Visiting scientists

Today I had the opportunity to sit in on a meeting between Senior-Adviser and a visiting speaker. I’ve been looking forward to this speaker for some months– I’ve got an entire folder devoted to articles from his lab on my computer. His questions are similar to mine, but in a different model system. Anyway, the conversation was completely fascinating! I could have been a happy fly (pun intended) on the wall in that room for hours. Unfortunately I never managed to participate. It moved a little too quickly, and segued in a direction where I had little to contribute. Hopefully the speaker didn’t make any comments on my total silence when he met with Adviser-Prime later in the afternoon (in the past, people have asked Adviser-Prime if I’m autistic.)

I mostly interact with Senior-Adviser at the level of day-to-day methods, so it can be easy to forget his amazing  perspective on the intersections of evolutionary and molecular biology.

I’ve had some very good interactions with visiting scientists in the past- they don’t always end in awkward silence. It’s always slightly bittersweet. I’m almost 100% sure I’m leaving research when (if) I finish the PhD. I’ve got less then two years left, and I know I’ll miss the sense of being on the cutting edge, and the privilege of meeting luminaries in the field. I realize ‘luminaries’ is a bit pretentious, but it’s difficult to think of a better term for people whose labs are metaphorically defining the current face of evolutionary and molecular biology.

The speaker’s actual talk was also quite good, and covered an amazing amount of ground. It wasn’t what I expected– he’s breaking into some different model systems, with enormous potential implications. He was also a very practiced, accomplished speaker. Some scientists do important and interesting work that they can’t effectively communicate– definitely not the case here. I’ll probably blog more about that in a future post.

Funniest moment was when he was talking about a high risk experiment that required “$60-70,000 in transgenics”, and Adviser-Prime audibly whispered “holy shit!” The speaker agreed that if these experiments hadn’t produced a useable result, it would have been a “very sad day”. Between the two of them, it got a pretty good laugh.

The spooky grad-student hell dream

I few months ago I saw a production of “The Book of Mormon”– the musical written by the creators of South Park. I didn’t really like the (ethnocentric and racist) storyline, but some of the songs were catchy and fun. One of these was “The Spooky Mormon Hell Dream”, link here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNEh4bm6rNQ

It’s Hell for Mormon-specific minor sins (it features dancing coffee).

I waste a fair amount of mental energy feeling guilty for grad-student sins.

Things I’ve felt guilty about over the last week:

-losing productivity in late afternoon

-not getting to lab until 11:30am (after staying in lab until 3am the night before)

-working on projects that should have been complete several months ago

-outlining a NaNoWriMo novel during office hours

-doing homework the same day it’s due

-gchat and other internet while in lab

-not working on the weekend

-not being conscientious about lab chores

-complaining about my advisers

-not paying attention during talks

-not appreciating graduate school

-being more excited about books/fun than science/work

and last but not least…

-blogging in lab 🙂

Forgive me Science, for I have sinned…

I’m always working on being a better student, and not all weeks are as bad as last week. Still, it’s unusual to go more than a week or so without some failures, and the resulting disproportionate guilt. Graduate Student Hell probably includes angry committee members, rancid seminar coffee, dead specimens, and eventual unemployment. Hopefully that stays a spooky dream, and doesn’t become reality.

So much for a regular blogging schedule!

Shanah Tovah, everyone, a few weeks late.

For a couple weeks I was very busy, and then I fell out of the habit.

I’ve also written a second short story, and read…way too many books. It’s funny– I used to work so hard as a graduate student. I had to instill personal boundaries like “no bench work after midnight”, and “if you need to be in by 8am, make sure you’re out by 8pm”, because otherwise that sort of thing happened all the time. These days I have my books, my creative writing, my pets, and a few other hobbies lurking in the background. I sleep every night, I shower every day, and I’m a lot happier. It feels a little like cheating. I have the sense that if I’m not miserable in graduate school, I’m probably not working hard enough.

However, I finally finished Mistborn: The Final Empire. In the space of a couple days, I also read the two sequels. Brandon Sanderson is probably the top name in the epic fantasy genre these days (excluding George R. R. Martin, of course). This Penny Arcade comic isn’t entirely wrong: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/09/30/sanderfuge

His prose is decent, his characterization is not extremely convincing, and large parts of his books get redundant and long winded. By the end of the trilogy, I’d find myself skipping pages at a time, because they were covering old (or annoying) ground.

That said, he can *nail* an ending! Any complaints I had about writing quality consistently disappeared in the last hundred pages of his books. They were all fast paced, surprising, and for lack of a better word, awesome. After finishing the Final Empire, and book 2 “Mistborn: The Well of Ascension”, I was ready to take back anything negative I’d ever said or thought about his writing. They more than make up for other weaknesses.

Pizza/work nights

A semester ago, when I was in the process of switching thesis projects, I managed to sustain a high level of productivity over several months using ‘pizza/work nights’. I was based in Adviser-Prime’s lab space at the time, which has a reasonably comfortable office-couch. I’d bring a change of clothes to work, and take an early-evening nap in the office. When I woke up  between 8-11pm, I’d buy a pizza and commit to a long night of getting things done. I’d usually grab a few extra hours of sleep in the early morning, between 5-8am, before starting the ‘real’ workday. I would do this two or three times a week.

It was great! It added about 4-6 hours of productive time to my day. I’m easily distracted, and the big, un-interupted blocks of time were incredibly valuable. I’d queue up the complicated tasks I was dreading, and the next morning would have made real progress.

It also made work feel fun. Successful pizza-nights weren’t last-minute high-pressure all-nighters, they were entirely voluntary and rewarded by pizza.

Obviously there were downsides. Living out of the office would be completely impossible for anyone with a family, or people at home. It also wasn’t great for my sleep schedule, and I gained over five kilograms in three months from the pizza. I’m a fairly small person, five kg was not trivial. However, a few extra pounds seemed like nothing compared to the possibility of actually graduating someday (maybe even on time!).

I haven’t been able to replicate the phenomenon successfully in about six months. I’ve tried a few times (most recently last night), but my circadian rhythm isn’t currently set up for early evening naps. Without the nap, I eat a bunch of pizza, get very little done, and fall asleep for the whole night.

It was wonderful while it lasted.

All oars at the boat

So much for posting every day. I’ve been working on a short story in the evenings, and that’s been eating up my creative energy. It’s been affecting my research as well. On a few (many) occasions I’ve found myself tweaking my draft, or looking up writing tips in the lab.

I think that’s worse than blogging in the lab. My blog is about reflections on science and graduate school, so it’s nominally related to my research. Writing sci fi stories is not.

A few years ago Senior-Adviser gave the entire lab a lecture on the importance of arriving at lab by 10am. It wasn’t delivered as a lecture, but as an extended metaphor, with accompanying visual aids. The lab is a boat (specifically one of the boats that used to sail out of Cold Spring Harbor). If you’re in science, it’s important to make sure that all the boat’s crew have their oars going in the same direction. Otherwise the boat moves to slowly, and the lab loses funding. If you want to have time consuming hobbies, you should work at a bank. In science, you need to be all in. And that means getting to work before 10.

I want to keep writing for fun, but I need to learn to set better boundaries. Otherwise I don’t belong on the pilgrimage.