I really need to write in this thing more often. There's one more month left before the second year of grad school is done, and before I forget, I figure I should write this schpeel now rather than two months late.
I hear from older/former grad students that the first year is emotionally the hardest, while the second year is academically so. First year, you adjust to new surroundings as well as a switch in lifestyle. Second year is when you get a permanent advisor, a general thesis topic, and a taste of grant-writing and presentation-giving (rawr, prelims).
First year wasn't really that bad; I had projects that I was interested in, but I didn't feel as much pressure to get good (functional/reproducible/publishable) results as I did this past year. I spent a lot of second year perfecting lab techniques -- like trying not to get 0% yield -- and REALLY understanding the topic at hand. Now that I think about it, I probably didn't see the big picture side of things until two or three months before prelims, when I pretty much shut down and went into hibernation with a giant stack of papers.
In retrospect, I thought the prelim process (and by "process" I mean just the oral exam) was a lot of anticipation, which scared everyone into studying. I thought my committee asked reasonable questions, all of which pertained to the mock grant I wrote. I thought it was tough, but fair...and I only say this because I passed in the end. :)
***
I'm kinda glad second year is over. My friend and I were talking about what that former grad student told me, and we both agreed that while first year wasn't too bad, second year was academic and emotional challenges rolled into one. For one thing, I know several people who just left their programs because they lost interest or decided that it wasn't their calling. I know others who have been diagnosed with depression and are currently seeking therapy. When news like that goes around, it's a bit of a morale crusher, especially since these things seem to always come by surprise.
I'm sure that people applying and entering grad school know all about the academic challenges; in the end, you're supposed to discover, or "add on to existing knowledge," if you will. You can't tell if a promising project at first might lead to a dead end later on, and even if you do get good results, you can only say that they "suggest" or "don't seem" to be part of some larger picture. Nothing is ever known for SURE.
On the flip side, I'm not sure how many entering students know about the emotional challenges that come as well. I'm not just talking about personal problems, but also dealing with lab-related issues outside of lab. There's been several instances in second year where results could make or break my day. Several times during second year, I'd spend a good two hours setting up some experiment, and have the whole thing go to waste because after I got the results, I realized that the negative control had gunk in it. Add that to me waging war with the qPCR machine and the pH meter, and the end result is me complaining on the phone to some very uninterested person at 11pm. They start wondering if I have a life and mind outside of lab. The answer is yes, but it depends on whether or not I'm away from Ann Arbor (not that often).
***
So here goes into third year... as Sherlock Holmes once said, "Data, data, data! I can't make bricks without clay."
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
reflections on teaching
Last week I sent out an email to my students asking them to fill out course evaluations, which are now online. Like all instructors, I pressed for written comments instead of filling in bubbles ranging from "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree," since most of them are probably going to fill in "neutral" for every single question. I'm kinda curious as to what they have to say about me, although I'm not going to be surprised if they all say I'm some sort of cruel dictator and a walking advertisement for my lab.
My intentions have been driven by interest in the subject matter, especially when it came to the frog module (and metamorphosis!), but it's hard for me to recognize that not everyone who's taking the class is going to be in love with thyroid hormone-dependent changes in morphology. A lot of the time during the metamorphosis unit I pushed for "correctness" based off of what I learned in lab (like particular signaling pathways, changes in the timing of metamorphosis, past and current research findings) without caring about whether or not it was TMI for the students in the class. At the same time, I justified it to everyone by saying "metamorphosis is cool and everyone should learn about it."
It's been less than two years since I was in undergrad (I graduated April 26, 2008), but I feel like I'm starting to forget about the undergrad work ethic and the expectations that come with it. As an example, I had to grade 22 term papers on various chemicals and how they caused developmental defects. If someone were to just look at the class average, they might say that (a) my class doesn't know how to write a term paper properly, or (b) I'm a harsh grader.
I admit I was a little harsh in grading the term papers. I never graded undergrad papers before, and the only thing I knew about science papers was the stuff I read in journal articles and the comments my advisor gives me on my own writing. I remember writing science papers in college, but they were few and far between, and it's not like I kept any of my work. So the only thing I was really going off of was what I experienced the past year of grad school.
When writing my prelim grant proposal, I was really careful about what stuff to omit and what stuff to include. The rule of thumb was that if I didn't want to be questioned extensively on something, I didn't mention it. The same rule applied when I was prepping for my seminar, and I used this rule of thumb extensively when I was grading the term papers for my class. A lot of the comments I wrote on their papers involved them mentioning some term and not defining it, which really got me confused (and possibly a little frustrated in trying to decipher what they were saying).
Anyway, it's been a fun, abeit sometimes frustrating, experience. One of the students (a guy who acted like a smart-ass at the beginning of the semester) wrote a short note at the end of his lab report which said "I had loads of fun this semester. I hope I wasn't too much of a pain!" I thought it was kind of amusing. :) As for the frustrating part, I think it makes for really good stories.
My intentions have been driven by interest in the subject matter, especially when it came to the frog module (and metamorphosis!), but it's hard for me to recognize that not everyone who's taking the class is going to be in love with thyroid hormone-dependent changes in morphology. A lot of the time during the metamorphosis unit I pushed for "correctness" based off of what I learned in lab (like particular signaling pathways, changes in the timing of metamorphosis, past and current research findings) without caring about whether or not it was TMI for the students in the class. At the same time, I justified it to everyone by saying "metamorphosis is cool and everyone should learn about it."
It's been less than two years since I was in undergrad (I graduated April 26, 2008), but I feel like I'm starting to forget about the undergrad work ethic and the expectations that come with it. As an example, I had to grade 22 term papers on various chemicals and how they caused developmental defects. If someone were to just look at the class average, they might say that (a) my class doesn't know how to write a term paper properly, or (b) I'm a harsh grader.
I admit I was a little harsh in grading the term papers. I never graded undergrad papers before, and the only thing I knew about science papers was the stuff I read in journal articles and the comments my advisor gives me on my own writing. I remember writing science papers in college, but they were few and far between, and it's not like I kept any of my work. So the only thing I was really going off of was what I experienced the past year of grad school.
When writing my prelim grant proposal, I was really careful about what stuff to omit and what stuff to include. The rule of thumb was that if I didn't want to be questioned extensively on something, I didn't mention it. The same rule applied when I was prepping for my seminar, and I used this rule of thumb extensively when I was grading the term papers for my class. A lot of the comments I wrote on their papers involved them mentioning some term and not defining it, which really got me confused (and possibly a little frustrated in trying to decipher what they were saying).
Anyway, it's been a fun, abeit sometimes frustrating, experience. One of the students (a guy who acted like a smart-ass at the beginning of the semester) wrote a short note at the end of his lab report which said "I had loads of fun this semester. I hope I wasn't too much of a pain!" I thought it was kind of amusing. :) As for the frustrating part, I think it makes for really good stories.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
finally some free time
Ok so... I passed my prelims!
I've been sitting on my bum all of "spring break" writing the prelim grant proposal, and I had to give a public seminar and the private defense with my committee today. Most of the questions were quite valid (controls, interpreting results, pitfalls, alternatives), and there were a few weird ones thrown in as well... like why the authors of a particular paper didn't examine gene expression past a specific stage (really no answer to this one...)
I'm just glad it's over with; it now means I can stay here and continue to torture the undergrads I teach, oops.. I mean, stay here and continue doing research.
So now the next few steps would be trying to get back to the "doing labwork" mindset, as well as thinking on who should be on my thesis committee and of course, writing test questions for that upcoming Devo Lab exam...
YAY!
I've been sitting on my bum all of "spring break" writing the prelim grant proposal, and I had to give a public seminar and the private defense with my committee today. Most of the questions were quite valid (controls, interpreting results, pitfalls, alternatives), and there were a few weird ones thrown in as well... like why the authors of a particular paper didn't examine gene expression past a specific stage (really no answer to this one...)
I'm just glad it's over with; it now means I can stay here and continue to torture the undergrads I teach, oops.. I mean, stay here and continue doing research.
So now the next few steps would be trying to get back to the "doing labwork" mindset, as well as thinking on who should be on my thesis committee and of course, writing test questions for that upcoming Devo Lab exam...
YAY!
Saturday, January 30, 2010
other side of the podium
As you can probably tell, this post is about teaching. I'm currently teaching a 300-level lab class (Developmental Biology Lab), which is full of seniors about to graduate. It's my first time actually teaching, as opposed to leading study groups or doing one-on-one tutoring sessions.
I led study groups for intro physics for a little over two years, and I still remember the first study group I ever had. First off, it was a class full of engineers, and there were still parts of the class I didn't fully understand (ahem, like the first few chapters?!). I was shaky on topics at the beginning of the course and had a better understanding of what came after, so things smoothed out as the semester wore on. As a result, I ended up learning quite a bit about the subject as well, and study group dynamics worked themselves out after a semester or two.
The biggest problem with actual teaching is the understanding (and acceptance) of the fact that not everyone who is in the class wants to be there. I never had a problem with it in the past, since study groups and tutoring sessions were made of people who wanted my help, not because they needed to get a tutor in order to fulfill some sort of requirement for their major. My own rationalization for this was that I was teaching an upper-level class, and that these were seniors who had already completed all the reqs for their degree.
The other difference is the authority problem. The class was off to a bumpy start, because I think no matter how prepared I thought I was, I still got a bit nervous standing there and talking to 22 people who I've never seen before. 22 kids. That's more than twice the size of my average study group.
I'm also physically the smallest in the class, which has the potential to compound the authority problem. But I think I have that problem under control with pop quizzes, lots of clarification, and randomly picking on people to answer questions.
I think I've also gotten some sort of reputation for being a tough grader as well as a walking advertisement for my advisor's lab. Just wait until they see the metamorphosis experiment in this course. :-)
Finally, teaching a class makes me realize that I most likely took my undergrad profs for granted. Students often complain about a badly worded test question, or just an overall impossible exam. But just as exams are hard to take, they're also pretty hard to write. After a particularly disruptive class one week, I went home and started putting together a pop quiz. Brainstorming a topic and a question for the quiz took me a long time. I wanted to cover "big picture" concepts and apply it to an organism that they never learned about, but at the same time, I didn't want them to be completely stumped (ok, I did; they made me angry!) and miss the concept at hand. The bottom line was that I did NOT want to write some multiple choice question that they're just gonna forget after they hand it in...but it was quite tempting to do so and get the writing over with.
All in all, teaching is enjoyable. The department requires two terms of teaching, but I wonder if my advisor will let me do more...
That being said, being a GSI isn't difficult.. provided that I continue to come prepared to class and refuse to take any shit from students twice my size.
I led study groups for intro physics for a little over two years, and I still remember the first study group I ever had. First off, it was a class full of engineers, and there were still parts of the class I didn't fully understand (ahem, like the first few chapters?!). I was shaky on topics at the beginning of the course and had a better understanding of what came after, so things smoothed out as the semester wore on. As a result, I ended up learning quite a bit about the subject as well, and study group dynamics worked themselves out after a semester or two.
The biggest problem with actual teaching is the understanding (and acceptance) of the fact that not everyone who is in the class wants to be there. I never had a problem with it in the past, since study groups and tutoring sessions were made of people who wanted my help, not because they needed to get a tutor in order to fulfill some sort of requirement for their major. My own rationalization for this was that I was teaching an upper-level class, and that these were seniors who had already completed all the reqs for their degree.
The other difference is the authority problem. The class was off to a bumpy start, because I think no matter how prepared I thought I was, I still got a bit nervous standing there and talking to 22 people who I've never seen before. 22 kids. That's more than twice the size of my average study group.
I'm also physically the smallest in the class, which has the potential to compound the authority problem. But I think I have that problem under control with pop quizzes, lots of clarification, and randomly picking on people to answer questions.
I think I've also gotten some sort of reputation for being a tough grader as well as a walking advertisement for my advisor's lab. Just wait until they see the metamorphosis experiment in this course. :-)
Finally, teaching a class makes me realize that I most likely took my undergrad profs for granted. Students often complain about a badly worded test question, or just an overall impossible exam. But just as exams are hard to take, they're also pretty hard to write. After a particularly disruptive class one week, I went home and started putting together a pop quiz. Brainstorming a topic and a question for the quiz took me a long time. I wanted to cover "big picture" concepts and apply it to an organism that they never learned about, but at the same time, I didn't want them to be completely stumped (ok, I did; they made me angry!) and miss the concept at hand. The bottom line was that I did NOT want to write some multiple choice question that they're just gonna forget after they hand it in...but it was quite tempting to do so and get the writing over with.
All in all, teaching is enjoyable. The department requires two terms of teaching, but I wonder if my advisor will let me do more...
That being said, being a GSI isn't difficult.. provided that I continue to come prepared to class and refuse to take any shit from students twice my size.
Sunday, December 13, 2009
reading, writing, and everything in between
Be skeptical.
That's what my advisor told me when I brought in a few papers a while back. And also what he said when it got to explaining my rationale behind my experiment predictions.
Part of my work involves an enzyme called AMPK, so I've been doing a bit of reading on it. But since it's such an ubiquitous protein, there's been a lot of work done on it already, even if I look into specifically what its role is in food intake control (another part of my project). So to organize my thoughts and see what parts I was still missing out on reading about, my advisor asked me to write a minireview (~5 pages) about AMPK and its role in feeding control in the brain, so that's what I've been doing in my "spare time" for the last two weeks.
Writing it was a little harder than anticipated. The first day of writing, it took me about three hours to write a paragraph. Not because I didn't know how to word things; it was because I was averaging one citation a sentence. Which means for every sentence I write, I have to read an entire paper written by someone else. I suppose I could read a whole bunch of abstracts and string them together to make an instant review, but that's out of the question. First off, my advisor is going to know whether or not I really read the papers; and second, sometimes the abstracts will sugarcoat things, and unless the reader looks into the methods, it'll seem like everything is legitimate.
------
I'm also in the process of scribbling ideas to write for my written prelim exam. In general, my project has to be on leptin in the frog, but since it wasn't cloned until 2006, there's still a lot of basic info we don't know yet, like if it signals through particular pathways, or if it is produced in a certain way. These basic questions have already been answered in mammals, and it seems to me like a lot of the mammalian studies nowdays are focusing more on different brain regions that leptin acts on, how they "talk" to each other, where other signals might come from, etc. It would be pretty boring (not to mention very uncreative) of me to base my written exam off of the statement "This stuff about leptin is true in mammals. Please give me money so I can do the exact same thing in frogs."
So now I'm kinda stuck on how to use the frog as a model to advance the field. Which probably translates to "I should read a lot more..."
That's what my advisor told me when I brought in a few papers a while back. And also what he said when it got to explaining my rationale behind my experiment predictions.
Part of my work involves an enzyme called AMPK, so I've been doing a bit of reading on it. But since it's such an ubiquitous protein, there's been a lot of work done on it already, even if I look into specifically what its role is in food intake control (another part of my project). So to organize my thoughts and see what parts I was still missing out on reading about, my advisor asked me to write a minireview (~5 pages) about AMPK and its role in feeding control in the brain, so that's what I've been doing in my "spare time" for the last two weeks.
Writing it was a little harder than anticipated. The first day of writing, it took me about three hours to write a paragraph. Not because I didn't know how to word things; it was because I was averaging one citation a sentence. Which means for every sentence I write, I have to read an entire paper written by someone else. I suppose I could read a whole bunch of abstracts and string them together to make an instant review, but that's out of the question. First off, my advisor is going to know whether or not I really read the papers; and second, sometimes the abstracts will sugarcoat things, and unless the reader looks into the methods, it'll seem like everything is legitimate.
------
I'm also in the process of scribbling ideas to write for my written prelim exam. In general, my project has to be on leptin in the frog, but since it wasn't cloned until 2006, there's still a lot of basic info we don't know yet, like if it signals through particular pathways, or if it is produced in a certain way. These basic questions have already been answered in mammals, and it seems to me like a lot of the mammalian studies nowdays are focusing more on different brain regions that leptin acts on, how they "talk" to each other, where other signals might come from, etc. It would be pretty boring (not to mention very uncreative) of me to base my written exam off of the statement "This stuff about leptin is true in mammals. Please give me money so I can do the exact same thing in frogs."
So now I'm kinda stuck on how to use the frog as a model to advance the field. Which probably translates to "I should read a lot more..."
Friday, October 16, 2009
the hardest part
We had a lab meeting earlier this week, and I was the presenter, so I spent a good amount of time putting slides together last week. If the old rule of "a minute a slide" applies, my presentation should have been a little less than 20 minutes long.
It was an hour and a half.
I got interrupted at practically every slide.
And I didn't know the answers to a lot of the questions.
So to fill in some of the gaps, I spent a good chunk of time this past week adding, deleting, and rearranging some stuff so it addressed the comments made in the meeting, and I ran it by my advisor today. The verdict: read some more.
The slides I got the most interruptions at were the slides that described questions I wanted to address via experiments. I kept getting called on for clarifying what the question really was, what my hypothesis was, and the reason why I formed that hypothesis. It turns out that the vast majority of my background information came from studies done in mice, and while it's generally assumed that the results would be the same for frogs, that's obviously not a good enough reason to base a series of experiments off of. There were a lot of preliminary questions that needed to be addressed first, using the FROG as a model before moving on, and I didn't realize that, since I had automatically assumed that an important molecule would be evolutionarily conserved between frogs and mammals.
That being said, there's a surprising amount of information we DON'T know (or I don't know) about frogs. This information had been well-documented in mice, but I had taken this info from mice, extended it to frogs, and proceeded to the next step, without bothering to test to see if the information also held true for frogs.
--------------
Last term in that grant-writing/prelim-giving/paper-reading class, we had a professor come in and talk to us about what makes a good grant. Three basic parts:
1. whats the question?
2. how do you test it?
3. so what? (why should we give you money?)
He said that the reason why a lot of grants are tossed out is because they don't have a good question in mind, and that the "what's the question?" part of the grants is the most difficult to answer. Originally I had disagreed; I thought "so what" was the hardest, since not everyone is going to be utterly fascinated in learning about social behavior in purple carnivorous snails (just an example). However, after the past two weeks of working on these slides, looking over at the comments made, and going back to revise things, "so what" is actually a pretty easy question to answer... once I figure out the question I want to test in my experiments.
So I'll be writing up a list of things that need to be answered, and try to weed out which question is the most fundamental...which will be the starting point for subsequent months.
It was an hour and a half.
I got interrupted at practically every slide.
And I didn't know the answers to a lot of the questions.
So to fill in some of the gaps, I spent a good chunk of time this past week adding, deleting, and rearranging some stuff so it addressed the comments made in the meeting, and I ran it by my advisor today. The verdict: read some more.
The slides I got the most interruptions at were the slides that described questions I wanted to address via experiments. I kept getting called on for clarifying what the question really was, what my hypothesis was, and the reason why I formed that hypothesis. It turns out that the vast majority of my background information came from studies done in mice, and while it's generally assumed that the results would be the same for frogs, that's obviously not a good enough reason to base a series of experiments off of. There were a lot of preliminary questions that needed to be addressed first, using the FROG as a model before moving on, and I didn't realize that, since I had automatically assumed that an important molecule would be evolutionarily conserved between frogs and mammals.
That being said, there's a surprising amount of information we DON'T know (or I don't know) about frogs. This information had been well-documented in mice, but I had taken this info from mice, extended it to frogs, and proceeded to the next step, without bothering to test to see if the information also held true for frogs.
--------------
Last term in that grant-writing/prelim-giving/paper-reading class, we had a professor come in and talk to us about what makes a good grant. Three basic parts:
1. whats the question?
2. how do you test it?
3. so what? (why should we give you money?)
He said that the reason why a lot of grants are tossed out is because they don't have a good question in mind, and that the "what's the question?" part of the grants is the most difficult to answer. Originally I had disagreed; I thought "so what" was the hardest, since not everyone is going to be utterly fascinated in learning about social behavior in purple carnivorous snails (just an example). However, after the past two weeks of working on these slides, looking over at the comments made, and going back to revise things, "so what" is actually a pretty easy question to answer... once I figure out the question I want to test in my experiments.
So I'll be writing up a list of things that need to be answered, and try to weed out which question is the most fundamental...which will be the starting point for subsequent months.
Monday, September 7, 2009
faith in science
I was laboring on Labor Day; apparently my cloning experiment didn't work again. The concept is simple enough: cut plasmid/inserted gene, purify, and then glue together. So why has it taken me over two months to do this? (aside from losing the DNA, breaking machines, fighting the Incredible Shrinking Insert...)
Molecular biology (or science in general) at its best (read: textbook figures) is a great concept. We have machines we didn't have a decade ago, protocols that have been refined multiple times, and reagents that can be mass-produced so that they aren't nearly as expensive (although $150 for a tiny bottle of Taq is still way too expensive, for my taste), but even with the technology we have now, everything is far from foolproof. PCRs will just fail for no apparent reason, and the only "logical" explanation was that whatever day the experiment was done on was just a "bad lab day." Likewise, the first sentence in our lab protocol for ligations (where two pieces of DNA are glued together) is "sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't," making it seem like you should mix the necessary ingredients together, follow the guidelines, and *hope* that it works.
Science is like a religion in itself; sometimes things just happen and nobody knows why. I've been restriction digesting and purifying "my favorite gene," which is supposed to be 500 basepairs long. Somehow after purification, the gene "shrinks" to 300 basepairs. I've ruled out every possiblity I can think of, and there's nothing that can really be done except start over (and maybe whine about it for a while). Yes, cloning sucks, but I suppose I just have to *believe* that whatever I'm doing is the right thing, and that one day after tapping my foot 55 times while wearing a red tshirt and singing along to some given song on my iPod, I'll get my ONE much-needed clone.
Seriously though, howcome superstition isn't more blatant in the research field?
Molecular biology (or science in general) at its best (read: textbook figures) is a great concept. We have machines we didn't have a decade ago, protocols that have been refined multiple times, and reagents that can be mass-produced so that they aren't nearly as expensive (although $150 for a tiny bottle of Taq is still way too expensive, for my taste), but even with the technology we have now, everything is far from foolproof. PCRs will just fail for no apparent reason, and the only "logical" explanation was that whatever day the experiment was done on was just a "bad lab day." Likewise, the first sentence in our lab protocol for ligations (where two pieces of DNA are glued together) is "sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't," making it seem like you should mix the necessary ingredients together, follow the guidelines, and *hope* that it works.
Science is like a religion in itself; sometimes things just happen and nobody knows why. I've been restriction digesting and purifying "my favorite gene," which is supposed to be 500 basepairs long. Somehow after purification, the gene "shrinks" to 300 basepairs. I've ruled out every possiblity I can think of, and there's nothing that can really be done except start over (and maybe whine about it for a while). Yes, cloning sucks, but I suppose I just have to *believe* that whatever I'm doing is the right thing, and that one day after tapping my foot 55 times while wearing a red tshirt and singing along to some given song on my iPod, I'll get my ONE much-needed clone.
Seriously though, howcome superstition isn't more blatant in the research field?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)