on being old and boring, part 2

The fear of being boring seems pretty common; I was talking to one of my friends who is in grad school for chemistry in Japan, and we were discussing the difficulty of meeting people outside our given departments. Not just for fun, but for the sake of diversity in conversation topics.

Since lab is such a large component of the doctoral program, it's impossible not to think about it even when I'm not there. And since a large part of research seems to be troubleshooting, conversations with other students center around what could be done to fix things, or getting advice with dealing with advisor expectations, etc. I think for the past two weeks that I've been out of classes, most of my in-lab conversations circle around "where do we keep the pipette tips?" or "my Western Blot flunked. What now?"

Last term I took a seminar-based class called "Teaching in the Sciences," and as a so-called "midterm project" we were supposed to put together a powerpoint presentation on something not science-related. (gasp)

The instant the professor gave us that stipulation, we all panicked a little, as if saying "but I don't know anything outside of science! I don't even remember what hobbies I have besides from PCRing and pipetting!"

I guess my non-lab related work is cut out for me this summer.

on being old and boring

Before I entered grad school, I'd hear all these horror stories about life in the lab. For example, one lab I heard about had an air mattress in the electrophoresis room, in case people were there late at night running gels. Another lab had a student who eventually got addicted to NPR because there was nobody in lab while he was working. I'm not addicted to NPR just yet, since this current lab doesn't listen to it, but I think I'm becoming addicted to my iPod.

My schedule for the past week has been pretty much the following:
10am to 5 or 6pm: lab
5 or 6pm: walk home and eat dinner
after dinner: either go running, then analyze data, or read up on what I'm supposed to be doing the next day
etc..

Unfortunately the majority of the time I spend in lab is spent in silence (save for the music from the earphones). One of the grad students is prepping for prelims, so he's probably not going to be in lab until those are over. The other grad student is in and out, and its pretty sporadic. There's a few undergrads, but they come in pretty sporadically as well.

Hopefully it gets a little better as the summer progresses.

Back when I interviewing with various schools, I was telling my friend Dan that I was afraid of either losing my sanity (gradually) or regressing back to shy (or something among those lines). He laughed at me and said he couldn't imagine that happening.

Seriously though... spending 7 days a week doing labwork means it's on my mind 90% of the time, which would severely limit the number of conversation topics. Grad school is making me boring, and I need to find a new hobby.

Or go on some sort of roadtrip.