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.

Day One

The first classes were today. I felt like an impostor when I put on my backpack, like I was too old or something. It seemed as though there was no possible reason on earth that a twenty-seven-year-old person should leave the house wearing one. I honestly was looking around for people staring...

But they weren't, of course. At least, not for the backpack.

Biochemistry scared the shit out of me for some reason. I don't know why, but I just hate thermodynamics. Every time I tried to do that stuff in the lab, like working with calorimeters and shit, I always fucked up. But there they were on the first slide - entropy and shit. The horror! I really, really hope this is the last fucking time I have to deal with this shit. Every time it comes up, I think it is the last time. But no, the punishment never ends.

I have a slew of other courses as well. It seems I am no longer capable of taking less than seventeen credit hours a semester. I know I am setting myself up for wrinkles and gray hair and shit, but I am willing to sacrifice that in order to get these dumb courses out of the way in the first year. I want them done. Over. Now.

Oh yeah, and I'm still not registered. Awesome.

The Last Day of Freedom

So I start class tomorrow.

Unfortunately, I do not know what classes I will be starting. I had orientation on Friday, but I was told that I would not be able to meet with my program director or advisor, and that a special meeting would need to be set up. I was supposed to receive word about this later Friday afternoon, but I have not yet heard anything. Hooray, things really are starting out well. I think I'll just randomly show up to classes that I think I should be taking. Or something. I don't even have my ID yet. I am officially shitting myself.

It appears that I will have to be in my first class by 9am every day, even Friday. Ugh.

Last week I had to take radiation safety and lab safety courses. These are the same ones that I have taken at every single institution I have ever been at, so it was mind-numbingly boring. However, as I sat there, I realized that it felt good to be sitting in a classroom again. Sadly, I must admit that I really enjoy taking courses. I am such a nerd that I don't even really read fiction books. My bookshelves are lined with science-based books and texts on philosophy and stuff like that.

I can't believe people hang out with me.

Monday

I hate those days when you absolutely cannot be bothered to do any experiments.

I'm having one of those days today. It's a Monday. I keep thinking about Office Space and shit. I've done very little actual work today. I've been pretty good about changing my screen to PubMed every time someone walks by. You know, gotta make it look like I'm doing something.

One of the post-docs here totally supports the loafing about. I mean, when it comes down to it, sometimes it is better to do nothing than to do something. For instance, there have been plenty of occasions where I just could not be arsed doing an experiment, I ended up doing it, but I fucked it up somehow. Now, if I had only waited to do it the next day, it might have been done properly. The particular experiment I am talking about takes about a week and a half to do from start to finish, so if I fuck it up I have actually wasted quite a bit of time.

So I think I'm sitting on my ass today. I'm fucking tired and shit.

I have a stack of papers about three inches tall that I should be reading. If I read them, though, I will pass the fuck out. The stuff I love can be so fucking boring sometimes.

It's like when I try to describe my research to someone outside the field - I get the glazed eye look. I try to keep it as broad as possible. "I'm in biomedical research." That is all I really want to say, but I am inevitably pushed deeper and deeper until I am talking about proteins and signaling. Then I get the glazed eye look from the person I am talking to, he or she is completely bored, and I have ruined a conversation. Fun, fun, fun.

I'm going to start saying that I am in the circus and just make shit up.

Fear and fear itself

Man, I start Grad School in a month.

I am starting to freak out a little bit. I mean, it's been almost two years since I have been in school, and now I have to get back in the ring again. Courses. Exams. Papers. They are all waiting for me.

Fuck.

I have been living the good life for two years. I'm salaried. I'm not expected to produce anything at this level, let alone publish. My lab is really well funded so I can do pretty much whatever I want, and it's beautiful. Beautiful! And now I'm going to have to put on a backpack? For reals? Fuck that! Fuck pencils and spiral-bound notebooks, man! I want to continue to be lazy!

One of the students who showed me around when I was interviewing at my school said that trying to grasp all the material in one particular intro course was "like drinking from a fire hose." I am jumping for fucking joy here. I can barely get my ass out of bed before 8am and now I'm going to have to digest information at that hour, after the one hour commute? I'm thinking no.

No coffee can awaken me to that extreme at such a perilously early time point.

Don't get me wrong, I am totally fucking stoked to finally be getting my ass in to grad school after all this time. It's just that I've been on summer vacation for a long ass time. The days are getting shorter and shit. I was never good at coming to terms with the end of summer vacation. On more than one instance, I spent the very last day trying to read each and every one of my summer reading books. It didn't go well.

Needless to say, I still harbor a hatred for Steinbeck.

I have a few weeks left, all of which will be spent frantically trying to get some kind of closure on my project. Amazingly, it is going very well, and I've produced some kickass data this summer. Unfortunately, there is no fucking way I'm going to get it anywhere near journal submission before I leave. This means that this fall, in addition to taking courses and doing a lab rotation, I will most likely be spending my weekends here in my lab trying to get my shit finished.

I need a life.

An observation

So I watched The Nutty Professor the other night. That movie makes me laugh.

To anyone with knowledge of cell biology and/or genetics, the plot is completely absurd. Amazingly, I was able to get past this - which is something that cannot be said for other such films. Something else bothers me, though...

I don't know why, but it really, really fucking annoys me that at the end of the film, in the climax scene, Professor Klump/Buddy Love keeps his potion in a tissue culture flask.

I scowl and become infuriated every time I see it.

Sussing the fuck out

There is this kid I know, with a similar position as mine, and he is also going off to grad school. I will be doing my research here, and he is going elsewhere. Awesome.

I like this kid. We never really became friends or anything, but we were quite friendly. We joked, shared buffers, and I taught him how to do a few things in the lab. It was pretty cool.

However, I recently discovered that he confided in one of the post-docs with whom I am close. He said that his degree was worth more than mine, since he went to a private school and I went to a state school. His GPA, therefore, was better than me graduating magna cum laude. Also, he said that he would be better off after grad school than I would. What the fuck?

You know what? Science is hard. And yes, maybe in the lower-level courses like Biology 101, I had a few multiple choice tests. But I worked hard for the other grades. I couldn't just sleep through those classes. I got a motherfucking A in Genetics - something which very few people at my university managed to do. That was a badge of honor and shit. But apparently, that is not worth the same as an A in Genetics from a tiny ass university I have never even heard of.

This was the major problem I had with choosing a grad school. No matter what I was told, I knew that if I didn't go to a school with a big name, I would be fighting an uphill battle for the rest of my scientific career. Why choose someone from State University when there's someone from Hopkins, Harvard, or MIT applying? Who would you choose? No matter the publication record, the person with a pedigree will always have a slight edge. That's just the way it is.

I wanted to stay in this lab for many reasons. I am treated like a colleague here - not a student. My opinion of techniques and papers is valued. My work is both valued and highly trusted. The people are awesome. What more could you want? But I am staying here at the expense of a big name.

I've decided to let my work speak for itself, to do this without a big name supporting me. I know that I'm good enough, damnit. I have my eyes open. He, on the other hand, is deluded enough to think that he's going to get a paper a year in grad school.

That will be funny to me until long after I graduate.

The job is so glamorous I could kill myself with glee

I kinda miss working in a university lab. The vibe there is much different than in my current institution. Essentially, this comes down to value of the product (i.e., publications) rather than the how the product comes about.

The university lab was great. At the time, I was doing a lot of molecular biology shiz, which of course involved lots of cloning and such. This process doesn't involve a lot of babysitting, since it's essentially just growing bacteria, so I didn't have to be around for the whole day - and I wasn't. This was awesome. I was working on experiments while drinking beer at a bar in the afternoon. It didn't matter that I wasn't there physically. What mattered was that I was progressing toward publishing my work.

My current place of employment is not as such. I am supposed to be here, working, eight hours a day. I'm still a student, but this doesn't matter. Eight hours. Bleh. There are some days when I'm rarely at the bench but I'm stuck here anyway. It can be torturous. Whereas I would goof off sometimes at the university but then make it up on the weekends, I simply cannot do that here. If I say I'm coming in on the weekends, I get strange looks and the postdocs suggest that I just wait until Monday. Here, it's timecard over product, and it's stupid. Stupid, stupid.

What do I do with this time? When I'm being good, I check out PubMed for the latest and greatest. However, since I regularly check about thirty journals via RSS on a near daily basis, this doesn't really take a lot of time. It is then that I turn to the internet and soil my brain with stupid crap. I read lots of blogs, since they change often enough to keep me sane. I chat on Gmail. I send text messages to friends. It's such an exciting life.

I often wonder how scientists did science before computers and the internet. Seriously. Did they just get more done? I mean, there are some people who come in to the lab and spend about an hour checking email before they even get to the bench. Depending on the day, I can be one of those people. But really, were scientists in the days of yore that much more efficient, or did they eventually even up the time difference by having to walk to the library and physically search for articles? I'd like to know.

Whenever I see pictures of scientists in the 50's, they're always hanging out in the hallways smoking cigarettes and pipes. Maybe it's as simple as that. If it is, then downtime in the lab has never been good for our health or sanity.