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i think this is a topic that grad students really should pay more attention to. i’ve blogged in the past about grads who do some really short-sighted things and greatly increase their post-graduation financial burden. this adds a lot of stress to anyone who’s paying the least bit of attention to the state of their finances. finding a job in today’s economy is not a guaranteed thing, but the loan payments will come back to bite you regardless. and compound interest can be a powerful foe or a powerful ally, depending on which side of the fence you’re on.
the grad stipend is really not much money to live on. and when you don’t have much of something, what do you do? if you’re smart, you prioritize, choose what’s worth using some of this limited resource to have, and then you learn to make it stretch to meet your needs. i am trying to get this principle across to my youngest sister, but she’s still in that mistake-making phase of her young life.
for context, rent for a little one-bedroom apartment costs 45% of my take-home income on its own. i recommend that single grad students try to find a room mate to share living expenses, because this isn’t an easy amount to manage. figure in electric, internet, etc and this adds up quickly. i refuse to live near campus due to the local crime, and the only safe places to live in that area are out of my price range.
the next biggest expense for the typical local grad is often transportation. the best car for a grad student is something that doesn’t tie you down with car payments. we have no car payments, and are very grateful for the feeling of freedom. i know several students who purchased a brand new vehicle, financed it, then took out student loans to make the monthly payments. let’s think about how wise this is:
say you buy a $20,000 car at 5% interest with a 6 year loan term. you end up paying a total of about $23,200 for the car and the interest when all is said and done. however, this entire $23,200 is paid for with other borrowed funds.
say you then borrow $4000 in federal unsubsidized loans per year for the car payments and car related expenses. (we are not eligible for subsidized loans for the first few years in my program.) the interest rate is 6.8% fixed. you defer these loans for 6 years while you are in graduate school, and pay them off over a standard repayment term of 10 years. this total loan amount of $24,000 costs you $9143 in interest for a total repayment amount of $33,143.
congratulations, that $20,000 car will have cost you $33,143 and will be 16 years old before it is really paid off. bad, bad move all around. find a cheap thing that will get you from a to b for 6 years and stick a couple bucks in it for the occasional repair. you will be far better off, even if your car isn’t as fancy as the ones your fellow students with poor decisionmaking skills drive. one thing you need to learn as a grad student is to NEVER judge yourself based upon what others are doing. (this applies to science and personal lives!) this is the quickest way to completely undermine yourself.
we have given up a LOT of entertainment for purposes of keeping the finances from going negative. no going out drinking (and it’s not that i don’t like a good long island or 3 with friends, but that they are expensive!), we only see 1-2 movies a year in the theater, i prepare food at home rather than going out, we rent a cheap movie here and there when we’ve got a quiet night to hang out. we don’t have cable, but we find tv shows we like on the internet. we play board games, cards, whatever we have laying around. i invite friends over for conversation and games, or potluck dinners.
finally, minimize everywhere else you can. keep your living space at a moderate temperature. buy real food and bring it to work, instead of buying power bars and snack cookies from the vending machines downstairs. drive conservatively. you don’t need an iphone when a 99 cent cheap phone will still get you in touch with your friends and family. now is probably not the time to be buying lots of new electronics you won’t have time to play with anyway- avoid the big screen tv and surround sound system until you have more free time. we all know what everyone else makes every month- there is no point in showing off what you can’t really afford to buy, to try to impress us. check out books from the library instead of buying them. get free food at seminars whenever possible.
adjust your expectations. you do not need to have the same standard of living as your parents, who are decades older than you and have established careers and work history. you may have grown up in a huge house if you’re from a well-off family, but when starting off on your own, you have far smaller needs. i have the opposite problem- my family thinks i’m the really well-off one! and maybe i am, in my family. it doesn’t make it much easier to make ends meet.
these are just a few ideas that i use on a daily basis, and spouse and i are pretty satisfied with our lives. we don’t have much, i admit. but we don’t really need much. we have what we need and don’t have what we don’t need. and if you don’t have something to work for, something that you want but can’t yet have (aside from the damned phd, we all want that!) then what are you doing to motivate yourself?
happy thanksgiving, everyone!
i’m thankful to be done with all that data processing stuff, and that my mega-cool observation still stands with a higher n and after removal of possible tracking artifacts. interaction of interest stands at a significant p value- sweet! one more experimental group to go.
i also just whipped up a bunch of tasty stuff that will go in the oven after the turkey is done, and be ready in time for dinner and/or dessert. i am so on top of things right now. i have been looking forward to thanksgiving for weeks!
alright, i’m just irritated enough to blog about this far too late in the evening and after working for nearly all my waking hours today. the more i read, the more my brain screamed at me to stop. but i had to continue on…
i mean really, nobody is going to be at ALL questioning of an article title that goes something like:
Marijuana Compound Grows New Brain Cells and Reduces Inflammation
zomg! it’s the miracle cure for like, everything! quick, find me the number for the dude with the weed!
the number of scientific inaccuracies in this article pained me. i had to say something about this, and i guess that’s why i have a blog?
the author of this interpretation bases it upon a presentation at SFN this year- this group published an article last year that can be found here if you are so inclined to compare. i had to read the real study, obviously, but then going back and comparing to this article made me feel worse. in short, the authors studied the antiinflammatory properties of the cannabinoid full agonist WIN55,212-2. this is an interesting study, because we know that the cannabinoid system does play a role in immunomodulation.
they started out by implanting minipumps into middle-adult or advanced-aged animals, and allowing 14 days of constant drug or vehicle infusion prior to running behavioral assays. drug animals received either a low dose (0.5 mg/kg) or a high dose (2 mg/kg). they studied the effects of this drug upon spatial and nonspatial learning in the Morris water maze. the brains from these rats were then subjected to three different endpoints: western blot or binding assay to quantify CB1, active microglia staining, and double-immunofluorescence for CB1 and several other markers.
i’ll get to the water maze task in a minute, because i find a particularly irksome quote in the interpretation article about this.
as i (and the rest of the world) expected to see, old adults had higher levels of activated microglia. interestingly, the high dose of WIN did significantly reduce the number of activated microglia over control.
there was a significant effect of age on receptor binding. this is expected, we know that CB1 peaks at an early age and declines thereafter. by the time rats are advanced in age as the ones in this study, they have much lower levels than middle adulthood. this was the only significant effect. drug treatment did not alter the receptor numbers.
they found no colocalization between CB1 and immune cells in the brain, but good colocalization between CB1 and neuronal markers- also expected, since CB2 is the main immunomodulatory cannabinoid receptor while CB1 is central. sadly, they did not venture to do the same immunochemistry with a CB2 antibody.
alright, now back to that water maze study. let’s just look at the figure, hm? (ooh, i’m venturing into posting images on my blog…)
here we have it. first thing to notice is that the middle adults (“young”) are much more adept at this task than are the older adults (“old”). now, what about the effect of low and high doses of WIN? in general, low WIN doesn’t have an effect on the middle adults, but high WIN impairs them across the later days of training. day 4 seems to buck the trend, as you see. low WIN also has no significant effect upon older adults’ performance in this task, but high WIN does improve their performance significantly.
interesting, right? the way i see it, clearly there’s some relief of inflammation going on in the high dose advanced adult animals that facilitates performance in a spatial learning task. i would debate the mechanism presented in the conclusion since they presented no data on CB2, and if they really want to sort out the mechanism they propose in this paper, they can do a future study including a CB1 selective antagonist to block the effects of WIN and i will be interested.
the interpretation article takes a very different slant on this, making it sound to the average reader (i tried this out on my electronics-guy husband) that taking this new cannabinoid drug now makes your memory BETTER over the long term! wow, a cannabinoid drug that not only fails to screw up your mental function, but improves it! surely we’re on the right track now!
NOW can i get to the part that pissed me off? this quote of the authors from the interpretation article:
“We used a low dose because we didn’t want to give them a drug that tried to save their memory while we’re also causing psychoactive effects,” [the author] said in a telephone interview yesterday. “The dosage of WIN would be like giving one puff a day and not a whole joint.”
i take several issues with this.
1. 14 days of treatment is plenty of time for tolerance to the psychoactive effects. i don’t think that’s much of an issue. at that point, there are adaptations in the receptor signaling system to compensate for long-term administration of a full agonist.
2. in general, agonists are known to disrupt memory via CB1. the “memory saving” effects are likely unrelated to the stimulation of CB1 on neurons, and they have not shown any evidence to convince me otherwise. based on their paper, i think this is related to the decrease in inflammatory cells. i think this whole approach that states the badness of cannabinoid drugs has been overturned by this one agonist was perpetuated by the article writer than the scientific authors.
3. the only effects were noted at 2 mg/kg WIN. this is a hefty dose of the FULL AGONIST drug, not like “one puff a day” of pot. i could see if they were trying to make this argument about their 0.5 mg/kg dose, but there was no effect at that dose. acutely, as little as 0.3 mg/kg is sufficient to beat the crap out of proper hippocampal information processing ability. i strongly, strongly disagree with the entire premise of that blurb.
so, point by point:
1. marijuana compound?
no. this is a synthetic full agonist. not something you’ll get when you smoke a joint, folks.
2. new brain cells?
no evidence that i’m seeing, though the investigators have had plenty of time to continue their work since they published in 2007. a quick lit search shows no effect of THC upon neurogenesis in mice, but nothing that really struck my eye at this hour…
3. reduces inflammation?
yes!
4. “a compound that mimics the effect of marijuana on the brain’s cannabis receptors”
anyone else think this is deceptive? i’m going to come out and say this again, i don’t at all believe this was related to the effects of the drug upon the neuronal receptors. i am willing to believe, with current evidence, that this is an immune phenomenon. pot and related drugs still mechanistically fuck up your capacity for learning and memory, and that will never be overturned factually.
5. “They injected some of the old rats with WIN and had them spend time in a swimming tank. It turned out that the rats who got hits of WIN found the hidden resting places much quicker than those who didn’t.”
hits of WIN. haha! um. [smacks hand against forehead] again, at the high dose. and until i see evidence that states otherwise, i am inclined to believe this is a CB2-mediated reduction in inflammation and not a direct effect of the drug upon neuronal receptors.
6. “Too much pot also would overstimulate the cannabis receptors, he said. “That’s what everyone is trying to avoid,” [the author] said. “If you overstimulate, you’ll have a detrimental effect on memory.”
overstimulate…? how exactly do we quantify this? and how is a full agonist going to be less likely to “overstimulate” than a partial agonist? from the perspective of a neuropharmacologist, this doesn’t do much to tell the public anything.
i suppose it’s not as bad as it could have been, but the spin present in the anti-drug and pro-drug communities is pretty frustrating. it serves as a good reminder to me, that as a drug abuse researcher i do need to watch what i say and how i say it. one negative to grad school is that i work so damned much, i don’t have time to go out and talk to the public about my work and get used to talking to everyday people about what i do and what my research means.
334 trials to retrack x 1 minute per trial x 3 attempts to retrack before i give up:
that’s 5.6 hours minimum, 16.7 hours maximum, hours that i will hate my life. (not including software processing and file search time, of course.) if i’m going to be angry and miserable, i might as well do it at home- where the music is good, the couch is comfy, and the snacks are already paid for.
i was putting together some thoughts on PTSD and ironically, as i did that i got an update letter from a friend in afghanistan. i thought this story was classic and should be shared. names obscured just in case they need to be.
In other news, we had the worst smelling goat in the country sneak in to our office building. SGT W attempted to herd it out of the office but it ended up in SFC S’s office, at which point SGT W thought that was good enough and eventually SFC S ended up getting it out of his office and the building. Great quantities of air freshener were then used to get the smell out.
to anyone that asks me, i don’t hesitate to mention that grad school blows. there are plenty of things about it that irritate me, most of it having to do with that necessary progression of putting in your own time and taking your own lumps before moving up to the older, wiser position.
but really, i’ve heard some stuff that just comes down to pissy whining lately out of one of the younger grads. and i just want to say:
“pull up your big girl pants, sweetheart. you signed up for this, you applied to one of our nation’s top programs and you got in for a reason. you can do this if you shut up and deal with it. either handle your shit or walk.”
that would elicit tears, so i can’t say that. a minor correction from the boss scared the hell out of this grad, so i can’t imagine what would go down if i let loose.
but really, things aren’t as bad as this student would have you believe. i’m beyond broke in my current situation, but if it were just me i had to support, i think i’d be able to handle the grad stipend pretty well. especially if i had a room mate. however, i have a spouse that requires my financial support as well. (insurance premiums alone are about 20% of my take-home income.) guess what? i make ends meet. i don’t have cable, eat a lot of rice, and we’ve gone so far as a car that runs on free fuel, but i make ends meet.
no, we don’t make $3 per hour. i calculated this out. to make $3 per hour, you would have to first alter the laws of time and space to make each day 26 hours long. then, you would have to work all 26 of those hours every day. at my reduced gross income (thanks to the screw-up who sits in the department secretary’s chair) i make about $5.80 per hour with my average 50 hour week. so the complaints about below-minimum-wage are valid (and overtime pay would be nice) but let’s not go overboard here. let’s also consider the amount of time i’ve seen you not working at work.
sometimes long hours are involved. it sucks, but you do want to graduate someday, don’t you? you do what you have to do, to collect the data. if that means getting up at 4am for 2 weeks straight and not getting home until 6pm, you do it. but when you find yourself taking brief naps at stoplights on the way home, you need to consider a higher dose of caffeine. this is not something that happens 100% of the time. for instance, next week i will spend about 2 hours per day in the lab, and the rest of my day working from home on data processing at my leisure.
the boss is going to get pissed off when you’re a slob. keep your workspace clean, and you won’t be the subject of a paragraph in an email tirade. you’re not going to get fired, your behavior is going to get corrected. the more you resist this, the more painful it is for you. i guess the boss doesn’t scare me anymore, but i’ve also never been the one providing reason for complaining about any mess in the lab.
classes suck, sure. i got tired of them on about day 3 of grad school. but you are not going to flunk out of grad school unless you’re incredibly lazy or don’t understand english. hell, i skipped out on probably half of my immuno class and still got a b. that said, i swear classes are a formality. you’re not going to get fired from your lab for doing poorly in a class.
if you need to tell yourself these things are true to motivate yourself, ok. but again, let’s not go overboard here. grad school only sucks to a certain degree. i was thrown to the sharks in a far nastier manner than anyone else in my department, and even i can tell you it’s not that horrible.
ahh, at long last! a weekend all to myself! no drugs, no insane amounts of recordkeeping, no hike across campus, no parking nightmare, no rats, and some time to get over these disgusting rat allergies i’m trying to deal with.
i have been trapped in a small room with 20 or more rats all day, every day, for weeks. i am beyond relieved for 2 days away.
my entire first cohort of animals appears to need video retracking. i am furious about this, because it would have taken all of 10 minutes for someone to run a test rat on their new setup. now i get to spend probably 10 hours fixing this shit in addition to all the time i spend watching the videos. the good news is that the ass kicking trend i saw is likely not affected by this retracking issue- it’s pretty even across all 8 of my experimental groups.
but i’m worrying about that another day- i have shit to do outside of work this weekend.
tonight i’m not primarily a scientist. tonight i am a friend, a volunteer, a baker, a loved one from home. i’m making a giant batch of home made cookies to send over to an army forward operating base in afghanistan. i’m going to send these along with some reading material (back issues of reader’s digest) and some notes from stateside. every day these guys and gals deal with being away from home, their loved ones, their friends; their children are living without their mommies or daddies for a while so that they may serve our military. they make this sacrifice gladly, proudly, for love of our great country. i do this gladly, proudly, for them. and wish i could do more.
i have always expressed my love with cookies. i really can’t explain it. i miss my friends and i know they will appreciate the reminder that someone from home is thinking of them. and the stuff i send.
while the cookies turn a nice golden color in the oven, i’m going to answer these questions. i wasn’t tagged, but i’m looking for a brief something to do.
5 Things I was Doing 10 years Ago:
(1) every hard rock concert within the state’s borders
(2) working full time
(3) paying massive medical bills
(4) oh, and high school. that was kind of an afterthought.
(5) pondering the purpose of my life
5 Things On My To-Do List Today:
(1) did behavioral assays
(2) a small bit of outside business
(3) hoped to not get pulled over for invalid registration (shh!)
(4) making cookies
(5) filling a flat-rate box with love and well wishes
5 Snacks I Love:
(1) homemade fruit smoothies
(2) fruit in general
(3) chex mix (or cheerios mix, which i discovered a while ago)
(4) skittles
(5) mixed nuts
5 Things I Would Do If I Were A Millionaire:
(1) pay off the family farmland
(2) set aside money for future children
(3) solar panels! well, i guess that also involves buying a house. so that too.
(4) donate to breast cancer research
(5) bribe my committee? >:D
5 Places I’ve Lived:
(1) various incarnations of my own personal hell
(2) a place we termed “b&e central”
(3) on the lake
(4) 16 blocks from the banks of the mighty mississippi
(5) a giant (to us) two-story townhouse
5 Jobs I’ve Had:
(1) entertainment/retail store management
(2) call center for a national newspaper
(3) independent study and paid work-study in undergraduate lab
(4) mystery shopper
(5) bench jockey/graduate student
a final note. you don’t have to personally know someone serving our country to be able to send a care package. if you’re interested in sending something to brighten a soldier’s day, please go to AnySoldier. the usps has “large” flat rate boxes that can be sent out for about $10.
i am so, so thankful for my science big sister. i officially adopted her as such a couple of years ago, when we connected on a personal level and i saw qualities in her that i wanted to see in myself in the future. a postdoc in transition to rt faculty at big name u, she has been of IMMENSE help to me on a variety of topics. she is away on leave for the time being, caring for her adorable newborn but we keep in touch via email.
today we had a discussion that for some reason brought a lot of stuff into my head. she disagreed with my interpretation of something, and so we discussed the topic over the phone so i could ask her some questions. i learned a lot, since i’m not a behaviorist by training (yet) and had to reconsider some of my ways of thinking about what i’m doing.
at any rate, it got me thinking about how my response to being challenged has greatly matured over the years, and how overall i’ve matured as a person since i came to grad school (hell, college). and also how i’ve adopted my own personal role models in life in the absence of healthy, productive ones in my family.
the result is- nine years after i left home too young, too angry, too bitter, too vengeful, and completely emotionally stunted- i feel like maybe i might almost be grown up. or at least caught up to my peers.
at small state u, i sought after professors whose qualities i admired, who held good conversations about science and everything after, who let me know that we scientists come from all backgrounds and still manage to work toward becoming the people we want to be. i found a great research mentor who was probably the exact personality that i needed- the sweetest guy in the entire department, not at all threatening or combative, always helpful. after the life i left behind, i really needed somebody like this as an influence on me. his lab was full of women, to the point where they called us [mentor]’s angels. this was one tremendous advantage to getting my college degree at ssu. the other was that i didn’t have any money and in-state tuition was an incredible deal for what i got.
when i came to big name u, the game changed in every way. the faculty, the students, the environment, the overall goals of the department were so vastly different that it was a huge adaptation for me. i had a good foundation of myself at this point thanks to my years in college, but i had to really figure out what i was made of to cut it in this environment. and what i was made of, was tested at every turn for the first 2 years i spent here. opportunities to connect with faculty were more sparse, and at one point i had just one faculty connection to the department.
early on, someone else had a misunderstanding on my behalf against a professor who (little did i know) would end up being my mentor. having the guts to go and clear that up made a good impression. later, when i found myself in a pinch, i came back to this professor asking for advice. i had developed a reputation as a very tenacious student. this earned the respect of the professor, who took me in.
as i mentioned, i did not have access to the variety or type of mentoring available in my college environment, so i started observing my PI. though for the first year or so, i admit i felt pretty intimidated. after all, i don’t work for the most social person ever. it took us both some time in getting to know each other, for me to finally make the kind of connection where i feel like this is someone whose example i should follow. i knew from day 1 that i could learn a lot working in the lab, you know, but one needs a bit more of a personal connection to determine whether a potential role model is a good one. and my favorite postdoc ever, we made a pretty quick connection and i have closely observed how she handles being a mom and being a powerhouse kind of scientist. she’s quite possibly my favorite role model right now, since she is much closer to me in age and career stage. and she is a trusted friend.
i view my experiences as much like climbing a rock wall. sometimes you can’t find the next foothold, and you flail around looking like a total dumbshit. but sometimes someone who has already been there will help you, point you in the right direction, or show you something that will help you along the way up. and i’m thankful for all the footholds that have been pointed out to me so far.
this happened to me about 2 weeks ago when i was included in the development of the grant proposal:
yes, my boss does know what i do. but i was asked for a protocol in damn near the same words.
[lacking permission, i won't paste the image on the blog. but i nearly cried, i found it so funny.]
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