Ph Do What!?

It's easy to feel guilty when you're taking time to do something for yourself.  To one degree or another, we all get get wrapped up in our work, but I think it's especially true with grad school, because it's more than just a job.  It is a job, but it is also something we are striving for, trying to learn and accomplish and prove ourselves: something we are trying to earn .  The idea that it's ok to step back from that, to take a break and disconnect, especially in our "nose to the grindstone" culture, feels like laziness, that to do anything but push towards this goal makes us unworthy. I slacked off this past weekend.  I got one of my labmates to take care of my cell line, I skipped the lab meeting, I didn't go to the seminar Friday afternoon.  I got in my car Friday morning, and I drove all the way to other side of the state. I didn't bring any papers or notes or data to work on.  I did bring my laptop, but only for uploading pictures and pla...

There's a joke I've heard time and again.  "Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.  Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.  In our lab, theory and practice are combined: nothing works and no one knows why." I have no idea where it originated, but I've seen it printed out and posted in at least 6 different labs that I've either worked in or visited.  It's a nice play on words, but it's also eminently relatable to everyone who's worked a lab. At the moment, I'm rotating in a cell culture lab.  We grow undifferentiated cells in a culture dish until we have a large enough colony, and then differentiate them into vascular tissues.  We can try a range of drugs, inhibitors, growth factors and other treatments to the cells to see how it changes the tissue growth.  There are four of us doing cell culture right now: myself and one of my classmates, a post-bacc student, 1 and a more senior grad student who has been teach...