Ph Do What!?

To quote Stephan Pastis's Pearls Before Swine : How many roasts must a man wok, Downs, before he is called a nan?  If you're unaware it's a pun playing off the question "How many roads must a man walk down before he is called a man?" which Bob Dylan used in his song "Blowing in the Wind" as a philosophical statement.  Yes dear reader, I I did just explain the joke, you're just going to have to deal with it.   So, what's all this rambling mean about grad school?  Well, not much, other than that the pun fits well into the analogy I want to make.  Consider a pot roast.  They make fantastic meals, but they also take a fair amount of time to cook.  Generally, you follow the rule of about an hours cook time per pound.  So a 4lb roast takes 4 hours in the crock pot.  There is no speeding it up.  It takes as long as it takes.  And that idea does have a lot to do with grad school.   Anyone who's ever taken a che...

 If you've ever used the term SNAFU to refer to a difficult, chaotic, or messy situation, you know that it is an acronym.  It is now 2021, and I guess this is normal.  If you're reading this sometime in well removed from when I'm writing it, this is the week after a group of rioters stormed the Capitol Building disrupting the certification of election results, injuring scores of people, and leaving 5 dead.  I'm more than a little shook.  But life goes on.   I ended up taking a prolonged break from writing this at the end of 2020. I was really  struggling, some with my mental health, some with classes.  As I mentioned back in August , I've been frustrated with my classes.  It's not that I dislike learning.  No one would be in grad school if they did.  I've just reached the point where I'm frustrated with coursework, and the inordinate amount of time it takes up.  Between that, the stress of living in a pandemic, and so...

I'm gonna deviate from my norm a little bit, and instead of talking directly about my personal experience, I'm gonna talk about something that is deeply relevant to all scientific studies, because you need to know about it.  That's right, we're talking medical and scientific ethics.  First, lets get the meme out of the way. While my opinion of that character and his "chaos theory" can be summed up by John Hammond , this quote is a pretty good representation of WHY we need to study medical ethics.  Any graduate  Probably the most commonly cited place to start with this conversation is Henrietta Lacks and the HeLa cell line.  You can read her story here , here , here , and here  as well as this recent Nature editorial,  Henrietta Lacks: science must right a historical wrong   (the last two links are the ones that primarily address the ethical issues).  I would also be remiss not to mention the book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks  by ...

Qualifications? Misrepresenting statistics.  Misrepresenting statistics? That's not much of a crime.  During a public health crisis.  Kinky... sign here. 1 Ok, that joke might be hitting just a little to close to home, but I was watching Blazing Saddles this weekend and wanted to work it in somehow.  Anyway, 5 months in and I'm finally getting back in the lab.  Brushing off rusty skills, being incredibly paranoid about what stuff I might have forgotten to do, and overall feeling like that gif of a dog in a lab coat hoping no one notices.  But that's ok right?  I've got time to get back into practice without a bunch of distraction and get back into the swing of things right?  Wait, what do you mean it's time to register for my fall courses?  Oh right, those things.   At this point in my academic career, I have a mixed relationship with coursework.  On the one hand, courses are a good way to learn new material, and also new ...

Now returning after an unplanned three month hiatus, this short research presentation will be an overview of what has happened over the months since my last power, and a quick glance at where this project is heading over the next several.  Dave, if you can get the lights, oh, and does anyone have an HDMI cord so I can connect my laptop to the projector?  As I mentioned in my last post, just short of three months ago, we had transitioned to online classes, and were starting to get information about our qualifying exam.  At about the same time, most of our labs shut down, or were reduced to critical employees.  By definition, 1st year grad students doing rotations were not critical employees (although a couple of labs side stepped their way around that).  This obviously threw a kink in a lot of plans.  We usually do three rotations, and from those choose a lab to do our thesis work in.  The third rotation just didn't happen.  Now, by this point,...

I usually try to have some sort of story or witticism to open these posts.  It's a rhetorical technique that carries over from my training as a public speaker.  The more I tried to come up with one to open this post, the less and less appropriate it seemed.  I promised you that this blog would be an inside look at the lived experience of grad school, and right now there is nothing witty about it, not even from my usual go of bleak, macabre, or self deprecating humor.  Right now, we are in the middle of a pandemic, and any use of humor would just be me deflecting.  Life is strange for everyone right now.  On the whole, I'm quite lucky.  My university determined that everyone working at the level of graduate assistant or higher would continue to be paid.  I'm financially stable, and able to pay my rent and other bills.  For that I am inexpressibly grateful.  Not everyone is so fortunate.  I have friends at other universities who are...