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the teaching position i intended to apply for (start date: fall semester) is no longer on the small state u HR website.
it’s not even april… i’m confused. did they make a decision on candidates that early? shit. i have no idea what kind of schedule they keep for these things. maybe that insufficient stats power on the holy-grail experiment fucked me over in more ways than one.
i can’t exactly apply for jobs [ahem, boss] without permission to write. so… i guess that opportunity is gone? i have no idea. there was such enthusiasm from certain parties when word leaked that i intended to apply. like, recently. because certain parties and i would be fantastic collaborators. and we all know this.
i should probably get in touch with my contact at ssu and find out what’s up.
part of me is actually really disappointed about this. and part of me is the slightest bit relieved if the issue of destination city is resolved by outside forces.
[added later: i see announcements of fairly big budget cuts in the local newspaper. i suspect the position got axed if it's not filled. that's sad. still plan to investigate further.]
dear undergrad in my class,
i understand that you, along with about 75% of your peers, are aiming desperately for an A in class, and nothing else will do. but i hate to inform you that in real life, 75% of students do not actually earn As. also, grading in the class is not subjective. you get points for turning shit in that is done in more than a halfassed manner. you get points for answering exam questions correctly. lather, rinse, repeat. points earned divided by course total times 100. that’s your grade.
i like you as a person. i’ve spent countless hours reading your assignments, and i know quite well you’re a smart kid. but that doesn’t get you any more credit than the smart kid seated behind you who has decided that a C is totally cool, because he’s going to graduate regardless.
while i think it’s odd when otherwise good students miss turning something in, it is not my job to go chasing after you asking why you didn’t turn it in. why yes, i do notice. because although there are a whole lot of you, i am quite familiar with your individual work output. i promise you, a B+ is not the end of the world. i graduated from a far less prestigious university with a GPA a little under 4.0 myself, and i got a decent gig at mega u. you will be fine.
leigh
ok, i know my next committee meeting is the big “permission to write” meeting. the only reason i care about this is because as far as i am told, permission to write= permission to look for jobs. (and presumably, a set defense date.) and the economy does scare me, and i’m geographically limiting myself. i need to be on the supreme attack, the candidate who’s the most on top of things if i want the job opportunities. the mega u name is pretty exotic in new state, and my program outranks the state flagship u by many places. but as we all know, relying solely on the name recognition is a very stupid and arrogant move.
i started writing in my non-bench time quite some time ago, and have had drafts reviewed by the boss. (reviews which actually make me feel pretty good about myself, honestly.) clearly, the issue of my leaving this place is on the table. clearly i have a bit of progress down when i have about 4 chapters pretty well knocked out.
and i can sorta see the boss’s logic in asking me to refrain from scheduling the last committee meeting until i have every bit of data in hand. (usually, boss-wisdom is spot-on in hindsight, i need to learn to understand this in foresight.) but we’re talking a 2-month meeting-scheduling lag here, when i will have hot fresh data in 2 weeks. if we don’t see the remaining effects with n=10, we’re just not going to see it. it’s not like we’re going to send me on a wild p-value chase. but if they are significant, we’re going to submit to high-impact field journal for publication.
i do want to finish reviewing all my analyses, but that won’t take me 6 weeks. i suppose i can attack dreaded introduction or format results for publication drafts, but i would sooner have that permission in hand and spend some time getting my name out there in the employment market. we still don’t know if the big breakthrough is going to materialize for my husband, so we’re still working on the assumption that we will have to move to new state where unemployment isn’t so rampant for him to get a job at all.
[sigh]… i hope this whole meeting timing thing makes sense after the fact, because right now i’m confused. and kinda frustrated.
i do love that some people think of me often. i get a lot of facebook posts- and since i usually update my status with some description of what i’m in the middle of doing, people like to comment on how busy i seem… and the inevitable “how much longer till you’re done?”
at a party recently, someone i hadn’t seen in months came running over when he saw me and asked “so, how long till you’re done?”
my sisters ask if i’m finally coming home this summer. all. the. time.
this evening, as i was frantically trying to finish shit in the lab because i was DAMN HUNGRY, an occasional visitor to the lab stopped and said hello, and asked how the dissertation writing was going.
fuck!!!!11!!!1
things are progressing FINE, thank you, but really, the more i think about it, the more overwhelmed i get, evidenced by the fact that this sentence is incredibly run-on with a shitload of commas. this is how my thought process starts to get unless i focus on one thing at a time.
right now i’m focusing on bumping up the n of my hopefully final experiment. if i focus on that AND the re-evaluation of aim 1 experiment 3, AND the review of every single ANOVA i’ve ever run (which i got most of the way through and then just kinda stopped), AND the finalization of the results, AND the impending review of the methods, AND the unavoidable but much dreaded introduction section, AND when this experiment is over so i can call the committee… i suddenly have no remaining focus.
so please, bear with me. i’m doing a whole lot of shit right now, and i assure you that even though the economy blows and that’s a little scary, i am in no way dragging my feet to get out of this place.
and no, i won’t forget to tell you when i’ve got a defense date. srsly.
i’ve put down a lot of footprints in my time, and in keeping with the “path” theme (which is generally how i look at where i’ve been and where i’m going, hence the blog title) i would like to describe where some of those old footprints are.
i’ve alluded to this one event several times, because it’s something i have still not recovered from, all these years later. one can only hide from one’s past for so long, and honestly, since i hear this recurring chorus that “people like me” don’t go to places like mega u and earn science phd’s… fuck it.
sometimes i feel like i’m a fairly unremarkable person. i have one of those average faces that seems familiar to everyone. (and everyone incorrectly guesses my family heritage, which i find quite amusing.) i don’t stand out in many groups. i am perfectly comfortable with leading in a smaller group setting, but in a larger crowd my hugely introverted and usually self-doubting nature keeps me from getting too vocal. i still feel like i don’t belong here some days, like i was the equal opportunity student.
and yet i’ve had this remarkable, colorful, tragic, painful and joyous past. i still can’t put a lot of it into words, and the brief mental attempt to do so just brought on a nice little wave of nausea. (yes, leigh has some big issues to deal with. later.) but i think i probably have the life experience of someone twice my age with half the time to absorb, cope and grow from the experiences. i just wonder sometimes how such a series of experiences have somehow made me into this. i should be shouting across the mountaintops each and every one of my achievements, what with having had to climb to the tops of those damned mountains to get here.
how can i be remarkable and unremarkable all at once?
fuck… it’s just one of those evenings.
i haven’t said much about my thesis writing ventures lately, but so far things are progressing well enough. i have a pretty solid draft of the methods/results chapters. the boss gave me some excellent feedback (because the boss is an excellent writer), and there were definitely things i needed to change, but i am apparently on the right track because most of the criticism was formatting and wording. i have to take my compliments where i can find them with my boss- sometimes this is a lower than expected level of criticism. ha.
i am dreading the introduction chapter, even though i’ve got a really nice background and significance from my grant. i am still dreading this, more than the discussion. the discussion will be pretty straightforward.
to all you younger grad students, i would strongly suggest writing your method and a straight-laced result page complete with statistics anytime you complete an experiment. this will save you a lot of time. it did for me.
next week i am going to be absolutely buried in work, but i shall emerge from the week victorious. i would prefer it if i could also be victorious over these headaches.
you know how real jobs give you benefits? vacation, bonuses, health insurance, whatever? well, don’t count on any of that shit in grad school.
i bust my ass at essentially all hours for essentially minimum wage. and i would be perfectly accepting of that IF i wasn’t paying out the nose for healthcare as a result of the utter shit that they offer us in the guise of “health insurance” coverage. in addition to coughing up a hefty percentage of my take-home for premiums, i also get sizable bills for health care. and as it turns out, the insurance company likes to reject claims for no reason, or just pretend they never received claims, and they like to fuck with their interpretation of codes so that they pay less benefits and i pay more of the bill. apparently, filing a grievance does no good, because i haven’t gotten a response to that either. and what really takes the fucking cake here, is the claim for when i ordered a piece of medical equipment for the spouse. see, we met the deductible for him but not for me. so what do they do when i submit a claim for something that requires the meeting of the deductible before benefit payment? they put ME down as the patient. even though i am not the one who has the condition that requires the medical equipment.
i could fucking throw things right now.
i should see a specialist, myself. but if i’m gonna get yet another series of $300 bills and have to fight them for 6 months while simultaneously fending off the collections agency, well, i can’t handle that right now.
i can’t wait to graduate, i am working so hard to reach the finish line. if only to get access to real motherfucking health insurance.
leigh needs a little more time to wind down tonight, mainly because she worked a little too late. so you’re getting another post out of me.
today i spent a significant amount of time on a large number of free-floating brain sections, which is something i haven’t done in quite a while. basically, you make incredibly thin sections of tissue for purposes of binding an antibody to them and looking at your phenomenon of interest. the problem with having them free-floating is that you can’t image them like that (no point of focus). they need to get mounted onto slides. this is the biggest pain in the ass about these. it took me a few sections to get my groove back, but here’s how to get yours:
1. good, but not hyper, music. you are going to want to curse those little fuckers out, even though they’re just inanimate fixed tissue floating around. i promise, music will help. today i chose a little tom petty.
2. ice!! room temperature sections have the consistency of snot. this is bad. (really, almost every biological substrate i have worked with can be described as having the consistency of snot under some circumstance or another.) so put your plates on ice, it will make your life so much easier.
3. make sure your section is not folded over on itself before you pick it up. unfolding them sucks, they like to stick to themselves. this is far easier when they’re still floating, so do it then.
4. more buffer! the more buffer you can pool on the slide, the better. this will float your sections a little and help you flatten them out.
5. don’t drip the mounting medium on your pants. this will make you sad. because it contains glycerol.
6. slow and easy with the coverslip! it’s easy to mess up your nice flat sections by coverslipping sloppily.
happy sectioning! let’s hope that was the last time i had to do that in grad school… [fingers crossed!]
i see my recent post has brought people in from all over the place, i seem to be linked on several sites. welcome to my humble blog. when i write about science here, my intent is to reach a general audience and hopefully make science feel a little more accessible to non-scientists. i hope i have accomplished that with my recent opioid post. anyway, thanks for stopping by!
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