I'm currently three weeks into my third year of grad school, and I'm asking myself how long it's going to be before I get enough meaningful data for my first paper, how many papers I need to graduate, and whether or not I can graduate on time (I'm aiming for May 2013). I'm currently unsure if I'm on track or behind; it just seems like everyone I know has more data than me...and by "everyone I know," I've pretty much limited it to other lab members. I want to get more data in a shorter period of time, but sometmes it can be difficult to strike a balance between being efficient and being high-quality.
I'm also in the middle of designing experiments for my thesis proposal. I finally got my thesis committee formed and the first committee meeting scheduled, but I'm not really sure what to expect. I'm guessing it's going to be a lot of questions on experiment design and controls (like prelims), questions on the validity of results (like prelims), and probably questions on the field as a whole (like prelims). My advisor send back some comments on my experiment design, and while his questions are quite valid, I sometimes wonder howcome I missed seeing it myself. In other words, the blanks I have to fill are a lot more obvious when they're pointed out to me by someone else. While this is all part of the learning curve in grad school, I sometimes wonder if (1) I'm a slow learner; (2) there are so many things that need to be considered in experimental design that it's mind-boggling, or (3) it's actually not mind-boggling.. it's just hard to see what else is important aside from the immediately obvious.
The good thing is I don't have to take classes anymore, so fall term is just a continuation of summer research. Right now it just seems like a long, hazy road ahead...
Monday, July 26, 2010
Thursday, June 10, 2010
hamster wheel
I would really like to get some meaningful data.
If the research question was "what happens when you add A to B," I'm currently stuck on getting enough A and B to put together. It's monotonous, but necessary, and it makes me feel like I'm on a research treadmill: working, but not moving forward. I guess as long as I'm not falling backwards off the treadmill, it'll be an improvement from last year already.
There's a lot of little things that need to be taken care of before I make any REAL progress... like figuring out what the normal patterns of gene expression are in the frog before I go in and mess it up with chemicals and the like. Since I'm currently in this stage (normal expression), I don't feel like I'm really contributing anything until I can go in and mess it up. And when I say "mess it up," I expect to see some dramatic changes.
...which is really not how science is supposed to work. Just because we think something is going to happen doesn't mean it will. And just because something happened, doesn't mean it's important (statistically significant). Several times last year, I'd get mini panic attacks when I got my results and they were contrary to my hypothesis or weren't significant enough to support the hypothesis. So next time I do things, I should probably stop panicking afterward... unless the results are skewed because the machine died (knock on wood).
Going back to making progress, if I look at what I did last year and how many times I had to do that obnoxious cloning experiment, I guess I can say I got stuff done. The only thing is that I really don't want my research progress to be broken down into years...
I really need data.
If the research question was "what happens when you add A to B," I'm currently stuck on getting enough A and B to put together. It's monotonous, but necessary, and it makes me feel like I'm on a research treadmill: working, but not moving forward. I guess as long as I'm not falling backwards off the treadmill, it'll be an improvement from last year already.
There's a lot of little things that need to be taken care of before I make any REAL progress... like figuring out what the normal patterns of gene expression are in the frog before I go in and mess it up with chemicals and the like. Since I'm currently in this stage (normal expression), I don't feel like I'm really contributing anything until I can go in and mess it up. And when I say "mess it up," I expect to see some dramatic changes.
...which is really not how science is supposed to work. Just because we think something is going to happen doesn't mean it will. And just because something happened, doesn't mean it's important (statistically significant). Several times last year, I'd get mini panic attacks when I got my results and they were contrary to my hypothesis or weren't significant enough to support the hypothesis. So next time I do things, I should probably stop panicking afterward... unless the results are skewed because the machine died (knock on wood).
Going back to making progress, if I look at what I did last year and how many times I had to do that obnoxious cloning experiment, I guess I can say I got stuff done. The only thing is that I really don't want my research progress to be broken down into years...
I really need data.
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Year 2 in review
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."
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, 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..."
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