Crystallography, the study of crystals and the structures of their constituents, is fascinating. I work in a field where making crystals like this is so tough that people spend millions of dollars on robots and reagents that just sit around trying every possible combination of temperature, concentration, and other parameters, just to make crystals with high enough quality to do structure determination.

Some crystals just never form. I know folks who spent 7 years trying to get their protein to crystallize and left grad school with a masters degree instead of a PhD because they failed, no fault of their own.