Deep Thoughts and Sage Advice

There are lies, damned lies, and work-life balance in the hard sciences.

Faith

It's no secret that I've been struggling with the religion I was born into, and consequently am struggling with my faith.  At this point I'm mostly apathetic; I just don't care enough to take the time to re-figure out what I believe.  But every once in a while I read something that truly inspires me and gets me riled up to start some introspection: my dear friend recently had this to say about God:

Don't tell US how to worship. Don't tell US who to vote for. Don't tell US we are wrong when we are right. . . .

You don't speak for me.

You don't speak for my God.

Because my God, the one I believe in, does not hate or oppress people because of their gender. Or their race. Or their political affiliation. My God loves everybody. Even horrible people. Even people who completely do not deserve his love. Even people who curse too much. Even liars. Even sinners.

Like me.

LIKE YOU. 

FUCK YEAH! I could not agree more.  Seriously, go read the whole thing.

In which I act full of myself

I'm speaking at another conference, which means at all the conferences I've attended where I've submitted an abstract, I've been asked to speak.  It's getting to the point where I'm worried about what my reaction will be when I am inevitably not chosen as a speaker.

But the much more important point is, what the hell shall I wear?  I think this is an excellent occasion for my new patent pumps.  This is an inaugural meeting so I'm not sure if it's suit appropriate.  This is the problem with working with both scientists and MD's  :/

Kinda proud of my birth town right now

Counter protesters out-number white supremecists 25:1 at ridiculous rally.  Love that they were throwing snowballs.

Postdoc Blues

So I've been doing this postdoc thing for about 10 months now.  It's really surprising how different being a postdoc is from being a student - but that's a good thing!  It means I'm learning new things, unlike postdocs who are just data chugging like a cheap tech.  I've written a review, coauthored a few papers some of which didn't get outright rejected, reviewed papers, applied for a few fellowships and even got one, am mentoring students (I currently have an undergrad, a very needy master's student, and a rotating grad student), presenting at conferences, leading committees, am currently writing the skeleton of an R01 and am taking a class as required by my fellowship.  Oh yeah and producing (somewhat kickass) data.  That's a long fucking list and there just aren't enough hours in the day.  I am feeling overwhelmed to the point that I lost control of my normally publicly cool self and swore at the janky-ass lab printer.  Très professionnelle. 

How I feel most days

Of course, it doesn't help that recently there have been two deaths (one a family member, one a family friend) in as many weeks and yet another sinus infection.  Nonetheless, I need to find a way to balance out my responsibilities.  I'm not sure how to do that, but I do know that it's a skill that I will need to be successful down the tenure track.  But all I want to do is take a long nap.

Throwing a tantrum

Why the fucking fuck don't memory foam pillows fit in a standard pillowcase?  I gotta shell out for a special fucking pillow because my neck's so fucked up from years of training-related tension, now I gotta buy special fucking pillowcases that don't match my sheets?  Fuck that noise.

While I'm at it, what's with all this #firstworldproblem bullcrap?  Back in my day we didn't come up with whitewashed fauxronic nonwitticisms, we just called shit like the above paragraph what it was: being a spoiled fucking brat. 

And another thing: YOU KIDS GET OFF MY LAWN!

Disappointed

Looks like the Obama administration is backing down on requiring employers to provide contraception coverage in their health insurance.

Looks like when I am searching for a TT job, I will specifically be avoiding Catholic institutions.  As a bisexual woman born and raised Catholic, the Church has continued to do everything in its power to push me out and then push me further and further away, then launches hilarious campaigns like "Catholics come home!" like I just wandered off like an unfenced dog.

Fashion trends I cannot endorse

I work at a primarily undergraduate institution, which affords me great fashion ideas.  There are, however, some trends I cannot understand.

I have been seeing low-volume ankle-height, flat, tan leather oxfords, people.  And not ones with wing-tips or patterns.  No.  I am seeing shoes on 20 year olds that remind me precipitously of shoes I once sold, orthopedic shoes targeted at, shall we say, twilight women.

Shown below are the Frye shoes I've been seeing and, for comparison, the SAS - yes that's right, San Antonio Shoes - that I am familiar with.  If you can't tell the difference I won't tell you.

No.  Just, no.

(However if anyone wants to buy me these in 6.5, I would love you forever)

Oh this is just funny as hell.

"Breastfeeding is a private, intimate moment between mother and baby. And dinner is a private, intimate moment between me and my cheeseburger."

Go read it.  Humor + logic + feminism = QR has a happy

OMG the Fundies were right about something!

May 21, 2011 is Judgement Day, apparently.

Which just so happens to be the day that my degree is officially conferred and I walk/get hooded.  The world begins to end, when I get my Ph.D.

For myself and my classmates, it really is judgement day!

via

I pass! I pass! I pass! I don't fail!

Yeah that's right.  I defended my thesis yesterday.  I kicked its ass.  They were throwing tough questions at me right and left (ohai, I work on brain cancer and development, yeah throw those primary cilium basic biology questions my way), and I slammed 'em right into the outfield.  There was laughing and joking during the exam.  My corrections are very minimal; the department chair didn't even have any corrections for me.  I should be able to finish them in less than a week, which means 3 weeks of vacation time for me!  Booyah!

You can now call me Dr. Queenrandom.  Oh yeah.

How you know you're a transfection guru

I am here on a lonely Saturday making some (GFP-expressing) adenovirus so I can get revisions done in time for my committee to let me graduate so I can walk this year.  I was worried because some of my transfections this week have been shit, but I did trash the reagent and get a new tube for this experiment.  Behold my reward when I pelleted my cells:

That thar be some GFP.

Methinks this batch will have a very high titer.

Someone sure is confused, but it ain't who you think it is, KK

Apparently Katherine Kersten's poor widdwe bwain is aww confused - she just can't undewstand that consensual sex and rape are different things.

Advice, honey: don't presume our young men are as confused as you are, that's insulting to men.  These students knew exactly what they were saying, and prettymuch every adult other than you understands the difference between "yes" and "no."  Hint: their definitions are in the dictionary.

Flattery will get you everywhere

Our rotating student thought I was a postdoc ("because you're so knowledgeable!") :D

Which begs the question, "WHEN WILL THEY LET ME GRADUATE ALREADY?!"

BTW: Got a postdoc lined up.  I'm very excited - the city is great, the area I'll live in is great (got that lined up too), the PI and I get along well (we're both grumpy old men, except I'm 30 and female...details), the project is something completely different that what I do, or what I thought I'd be doing, but it's very exciting.  I am so ready to be done with this grad school bullshit.  Hopefully my committee lets me set a date at my meeting next week.

Where I have been -or- Learning to love your reviewers

So yeah.  Submitted manuscript in late July.  1 day under 6 weeks later, we get reviewer comments (I think you can guess the review deadline for this journal).  Good news: they didn't reject it and there are improvements to be made.  Bad news: I immediately wanted to stab reviewer #2.

Reviewer #1 asked for, by far, the most time-consuming experiment (in addition to several other things that could be addressed entirely in writing).  But, Reviewer #1 was very positive about the findings, the experiments and the impact.  Even though s/he asked for the big guns, I was happy to address them because A) the reviewer likes my science and that's always a nice ego stroke and B) they are, logically, the next step of my project.  It was an insightful review, and I appreciated both the comments and the professionality.


Reviewer #2 sounded like s/he just returned from a colonoscopy.  Said some pretty unflattering things about the novelty of my work that, frankly, sounded as if they came from someone completely unfamiliar with the field.  Asked for some nit-picky redos.  Asked some questions that made me wonder if s/he even read the text or attended a science class, like, ever.  Asked for a particular pet method that is less accurate than the one I used for a particular experiment (yeah, you bet we argued that one).  Didn't like my controls and asked for ones that I personally think are less informative.  So, of course, I immediately decided the person was an idiot.  But now, in my wisened 2.5 months out from receiving the decision and having resubmitted earlier today, my attitude has changed slightly.  I still disagree about the usefulness of the particular control, but I did it, and I am glad I did it.  Because the experiment should have been straightforward, but it hit some kinks.  These kinks were unrelated to the validity of my conclusions, however they did relate to the efficiency of my method.  This forced me to re-evaluate a few early steps of my protocol and when I got the final readout, it was obvious that this new and improved method made my data much cleaner than they had been before, so I went back and redid all the experiments done on this particular protocol and got prettier results.  So even if I don't think the particular control I performed to please the reviewer improved my paper in an appreciable way, the comment still did improve my paper immensely.

And about those questions I deemed dumb?  When I sat down to answer them, it forced me to really, really think about my field as a whole.  About the validity of using cancer cell lines and mouse models to study human cancers; I thought this had been pretty damn obvious since the cancer I study happens in the brains of toddlers.  But being forced to put it down in writing in a way that both was supported by published evidence and not snarky made me a better scientist, if only in a small way.  It challenged me to question my assumptions and to be able to defend what is generally unquestioned.

So now, looking back, even though I still think Reviewer #2 is a cranky jerk, I am now starting to think that rather than being stupid, s/he was stupid like a fox.  In a way, at this point, I appreciate Reviewer #2 more than the nice Reviewer #1 (not that I am asking future reviewers to be mean to me!).   While I need the enthusiasm of people like Reviewer #1 if I ever hope to be published, ultimately, the comments from Reviewer #2 improved my science more, both in the short term and the long term.  That's really what it's all about, isn't it?

O PI Where Art Thou

Trying to talk to my PI all day about exciting new data (last set of ChIP PCR finally worked!  Figure complete!  Hooray, lower annealing temp and Q Solution!) and hoping for advice on job search.

Always in a conversation with someone else.

Keep checking on office.

On phone.

Check again.

Left early for holiday weekend.

CRAP.

The big question: Will I still remember what I wanted to talk about on Tuesday?

Improving Your Scientific Communication: Presentations

I believe firmly in the philosophy that one is an eternal student, always learning, and one should therefore always be open to improvement.  This is particularly true of presenting your data to the scientific community.  After all, your data may be awesome, but if it's presented shittily, it will be less well received, or maybe even looked over.  Some of my student colleagues may disagree - they think that their presentations are "good enough" and the data will stand for itself.  Bollux!  I, for one, am not going to stand at a poster for 20 minutes trying to puzzle out which band is which and wonder what the hypothesis even is, if the poster is not clear.  Furthermore, a good presentation will jump out and grab viewers by the gonads, exciting them in your work and further engaging them in your science.  A poster that is boring or hard to follow won't get stopped at as much, and a presentation that is bland or overly complex won't elicit the types of engaging questions the presenter might want - after all, who wants to spend their 5 alloted minutes for questioning rehashing their presentation?

I also wonder how many scientists have any sort of formal training in oral or poster presentations.  I am willing to bet the large majority does not, and instead relies on apprenticeship to gain presenting skills.  This is great if your mentors are good presenters, but this is terrible if your mentors are horseshit presenters.  I'd argue that even if your mentors were good presenters, there are still improvements that can be made.  First, your mentor's style, while it can inform yours, can't be your style; you need to find your own voice, early and often. Second, I have noticed many faculty present in the style that was popular when they were in school or doing their postdocs, leading to an overwhelming amount of comic sans, complexly arrowed diagrams, too much text, and design that is incredibly red-green colorblindess unfriendly.  Hell, I first learned to do my presentations in the late 90's-early 00's and am guilty of many of these mistakes.  Relying on outdated methods/styles should be avoided at all costs, as it reflects complacency and a lack of refinement of personal skills.

In my quest for presentation skill knowledge, I recently came across two incredibly helpful blogs: Better Posters and PowerPoint Ninja, both of which have gads of presentation style pointers as well as technical advice.  Aside from my #1 rule of thumb - never say in text what you can say with graphics* - there isn't really much more advice I can add to the subject than has been covered there, so my advice is to get your ass over to those blogs and play around for a few hours.  They're pure awesomeness.

Discovered via Ambivalent Academic.

*Let's be real: NO ONE reads the text after the section/slide title. You can test this by inserting jokes into your poster figure legends (or, as a student colleague did, into the footnotes of your thesis - only her student reviewers noticed).

The horse says, doctorate denied!

If you're contemplating grad school, or perhaps preparing for your thesis defense as I am, this episode of Futurama is obligatory viewing. (Note to self: do not show up to thesis defense sans clothes).

Getting Thesis Committes to Work for the Student: A Modest Proposal by a Student who's Been There and Back Again

I have often said that I like to live my life in clusterfuck: the week I got married, I decided to adopt my first pet and buy my first car; in a 2 year period I started grad school, bought a house, and bought a business.  You get the idea.  But lately, I'm starting to think maybe I just live my life in coincidence.  I have recently become part of a coalition of grad students at my institution fighting to get the school to take our career development seriously.  It hasn't been an easy fight, but we also have our allies among the faculty.  Our idea is to get some sort of centralized aid for students to learn about their options as scientists, to improve their scientific communications, to connect with potential employers/mentors, to learn what steps they can start taking to make themselves attractive for future grants, institutions, etc.  Students weren't being asked to review papers or grants, or encouraged to network at meetings, or guided with how to get a PI position, and worse, they were well aware of the bottleneck in positions as one climbs the academic ladder.  So, because a coalition of students doesn't necessarily have the power to force PIs to help their mentees with their careers, some students and myself have been working on an end run-around, to get our fellow students the development they need from the school if they can't get it from their mentors.

Now, one might say - and many have - that this is the job of the thesis mentor and, to a lesser extent, the committee members.  Well the problem is, to be perfectly frank, the mentors just aren't cutting it, and committees don't care*. 

Attention!

QR is in manuscript writing hell!  Including delays caused by: a computer virus, my mentor moving, jury duty, and weddings!

Hoping for a return to normalcy soon.  So I can do super fun things like try to find a job and write a thesis chapter by the end of the month.

You wish you were me.  Admit it.