Thursday, December 16, 2010

2010 (Un)productivity

I haven't gotten very nostalgic lately whenever news broadcasts go into their annual "year in review" montages; more often than not, I can't wait for the year to end in hopes that 2011 will bring some real progress.

In terms of research and grad school, my verdict remains the same. Several of my labmates and I recently submitted fellowship applications to the NSF or NIH, which were due at the end of November/beginning of December. For me, it was like writing prelims all over again, except (a) the stakes were much higher, (b) my advisor edited it extensively, and (c) I had to relate everything I did to human health, which was slightly irritating. It wasn't too difficult to relate my work to the obesity epidemic, but sometimes it seemed like a stretch. One of my friends works as some sort of grant reviewer for the military, and I sent my (simplified) aims to him. Granted, he has an engineering background, so he didn't understand a lot of the language used in my writing. I used him to gauge what questions people might ask about my work in terms of human relevance; even so, sometimes I wonder if the relevance I presented in my application is a bit of a long-shot.

It seemed like the only things I did this year were teach and write. I taught during the term I took prelims, and then I went completely AWOL from lab for two weeks to concentrate on writing (and grading, but mostly writing). After I turned in the written portion, I was still teaching, but prepping for the oral exam. During this entire process, I think the only new data I got was that I could finally get bacteria to overexpress "my favorite gene," which I had been cloning for about 6 months. "My favorite gene" got translated in vitro to "my favorite protein," but I didn't get to test biological activity of the protein until June.

Summer was pretty nice; I tested "my favorite protein," and got some descriptive data. The minor problem was that it wasn't exactly full-speed ahead research. I got my thesis committee formed, but my project was still a bit hazy. So as a result, my advisor said to write a thesis proposal for my newly-formed committee. The proposal was similar to the one in my written prelim, but I could incorporate new data, so I had to do some rearranging/rewriting. At least I didn't have to go MIA from lab.

Until I got a surprise teaching assignment for fall term.

So somewhere in there I was teaching a heavier courseload and writing my application for the NIH. And somewhere in there I started feeling a time-crunch and data-crunch. What on earth did I accomplish in the past few months? I could summarize my entire year's worth of data in a picture and two graphs. Hardly what I would call a paper, and I'm halfway through my third year. O_o

The good part is that 2010 is almost over, and the road ahead looks less foggy in terms of project direction. The *really* good part is that I don't have to teach in January, so it'll be full-steam ahead from January until the end of August or even later. Here we go!