Grad School Update
So I have to apologize a bit for the delay in posting about both Val’s shower and Ray & Donel’s wedding. As soon as I got back from that trip to NJ, I’ve been working like crazy to get new data for my thesis, and more specifically, for my departmental student presentation and annual thesis committee meeting. After being really sick, and yet dragging myself into the lab for an entire weekend to get those last few bits of precious data analyzed (where my advisor saw me in the lab and knew I was sick), I spent a week basically 9-5 over at our stem cell core lab taking the UCI Stem Cell Techniques Course. Before I went home every night I would spend an hour or two in my lab either gathering data, setting up one more plate of samples to be run, or getting tables and graphs ready for my slides. I should have known things would be going downhill when I unwittingly lost about 3/4 of my presentation the middle of last week. See, I’d been going back and forth to the lab so often, I’d just been working on the copy of my presentation on my USB drive, instead of saving a local copy and working on that. So last week when I was just making one small change, I had the memory stick was plugged into Kris’s computer, which is networked in-house to my computer. His computer crashed, and somehow, when he rebooted and I “saved” my slides, only the first 15 or so actually got saved. Crap…
But that wasn’t the worst part. I didn’t realize what had happened for two days because I thought everything had saved just fine, and I hadn’t needed to change anything in my presentation, which was pretty much ready to go. When I finally did realize what had gone down, I wanted to cry because I only had two more days to get all the slides put back together AND read all the papers I’d put off reading until the last minute because I am a horrible procrastinator. Kris, bless his heart, spent nearly four hours trying to find some way to recover the data I’d lost. Unfortunately while he was doing this on both our computers upstairs, my laptop, and my USB, I couldn’t work on putting anything back together. Because I am an idiot.
Luckily, I had about half of what I’d lost saved in my presentation for the department last year, and Kris did recover about another quarter of the rest, so it didn’t take too long to get back to the point where I’d lost everything. Of course that also meant I lost time in which I could have been gathering more data, but I accepted that loss. I finally was ready for my presentation!
So…the presentation went great! A bunch of people from my lab came that I was hoping would come, and even a few of my other friends showed up (thanks Renee and Karen!!!) that I’d invited but didn’t necessarily expect to be able to make it. The only bad part was that the room we were in was FREEZING, so my committee decided to move my annual thesis meeting to another room.
Well, since the presentation had gone so well, I truly expected that the meeting would go well too. Everyone I’d talked to had told me not to worry about it, that it was just meant to be a helpful time to guide you with your project. But for me, it was (no sugar-coating here) a nightmare. They kept asking me questions I couldn’t answer, so I kept having to rely on my advisor to answer them for me. And they kept saying “I have a bit of a naive question…” so how stupid did I feel that I couldn’t even provide a glimpse of what they wanted to know? I felt even worse when my advisor tried to give me hints with a simple yes or no question that I just had to guess and then guessed wrong…I’m getting a feeling of nausea just thinking about it again. He asked me about staining certain parts of a cell, which I’ve never actually even done, and if I’ve only read about something and haven’t done it hands-on it’s very difficult for me to grasp how things are done. They asked SO many things to which I knew I knew the answer, but for some reason just completely blanked on, and then remembered as I was driving home later on. I mean, I did know that I needed to do more reading in relation to the project I’d been working on, but in all fairness I had been working on a different project when I presented for my advancement to candidacy and did not realize the scope of what I needed to know for this current project would be so huge. Then the worst part happened…my advisor made me get up and “draw it on the board.” I had no idea what he wanted me to draw, and again the “I know this dammit!” frustration set in, but I just could not for the life of me remember or deduce what the heck this structure looked like.
The torture was finally over, and they asked me to leave the room. I honestly didn’t think that was part of the annual meeting process, just part of the advancement to candidacy and more formal meetings. But I for some reason still had a good feeling of the presentation going well, and while I was waiting I was not nervous at all, chatting with a couple girls from the lab in the kitchen. After about 15 minutes, they call me back in.
My advisor does all the talking, and it’s NOT good. “We feel that your level of knowledge is significantly lacking for a fourth year student. You don’t seem to be dedicated or enthusiastic about your project, and we want to plan a follow-up meeting for September. This project is a thesis on a golden platter, and you should grab the opportunity to get some high-impact papers as soon as possible.” Or something close to that. I felt like an idiot, and I was mortified. They asked how I “felt about that” and I replied that I knew I had more reading to do, and that I was actually going to suggest we have a meeting again in the fall (since one of my committee members is leaving for France at the end of the year; let’s not even mention how much I was freaking out about that the whole week before my meeting too…). I didn’t say anything about the “not being dedicated or enthusiastic about the project” part - I was just too upset about that. I also admitted that I knew I was going to be in graduate school for a couple more years. I got married last year, and have taken a bit longer to fulfill my requirements than the “usual student” so I did know that already. But no excuses can be used, nothing is good enough. I was pissed that even though I’d spent a whole weekend while I was sick IN the lab (did I mention that before???) and didn’t get any credit for doing so. And I was really bummed that they didn’t think I was enthusiastic about my project!!! I really love my research, but this whole experience made me consider (albeit for only about five minutes) just leaving graduate school right then and there. I so just wanted to go home and cry. But I also wanted to get stuff done in the lab, to prove them wrong that I am actually working hard! So I set up more samples to run for sequencing, and some other digests to run overnight.
But it didn’t end there. I was horrified to the point where I just didn’t want to look anyone from my committee in the eye. I couldn’t leave the lab right after because later on Tuesday we had a meeting of all the graduate students and my advisor about visitors we’ve had the rest of this week - going to their seminars, having lunch with them, and accompanying them to their various interviews. I wondered how the hell I was going to get anything actually accomplished in the lab at all during the rest of the week, because I was obligated to go to these lunches (well, it was free food at least), the seminars, and the thesis defense presentation of the senior graduate student in the lab.
I feel so bad making this comparison, but right now it seems somewhat appropriate. Just like a huge earthquake that went off Tuesday morning, I got to feel the aftershocks all week long.
On Wednesday we had regular departmental seminar with a high-profile speaker that 3/4 of my committee came to hear speak, as well as a seminar given by an interviewing Post-Doc in which half of my committee was in attendance. So after being embarrassed to hell with all of them the previous day, I had to face them all at one time or another the very next day when I normally wouldn’t have seen them for weeks on end! After that was probably the best and worst part of the week - the senior graduate student from my lab gave his thesis defense. It was good because it was a gleaming light at the end of a very bleary tunnel after getting beaten down in a committee meeting, but bad because I am now the senior graduate student in the lab. It was also the worst part of the week because I swear my advisor sat there glaring at me during a few moments in the presentation, and also because of what my fellow grad student said at the end of his talk during his acknowledgments. He talked about how our advisor had taken him out to lunch almost every week when he started to talk about his project and science in general, then over the years, he got to work more and more independently. He talked about how our advisor is known as a great scientist, but how he also got to know that he was a great advisor too. I wanted to gag myself and also scream out in jealousy. I felt so pissed - just that maybe, if I’d had that kind of advice and one-on-one time, meetings every week when I started, that I wouldn’t be “so far behind.” That maybe, just maybe, if my advisor was actually around a bit more often and I didn’t have to remind him EVERY TIME WE TALKED what project I was working on, that I would be able to get a little bit more done, and if maybe he was in town a little bit more often he would actually have time to meet with me.
Well, that was pretty much the end of the hugely emotional parts of the week. Things are slowly getting better, and I’m sure will get much better by the end of next week. The prof that’s leaving for France helped get me some really excellent reviews for the broader aspects of the project, and also told me how to show I’m enthusiastic about the project - by taking the lead on it, which I am really trying to do now. And the really good news had to be that my committee does think I have a great project - so now all I have to do is read and get some data!
