My plans? Destroyed.

I am an idiot.

In order to be all proactive and shit, I decided to ask my boss which journal I should submit my paper to. She usually leaves that up to us, but I know I'm lucky that I'm even getting to write the damn thing in the first place so I'm not trying to push my luck here. Anyway, her response was that she would like to see my results section - right away - in order to make that decision.

Fuck.

So yeah, I'll be in the lab this weekend.

There's a really important lesson here. It's one that I thought I knew already. Way back in my undergrad years, the sage grad student in our lab told me that I should never let my boss know exactly what I was doing at any given time. I should instead give him old data (ie, a few days) instead of fresh, just finished yesterday results. That way, I would always appear productive and on top of things. I would be able to take off in the afternoon and drink beer - just like she did - even when the boss knew about it.

See, I've brushed up with up-to-date here. My boss knows that I don't have my results written and all of my figures done. She didn't sound too happy about it, either.

Ah, the imaginary connotation of email.

Writing a damn paper

Ugh. More complaining!

Ok, not really. This one really isn't that bad. I am just writing my first paper. It is, in theory, fucking awesome. The idea was mine, I designed and performed every damn experiment for the thing, and I am writing it. It's my first first-author paper. Woohoo!

In practice, though, it's semi-horrible. I work much better with a gun to my head. In fact, I've done my best work under atrocious conditions - and I have the gray hair to prove it! For this, though, there is no deadline except for "soon." That is just not working for me.

I can't tell you how many times I have toted my reference papers and photocopies of my results from the lab, to my home, and back to the lab again without even taking them out of the binders. They just look at me over the weekend, taunting me. I keep thinking, "I should be working on my paper." Torturing myself. Over and over. I always end up watching some stupid crap on TV and feeling guilty when I stroll in to the lab, late, as usual, on a Monday morning.

So I've made a deadline for myself. I have ten days to finish the first draft. With hope, this goal will make the transition from arbitrary deadline to a proverbial gun to the head and I will accomplish the task.

The outlook? Not so good. I foresee several all-nighters in the murky future, or endless streaming waves of guilt. Awesome.

Some new vocabulary

Today I was so tired in class that when I was taking notes, I wrote "geen" instead of "gene."

Disaster at a temporary pause

Right. I was postponing writing about the end of the semester until I received all of my grades, but that hasn't happened yet and I've already started a new semester. So here it goes.

Fall semester.

This was the single worst semester of school I have ever experienced - and that is saying a lot. I got kicked out of school three times my senior year in high school, so there was some pretty tough competition on that front. Seriously, I've tried to convey the horror here but I am incapable of finding the right words.

See, my education means a lot to me. I feel a little silly sometimes when I take bad teaching so personally, but then really everyone should. I'm only going to go through grad school once, so in my opinion it better fucking count. But the majority of professors in this school are horrible and are making class pointless.

Let's say someone gives you a lecture on how to make a batch of cookies. You follow along, understanding why things are added when. It all makes sense. Cooking is, in fact, just chemistry. But then you are tested on this lecture. It's a multiple choice exam, and the questions are asking how many millimeters across the dough mound should be and about the type of heat that is delivered by your oven. Are both of these points important? Sure they are. But do they truly further your understanding about how cookies are made? No.

This is what I am talking about. I am being taught stuff, but not learning anything. It's horrible.

Anyway, the first semester is over. Thank fuck for that. No more complaining about that shit. This semester, instead of taking seventeen credits, I will only be taking fourteen. Or twelve. I haven't really fully decided on this one class, so I'm going to wait and see how that goes. It sounds interesting, but it's on Wednesday evening and gets out after 5pm. This means less time out of the lab. Tricky.

Maybe it's that I'm fresh out of a break, but things are good right now. I'm writing my paper, finally - but that is another story.

Finals

So I'm in finals week.

This semester has been horrible. At first, I thought that the classes were too easy - and they were, in a sense. For instance, I have covered DNA transcription in no less than four courses. But I had to cover it again here in the Biochemistry course at the University of Hell. By this point, transcription is easy. Somehow, though, I ended up with Ds on all of my exams. Ds! Me!

I've been panicking since that second D, thinking that I would have to take this class over again. There is absolutely no way on earth that I could do that. I am done emotionally. I am filled with rage at the condescending manner in which the professor speaks to me and the other students, at the level that the material is covered, but most of all because all the exams are multiple choice.

I seriously think I would have transferred had I failed. But then, I probably wouldn't have been able to transfer if I failed. Fuck me, I cannot wait to get these dumb classes over with and continue on with the real reason that I came to graduate school - to do fucking science, man!

I have three more finals left, none of which pertains to anything that I am now doing in the lab or anything in which I am remotely interested. I have no motivation. I am probably going to end up on academic probation.

But I am back in my home lab now, and much happier for it. My overall mood is improved, my experiments are working, and I'm writing my paper. I have to say, it is really strange to think that these pictures of blot membranes and graphs that I quickly put together so as not to be late for lab meeting will one day be in print. It's bizarre. My shitty little science might actually mean something.

Maybe this is all worth it after all.

Misery

Can you believe it? Things are still shitty!

I have decided to stop complaining, though. There is literally nothing that I can do to remedy this situation. I have thought about transferring to another school, but then I would have to go through another year of courses. That will not do. So I am stuck here, in Dumbshit University, for all eternity.

The medical students here are, in a word, ridiculous. I don't think they are aware that they are out of college, or maybe even high school. They are very, very loud and obnoxious. To top it off, they are also very stupid. I mean, all you do in medical school is memorize shit that other people have figured out. A monkey could do that, given enough time.

Seriously, if this is the state of medical schools across the country, then I am completely afraid for my future health. Maybe they just learn everything during residencies. I'm pinning my hopes on that. These dumbshits have less than shit for brains.

I think though, that the landscape might be different at state schools. This is a place of privilege, after all. Some medical students go here just for the name. I'm sure a significant chunk of them did so just because daddy went here too. At state schools, though, there are people who have busted their asses their entire life to get into medical school. I'm sure they take things more seriously there. They have to, right?

Anyway, I'm becoming more and more bitter. It has nothing to do with these retarded medical students talking loudly in the library while I am trying to study, or the fact that my academic adviser has yet to show up for our morning meeting and it is now approaching 1pm. It's that I am becoming less and less like anything that my friends and family can relate to. I have nothing to offer but shitty scientific dribble. My life is school and lab. And rage.

I am so fucking boring.

This weekend, I stayed in and wrote a damn term paper. I didn't even leave the house once! In fact, I can't really remember the last time I did anything fun for the sake of fun. It's really sad.

Yay grad school!

Things you must learn in grad school #1: Scavenging for free food

Finding free food. No matter the subject of your research, this is one of the most important (and useful) skills you will learn as a graduate student. The concept seems obvious at first, because who doesn't like free food? We are poor students, after all.

Sometimes coming upon food happens because you are in the right place at the right time. For instance, dumb luck today netted me a turkey sandwich with two types of cheese on a kaiser roll, fresh fruit (including raspberries and blackberries), cheese tortellini pasta salad, hummus with pita chips, barbecue lays, and a brownie. And a diet coke. All of this because I walked out of class a little early and right into the middle of a poster symposium for the medical students. Ah, luck.

Did I pretend to be interested in the posters? No. Did I ask who the food was for? No. I just got in line. The important skill here is that you need to look like that food is meant for you. It's sorta like why you never got carded for alcohol after you turned 21. It's all about confidence.

Another way to score free food is to get involved. I know, I know - getting involved is a time vortex. Meetings and stuff have free food and refreshments all the time, but you have to like do stuff for it. Fuck that. I add it here simply because it is another scavenging source.

Reading flyers is monumentally important. These will tell you about vendor shows - which can sometimes have some pretty good fare. Again, the goal at the vendor shows is to get in and out with your food. Don't feel bad about not talking to the people trying to sell you pointless new crap - you are on a mission. I once saw a vendor make the mistake of announcing that they were bringing pizza as their lunch treat. I have never ever seen so many people go through so much pizza so quickly. In less than five minutes, hundreds of people descended upon over fifty pizzas and cleaned out each and every cardboard box. It was astonishing. That, my friends, is how is how it's done.

Get to know the people who run the little coffee shops and snack stops on campus. Also, get to know when they close. Hang around when they close. They have to get rid of those old pastries and cookies sometime, you know. Wouldn't they be better in your stomach than in the trash? You're a grad student - use your powers of persuasion and stuff to make that shit happen.

The point I'm trying to make here is you must be bold. You must be confident. You must not be afraid of getting yelled at for taking food.

Aside from the whole instant gratification of the free food, there are other important factors to which scavenging for free food contributes greatly. You have to get to know people, so this increases your networking skills. Also, the more people you know, the more chances you will hear about someone's dissertation refreshment sessions or really undisclosed food opportunities. You have to be paying attention, so make sure to look around when you are carrying your samples down the hall or leaving a professor's office and wishing you could punch him or her right in the face.

But most importantly, finding free food means that you can spend more time in the lab. That stuff you brought for lunch can now be your dinner. You just earned some extra time working that you didn't have before. And the time that you are there will be spent in a much more pleasant mood due to the afterglow of free, delicious food.

Man, this turkey sandwich is fucking awesome.

So I've been away...

So I haven't posted in a while because, well, I hate everything.

Work in the rotation lab is not going well. On two separate occasions, my cells have become contaminated with yeast. I have no idea how this is even possible. I have been doing tissue culture work for years, and I have never had a problem. Now suddenly this has happened twice. Twice! The PI looks at me like I'm an idiot.

I finally got enough cells growing to do a immunoprecipitation experiment. I did the IP just fine, but today when I went to run the gel all hell broke loose. Someone prepared the running buffer wrong, so although the current was steady - there were 700 volts flowing through the damn gel. The cassette got so hot that it cracked the glass and my gel dribbled out of the casing, and I lost my sample. It took me forever to get that shit ready for the experiment and a lot of time doing the experiment itself, only to be foiled by a buffer. What. The. Fuck.

I'm bringing contamination and destruction everywhere I go. It's like I'm living in bizarro world and I'm completely incompetent.

I can't wait to get back to my real lab.

Class is still horrible. I'm still doing really bad on exams for some unknown reason, even though the material isn't hard. I don't get this, either.

I went to a conference a few weeks ago. I was all prepared for people to ignore my poster, as is usually the case - but this time was different. I had quite a few people show up to talk to me during the poster session. In addition, I heard from my work colleague that he saw about four or five people taking photos of my poster when the hall was empty.

I hate people that do this kinda shit. I mean, if you aren't able to come up with your own ideas and your own experimental design, why the fuck are you in science at all? If you need to photograph the slides from someone's talk because you can't figure shit out on your own, you should turn in your degree. I absolutely can't stand these assholes.

Now I have to start writing my paper so I don't get scooped. I don't know what I will do if I get scooped. I'm pretty sure that petrol bombing would fit in there somewhere.

Man, I thought grad school was going to be great. I'm being challenged in all the wrong ways, though. Pointless memorization. Idea theft. Dickbag professors. And worst of all, the stifling of my creativity. I'm sure I can use all of these lessons eventually, but that fact is really not making things any better. This sucks.

So yeah, I hate everything.

Caffeine

I did not sleep much last night. I was thinking about the lab. Unfortunately, I do this often. I can't tell you how many times I've come up with some really great ideas for experiments and such while in bed. I mean, the ideas are a good thing - I just wish I could sleep sometimes.

Fun, fun, fun

Well. The comedy is over. My statistics professor spends a great deal of time talking about her cruise of the Mediterranean. The class is so easy that I don't even know why I bother to show up anymore.

In my Molecular Biology course, there are people who don't know the difference between sense and anti-sense DNA strands. I wonder how they got in to graduate school. I wonder why the fuck I thought coming here was a good idea. I wonder if I threw my career trajectory away to keep my apartment.

A long time ago, I went to this lecture on "The Imposter Syndrome." A lot of smart people think they are imposters, that they don't measure up and are secretly really stupid. There was a grad student from MIT in front of me. I was afraid of that, so I sold myself short. I didn't want to get ass-raped by intense courses.

I thought grad school was going to be fucking brutal no matter where I went. It is not. I swear that I am not that smart - it is just that this shit is mind-numbingly easy.

It depresses me. I am depressed. Poor me, school is too easy. My rotation lab is working me like a slave. I am pretty sure that I hate everything right now.