Wednesday, March 16, 2011

The Love-Hate Relationship

Several weeks ago I was talking to a group of third-year medical students, and one of them asked me how I liked my work as a grad student. I think they have the impression that I work weird hours and live to serve whatever samples I have running or animals I've isolated. Then again, what they consider as "weird hours" is seemingly normal for me and for several other grad students I've talked to. My friends in med school have more of a set schedule; they're required to be at a certain place by a certain time, rather than coming in whenever they want and leaving when the work gets done.

That doesn't mean that I walk into lab at 1pm every day and work until 9 or 10 at night. There's still an expectation that I'll be in the lab enough to get the appropriate amount of face time with my advisor, but there's not much of an endpoint to when I'll be done for that particular day, which may be irritating for some people. The good part is that I can at least estimate the amount of time I need and plan accordingly, which is often what I tell people who think I'm overworking (namely my parents).

I have this ongoing love-hate relationship with grad school. Good results and published papers aside (which everyone loves anyway), I'd have to say I like the steep learning curve which can't be picked up in any class and the fact that I get paid to do something I enjoy (i.e., biology). It's also nice to have labmates I get along with.

That being said, I haven't met anyone yet that enjoys every minute of grad school; there's always bound to be something unsatisfying about it. When I first started, there were only three grad students (including me) and two undergrads. One of the grad students was MIA due to prelims, and the other came in at sporadic times. The undergrads had set schedules, but since I didn't know what they were, it seemed like they came into lab pretty sporadically as well. I had just started in the lab, and aside from not knowing where any reagents were kept, I also was unfamiliar with the project. So I got to sit in the office and read papers all week... or week and a half... which was an utterly isolating experience. The lab has since then gotten more members; there are now five PhD students, including me, a Master's student, an assortment of undergrads, and a lab tech, which livens things up a little. Plus I'm not completely lost as to what I'm supposed to be doing, so I can spend lab time actually doing benchwork instead of reading.

***
I really don't think the in-lab isolation aspect is nearly as bad as the out-of-lab aspect. There are days when I come home pretty late and the only thing that I want to do is wash up and read a mystery before bed. There are also days when I use going to lab as an escape of sorts from whatever problems I don't want to think about in the "real world." Other days it's equally painful to go into lab as it is to stay away from it, but the good part is that those days are rare.