Realistic Optimism

Over the past few years I've heard from various people that I'm "blissfully optimisitic". One time I was stepping off to bus to go to school, and some random guy came up to me (while I was zoned out on my headphones) and said "I see you all the time and I have to ask: why are you so smiley?" Another person told me multiple times last year "I can't believe you're so happy all the time." Another time during recruitment weekend I ran into someone on the walk to lab and they were talking about how only first and second year grad students are asked to host a prospective student, since at that stage of their career, they're still "happy and excited about their research," while senior grad students are stereotypically bitter and irritated that they haven't graduated yet.

Looking back on my blog posts starting from undergrad commencement, I've definitely taken a more serious tone in my writing about the grad student experience. I've rarely written about my project as of late and have focused more on experiences outside of lab and the changing perceptions of myself and other people. However, that doesn't mean that I'm not excited about my work anymore (my advisor recently told me that I seemd very optimistic about experimental outcomes). I think it's more of the realization that if experiments don't work, there's really nothing I can do except think it over, change a thing or two, and rerun it.

...which takes care of my life inside the lab. Outside the lab, things become very different. Sometimes I find it difficult to simply be happy when I'm surrounded by subtle pessimism, not just about lab, but also about their lives outside of lab. Two people I know have made their love lives a running joke by saying things like "what love life?" and "yours can't be more of a joke than mine!" While their comments may be on the light side of things, there are other people who say things like "marriage makes you a better person." I know one person who told me that she cried herself to sleep because she didn't have a boyfriend on her birthday. It's hard for me to deal with stories like that, especially if I'm being constantly bombarded with messages that  I can't be happy as I am, or that I simply can't become a better person because I'm unmarried.

***
My cold-emailing-club-directors-and/or-instructors is finally starting to pay off; I've started dancing again and got involved with a science outreach group. And I'm definitely seeking out happier people to be around.

Isolation and Impatient Optimism

Several older students told me that everyone in grad school eventually enters the "bitter grad student" phase in their career, and I think that time is around now. I don't even have to talk to other people about grad school and research to realize this. I've noticed that many people I talk to don't have any enthusiasm to do anything...social or otherwise. For the past few months, getting people together to do something fun has been (and still is) like pulling teeth. I usually get some variation of the excuse "when I get home from lab I just want to sit and do nothing," which makes me wonder (a) if I'm not working hard enough in lab, since I still have energy, and (b) if I get cabin fever way faster than everyone I know.

   I think part of the problem is that by now, we've settled into a life of routine...we get up, go to lab, do work, come back, and crash, only to repeat this cycle 6 or 7 days a week for the next couple years until our advisors say we can graduate. While routine can be comforting (sometimes), it also is a recipe for isolation. And after a long time, it becomes a hard habit to break. The other problem is that we're surrounded by the same people day after day, and opportunities to meet new people who aren't in the same field (or the same lab, for that matter) are scarce to nonexistent.

   One of my friends goes to med school at MSU and he came to visit several weeks ago. We talked about some of the trends we've seen in people as we go through grad school: the pessimism, isolation, and general laziness which gets progressively worse with time. He said that the best way to combat it is with optimism, "impatient optimism" to be specific. (The phrase came from a graduation speech that Bill Gates supposedly gave at Harvard.) It means to be happy, but also to be proactive in pursuing the activities that bring happiness.

   I really think I've been trying to get people together, but it's not working. At the same time, I've also looked into other activities that branch off of what I liked to do when I was younger (dance, for instance) as a way to fulfill my mental health time. Several people have told me that I should stop trying so hard, but I don't think that passivity is the best way to solve this problem.

   I don't think I've ever felt more alone in my life.

Evolution I

The grad school environment isn't exactly a breeding ground for social activities, and in some ways, the lack of "practice" coupled with constant, focused brain activity forces people to change. The other part, I suppose, is growing up in general. I'd be naive to think that people won't change with time, but sometimes the way they evolve can be surprising.


I was talking to my (now married!) friend the other day about how I found it increasingly difficult to connect with "normal" people, defined as people who never went to grad school. Obviously upon meeting someone new, you try to find some common ground first, and with other students, going to grad school IS the common ground. You start off with "Hey, nice to meet you. What program are you in? Who's lab?" and then drift to other topics that may or may not be related to work. With non-grad students it becomes harder:


-So, what do you do?
-I'm a grad student doing developmental biology.
-Masters or PhD?
-PhD.
(conversation dies in about two more sentences, unless the other person is actually interested in what you're saying)


One could argue that it's just a personality thing, but in general, I find that meeting and talking to other grad students is easier than meeting non-students.
**
That's not to say that all people in grad school change the same way. Some become hyperfocused on their work and let everything else (friends, hobbies) drop to the side, and in some extreme cases, drop entirely. I don't think school is very conducive in making people strike a balance between work and leisure; there's always "I'm too busy with lab," the universal reply to almost anything that anyone asks, unless it's the PI who's asking.


It's becoming more of a struggle for me to strike that work-leisure balance as I go into my fourth year here. Not like I don't want there to be a balance... I feel like I'm trying really hard to seek out my friends to do something fun once in a while (even as a mental break), but the act of getting x number of people together at the same place and time is sapping out the fun in whatever activity there is to do. Disagreements about where to go and what to do are normal, but they cross the line when people start complaining about my ideas without offering any of their own. I even had one person tell me (when I invited her to go to the comedy club with us) "No thanks, I don't wanna go," which would have been perfectly fine, except she continued, "I don't know why you keep inviting me to do stuff; it's not you, it's the things you plan. They're just bleh."  Who needs to hear something like that? And for the record, it's not the first (nor the last) time that someone has vetoed my ideas without a countersuggestion.


I'm trying to not use the "I'm busy" line too often without giving an alternate time, and it's been working pretty well. But right now I'm grappling with my own (perceived or not) increasing social awkwardness and decreasing sanity/patience. I also perceive that I have been constantly seeking out others, which makes me feel clingy and very dependent, something that makes me quite uncomfortable.


I suppose the good thing is that I'm relaxing a bit this upcoming weekend without having to strain myself in getting groups of people together in the same place at the same time.

motivational decline

One of my friends is getting married out of the country and I'm taking a week off to attend and go sightseeing. I'm leaving within the next couple days, and in the past week, I've been processing samples and running experiments to analyze immediately when I get back. Although it's been a bit busy lately, I will say that my motivation level in the past month has really hit an all-time low.

I had two major projects to complete before I go: one was a hormone/chemical treatment on the tadpole brain to determine the rate and location of cell division. The other is riboprobe synthesis for use in the early-stage tadpole brain. I admit I've been really slow in getting started, but sometimes just looking at the protocols makes me feel sluggish (for instance, the riboprobe synthesis and testing takes about 3 days to finish).

I'm guessing it's the 3-4 year slump; prelims are done, the post-prelim high has passed, and now it's just straight up research until my advisor says I'm done. Which would be...nobody knows when.

Two of my friends who quit grad school did so at the end of their third year/beginning of fourth year, which is where I'm at right now. One said experiments weren't working out and the other simply lost interest in their project. While I'm not planning on quitting, I'm definitely feeling the decrease in motivation (and with it, productivity). I'm guessing once I get my brain out of vacation mode -- where it's been for about two weeks -- at least some motivation will come back and I'll have cool new stuff to present/defend at my next committee meeting.

I wonder if anyone else is getting sluggish about their work...?

on knowing when to quit

Parts of science are extremely frustrating in that almost nothing works the way you want on the first try. Many assays and techniques need optimizing and multiple confirmation steps before they can yield decent data. But how do you know when to abandon something? Or is it ok to simply keep beating your head against a wall?

A good example would be in 2009, when I was trying to clone an antagonist to receptor X; I spent July to November cloning, and when I finally got a clone, I found I couldn't make cells produce mass quantities of this antagonist. Which meant I had to either reclone it, or optimize production methods. It turns out altering production methods didn't work, so I had to reclone it into a different plasmid and test for production again. By the time all this was done, it was March 2010, and I didn't actually get the antagonist tested in cell culture until June 2010.

My adventures in cloning this antagonist isn't the only one in our lab. My predecessor had done the original mutagenesis and cloning of this protein and found that he couldn't get the cells to produce it. When I took over the project, I cut off some stuff from his original sequence and cloned it into a different plasmid, but it didn't seem to make a difference, so I had to keep cloning until I got one that worked.

There are different ways to block cell signaling, but I can tell that my advisor thought it would be useful to have a receptor antagonist as a possible tool for future studies. But is the time spend on cloning and testing (in this case, more than two years) worth it? How much money and time needs to be spent in order to get this one tool?

A second example involves my time working as an undergrad in the plant lab downstairs. My job was to optimize primers that came in; since we were working with plant DNA, PCR could be a bit tricky since plant cells have all this glop (resins, tannins) that interferes with the yield of good, clean, DNA. The problem here was that I was even more clueless back then, so I just did what I was told, and couldn't explain the strange bands I kept getting on my DNA gel. So I had to try different temperature and time settings to get the primers to amplify the sequence of interest. Someone later asked me "why don't you just get new primers? They're pretty cheap."

After I left, the lab did get new (redesigned) primers. I talked to the lab manager after I started grad school, and she told me that someone else designed the old primers, and that their design had a lot of mistakes. But why couldn't we have checked them for mistakes earlier?

It sounds like many of the reasons for stopping or not stopping with a given project are financially motivated, but it can't be the only reason. Clearly the benefit of having a functional receptor antagonist was worth the time and funds spent to clone and test it. But what if the tests showed spotty results, as in sometimes it worked well and other times it didn't? Would we have abandoned that project?

Might be another thing that comes with more time in school...

The Quarter-Life Crisis

Fourth year is starting in two days, and the progress meter is at a standstill. While there are day-to-day frustrations with experiments and strange results, the sudden (or not-so-sudden) realization that we're a little closer to graduation (hopefully) and finding a real job can be jarring. I heard more stories of people leaving their PhD programs in the past year; they decided the pressures experienced in academic research weren't worth the end product of having the degree. Even amongst the people who stay, I find that more are struggling to figure out what the next step is going to be.

For instance, one of my friends is experiencing a few funding issues in his lab. We were talking about the pros and cons of a career in academia, and came to the conclusion that we might not be as well-prepared for such a career as we once thought. Nobody enjoys the grant-writing process, and I have limited patience when it comes to teaching. At the end of it, he said "industry doesn't look so bad now, does it?" He might as well have said it to himself as to me, since when we started grad school, he was vehemently anti-industry and didn't like the idea of science for profit's sake. Now that we've spent a bit more time here, we're both wondering what we might and might not be cut out for.

Being in industry has its own problems, and even people in that field may be rethinking what they want to do. Someone I know who is currently an industry postdoc is considering a career switch. It seems to be that there are more freedoms in academia than in industry; there's no well-defined end result in academia, whereas in industry all the time and resources are poured into drug development or disease therapy. That's not to say that all of academic research is purely for knowledge, but from my own basic science perspective, the line between academics and industry is much more pronounced.

Looking back at the past few years, I feel like I just stumbled into grad school. The story begins much earlier that college, however. In high school, my counselor highly suggested taking AP biology as prep for the college premed track; taking this class was enough for me to major in biology in college, and even though I started out premed (like everyone else), the further I went along in my college career, the more I realized that I didn't want to pursue medicine. A series of dev bio classes, a certain GSI, and a string of lab rotations helped me carve out what I wanted to do in grad school...and here I am, working on a project I enjoy that borders development and evolution.

My biggest problem now is that I can't "stumble into" the next step. I'm having some doubts about staying academia after graduation (when that happens), but so far I know that I want to remain close to the science.

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...