Hindsight -or- Choosing a Research Mentor

The single most important choice of graduate school is choosing your adviser/research mentor. Your adviser affects nearly all aspects of your career:

• Science - Not only will your choice in mentor shape what projects you work on, but part of the job of the mentor is to train you in both scientific thought and methods. A good mentor will be able to train you to recognize the difference between good research and bad, when to stick with something or give it up, when to publish, and how to produce quality data.
  
• Continuity of Research - Your mentor will provide partial or total funding for your project through her grants, depending on institutional policies. It is critical you have the funds available to complete your thesis project; without them, there is no project!
  
• Writing - Your mentor will also guide you to learn scientific writing for meeting abstracts, thesis preparation and publication. It is crucial to learn good written communication skills; they are the bread and butter of science. Without quality publications, your hope for getting a J-O-B is practically nil. A good mentor will produce easy to understand, quality publications and help you to refine your own writing skills.
  
• Visibility - Related to the above, your mentor can determine how seriously your communications are taken, and whether they are even in existence. A good mentor will encourage your participation in national meetings and timely publication. Your mentor can provide you with contacts to people who work in your field of interest and can advise you on which academic societies are worth your time (and money!)
• Leadership - Your mentor also serves as a model for how you might run a lab in the future. She may also provide you with leadership opportunities within the lab so you can start to develop your own style. Leadership styles differ greatly; try to pick a mentor who is similar to the style you would like to emulate, but not exactly the same. You might learn something from the differences!
  
• Graduation - Your adviser should always have your graduation in mind. A good mentor will make sure you stayed in school long enough to get the skills necessary to do a postdoc, but not so long that they're taking advantage of cheap labor. They will press you to make progress, without demanding too much or allowing you to fizzle out and get a terminal Master's.
  

Given how very important your Ph.D. adviser is to your future career, choosing one can be very daunting. You might ask yourself, how do I rank potential advisers? Funding? Science? Personality? Success graduating students and placing postdocs? These are all important; only you can decide which is the most important for you, given your situation. For me, all the mentors I rotated with had interesting science with established projects, so I could eliminate that from my final decision making process. I made my initial decision based on appearance of funding (more on that) and leadership style.

But as you may be aware, I encountered some bumps.  Lots of bumps.  I chose my first mentor poorly and had to switch labs. My purpose, chickadees, is to prevent future baby Ph.D. students from choosing poorly.  Given my methodical mentor-choosing process, where did I go wrong?

Time for Change

Sometimes what we start to do doesn't end up matching what we need to do. When I started this blog, I didn't really have a clear goal or mode in mind...I just thought, "Hey, this will be where I put my thoughts down lalalalalala!" This led to me getting distracted and not posting.

I have recently put a lot of thought into what I want this blog to be. I would like to focus more on science and social justice - things which are very important in my personal life, but that I have been ignoring here (don't worry, you'll still get my self-depricating sarcasm and animal stories, for suresies). To that end, I need to do three things. First, I'll need to overhaul this blog. There will be arcives, for sure, but I have reorganized them a bit. And with new content there must be a new look! The second, and much harder one, is I need to break out of my shell. I need to stop being afraid of criticism. The third is to fully commit to regular posting, at least once a week. I'm scheduling it!

Enjoy!

Blizzard Blog '09

First things first: Flikr is being a douche (or maybe it's user error but hey I don't feel bad hatin on a conglomeration of code so I absolve myself of responsibility :P) so the album link is here, sorry I can't link individual pics today.

Here's our own personal snow gauge. Our deck furniture doesn't get much wind, so the snow accumulates nicely on it. How many inches does that look like? I think it's over a foot.

I Must Be Insane

Here I am sitting at work at quarter to nine during what has to be one of the worst blizzards I have ever seen. Aside from the M.D. who is required to be here, I am the only person on my floor who decided to work. Well let me back up, there is a story here if I can glean it.

My current thesis adviser informed me this October - on the day I returned to work from a week and a half bout of H1N1, no less - that come June she was leaving this institution and accepting a better position at another institution. Having only been in her lab for a year, and after all the crap with my former adviser, I silently screamed, then had a heart attack. But we have a plan. The plan is, well, my work is going well so we need to get published ASAP. The hope is to at least be have the manuscript accepted and in revision by June. Ideally revisions would be completed by then and I could start writing my thesis while some other PI babysits me (this school is not huge on students doing things independently without the official, watchful eye of a faculty member). If not there are labs I can do my revisions in; we'll just make sure to order all the supplies I need before she leaves.

The upshot of this is that I've been working my (somewhat sizable) ass off since then to the exclusion of all else. I'm surprised my hair hasn't started falling out yet (I keed I keed). So I planned three huge and costly experiments for this week, taking multiple days each but the most work and expense culminating on the last day. It's called flow cytometry, and at my institution, we have a group of people who, once you've prepared your samples, will run them through the cytometer and do basic sorting and analysis for you. I have completed two and today is the last day of the third, which would conclude this chapter of my research and be a nice, pretty little graph in my manuscript.

Cue blizzard.

Resolved: We are investing in kilts.

LB and I have both recently had pants-related disasters which have left me wondering whether we are responsible enough to be allowed to wear them.

Mine:
So the other day I was wearing my skinny jeans. But these particular skinny jeans are a little weird; they seem to get skinnier every time I wash them and never relax again. Also? While they have plenty of room in the butt, hips and thigh, what I didn't expect is that they would be tight on my monstrous calves (srsly. I have had distance runners astonished by my calf muscle size). So after work I change into my sweats. This day, as I am attempting to pull my skinny jeans off my calves, and they are just not coming off; they are much tighter than usual. I gather my strength give a good jerk, managing to yank so hard that I pull my feet out from under me. As I am falling, in what can only be described as fortuitous clumsiness, instead of landing straight on the floor I instead fall into the corner of the mattress, bounce off in the opposite direction, then land on the floor - looking very dignified with my jeans around my ankles.

LB's:
LB has this ancient pair of dress pants he had somehow inherited, and whether they were structurally sound was in question. This question was answered several months ago, when LB bent over and ripped the buttcrack seam. Like, all the way from taint to waistband. Normally I mend clothes, since between the two of us, I am the least unhandy with a needle. But this was too much for me; I knew that A) I would not be able to get a straight line so his butt would look wavy and B) I would get an ADHD attack halfway through and the stitches would get large and ineffective. So I told him to take them to a tailor. Apparently at some point he instead put them back into the laundry hamper, and they were washed and folded as usual. The other day, LB put them on and wore them to work, NOT NOTICING THE FOOT LONG HOLE IN THEM as he put them on. He briefly tried to blame me when he got home, but I pointed out that not noticing a hole THAT big in the pants you're stepping into was no one's fault but his own. He capitulated, without admitting defeat. I had a laugh at his expense.

How I Spent my Sunday

Did you know that cats can projectile vomit?

All over your hands and satin robe?

Thank you, Max. Love ya.

This story is awesome. The hero of our story, Dennis LeRoy Anderson, owns a custom, motorized La-Z-boy, which in and of itself is awesome. Not only could he drive it around town (and, as will soon be pertinent, to the bar), but it has a stereo and cupholders built in. Genius. GENIUS! As any person in their right mind would do, he tooled this chair down to the bar one Monday evening and proceeded to get smashed. When Mr. Anderson decided that he had partied enough, he drove his La-Z-boy home. Except poor Mr. Anderson didn't make it home that night; because he was so drunk, he crashed his La-Z-boy into a parked car in the parking lot. Sadly, Mr. Anderson was then issued a DWI and to add insult to injury, his chair was confiscated. All for having the genius of getting wasted in his own, personalized, motorized recliner. Moral of the story: In Minnesota, motorized furniture, while completely awesome, is still considered a vehicle, so don't drive it drunk. Call a friend with a pickup to get a ride home so you can enjoy many more days of getting drunk in your personalized, motorized La-Z-boy.