Bronte-Saurus! RAWR

This prettymuch made my week.



Via

Ways to set off my bullshit meter in less than 5 seconds

Sending me, a student, an email addressed to Dr. Queenrandom with the opening phrase "Due to your stature in the oncology field...."

Permanent Spousal Record: Recent Conversations

The Inexplicable
LB: "I should have figured you'd be into kyaking; lesbians love kyaking."*

The Dastardly
Setting: QR is diligently, distractedly writing a manuscript on the couch whilst LB watches a hockey game.
LB:  "Can I have your Cookie Dough Ice Cream in the freezer?"
QR: "Yeah sure whatever....." commence 10 second pause while I tippity-type away... "Wait...What?  NO!"
LB: "Too late!  AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"

We Love Each Other, I Swear
In response to me sending him this ecard:

 

He sent me this one:

Would that it were not so true.



*Said completely without a sense of irony.  I'm glad my husband is comfortable enough with my sexuality to make seminonsensical jokes about it.

Spring Cleaning

I thought I would be much less busy when I got back from a week long conference.*

I thought horribly wrong.

I am now Filled! With! Ideas!  in addition to having to finish up long-planned experiments and write my manuscript.  Oh and put together a journal club presentation, help plan and implement a career development series for the fellow's association, spend a day escorting around an invited speaker, and other various seminars.  April has been a bitch and May doesn't look much better.  I might not get any relief until my fucking cherished civil service of jury duty in July (apparently "I'm writing a goddamn dissertation and trying to find a job you fuckwits" is not a valid excuse for getting out of jury duty).

I'm also trying to fill out all the forms to transfer labs - my mentor is changing institutions and the plan is for me to go to a similar lab here to finish up the last few months of my training - and making sure supplies & such are in order for me to do so without too much disruption to my research.

To give you an idea of how busy I am, witness the current shameful, shameful state of my lab desk, which is the worst it has been....ever in my life:

Nerves

Queenrandom is leaving for her VBICM shortly and is pretty nervous about her talk, although the nice doctor gave her some shiny drugs that calm her nerves and cause her to write in the third person.  The conference is rather long so she doubts she can get any substantive posts written in the next week or so, after which regular Random Sample programming will resume.

Think happy good presentation thoughts for me!

Feelings of Fraud and Inadequacy in Grad School

I keep starting to write this post and then stopping.  This subject is very difficult to write about; it's very personal and one of my deepest professional insecurities, and I don't think I'm alone.  You see, I was talking with a couple of fellow grad students not too long ago, one senior student like myself, and a fellow a few years younger than us.  We were discussing data quality and publication, and I admitted that sometimes I feel like a fraud - sometimes I think my good data is all in my head, I'm imagining it, and someday soon some experiment is going to unravel my entire body of work.  The other old salt agreed with me, while the young pup exclaimed "What, you mean those feelings don't go away with success?!?"  All three of us were affected by classic impostor syndrome.  I read that women are more often affected by men, although anecdotally I was the only woman in that conversation.  I wonder if this is more common among certain fields or regions.

What I find even weirder is that as I achieve higher levels of success with my project, these feelings seem to intensify - the more I participate in the scientific field, the more chances there are that people will discover what an idiot I really am. 

Winter Wonderland

 I meant to post this photo a while ago.  I snapped it one saturday afternoon when walking home from work.