Grad School Blues

I hear that everyone in grad school gets depressed. Well, maybe this is my turn. My time to be awash in misery and question my desire to continue.

There are just so many things wrong. I should be happy, having finished and passed all of my classes this semester. It is also the last semester of full-time coursework I will ever have to endure - so even more reason to celebrate. But no, I am in a strange void.

So, to start, I am being challenged by my own lab about my paper. It's getting to be a really uncomfortable, antagonistic environment. I designed a new method, and it works, but no one in the lab believes me.

I don't know what's going on here, but I am miserable. I have pulled up paper after paper and provided tons of evidence that demonstrates my method actually works. It works! I have done countless controls before starting these experiments, but the past month has been spent doing more. More controls to prove something that I have already proven dozens of times over and over and over.

So this is science?

I am amazed at how myopic scientists can be. It really saddens me. They get something in to their heads, and it becomes an immovable fact. There is no plasticity in their brains - just facts. "Facts." Unfortunately they forget that, in order for science to be evolving, some current knowledge must, by definition, be incorrect. Some "facts" are fucked, and if we keep using the same methods and the same setup, we will never learn anything new. Science must evolve, or else it will become like the medical field - figurative and literal regurgitation.

I can't wait to have my own lab. I hope I make it.