General Exam Crazyness

It's coming! My Oral Exam is rapidly approaching-- February 10th!

Needless to say, things have been insanely busy. Really. Most days involve waking up to babbling Baby Girl at 7:00am and it doesn't stop til I hit the pillow again that night. Even so, I am making a lot of progress and being productive, which feels great. Proposal is written, revised, and sent out to the committee. This was a ton of work but I've admittedly learned a lot through this whole process of reading and digesting literature. If there is anything to be said about this whole stressful endeavor is that preparing for this exam is incredibly useful (unlike the written exam we work our asses off after our second year, full of knowledge that most of us never use afterwards). Lab work is often routine and monotonous; it's easy to feel like you're not really an 'expert' in anything besides pipetting. In reading so much of the current (and past) literature, I feel like I finally have some ownership over these content areas. Plus, my thesis is now about 2/3 written.

Currently, I'm working on my presentation and analyzing some more experiments I completed a couple weeks ago. I am genuinely interested and -gasp!- excited about the results. They've proven useful for my presentation thus far, so that's a plus.

Woo! Almost there. Seriously cannot wait for this to be over.

Jet lag

Any tips for re-adjusting an infant to their normal time zone after 2 weeks on the East coast (3 hrs ahead of Seattle)?



Any other suggestions?

Baby Girl's been having a tough time of it. She unintentionally adjusted to the East coast schedule; by the time we left she was going to bed around 8PM. Now, she's exhausted by 4:30/5:00 PM here and waking up at strange, frequent intervals. For C and I, this means waking up twice before the final wake up call around 6:30 AM... I feel like we're back to the first month all over again! Exhausting. Hopefully, she'll catch up soon....

I'm Tired and It's Only January 3rd

Happy new year! I hope 2012 is looking bright for everyone, I wish you all good things in the new year.

So far, 2012 is looking to be busy exciting. On the agenda: I have my General Exam scheduled for February 10th! I'm happy to finally have that on the calendar. I've met with each of my committee members individually and have mostly positive vibes coming from them, which is great. Something the whole process did make blatantly clear, however, is that I really should have started meeting with them a whole lot sooner (meaning at least a year before I did...). Outside input-- separate from your advisor-- has proven to be incredibly valuable for both my project and my psyche.

Sadly, for many of us in my program, engaging your committee in your project construction is this nice fairy-tale idea that is not actually encouraged. If anything, one gets the feeling that it's frowned upon until you have a clearer idea of your project.. more "preliminary" data... in my type of lab work, however, by the time you have this data, half your project is completed. Kind of negates the whole idea of having other bright minds contribute to the formation of your project and ability to give you feedback on your PROPOSAL... you know, prosed work? At this stage, it's no longer proposed; it's done. And there's really not a whole lot of time left to change your approach to address concerns from committee members. Perhaps we, as grad students, could be "more proactive," but it seems that even when students try to push, unless your PI is on board and supportive, it's futile.

Anyway, ranting aside, it's scheduled and I can't wait for it to be over! January is looking super busy with experiments and proposal writing/studying for the exam. SOT comes around again in mid March in San Francisco (woo!). The most exciting news: an abstract was accepted for a poster at an international conference in Paris in May!! I'm on a mission to find funding to support my travel, I'm optimistic that I'll finagle something. I've been aiming to go to an international conference, and this one is perfect-- it focuses on environmental stressors in the origins of disease. Plus, it's in Paris :) Wish me luck!

Babies = Disease Vectors

I'm on to my second cold in two weeks. I was happy that I didn't give Baby Girl my cold last week, but I'm sad to see it doesn't work the other way around: I caught my newest cold from her. Immunological properties of breast milk: 1  Me: 0.

The Air Up There: Taking the Fumes out of the Dreamliner

Check out my post on The Bill Nye Effect about Clem Furlong, an awesome researcher in Medical Genetics at the UW who does some interesting Toxicology field work with toxic fumes on airplanes.

While you're there, read some other postings on our blog!

Vicious Cycle

Like politics, research funding, and most everything else, life in the lab seems to run on a cycle. All of the visuals that come to mind-- a pendulum swinging left to right, the peaks and troughs of sinusoidal waves (or a roller coaster, for the less geeky)-- accurately describe the highs and lows of life. Sadly, the commonality of such patterns doesn't make the lows any easier to bear, nor the highs any more lasting.

Things were going well in the lab, and I guess overall, still are. Unfortunately for my sanity, there are still a few outlier experiments that should be working and aren't. And, as in the past, I have no idea why. This is the vicious cycle of lab research: knowing something is wrong but not knowing what it is, which makes it impossible to fix, and ultimately dooms you to repeat the mistakes. Until, perhaps, something magically changes. (Laugh if you will, but it's still the only explanation I have for my experiments beginning to work correctly back in March.)

I feel like a broken record saying all this, but it's so head-slamming-against-the-wall frustrating that I can't help but vent about it. Positive vibes are welcome these days, send them with care to the angry little lab rat.

I feel you, cat.

Feeling the Crunch

I'm having trouble deciding which time crunches in life are real and which are self-inflicted (and likely unnecessary). In my head, it's all about the next thing that has to be done, and it has to be done ASAP. No exceptions. That nagging voice telling me to work faster and walk quicker just doesn't quit. Maybe the academic environment is responsible for this: you're made to constantly worry about not producing enough data, or not fast enough (what if you get scooped?). What if your funding runs out? Many aspects of these things are not controllable, so the one thing that is-- your productivity-- becomes the main object of obsession.

I'm feel like I'm always late, and I'm unsure how important that date really is.

I walked out of a lab meeting today and was immediately stricken with a mix of anxiety and panic. My presented progress was sufficient this time around, so I left relatively unscathed. Regardless, my brain switched to scheduling the next 2 months+ of my lab life the instant I finished discussing my data. No matter how much progress I feel I made, or how hard I had worked in that past month, I ALWAYS walk out of the meeting overwhelmed by how much more I still need to do. Is this me being too hard on myself, or is this really just the reality of being a productive worker? When do you get to the point where you feel like you were productive enough?

For someone who really likes to strike a line through such things, mentally and physically, these lingering loose ends are guaranteed to induce panic. With the nature of lab work-- tedious, relying on cells to grow over the course of days and weeks-- I can't just rush to my desk and bust out the work that needs to be done. I am forced to sit and plan, and work for weeks to finish even one more experiment, one that may work to my benefit...or it may end more tragically (See: cell contamination). It's a horrible lesson in patience that I'm really tired of learning.