amount of energy required to preform this? Would I have to find out experimentally?

B: Can I be certain that the group will end up in this location?

>Is there a way to calculate the amount of energy required to preform this?
Approximate it with bond enthalpies, but its best to run the magical and insane regiospecific reaction that will add to that specific carbon [at constant pressure] and measure the heat generated

>Can I be certain that the group will end up in this location?
Put the sample under an H-NMR and then cry

>Put the sample under an H-NMR and then cry
lel

>Put the sample under an H-NMR and then cry
could use COSY, HMBC and HSQC to solve it tbf

proton overlap wouldn't be a problem if he used a >500MHz NMR and a polar solvent like MeOD.

also, could compare to lit

David Hann aka the radioactive boy scout.

How many?

>supposed I wanted to regiospecifically hydroxylate indole
>just for fun
>just for learning
>I'm definitely not trying to make psilocybin or its analogues

Give up, OP, just because Alex Shulgin did all his work in his shed doesn't mean you can, times have changed.

This dipshit doesn't just want to make a reactor. He wants to make a "nuclear fusion reacter". Sustainable nuclear fusion for power generation has been in the works for decades. Countless nuclear engineers and physicists have devoted their live to the problem and so far no one has solved it. Now, I understand that sometimes you need an outside perspective to make a breakthrough in a field, but that breakthrough won't come from OP, who doesn't even know what degree he needs and can't spell reactor right. A philosophy undergrad has a better chance at that than OP.

Who the fuck said sustainable. You can just get some hydrogen and deuterium and heat it to a super hot plasma. Some fusion might occur. There is your reactor. Sustainable fusion is a meme perpetuated by the scientific community for funding so they can have jobs and not starve on the streets. Every respectable physicist has done the math and knows, with our current understanding, we can't make a viable energy reactor from that shit

>How long will it take to learn everything?
Considering that right now, you are at a point, where you legitimately think, that it is written "reacter" (you wrote it like this in two different posts) and that you think it is a topic of chemistry, rather than physics, I'd say: "Pretty long, mang!".

no they haven't, what the fuck are you talking about

You can use density functional analysis to calculate the energy of the product, reactant and transition state,

Install Linux, then CP2K, (or pirate gaussian on Windows) read about searching for transition states, if you can find all the global minima for all the transition states for all the regioisomer products then you can start comparing and seeing which mechanism is favoured, one with the lowest T.S,

Then more interesting find a metal system that provides a lower energy transition state and mess with different ligands to selectively lower the energy of the transition state for that specific reaction pathway for specific regioisomers,

and there you have it, with a powerful enough PC, about 6 months solid in computing time, and alot of perseverance of learning (it's really hard) you can design your own regioselective catalysis reactions

Psilocybin doesn't have an OH there

you can do further reactions from the OH

not possible to be a pro chemist from home, you'll get arrested long before you do anything useful

Truth is, you dont need to get to college to learn as much or even more than most of the people here that suggest you do.

They just cant stand the fact that you, by not doing so, will surpass them.

there aren't many (any?) known psychs that are substituted at the 1 position of the indole

unless he's planning on making a series of completely new analogues with untested receptor binding and pharmacodynamics, which I doubt because he's asking for help on Veeky Forums, there would be literally no reason to hydroxylate position. Assuming he was trying to get to a drug