Pondering #1

At this point in the cycle I am going to assume that grad school is not going to work out this year, and strangely making this assumption makes me feel much better about the whole deal. There are some programs from which I've not yet heard back, but even so, they may actually not even be the best fit for me anyhow. I'm already so busy doing so many awesome things that this doesn't really set me back, it just gives me more time to better up my badness.

The more I've pondered the luster of a purely academic career, the duller its enticing sheen has become. I'm not certain that I want to spend the rest of my life trapped in an office thinking thinking writing writing chasing funds and collaborators and students. There's nothing wrong with that career, it's the endgame for many scientists and most are very effective at commanding some incredible science from their desks, but I'm just no longer sure that I want it. As the sheen of academia has faded, entrepreneurship has become more enticing. I know it would involve a lot of the same office-bound paper chasing that I mention above, but that somehow doesn't make it less appealing. I think the primary appeal of it may be that the organization I build would be a product of my own devotion and charm more than bound by the strictures of bureaucracy and tenure requirements. I am terrified of complacent mediocrity (terrified I may someday see it in myself), and I'd much rather fail spectacularly than piddle along because there's a lot more to learn in failing than in middling.

However, right now I'm just a Bachelor of Science, not even a Master thereof, so I know that founding a start-up now would be substantially more complex than doing so later after I've attained more letters behind my name and the experience (wisdom?) that goes with them*. So grad school remains as a goal, I'm just content at the moment to polish my street cred and scientific credentials to help me get in next year rather than be disappointed by this year's rejection.

*This may not stop me anyhow right now.

SEEKING ADVICE!!!

The time has come for Toaster to begin pounding out emails with enough intelligence and wit to firmly lodge my real name into the skulls of potential advisors at Ph.D. programs I am interested in. I know well enough to use proper grammars and to include titles and whatnot, so it's not the content so much that has me worried. I figure I'll track down interesting PIs through program websites, read a recent paper or 5 by them, and then ask sparkling questions about their future research plans (eventually working in the question about whether or not they expect to have spots for students available in their labs for the next round).

However, recent developments render me much more mobile than I had previously been. Now that I don't have a serious girlfriend to consider and am forfeiting most of the furniture, I can pretty much move whereever in the world I might want to. Therefore, dear reader, what is the graduate school situation like in countries outside of the U.S.A.*? Are the academic customs and mores different? Do they fund students with tuition and stipends?

I first noted UCL (University College London) via the popsci book "Oxygen" by Dr. Nick Lane and then noted that it produces a lot of high quality research. There seem to be many other high-caliber research institutions in Britain as well**. At the same time, there are several groups in the Netherlands and one at the University of Munich doing very interesting immunological research. But I realize that my lens on this is entirely modulated through the Internet and as such may be missing some really cool/interesting/awesome groups, so who else is out there?

Toaster thanks you for your wisdom in advance.

*And not just those that speak English.
**I am somewhat concerned about the prospect of living in a country that hasn't seen a fresh vegetable since Cromwell (and eels don't count!), though at the same time the dangers of living in a city with a Würstchen-, Bier-, und Kuchen-based socioeconomic dialectic also seem manifest.

Loyalty vs. Opportunity

So about a month ago my boss told me I should probably start looking for other jobs because the only grant funding we had left was due to expire this coming Sunday. I went home and sent out a flurry of graceful applications to as many jobs as I could find posted in the area. Since then the lab has been rescued by an ARRA-funded challenge grant. Now, though, I'm beginning to hear back from the positions I applied to.

The new grant in my current lab presents me with new opportunities to expand upon techniques I've already learned and finally generate some real data. But at the same time, these other positions potentially represent very real opportunities to sink my teeth into an entirely new system and expand my skill set. My current position is applied immunology/microbiology, the potential positions are more basic immunology.

I find myself caught between loyalty to my current boss--who has taught me quite a lot but at the same time also left me alone in the lab and expected me to move mountains with chopsticks (and no glue to make a bigger lever)--and feeling that moving into another lab with another PI and even broader immunological focus would make my application to graduate school this fall stronger. However, this premise itself could be false. I know that in looking for a job, it's a major black mark to have drifted among several labs for short periods of times; but is the same true for graduate schools? I've spent 2 years in the current lab, if you combine the time I have spent here as an undergraduate student, temp, and staff. Would the grad school admission committee see my moving into another lab shortly before applying as a negative quality?

I'm tempted to send out the information requested and attend any interviews I am offered. If they wish to follow up my references, of which my boss is one, I will let her know that she may be getting some calls. Yet I worry that doing so will endanger a good recommendation letter from her.

Therefore I find myself at somewhat of an impasse.

UPDATE: I went ahead and sent out the requested information and affirmed my interest in the position. It's not even an interview yet, so maybe I'm making chromosomes out of oligomers. But still, it's a research assistantship instead of tech position, so I feel it is wisest to pursue it and see what may come of it.

Useful Uses for Anger

I have been rejected by all the institutions to which I applied for graduate studies.

Family and friends keep asked me if I was OK about it, and I told them that yes, I'm just peachy because there's always next year (there is, right?). But I'm not. I guess in reality I'm kind of torn up by this, as well as mightily pissed off, but I don't tell them this because I don't want them to worry and I don't want them to see just how much I care because then I think they'd share in my disappointment. I have an uncle or two in Scandinavia that I think went to graduate school, but I'm fairly sure that they went for professional degrees. But of the family that I grew up with here in the States, no one else has ever gone to grad school. And they're all looking at me expectantly smiling and prodding me on, expecting me to set a gleaming example for the younglings of my generation (I'm the eldest of the current generation). And in addition to this pressure, I put myself under more, muttering fervently the exhausting mantra: "Do more, be better!"

Failing to get into grad school, failing to even get so much as an interview, is not doing more or being better. And because of this I'm not so much pissed off at the institutions (they had very few spots, I understand) as I'm angry at myself. Angry at not selling myself better. Disappointed that I didn't find the wonderful advice that Eppendork, Dr. Isis, PhysioProf, Ambivalent Academic, et al have shared with the world via their blogs.

Part of this, I know, is that I am sick of being stuck in small-city Midwest, sick of the same grey weather, sick of the same fucking patterns of everyfuckingthing. Especially sick of the bougie locals who think science is just cute. But it's also largely that I'm restless, I want to move on, and as far as I am willing to see, the only direction to move on in is up.

But a larger part of it is that I am having a hard time separating my self-worth as an aspirant scientist from being rejected.

I want so badly to tear through some new applicable literature*, to sink my teeth into a new set of experimental skills and shake the living shit out of them until they splatter beautiful data everywhere, to learn further and deeper and have peers with whom I can discuss it all, to design and fail and design and fail again and again until I have hammered out elegance! Most of all, I want to be challenged!

The anger I currently hold is of a useful sort. I can use it as fuel. It was anger at being trapped in an endless surburban tract with people who cared more about their lawns' green-ness than the dynamics of molecular orbitals that motivated me to do well in high school so I could get the fuck out of the South**. It was anger at national politics that caused me to harrass the university newspaper's cartoonists until they let me into their club, and that later got me condemned by Catholics, fundamentalists, and Republicans across campus.

So it is this anger, me being mad at being mediocre, that will have me kicking in doors this coming summer and contacting specific professors instead of relying on the sparkliness of specific programs. It is this anger that will have me dissecting my essays several more times, and maybe even being more careful with whom I ask to write letters on my behalf. I am going to beat down the door to academia, even if I'm not sure I want a post-postdoc career in it, with manners and all the charisma*** I can muster. I'll keep the anger to myself, but I'm sure as hell going to bend it to a useful use.

*I frequently read papers on topics other than my projects, but it's always kind of bittersweet because I don't get to use them for anything.

**At the time I thought that I was getting out of the Midwestern mindset (I lived in the interface of Midwest and South) when I came to Michigan, but it turns out that Michigan was just as dopey and the food wasn't even nearly as good. Seriously, why do Michigan tomatoes taste like nothing?

***Note to self: get charisma. Best strategy likely to be attaching my name to a celebrity like a male anglerfish, but much handsomer.

Even Toaster's anger contains polka.

Career

Today is one of those days where I am wondering why I am trying to be a scientist at all.

I see my PI struggling to pull down enough funding to keep the lab going. I see other PIs in the same boat, always running themselves ragged and noses worn to bloody stumps by the grindstone. I see jaded graduate students swollen with regret and post-docs seething with frustration. Is this what I want for my future?

Once upon a time I had pinned my dreams for the future on this. Now I look back at the myself of then and facepalm violently.

But still, what's to say that in 15 years with lots of experience and a Ph.D. I won't look back at the myself of now and vomit out my ileum in jaded disgust over my possible present naivete? Even now I kinda sorta feel that I should have gone into computer science because it also offers intellectual thrills but without the 20ft. deep mud bog soccer game of scrambling for grant funding. I thought that I was going into a job that'd be thankfully cubicle-free and secure in spite of my plans to go ahead and get into grad school fairly quickly. Although I don't have a cubile, I do have a bench and a desk, so there's not much difference. And security depends entirely upon funding, which is nowhere near as secure as I once believed. I mean, I can certainly get my intellectual kicks from science and I can definitely be happy afloat in a sea of carbonated data and statistics, but I can't eat ideas (I imagine that great sparkly ideas would taste like cookies and terrible bad ideas would taste like rancid butane). The payoff in an academic career is so far away, and the crap to wade through to get there so deep, that I really have to wonder whether it's even worth it in the first place. Yeah, sure, SCIENCE!, but...years and years and years and years and years and years of science, science, and nothing else. I have been happy to create and conduct science, but will science consistently continue to be a source of happiness for me throughout the rest of my life?

Maybe I'd be less existentially gloomy if I'd remembered that whole lunch thing today...

Partly at least I know why I'm doubting my plans thus far. I've invested my time in other difficult things before with no real substantial happiness payoff. Logically, I know that science is not a cello, but still: the point stands. I know that I could put my head down and ball up my fists and plow through everything in my way (sisu!), but right now I'm wondering what the risks of missing almost everything beautiful and joyous along the way are. I know that life aint' all butterfly turds and puppy chuckles; I know that being successful at anything requires major investment of self, time, and energy. I want to sink my teeth into science and tear it a new hole it never knew it needed so badly, yet sometimes I doubt that I'll ever be anything more than just mediocre.

Maybe it's a screwed up way of looking at things, but I'd rather set out to do something and fail outright than to be mediocre in that goal, because then I wouldn't be learning anything...

I'll probably blather on more about this later. For now I should go seek food and find a program to remind me to eat regularly instead of going without food for 10-12 hours at a time (today only for about 8 hours, but 10-12+ isn't unusual for me).

Guild

Just got out of the lab. Spent 3 hours in the flow hood plating serial dilutions of bacteria. Tedium. Tedium in which I must remain very accurate and precise with my measurements, which had to be done a couple hundred times (the same measurements).

Sometimes I look back to the craft guilds of the 17th century prior to the Industrial Revolution. They regulated all the craftsmen and their products and what was allowable and who could sell where and what and how and for how much. But they also trained young people as apprentices, then when they became competent let them be journeymen, and finally, after their masterpiece was complete, they were masters of their trade. In some ways, becoming a research scientist recapitulates that progression.

I very recently graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Cell and Molecular Biology. As an undergraduate, I worked in labs, and on my own project, kind of like an apprentice. I learned the practical basics that they can't teach in lecture halls, such as pipetting, cell culture, operating cantankerous equipment. Now I've graduated and am working in a lab as a technician. This is like the journeyman stage. Later, when graduate school happens, it will be as if the guild has granted me permission to continue to advance my craft as a journeyman. And in graduate school, I will have to research and defend a thesis, the academic equivalent to a masterpiece.

The only problem with this is that I feel like I should have my own tools. A good set of micropipettes, maybe a pH meter, a couple sheafs of protocols. Unfortunately, micropipettes are a lot more expensive than hammers.