Hello all,
If you are unfamiliar with the mathematical convention, "N" in this case is some arbitrary positive whole number (i.e. not a fraction, not a decimal, not a negative number)1 that represents the maximum number of posts of this type. What it means in this context is that "Grad School is overwhelming" will be a recurring theme in this blog and many posts will probably have that as their title as I go on writing: there will be N posts titled "Grad School is Overwhelming."
The first month of grad can best be summed up by the metaphor "drinking from a fire-hose." It's a pretty common analogy. I am far from the first to use it, and I certainly won't be the last. There's a lot of information, presented at a rapid pace, without time to properly assimilate that information. I have done more online trainings this month than I have in the preceding decade (and I spent most of that decade working wither with or for the Bqy Scouts of America, who really love their online trainings). I probably retained less than a quarter of what I was supposed to get out of those trainings. Many of them were safety trainings, and I'll get that information presented again in a hands on fashion from many of my lab mates and the PIs2 I work with (or at least their post-docs, it's pretty rare to see a PI actually in the lab, although I did spot one today. I marked this momentous event down in my journal). These trainings are required by the university, you've probably done much the same if you've started a new job and had to do OSHA and Title IX training. We have those, but there are also a lot more AICUC, IRB, Responsible Conduct of Research, Biosafety training, and several more besides (just google the acronyms, or don't the specifics aren't that important here). The biggest problem with a lot of these is that in addition to not retaining the material, I really don't have the resources I need to go back and look up the material should it suddenly because relevant to what I'm doing. Online trainings are troublesome like that. This is all in addition to learning new protocols and discipline specific information in lab, and on top of our coursework, which I will admit has not been as difficult for me as it has for some of my classmates, but I have the advantage of having at least seen most of this material at the graduate level before.
Some of you are probably thinking something along the lines of "well yeah, that's just how school is" and you'd be right. What makes this different is that when I leave "class" and go to lab, I have a entire other set of responsibilities. These aren't things that just nest neatly in with my existing schoolwork, they are often competing demands on my time, often with flexible deadlines, which sounds nice until you realize that means you have to track and juggle those tasks and deadlines. I'm about a month in to my PhD program and already if something isn't on my phone calendar, it doesn't exist in my mind, and I won't be at it. This even includes things as important as the memorial service for the passing of a family friend that I really should have gone to, but since I never put it in my calendar I forgot it existed until someone posted about how beautiful it had been on social media.
Now add to that all the normal day to day responsibilities of life. Laundry, food, paying bills on time (thank God for auto-pay), and even things as simple as keeping track of your keys. See, I've locked myself out of my apartment four times this month because I would walk out to get my mail, go to get groceries, or run down to the gym and not grab my electronic access card. Which leads me to tonight, sitting here, drowning my emotions in ice cream, and writing this blog post. How can I be a good grad student, a successful researcher, an academic whose very livelihood is their mind, and simultaneously not be able to do something as simple as keep up with a damned access card?
I put that question to one of my friends (who is also a grad student) while moaning about how embarrassing it is to have gotten myself locked out (yet again) and this was her response: Your brain is so inundated with science that mundane simple tasks are taxing. She wasn't joking. She went on to tell me about how she had almost thrown her phone in the washing machine this week. Since I am not a a psychologist or neuroscientist, and I have neither the time nor the inclination to dig into the literature on this topic, everything I'm about to say here is speculative, but I speculate that there is a limit to how many tasks a person can manage at one time, and as you have more and more things to deal with, smaller things get dropped by the wayside. When I left my apartment this evening, I was thinking about what I needed to get at the store. I was also thinking about the experiment schedule for this week, about the article that I need to read for class on Thursday, the laundry that I need to finish tonight, and about the presentation that I have to give tomorrow morning. I was not thinking "grab your access card from the clothes you just changed out of."
For me, this is exacerbated by the fact that I am mildly ADHD. I manage well, and I haven't needed medication since I was in gradeschool. That said, this sort of absent mindedness, this inability to track small simple things that we absolutely SHOULD be able to keep up with according both ourselves and everyone around us is common among grad students. Last week, a co-worker got locked out of the lab because they left their ID badge on the bench after cleaning up an experiment. I watched another walk from the door to their desk and back three times trying to get to class, because each time he got to the door, he remembered another thing he needed to take with him.
My point is grad school is overwhelming, and it's easy to feel stupid, and not just in the "what the hell is the professor talking about?" kind of stupid either. It also comes with the "I am barely a functional human being" kind of stupid. I don't have a solid answer for how I can understand a cell signaling pathway but can't keep track of where I left my notebook, but I can tell you that no matter how well organized, no matter how meticulous you are naturally, in grad school you will hit your limit. My only advise is to adapt to it, manage as best you can, and hope that your neighbor is kind enough to let you back into the building. Now, I have to go see if that really is my car keys I hear rattling around in the dryer.
Be well, and always look at the data,
Faxe MacAran
Twitter: @TheMacAran
1) Technical N can be any "integer" (a positive or negative non-fraction, non-decimal) number, but when you are counting things N has to be positive making it a "whole number" by definition (a zero and all positive integers, but not negative ones) and since I've established that N is at least one, probably 2 or more, it can't be zero, making it a "natural number" by definition. Mathematicians like to classify things. If you're interested in this sort of thing, you can read more here, or google any of these names and read about them.
2) A "PI" or "principle investigator" is the person to whom a large grant is issued. They are the professor who runs a lab. You may hear someone refer to being in the Smith Lab or the Jones Lab. Professors Smith and Jones would be the PIs of those particular labs. They tend to be the people planning long ranging projects, writing grants, and keeping the administration happy. They are often long since removed from the day to day activities of bench science. Such is the tragedy of the Academic. If you are successful enough at the thing you love doing, they eventually stop letting you do it.
If you are unfamiliar with the mathematical convention, "N" in this case is some arbitrary positive whole number (i.e. not a fraction, not a decimal, not a negative number)1 that represents the maximum number of posts of this type. What it means in this context is that "Grad School is overwhelming" will be a recurring theme in this blog and many posts will probably have that as their title as I go on writing: there will be N posts titled "Grad School is Overwhelming."
The first month of grad can best be summed up by the metaphor "drinking from a fire-hose." It's a pretty common analogy. I am far from the first to use it, and I certainly won't be the last. There's a lot of information, presented at a rapid pace, without time to properly assimilate that information. I have done more online trainings this month than I have in the preceding decade (and I spent most of that decade working wither with or for the Bqy Scouts of America, who really love their online trainings). I probably retained less than a quarter of what I was supposed to get out of those trainings. Many of them were safety trainings, and I'll get that information presented again in a hands on fashion from many of my lab mates and the PIs2 I work with (or at least their post-docs, it's pretty rare to see a PI actually in the lab, although I did spot one today. I marked this momentous event down in my journal). These trainings are required by the university, you've probably done much the same if you've started a new job and had to do OSHA and Title IX training. We have those, but there are also a lot more AICUC, IRB, Responsible Conduct of Research, Biosafety training, and several more besides (just google the acronyms, or don't the specifics aren't that important here). The biggest problem with a lot of these is that in addition to not retaining the material, I really don't have the resources I need to go back and look up the material should it suddenly because relevant to what I'm doing. Online trainings are troublesome like that. This is all in addition to learning new protocols and discipline specific information in lab, and on top of our coursework, which I will admit has not been as difficult for me as it has for some of my classmates, but I have the advantage of having at least seen most of this material at the graduate level before.
Some of you are probably thinking something along the lines of "well yeah, that's just how school is" and you'd be right. What makes this different is that when I leave "class" and go to lab, I have a entire other set of responsibilities. These aren't things that just nest neatly in with my existing schoolwork, they are often competing demands on my time, often with flexible deadlines, which sounds nice until you realize that means you have to track and juggle those tasks and deadlines. I'm about a month in to my PhD program and already if something isn't on my phone calendar, it doesn't exist in my mind, and I won't be at it. This even includes things as important as the memorial service for the passing of a family friend that I really should have gone to, but since I never put it in my calendar I forgot it existed until someone posted about how beautiful it had been on social media.
Now add to that all the normal day to day responsibilities of life. Laundry, food, paying bills on time (thank God for auto-pay), and even things as simple as keeping track of your keys. See, I've locked myself out of my apartment four times this month because I would walk out to get my mail, go to get groceries, or run down to the gym and not grab my electronic access card. Which leads me to tonight, sitting here, drowning my emotions in ice cream, and writing this blog post. How can I be a good grad student, a successful researcher, an academic whose very livelihood is their mind, and simultaneously not be able to do something as simple as keep up with a damned access card?
I put that question to one of my friends (who is also a grad student) while moaning about how embarrassing it is to have gotten myself locked out (yet again) and this was her response: Your brain is so inundated with science that mundane simple tasks are taxing. She wasn't joking. She went on to tell me about how she had almost thrown her phone in the washing machine this week. Since I am not a a psychologist or neuroscientist, and I have neither the time nor the inclination to dig into the literature on this topic, everything I'm about to say here is speculative, but I speculate that there is a limit to how many tasks a person can manage at one time, and as you have more and more things to deal with, smaller things get dropped by the wayside. When I left my apartment this evening, I was thinking about what I needed to get at the store. I was also thinking about the experiment schedule for this week, about the article that I need to read for class on Thursday, the laundry that I need to finish tonight, and about the presentation that I have to give tomorrow morning. I was not thinking "grab your access card from the clothes you just changed out of."
For me, this is exacerbated by the fact that I am mildly ADHD. I manage well, and I haven't needed medication since I was in gradeschool. That said, this sort of absent mindedness, this inability to track small simple things that we absolutely SHOULD be able to keep up with according both ourselves and everyone around us is common among grad students. Last week, a co-worker got locked out of the lab because they left their ID badge on the bench after cleaning up an experiment. I watched another walk from the door to their desk and back three times trying to get to class, because each time he got to the door, he remembered another thing he needed to take with him.
My point is grad school is overwhelming, and it's easy to feel stupid, and not just in the "what the hell is the professor talking about?" kind of stupid either. It also comes with the "I am barely a functional human being" kind of stupid. I don't have a solid answer for how I can understand a cell signaling pathway but can't keep track of where I left my notebook, but I can tell you that no matter how well organized, no matter how meticulous you are naturally, in grad school you will hit your limit. My only advise is to adapt to it, manage as best you can, and hope that your neighbor is kind enough to let you back into the building. Now, I have to go see if that really is my car keys I hear rattling around in the dryer.
Be well, and always look at the data,
Faxe MacAran
Twitter: @TheMacAran
1) Technical N can be any "integer" (a positive or negative non-fraction, non-decimal) number, but when you are counting things N has to be positive making it a "whole number" by definition (a zero and all positive integers, but not negative ones) and since I've established that N is at least one, probably 2 or more, it can't be zero, making it a "natural number" by definition. Mathematicians like to classify things. If you're interested in this sort of thing, you can read more here, or google any of these names and read about them.
2) A "PI" or "principle investigator" is the person to whom a large grant is issued. They are the professor who runs a lab. You may hear someone refer to being in the Smith Lab or the Jones Lab. Professors Smith and Jones would be the PIs of those particular labs. They tend to be the people planning long ranging projects, writing grants, and keeping the administration happy. They are often long since removed from the day to day activities of bench science. Such is the tragedy of the Academic. If you are successful enough at the thing you love doing, they eventually stop letting you do it.
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