Bubble

One thing I've noticed about school is that it tends to shield people from the "real world." This was especially apparent during my freshman year of college, and gradually got better when I left the dorms. However, the shield is still there; sometimes it's a good thing, but other times it means an somewhat isolated existence.

A lot of people have said that the past couple years has been a good time to be in school. The number of people pursuing post-college education has increased as the economy tanked, and in many ways, grad school is a shield from having to search for a "real" job or worrying about the consequences of not having such a job.

However, grad school comes with its own bubbles; depending on the day, labwork can be stimulating, tedious, meditative, or just plain robotic. While the schedule is relatively flexible (I go to lab when I want, but I leave when the work is done), the flip side of having such fluidity is that everyone else is on a different schedule, and sometimes I'm there by myself with just my iPod and the frogs for company. It's gotten much better, since there are more people in the lab now and the chances that I'll have human company during work hours has increased. But since people have different projects, sometimes it can still feel a little isolating, especially when the people you interact with the most aren't present.

I don't mind the lab bubble as much as I do the bubble that extends outside of work into "normal life." I've noticed lately that people are less willing to go out and do semi-organized activities. My friend, who's in a different program at another school, has noticed it too and pointed it out to me. She had tried to get people together for a wine-and-games night at her house, but out of the 30-some people she invited, only half replied. And out of the half that replied, 8-10 actually showed up, which is a pretty good sized group, but considering the number of people she asked, it's quite a low turnout. I've started to notice that as well; people are increasingly wrapped up in their own lives and not extremely willing to go out and do something social (myself included).

One of my other friends (in med school) thought that we're all in a particularly antisocial period, since we're trying to get enough done to graduate, but also trying to figure out what we want to do in the long run...a "quarter-life crisis" of sorts. As a result, many other things, including attempts to have some semblance of a social life, is seen as a distraction. An alternative is that we're all reaching the end of our third year, and "what have I (not) accomplished these couple years" syndrome is starting to sink in. That being said, I wonder if this is going to get worse as fourth year approaches in a few months...

Unfounded Anxiety

People who know me at least a little bit know that patience is definitely not one of my virtues, which doesn't bode too well for a career in science. When I started grad school, I noticed that I had more patience waiting for my experiments to stop running than I did for certain situations outside of work. Lately though... I haven't had much patience for ANYTHING, including bad experiment results.

I don't even have a good reason to feel rushed; I'm nowhere close to graduating, and the only person who's complaining about how little data I've gathered is myself. I have a problem accepting that are some lab days where the only "benchwork" there is to do is wait for cells/animals to grow, and I feel pretty guilty when I'm in lab and not doing benchwork. One of my friends pointed out that benchwork isn't the only way to be productive, but that's also something I have difficulty realizing.

I think the anxiety might rub off on others, namely my advisor. He was working on a paper that I contributed some data to, and I got a draft of it about two weeks ago. It's not complete at all, but I was visibly anxious about getting a draft to look at. I think I asked him every (other) day about it until he sent it. Hopefully he's just thinking I was super excited to get my name printed on something... which I am, but for some reason I still feel I need to push harder to get another paper out.

By now it sounds like my only interest is in boosting my resume. While more publications is always a good thing, there's obviously a limit to how much I can do within a certain period of time. My biggest problem right now is that I feel rushed to produce something, and get really upset/jump to conclusions when things don't work the first time around, regardless of me making some stupid mistake that caused it not to work. I'm hoping it's just a phase I'm going through, but in the meantime, I should probably find something to calm my nerves...

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.

Mentorship

I'm a horrible mentor. There, I said it.

Back in August, I told my advisor that I was interested in getting an undergrad helper for my research. There's a school-wide program here that helps undergrads (particularly underclassmen) get started on research by getting in touch with different PIs and their projects. I got to interview the students, and chose one to help me out, so he's been here since mid-September.

Unfortunately I've realized that I'm not very good at thinking of spinoff projects for other people. A few weeks ago, my advisor asked me how everything was going with the undergrad helper -- what was his project exactly? What was he doing? My answer was something among the lines of "he does what I tell him to do," which didn't sit very well with my advisor.
I've been teaching the student various molecular biology techniques, along with an overview of how they fit into the bigger picture of my project, but this approach doesn't work very well, especially if I just dictate what he's supposed to do and watch over his shoulder while he does it.

One of the biggest problems is that I don't trust other people to do "my" work, for fear of things getting messed up. I'm pretty sure my advisor had the same problem with me when I first started working in the lab; it got to the point where my advisor asked another grad student (a year above me) to watch my technique... as in look over my shoulder. When the other student said "but I don't think she's doing anything wrong," my advisor said "well, just in case..."

I'm trying to get the student to see the big picture before he goes off to work, but sometimes I glaze/skip over things that seem second nature to me, without realizing that the student is lost. However, there's a limit to how much "big picture" stuff can be covered before the students lose interest, and many subtleties can only be learned through actually DOING the work.

If I continue mentoring throughout the next school year, hopefully the current student stays in the lab...

Conflict of Interest

I'm in grad school at the same place I went to undergrad, and I was telling a recent seminar speaker over lunch that the divide between college and grad school seemed much more pronounced. Then again, I have no other basis for judgement.

However, my first teaching experience was in a class that I had taken my junior year of undergrad, and my GSI was one of my current advisor's former students. He seemed pretty relaxed about class policies, given that we didn't do anything stupid, like take naps or text people. I think one of the best parts about the class was that everyone who was registered actually wanted to be there, and nobody was in that "I need an easy lab course to cruise through my senior year" mindset, which made life easier for both the GSI and the students.

Unfortunately cases like that are pretty much utopia.

I ran into that GSI about a year later, and found out that he was teaching the same class again. When asked how teaching was going, he gave a different response: students had become whiners. Granted, it was a lab class that met for four hours on a stretch, and lab activities aren't always going to be fun and games, especially if grades (and possibility of future schooling) is at stake. The biggest problem is that most of the students WERE in the "I need an easy A to graduate" mindset, and as a result, procured mediocre work and less-than-stellar behavior.

So what changed? The undergraduate biology program here requires all students to have at least 2 lab classes picked from a specific list. This class wasn't on the list when I took it, and suddenly it was, resulting in an influx of students that may or may not (most likely the latter) have wanted to take the class to begin with. The class always counted toward a biology degree, but since it wasn't on that specific list of labs, most people overlooked it.

One of things I struggled with a lot during my year of teaching was a huge conflict of interest between me and the students, or me and the institution. I wanted to students to care about the material they were supposed to be learning, and I expected them to put in the effort to do well in the class because they chose to take it. On the flip side, most students wanted an easy A and do just enough to cruise by. I had one student turn in his Google search list about Compound X as his bibliography about how Compound X affected embryonic development. I emailed him and asked him to redo it, which he never did. Two weeks later, he came into office hours in a panic because he claimed that he was "snowboarding in Canada" that day and didn't get the email. And also, "can I still get credit if I redo it now?"

Seriously? Why even bother asking that question? The answer is obviously no.

***

I was having a discussion with one of my friends about institutions of higher learning; I was angry about our current system and how much grade inflation there was. I think bell curves can be pretty fair, but right now our bell curve has shifted so much to the right; the average, instead of being a B- or B like some of the classes I saw in undergrad, is now an B+ or even an A-. How are you supposed to differentiate between the average students and the outstanding students then?

On the flip side, instructors get in trouble with admin if their class averages are too low. My professor for Orgo II got fired after her term teaching us. Student evaluations aside, she had one test that was so difficult that the class average (for 1000+ students) was a 42%. So part of this huge grade inflation problem stems from instructors wanting a bit of job security... I understand that at least in part. However, things get out of hand when a student who clearly deserves a C- or a C ends up getting a B... just so we can move the class average up a few points and avoid getting in trouble by admin.

No instructor wants to reward mediocrity, but it ends up that way because students are the ones who are paying... and therefore the customers. So what do we do?

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!

The IQ Cutoff

My friend sent me an article a while back called "The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research". The author defined "stupidity" not as a lack of intelligence, but simply not knowing what the answer was... and devising ways to find out. He wrote that research is delving nto the unknown, and realizing that we'll never know everything about what's around us. Granted, scientists are making discoveries faster than ever, but the more we find out, the more we realize how much more we need to learn. There's always going to be phenomena that don't necessarily fit with our theories, and even as we learn new things, we can't say we've ever proven anything... just that whatever we discovered "supports" our preexisting hypothesis.

Unfortunately that's not my problem. I might not be fully aware of how much there is to learn, and I'm not too afraid of venturing out to learn something new. My biggest problem right now is that sometimes I feel stupid. And this time I mean lack-of-intelligence-howcome-I-can't-see-that-but-everyone-else-can stupid.

I'm currently writing a fellowship to be submitted to the NIH, and while the research strategy, experience, and rec letters are the most important, I still need to submit my list of science classes I took in college/grad school and the grades I got in them. I'm quite self-conscious about my grades; this problem happened when I was applying to grad school, when I was working as a rotation student, and it's happening again now. In college, I took liberties to challenge myself with multiple science classes (like any science major), but I might have underestimated what it was going to be like. Eventually I learned how to effectively divide my attention between three or four different science topics, but sooner or later, I would focus much more on the class(es) I liked, and as a result, the other subjects were set on the back burner. All in all, I was an "average" student.

Science might not be full of super-geniuses, but sometimes I wonder if there is a baseline level of intelligence and whether I'm floating around that line. My grades aren't saying much, and sometimes (like now) I get afraid that they might stand in the way between me and a fellowship. Do you have to be above average to succeed here? When do grades stop mattering at all?