The Future? What Future?

Since I neglect to update this blog on any type of regular interval, I'm going to try to summarize:

I graduated!  Yes!

I have a post doctoral position lined up!  Yes!

It's in a different country!  Yes?

Let's start with the first thing:  defending my thesis and graduating.  Everyone had told me that it was a "formality" and "easy" to defend the thesis and go through the committee meeting afterward.  At my institution, we have four faculty members on a committee, who are joined by a fifth from another institution.  They read through the thesis, make comments, and ask questions of you for a few hours after you have presented on your research to the department.  The after-presentation meeting is where things were not so much fun, namely my committee asked questions that I have absolutely no idea how to answer.  I'm not sure if that's how it was supposed to be, but it was very painful.  First question out of the gate was about a protein that I remember marginally, so I had to really think on my feet and try to come up with something.  Eventually the conversation drifted toward metabolism, which I abhor and have not thought about for four years.  Needless to say, I was exhausted afterward.

Something that surprised me was how little satisfaction I received from finishing my defense.  At the end, everyone politely says congratulations and then life moves one.  Meanwhile, I was thinking in my head, "HOLY CRAP I'M DONE."  In reality, it doesn't mean much.  Sure, my parents were excited, but to everyone in the lab and the department, it was more "meh."  Just another PhD, I guess.  That's rather depressing.

My thesis edits aren't terrible, and I was quite surprised at how my committee really had few corrections.  As I was going through all of the pages (so much paper wasted!), I realized that I didn't have that much to do.  I went into this process knowing that I would have to make changes, so I expected some things, such as expanding the discussion and clarifying a few issues.  Nonetheless, I expected that they would tear the document apart.  Not the case, thankfully!

Which brings me to the topic of my next post...  how to write a thesis without going crazy.  I'll save it for next week, assuming that I remember to actually update this blog.

A Potential Rejuvenation

Although I'm not going to make any promises, I'm going to try my hardest to update this little blog a little more frequently.  As I near the end of my PhD (how in the world did that happen?), I'm realizing that I need to concentrate a little more on my writing, be that at the professional level of writing papers and proposals (and a thesis!) or in simple blog posts.  Walking into lab this morning, I realized that the amount of time I spend writing is abysmal and that I really only write when I must.  Since that's probably not going to fly too well with a future employer, I feel that writing more frequently in this blog might be just the remedy, regardless of how few people actually will ever see these words.

That being said, I'm not sure of how best to approach a "reboot," as I hate them as much as the next person. Since my last posts on this blog, I've matured into a much different person and scientist - much calmer, more cynical, and even more disgruntled.  The last few years of graduate school have been a whirlwind of chaos that has taught me many valuable life lessons and has beaten every once of creativity out of my brain.  I both hate it and love it at the same time.

Let's suffice it to say that papers have been published, conferences have been attended, and proposals have been written.  I'm not going to go into gory details of any of those aspects since, quite frankly, no one wants to read that information.

In the future, I hope to further explore what's been going on in and out of the lab, as well as topics that have been bothering me, such as finding that elusive post-doctoral job and not bursting into tears when an experiment fails.

A Rant about Western Blots

I hate Western blots.  I think they are the most annoying, frustrating, and obnoxious experiments to do in lab.  I hate that the process takes at least two days and that it's so antibody-dependent.

First, I am fully willing to admit that I am not good at Western blotting.  My films usually look a little messy, and I've taken several steps to clean up my methods to no avail.  The process is so touchy and there are so many steps that, apparently, I have trouble performing properly.  That's my problem though.

What I hate about Westerns is how subjective they are.  One antibody uses a milk block; another uses BSA; the last one takes three quarts of finely grated basil and a dash of kosher salt.  The first one needs to be incubated overnight at 4 degrees; the second needs three hours at room temperature; the third needs to be set on a wooden stool in the midday sun from exactly noon to 2:30 PM.

The "voodoo" science involved in making these antibodies work bothers me.

It also doesn't help that the department's developer was made prior to the Cold War era (and I'm probably not even exaggerating too much).

What alternative is there?  None.  I may hate the process, but there's no way I'm getting around doing Western blots for the rest of my laboratory career.

Science music!

I like listening to music a lot, and I always find it comforting to listen to it in lab.  This often leads to me basically choosing what everyone else has to hear... which was fine when there were two people in the lab.  Now that we've grown in size, however, I feel bad about making everyone listen to my music.

In reality, they have every right to plug their iPods into the stereo or choose a different radio station... but they don't.  So I do.  Does this make me a bad person... because I listen to my music all the time in the lab?  Maybe I would feel bad about it if anyone else expressed interest in playing their music.

I guess that I'll just continue listening to Britney Spears and the Spice Girls on a regular basis.  Nobody's complained yet...

My lab playlist:

• Joss Stone
• Girls Aloud
• Maroon5
• Clarika
• Britney
• The Saturdays
• Janelle Monae
• Amy Winehouse
• Nicki Minaj
• Ke$ha
• Erykah Badu
• MGMT
• Paula Abdul
• Spice Girls
• Alicia Keys
• TLC

I'm not entirely sure why they're almost all female singers, but I guess that's my preference.  I like to think that I have a mixture of music, but I tend toward radio-friendly pop music.

Pressing the "Submit" button

As I mentioned in the last post I did, my PI is gone on vacation and I've been working my butt off with a number of different experiments.  Today, I finish the last experiment we need to submit our latest paper.  The problem is that she's out of the country... leaving me to submit the paper.

She sure didn't seem to have any problems with me submitting the paper.  Maybe I should take that as a sign that she trusts me to do this on my own...  But it's still freaking me out.  What if I upload the wrong file?  Did I choose the right keywords?  Is my new figure "pretty" enough?  I shouldn't be worried since it's not an enormous paper, and it's not going to a super-high impact journal.  Still, it's my first time...

Submitting this paper is scary and fun at the same time.  I guess it's a good experience for the future, regardless of how I feel about it.

While the boss is away...

My PI is on vacation to a far-away land.  And I am not.

As usual, when the boss is away, everyone in the lab is even more stressed than ever.  I'm still trying to finish up the comments on the paper we submitted last month, so I'm under a deadline to submit it before vacation's end.  Everything would have been done last week had I properly read the labels on our antibodies.

Dammit.

But all is not lost - I will finish my experiments this week, get back on track, submit the paper, and maybe even relax ever so slightly.

On a positive note: the experiment I so desperately needed to work for my thesis actually worked.  The universe doesn't hate me!  And the best thing is that I included almost every single possible control in my first set of experiments.  Now all of my data is organized, beautiful, and figure-ready.  I've never had my experiments work so beautifully on the first go.

I could get used to that.

Oh, and I changed the background on the blog because I was playing with Illustrator and liked what I made. :)

No time for sickness

The Independence Day weekend was fantastic, visiting my undergraduate school and bumming around town during the hot, sunny, beautiful summer days.  At times I miss being an undergraduate, particularly in the summer, when I had few responsibilities and I had a lot of free time to just relax.  Those days are apparently over, and while I might reminisce, I feel that it is truly time to move on and be a "responsible" and "mature" graduate student.

And while on that mini-vacation, I became sick.  It started just as a sore throat, and now it's going into full-blown sinus nastiness.  I can't breathe and my head feels like it's stuff in a giant feather pillow.  It's not like I'm dying, but I'm not enjoying this current state either.

Regardless, I don't really feel like working or thinking today: my head is tired, I feel sick, and my vacation days just ended.  I would like to crawl into a small, science-less ball and take a nap.  It's not like I'm asking for much.

But no. Cells must be split, infections must be inoculated, plasmids must be digested, and primers must be ordered.

I'm just going to do it all slowly.