It was kind of a rough weekend, but I'm getting through.

First things first: making a slideshow for my friend's wedding is a GREAT distraction from what I really should be doing, which is writing. Oops. But it is definitely fun to go through old pictures and find little themes within them...if only that were a paying job. But then I suppose I wouldn't enjoy it as much if it were actually my job.

Second, why can't universities figure out climate control?? The lab is miserable and humid and warm, but one of the labs downstairs is freezing. But it makes it terrible for trying to do experiments, especially since I'm allergic to mold, and humidity = bad sinuses + mold = worse sinuses. Try having to put on a lab coat and work w/ radioactivity when it's miserably warm in the lab. The thermostat on the wall says 77. Bleh. 80 degrees is the same temperature as most of my experiments. Really annoying.

I think I might try to do mini-reviews of papers on here. Unfortunately, currently that means I might review papers only relevant to my research, but hopefully I will be able to branch out. More on that later...first I just need to survive and not melt in lab.

Can grad students get maid service as part of their stipend?

Weekends always seem like such good times to get a lot of writing done; I'm spending less time in lab, so I can spend more time at the computer, right? I always forget that I also have an apartment, a boyfriend, and a dog that all need attention, too. If only we got maid service as part of our stipend! They pay us to not have other jobs so we can focus on our research, but if they really wanted us to focus they would take away a few more distractions, such as needing to clean.

Pondering productive procrastination

This has been one of those weeks where I work hard trying to get an experiment to work, and nothing really happens. I have a lot of good information that is just a little more confusing than it was before, presents more questions than I started with, and begs for more control-like experiments to figure out why something looks the way it does. Is it more important to figure out the answer, which could take awhile, or is your time better spent on other things? How do you decide? Part of me really wants to know, because it could be something important to the project. Another part of me knows that I will never really figure it out; it may be nearly impossible, or worse, may be an artifact of the way the protein was prepared.
It's always a hard decision to go to your advisor and ask for help interpreting results. On the one hand, she's more experienced than me in some areas and adds a different perspective. On the other hand, this technique is done more by my collaborators, so talking to them first would help. If only things weren't complicated further by the advisor leaving next week to do some experiments in Boston. I think I will try for one more week on my own before begging for help.

At least I have picked slowly at parts of my papers this week, including getting a draft of a resubmission back to my advisor, and making some figures for the next paper (which, by the way, only needs one more mutant to be made- a mutant I've been trying to make for three years now...). I've even added maybe a paragraph to the intro chapter of my thesis, and written the methods section for a paper I'm second author on with one of my collaborators in another lab. Hopefully this weekend will bring on more sections of my thesis.

I find that working on my papers and my dissertation is a great way to procrastinate what I REALLY should be doing - which is looking for a postdoc. The whole process overwhelms me, though. I think I have an idea of the general geographic location I want to be, but what I want to study, who I want to work for, and what I need to do to get ahead are beyond me. It doesn't help that I feel less confident in what I want my ultimate career to be than before I started grad school. I realize that I need to just start picking people and sending them emails, but I guess I'm just scared out of my mind about making the wrong decision.

Getting Started.

As I start to finish up my PhD, I have decided to record a little bit about the everyday ups and downs of trying to just get everything done, and figure out exactly what to do next with my life. My hope is that this will resonate with a few, but mostly serve to get a little of my crazy out of my system, as well as hold me a little more accountable for all the bits and pieces I need to accomplish along the way. It will at least get me to write a little about something every once in awhile, even if this isn't exactly my dissertation...