The best way to cram before your defense...

does not involve coming in to work and spending four hours entertaining your coworker's seven-year-old child. At your desk. Adorable, yes. Beneficial in any manner to overall productivity? No.

I need a signature from M. Santi. Wait, who the hell is M. Santi?

The university that I attend is famous for the ridiculous amount of administrative staff its hiring in the past few decades (who continue to get paid more and more while tuition has gone up by a factor of ten). The graduate school has shuffled nearly all of its responsibilities back to the individual graduate programs. What do they do? Graduation.

I received the graduation packet in the mail the other day. Although everything looked A+ online when I submitted my request, I've received a form that my committee has to sign in the next ten days (i.e. before the first working day of the month of defending). Which is rad, but ... the four people listed on the form? They're not my committee. Well, two of them are. But one was removed three years ago, and one, well, I've never even heard of this person before. In any of the biomed departments.

Really, graduate school? You have minimal shit to do now. And of all of the things to fuck up...?

Really?

Really?

The saddest post ever

I am a charming, engaging individual. I enjoy giving seminars. I'm animated and engaged with the audience. I get by on charm relatively often. I understand that. I entered graduate school and joined a lab with no prior experience relevant to any of the fields of study involved in that lab. I'm on my second round of interviews for a position I'm not really qualified for. I'm the face of my department, both in the interactive involvement sense as well as the literal "face on the department pamphlet" sense. I enjoy it. I'm good at it. I like PR. I'm analytical and strategic, and I like to be involved. I'm not here just to get a degree and run off. I abide by the campsite rule, and I genuinely want to make my department a better place to be for incoming and current faculty and students. I want to see my department grow and succeed. And I have worked hard to contribute to that.

That said, I have spent many years being taught that this is wrong. I am not, in fact, here for any of these things. These things are, I assume, a waste of my time. I am here to do a job, and that job is to get a degree and get out.

The re-occurring theme of my graduate experience is that my thesis committee does not think I am serious enough. Now, that hasn't been brought up since my prelim, but the bossman seems to think it will be an issue at the defense. In fact, he has begun telling other, uninvolved people that it will be an issue at the defense. Combined with my experience as a graduate student of the bossman, these are the things I have learned (outside of technical, scientific facts):

1. Science is a career, it should not be fun.
2. Whether or not you enjoy your work is irrelevant.
3. You should never, under any circumstances, be excited about new findings or results in your data.


To appease these items, I will not be submitting an acknowledgements or dedications page of my thesis. I also will not have a "thank you to friends and family for putting up with me" slide during my oral presentation. There will be no ice breakers at the beginning of the presentation about the fact that the only room I could schedule is in the bowels of some unknown building halfway to another zip code. There will be no chuckles about repeating experiments, no segments on data trends I thought were really fascinating. There will be no congratulatory thrills after the seminar. No cookies, no coffee. I will wear a business suit, no makeup, and sensible, neutral shoes. There are no celebratory events planned after the defense. Even if I receive a pass, there will be work that needs to be finished; additional revisions to the thesis, additional revisions to the recently submitted manuscript, and potentially any other stipulations that my committee feels necessary. I will not be getting paid after the defense, but there will be work to do, and I will do it.



Remember, science is not fun. It is not exciting. You are here to do a job. Complete the job and leave.

How to format your thesis: A step-by-step guide to the most challenging aspects

Importing Figures:
1. Import 20 multi-panel high-resolution .tif figures and marvel in their clarity.
2. Cry after Word crashes and is no longer able to open or recover your most recent save.
3. Bang head on available flat surface.
4. Import figures again.
5. Repeat steps 2-3 several times.
6. Post to Facebook about how and why your computer is a piece of garbage and why can't it open the stupid file, it isn't that big and this is a stupid problem and Word is a stupid program and this whole thing is stupid anyway.
7. Reach through the computer screen and punch the person who comments and tells you to write it in GoogleDocs.
8. Abandon all hope for clear, high-resolution figures. Import fuzzy, low-resolution images.
9. Continue onward after losing several hours.

Page Numbers:
1. Follow guidelines: "Click on the first page of the document. Insert page numbers as specified, lower right corner not in the margin space. Start with "i" and continue with Roman numerals. Then add a section break at the first page of your thesis body. Insert page numbers and start with "1" and continue with Arabic numerals. The first three pages of the dissertation (title page, signature page, and copyright page) should NOT be numbered."
2. Spend two hours staring at formatting options, trying to figure out how to avoid having page numbers on the first three pages of the document when you are supposed to start on the first page of the document to insert page numbers.
3. Try all of the page numbering options.
4. Click every button on the toolbar.
5. Insert section breaks on the first three pages. Click every button again, several times.
6. Magic.
7. Continue onward after losing several hours.

Table of Contents:
1. Enter pages and sections/subsections/etc into table of contents.
2. Spend two hours typing "........[number]" 
3. Realize you have 115 subsections to your thesis and that you have typed "......." for 115 different lines.
4. Align to the right side of the page so the page numbers line up.
5. Align back to the left side of the page because the indent formatting for sections --> subsections --> subsubsections no longer line up.
6. Justify.
7. Align back to the right side of the page.
8. Align headers to left side and things that end in page numbers to the right.
9. Undo.
10. Align back to the right side of the page and hope that nobody looks too closely.
11. Continue onward after losing several hours.
12. Re-number approximately 75 sections every time you edit your thesis. Daily.





 

Foreign languages

Today, I cried at work while revising my thesis. A real banner Monday in K land. I had received several iterations of the same comment that I did not understand in the past few versions of revision suggestions from the bossman. I tried to address it each time and failed. We've been in discussions about this topic several times, and I never leave our discussions fulfilled. I either can not follow the bossman's logic or he tells me to look it up myself. I usually flounder around on my own, reading unnecessarily detailed journal articles for several weeks, confusing myself more. The topic is a ridiculously detailed and somewhat unknown immunology mechanism, and I'm trying to summarize decades of hypercomplicated research into three sentences at most. It turns out, most of what I understand about this mechanism is completely wrong. How did I figure that out?

The post-doc, whose first language is not English, explained it to me in a couple of sentences.


Over a year of ridiculously detailed information on this mechanism from the bossman and multiple meetings and I never understood it....


Does this tell you anything about my experience as a graduate student? It should.

Thesis date, targeted. Now hire me, please.

Although not in the simplest manner, we have set a target thesis defense date. After reminding the bossman on at least an every-other-meeting basis that I was aiming to defend in March and he finally told me it isn't possible (Aside: Bossman has a grant due in the same time period that I was to defend. Clearly it is not convenient for him. However, working for free after my funding runs out in March is not convenient for me.). Then he gave in and I will hopefully be defending in March. The past three days have been 12+ hour days that involve nothing other than revising my thesis (which, again, draft is completely written, just need to put in figures into the intro and format and so on) and my manuscript that we will be submitting for publication soon.

No really, that is it.

For the past hour though, I've been job hunting. Not even a single interview yet, and I've sent out approximately 50 job or fellowship applications. This tells me that I'm not qualified for anything. Literally. I am not qualified to work in a position away from the lab bench because I have no experience, and no one wants someone with my degree, which is not a buzz term like "Molecular genetics" or something. At the bench, I can no longer work with animals because my allergies hinder my ability to function, and continue to get worse with additional exposure. And because I have no experience in cell culture, I'm not qualified for that either.



So ... who wants to give me a job?

The greatest compliment of my academic life occured today.

Today I met with a visiting professor from a nearby school/hospital system (as many are). This person was part of the study that my least favorite professor first-authored... I've mentioned it before. The one that duplicated my idea but with a different drug target. Needless to say, I entered our meeting with skepticism.

Turns out, this person is pretty neat. We talked about how nobody really knows how my project and all others like it actually work, and that there is a lot of hand-waving and speculation with no actual, legit, hard data to back up the reasoning in a direct manner.

Aside: in science, all evidence must be direct - A causes B, not A causes C and B probably happens or A most likely causes B or A1 causes B1, so A2 probably causes B2. 

At any rate, I pulled a bunch of papers out of my head, throwing down some relevant general concepts, as I usually do. Ok, the authorship wasn't totally correct since I said they were all author A and only one of the three I was thinking was actually written by A. But I contributed to the discussion, took some charge and asked about both basic science as well as long-term human use consequences of the visiting professor's work. We did not have time to talk about my data, and I still had things coming out of my head when the bossman showed up to take the visiting professor to the next meeting. But... know what the visiting professor said when I was leaving?

Something along the lines of "you're a great grad student and I'd love to have a grad student that thinks like you do." There might have been something in there about how the bossman should be proud of me, but I was so caught offguard (holy fuck, a compliment! people don't compliment each other in science/academia! wtf!) that I was utterly unable to listen to anything else that happened.

HELLO, WORLD. For perspective, I consider a meeting with the bossman to be "excellent" when I don't want to run out in tears.

Lets put that in a larger font so I can come back to it later. I should have recorded it. Having a bad day? Play. Still having a bad day? Play again.

"you're a great grad student and I'd love to have a grad student that thinks like you do"

 Small step for grad students everywhere, large leap for K-kind.