MIT Grad Blog

How excited are you about orientation week(s)!  I sure am!  I’m definitely looking forward to the kickoff at the Thirsty today at 5pm. I’m hoping to get one of the plastic mugs for the first 500 people, we’ll see.  Maybe I’ll meet you there?

We could talk about fall and new classes, college football starting back up (Boomer Sooner!), and heck, I’m even excited about the Pats playing again and maybe even catching some MIT sports (I’ve heard the water polo team is intense).

Yeah, I’m not sure about you, I’m not so excited about summer being over, but at least a cookout helps with the chill and makes the darker evenings more fun.  Come say hi at an Orientation event!

Bye summer!

I am/am not my research.  (Circle one.)

This GRE question has bounced around my head for the last (mumble mumble) years.  It arose because of a struggle between my work and my self.  At times, this struggle makes me want to pull out my hair.

When things are going good in the lab, I am on top of the world.  I am one baaaaaaaad motha-shut-yo-mouth.  I am a genius for selecting my technique, and a rock star for properly calibrating it, applying it, and monitoring it.  My analysis could go platinum.  Twice.

But when things don’t go so well?  When the experiment stops for no apparent reason overnight?  When the results that I got twice in a row decide not to reoccur?  When the trend — the beautiful, understandable, reasonable, backed-by-literature trend — disappears?  Ohhhhhh — just get me a coffee and back away slowly.  And hide me from my advisor.

grad student life

The life of a researcher can be feast or famine.  It can be the Cyclone at Coney Island — the highest of highs and the lowest of gut-wrenching, vomit-inducing, white-knuckled, heart-beating-in-my-throat lows.  And the highs are great, yes, but this up-and-down? Well, more than a few hairs may be found on the floor around my desk.

And here’s the tricky part: this is maybe kind of how it is supposed to be.  You hear it all the time, that every genius has a dose of psycho, too.  That the successful people find success because they are obsessed with what they do.  In fact, pundits have developed a cute little phrase to highlight the necessity of this obsession.  Tiger Woods bleeds golf. Venus and Serena bleed tennis.  Chris Rock bleeds comedy.  Oprah Winfrey bleeds talk.  These people are the greatest.  They are great because each has incorporated  his or her activity into his or her blood.

So what is a grad student to do?  Do I stay on this roller coaster and live for the highs?  Buckle down and fight my way through the lows?  Or do I remove myself?  Should I stop trying to be the Tiger Woods of micromechanics?  Spend less time in lab and more time anywhere else?  Does that mean I stop caring and do only what needs to be done?

I think the answer is somewhere in the middle, but I don’t really know.  I also think my answer would not be your answer, or his answer, or her answer (I’m pointing at some people behind you, now).  Even if I knew the answer, I would still have to figure out how to live it.  I’ll probably figure it out the day they give me my degree.  If not then, then definitely the day I get tenure.  Or the day I retire.

Until then, if you have any advice, I would love to hear it.  You can find me in the lab, or at the Muddy, or maybe on the basketball court .  I’ll either be the grad student pulling out her hair, or the one doing a little a victory dance and slapping high fives with her grad student buddies.  Or better yet, just look for the one who seems like she has not figured everything out just yet.

Last Friday was one of those lovely days where you jump up, pack your books, and tell your office-mates you’re going to “go read in the sun” (Nothing can tear you, Scholar-of-Scholars, from your precious work — not even a gorgeous day.)  Well I am a Scholar-of-Scholars, so I did that, and I was just getting really into the micro-detection of the plastic zone in metals beneath the shade of an ancient tree — when I sensed some movement near me.  Some impatient movement.

I looked up.  I screamed a silent scream and jumped up.  About two feet away from my rear, well within my personal space, my human bubble of protection, was a squirrel.  A gritty, street-wise, impatient squirrel.  I know he was street-wise and impatient because he didn’t run away when I shouted at him.  He didn’t flinch when I clapped my hands and raised my arms to look intimidating.  I think he actually rolled his eyes.  And chuckled.  (Kind of like a group of tourists strolling along the walk at that moment.)

I was really creeped out so I kept backing up, and when I had stepped sufficiently out of his personal space, he hopped over my books, scurried right through where I had just been sitting, and paused beneath an open window on Building 1.  He made sure that the coast was clear — and leaped into the window.

I didn’t dare sit down until he reappeared about three minutes later, empty-handed but in an impatient hurry.  He scampered off to wherever he had come from.  Apparently he had just needed to check on his experiment or something.

Central Park ain’t got nothin’ on the squirrels at MIT.  From now on I’ll be doing my reading inside.  With the window closed.

just another grad student

. . . begins with chapter 3.  or chapter 4.  and  definitely not chapter 1.  that’s what i’m told, anyway.  all of my friends who have conquered that nasty monster, the thing-with-the-forty-eyes, The Thesis, have told me,

“Do Not, DO NOT, DO NOT begin with chapter 1.  Do that LAST.”

mas-ter [MAS'tur]; (noun, singular) that which one must beat to pass either grad school, or a level in Super Mario Bros.

master, or thesis?

A while back I was cooking dinner with some friends. We were casually chatting about labs and research and such as I was shucking corn to make chili-lime corn on the cob (fantastic and ridiculously easy, BTW).

Friend 1: What’d you do in lab today?

Me: I’m playing with Helicobacter pylori, the bacterium that causes stomach ulcers. It’s cool, but it’s been a while since I’ve been in a bio lab so my technique is still kinda sloppy.

Friend 2: That’s… comforting…

I wonder why no one ate my corn…