Tag Archives: Graduate Student

Lab Rat: What I’ve Learned

Posted on July 25, 2011 | 2 Comments

Wednesday marks my last day working at the lab that has been my nine-to-five this summer (I’m headed to Japan for a week and a bit, tell you about it when I get back!).  What do I have to show for my time?  About 50 Western blots.  And a head full of knowledge about What Makes a Good Researcher, brought to you by All the Reasons I Am Not One.

Here's me counting rows of plants back when my tree-hugging self thought I might go into ecology research. And no offense to ecologists, but I am so so glad I didn't go down that road.

1) You need to have common sense, AKA not be a spaz.  I, on the other hand, set an accidental ethanol fire on the benchtop.  No joke.  I was putting bacteria on petri dishes, for which you use a wire triangle that you dip in ethanol and then flame on a Bunsen burner.  I spilled a little ethanol on the bench, but did I wipe it up?  Not I.  “It’s volatile, it’ll dry in a jiffy,” I thought, continuing on my merry Bunsen burner way.   Well, volatile = flammable fumes = sizeable puddle of flaming alcohol.

2) You need to be meticulous.  Whereas I have never really liked wearing gloves, mostly because they never fit and my dexterity suffers accordingly.  I also rarely get sick, so contamination precautions to me can be more guidelines than hard-and-fast.  Yeah, this is shaping up well for me being a doctor surrounded by diseases.

Look, I'm wearing them now! And...as I type this I realize I shouldn't have touched my computer with my dirty gloves...

Anyway, I got my scare a couple of weeks ago.  I work with ethidium bromide, this chemical that fiddles with your DNA and can cause cancer.  It’s nasty business, so we try to be pretty careful about where it goes.  It also glows under UV light, and so as I was looking in the hood to visualize some DNA, I realized…my forearm was glowing.  And my elbow.  And…how did I get ethidium bromide on my shoulder?!   Needless to say, I’ve been more careful, but after several weeks in lab (and years of living my flaky life), the damage probably has been done.

3) And lastly, to be a good researcher, you have to have the heart to continue even after your experiments have failed time and time again.  This is what separates the people who go into research from those (like me) who seek a different career path.  Everyone likes conducting research when it’s going well and you’re getting novel results and great data.  It takes a different sort of mind to believe in your ideas when bad luck shuts you down, and to slog through the tedium of refining an experimental protocol or fiddling with buffers before you can even start collecting data.  But I guess while the lows can be low, the highs are really high (finally having your faith in science validated is a pretty wonderful feeling).

So I’m not cut out for research…unfortunately my future career path lends itself equally poorly to careless mistakes and a low tolerance for failure.  (Although I am of the firm opinion that it takes two very different personalities to be a physician vs basic scientist.)  In any case, something has to change–cross your fingers that I stay vigilant against accidental fires in the hospital.

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Life of a Lab Rat

Posted on July 11, 2011 | 1 Comment

Well goodness.  Here I was planning to post about my day during lunch, but oh, how life got in the way today.  Doubt my grad student would have bought it if I said I couldn’t possibly run another cell column, I had to write for my blog…

In any case, since I post on Mondays I should have planned a post for you about my routine the day before…but I don’t want you all thinking that my daily routine consists of waking up at 10, watching a Harry Potter marathon, going to a cookout, drinking Pimm’s with my best friend visiting from Paris, going quarry jumping, and then watching more Harry Potter.  Yes, that’s how I’m forced to spend my weekends, my life is so hard.

But here’s how I spent today, working at my summer internship in a neuroimmunology lab:

8 am–Woke up, made coffee.  Started to clothe myself and got distracted by my shirts drawer.  Spent 30 minutes re-folding shirts.
8:45–Sat in my bed for the five minutes a day that direct sunlight enters my room.  Realized I still wasn’t acceptably clothed to go into lab, de-nudified myself, and rushed out the door.
9–Got into lab, checked on a Western blot (test to detect proteins), cried inwardly because the staining looked horrible.

A different Western blot with equally terrible staining but irrelevant results (so I won't be giving out lab secrets or anything).

9:10–Isolated lymph nodes and spleens from six mice.  This is essentially to harvest white blood cells to culture them in petri dishes.  It’s pretty cool.  Mouse anatomy is shockingly similar to human anatomy.  Everything looks exactly the same, down to the wee little appendix on the large intestine.

Envious?

10:45–Started T-cell isolation.  I’m not going to go into detail since it would be pretty boring, but essentially I pipetted a lot of different chemicals into tubes.  And counted cells.  And pipetted more.
12:45–Still pipetting.
3:45–Yep.

MAKE IT STOP I'M SEEING 7.2 MICROLITRES IN MY SLEEP

You get the drift.  But anyway, the afternoon passed by, the hours wore on.  I alternated between periods of intense pipetting and sitting around waiting (read: gchatting) for my timer to ring so I could start up again.   Somewhere in there I made more coffee and ate a cookie from the neuroscience office.  It was a high point of my day.  But then–

7:40 pm–Turns out I was using the wrong setting on the MACS machine (Magnetic-Activated Cell Sorting).  So the cells we wanted?  Not as concentrated as they could have been.  And the last few hours that I’d put in?  At that point, it either meant we could backtrack, spend at least two more hours in the lab isolating and plating the cells…or we could go home.  And start again another day.

And guess what we did?  Yeah…cut our losses and resolved to learn from our (my) mistakes.  That’s research for you.  At the end of the day, when things don’t work out, sometimes you have no idea whether it was your own sloppiness, bad chemicals/equipment, bad theory, or bad luck.  Don’t get me wrong–I respect and sometimes really enjoy research!  But at the end of the day, I’m glad that “researcher” will only be my label until August.

P.S. 8 pm – 11 pm–Went to Kroger, bought a freezer pizza, ice cream, and strawberries.  Today is not a day for cooking–get at me, Dijiorno’s.

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That Darned Glass Ceiling…Or Not?

Posted on June 27, 2011 | 2 Comments

I recently attended a seminar for Women in Surgery, which was a very nice set of lunch meetings geared for young female med students/residents considering or already starting careers in surgery.  Events like this always end up making me more apprehensive about the future—I’m too far from a career or a family to have real perspective of what it will be like, so I briefly freak out.

Something that doesn’t help me calm down is the fact that I often feel as though I’ve failed before I’ve even begun.  Why?  Because in addition to having more family woes as a female physician, I also hear that I won’t make as much money as male doctors do.  So–not only will my children hate me for never being around, but I won’t even be able to support them as ably as I would were I a man?!

Depressing. Maybe I should try this, is my mustache convincing?

Well, the money part is true.  It’s impossible for a girl to go through life and not hear that she is destined to peer up at her male counterparts from beneath the glass ceiling. (That typed sentence sounds a little weird, if only because now I’m imagining looking up at dudes walking on glass floors.  But I digress.)  Anyway, this is obvious, I’m not breaking any ground by saying that on average in the U.S., women make less money than men.  You all know this.  Seventy-seven cents to every dollar.  Doctors aren’t the exception, either; this survey of over 8,000 doctors in New York shows a gap of almost $17,000, or 18%, in male-female starting salaries.  Starting salaries, i.e., similarly qualified doctors entering jobs out of the same class of residents.  And our keynote speaker at that seminar told me something I didn’t know—these figures come after the data for women taking maternity leave and switching to part-time have been pulled out of the equation.

She left us with another tidbit: a woman who graduated high school in 2006 (which is all five of us on this blog, as well as many of my medschool class), over the course of her lifetime will earn on average two million dollars less than her male classmates.  “Say it with me,” she scolded us over the microphone.  “I want my two million dollars back!”

But wait!  This isn’t a rant about gender inequality or being subjugated by The Man.  I’m not one for identity politics, and I’m not here to rail against sexism keeping me down.  In fact, the “glass ceiling” irks me partly because it’s supposed to inspire so much righteous outrage on our part.  Women…get…paid…less!  And we’re…expected…to…HAVE BABIES!  Outrage indeed.  And part of me does get indignant that I might get offered lower starting pay than a male resident coming out of the same program. It is unfair that women are more often expected to take on the greater parenting role than their husbands.  Dr. Michelle Au puts it beautifully when she says, “Male doctors have children too, don’t they?  So why is it, in families where the mother is a doctor, that she is made to feel like the one who has to strike the balance, the one with the elaborate juggling act, the one who has to make a choice?”

So what’s keeping me sane?  Why won’t I let this bother me (except when I’m wallowing, as we all do at times)?  To put it shortly, I simply don’t believe in statistics*.  (I also don’t believe in jinxes.  Get at me, Fate.)  I refuse to be penned in by data that say I’m doomed to divorce, or that my children will hate me.  And getting paid less than a man?  I don’t care about being paid less than that guy over there; I care about getting paid less than I, with my own unique capabilities and talents, deserve.

Here's to hoping, UVA SMD14!

Maybe I’m being idealistic.  After all, sexism exists and is a very real force in the lives of career-seeking women everywhere.  But I can’t help but think (now, while I’m not actually slogging through the job search and the salary negotiations) that it can only affect me as much as I allow it to.  And that is: not at all.

* Okay, I believe in statistics.  As in, I believe they exist.  And sometimes I even believe they’re accurate.  I just refuse to let them define my life.

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Slacker

Posted on April 28, 2011 | Leave a comment

Well, I’m in finals mode. Excuse me for this week.

I am finished with five years of college and two degrees next Wednesday.

Job update: I accepted the job, officially. I’m employed!

Oh, and Joceline? I’m frequently sweaty, too. This humid/sunny/thunderstorm weather? Not helping.

See everyone on the flip side, aka end of finals.

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Graduate Students: Everyone’s Favorite Scapegoat

Posted on January 19, 2011 | Leave a comment

I’m sorry. Did I miss something? Do graduate students kick puppies? Do they stick razor blades in Halloween candy?

It seems that everywhere I turn – both in the real world and in cyberspace – there is a strange (and random) animosity towards graduate students and aspiring graduate students. Is it the ramen noddles? Is it the loans? Is it the embrace of obscure, specialized fields? Someone please enlighten me (see comment box).

Lori, I salute you for following your academic dreams in the above environment. Embrace your label with pride. Just because some people are using graduate school as an expensive shelter from the economic storm, it doesn’t mean that your good name should be tainted.

So next time you want to heckle a graduate student, pause and reflect. Does he/she really deserve it OR does he/she have a genuine passion for their studies? If it’s the latter, just swallow the joke and move on. After all, our society couldn’t function without further research on empathetic facial cues and a firm, historical understanding of zebra striped wall paper in ancient Rome.* Right?

Right?!

*Confession: I just referred to the specific interests of two close friends in PHD programs. Sorry, guys. You know I love you and think you’re awesome! Next time I’ll take my own advice and swallow the joke…

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Graduate Student

Posted on January 13, 2011 | 2 Comments

Well folks, it’s back to school for me tomorrow. Tomorrow marks my last semester of college…possibly ever. I’m looking forward to naps during the day and watching Oprah. These are things I missed when I worked 50+ hours a week last semester as a student teacher. I have only twelve credits awaiting me.

Join me next week, when I discuss the label “sorority girl,” as I am going back to face recruitment, a time when you spend eight hours a day with your sorority.

For now, I beg your pardon, but I’m packing and taking hour long baths while I say goodbye to a private bathroom.

Goodbye comfortable bed! Goodbye Mom’s cooking! Goodbye parking right in front of my house! Goodbye privacy! Hello party time.

Me & the Cheetos at The Virginian. It's a partay!

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Medical Student

Posted on November 15, 2010 | 5 Comments

For my first post it makes sense that I’d talk about being a med student.  It’s the first and easiest handle I use when introducing myself to someone, since it does put me in a context that more or less fits–in vague terms, I’m sleep-deprived, competitive, and get overly excited about white blood cells.  And while I would hate to be defined by my occupation, at times it seems like med school has consumed me.  From the time I slap my alarm clock off to when I flop back into bed, invariably later than I intended, the majority of my day has been spent feeding the med school beast.  During exam weeks, the Health Sciences Library becomes the hottest social outlet in town (and by hottest, I mean quietest); and since my class has an exam every other weekend, I go through a two-week cycle with a week of constant studying where I fail to clean or feed myself, alternating with a week of  laziness and inactivity (ultimately piling up twice the work for the next week.  Do I learn?  No.).

Posing with some of my classmates in our white coats.

Aside from sheer time spent, life as a med student has its own special quirks.  My classmates and I have shared an embarrassing number of nerdy links, including the 12 typical medical students; we snicker when someone mentions “tropical sprue” and sing songs to help us remember the symptoms of diabetic ketoacidosis.  I have expanded my vocabulary to include the word “gunner”, describing the stereotypical cutthroat student who secretly lives inside each of us.  And while my life isn’t like House or Grey’s Anatomy* (I haven’t yet seen patients with horrific trauma or two ridiculously obscure conditions at once, or saved someone with an umbrella, a corkscrew, and sutures constructed out of my own hair), I have gotten to practice stitching up pig’s feet, drawn blood, and learned all sorts of diseases and metabolic conditions.  I absolutely love this part of medical school: hearing from patients with hemophilia and HIV and cancer, taking part in round-table style case presentations and diagnoses, and learning the mechanisms of the body in exhaustive detail.

Re-starting school at UVA after I graduated this May has thrown another element into the mix.  My life has changed as a med student—I have classes on a different part of Grounds, I keep a drastically different schedule, and from the first day of class I’ve become friends with a new group of 155 students who share many of my interests and personality traits.  Despite this, I still identify to a large degree with UVA undergraduates, and I have friends who either haven’t graduated or are still around for their own post-graduate educations.  Balancing new friendships with old ones during the time not spent in the library cubicles does take some effort.  I can easily find myself falling out of touch with old friends, as my classmates and I spend so much time together and have so much to commiserate (complain) about.

Just as I continue to keep those relationships that are important to me outside of medical school, I have to remember to give myself time outside my classwork.  While being a med student is a major part of how I live my life, I’m constantly trying to keep myself grounded in my other interests, making sure I stay more than just ”sleep-deprived and competitive” (but talking white blood cells will always get me hot and bothered).  I have to keep dabbling as an amateur photographer, grabbing dinner with a friend even though I know I should be studying, or taking the time to feed myself beyond something cooked in the microwave.  Without these things, I’d be terribly dull at a cocktail party (assuming I’d even take the time to go to a party).  And while I can’t promise not to talk medicine at times on this blog, I’m still taking precautions against letting medical school become the one note of my identity.

Bringing a little autumn color to the library helps me breathe easy when studying cell death pathways.
*Somewhat like Grey’s, though, sordid love affairs have been ripening as the year goes on.  We’ve all been warned not to date within the class, but it’s hard not to when the only people you know are the ones you spend hours with every day.  But then, that’s a post for another day.

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