New grad student drinking game

Ah, springtime. The weather is getting warmer, the days are getting longer, more and more open toes among the lab benches...and the pitter-patter of perspective graduate students on interviews echo through the hallways.

(N.B. I am not a grad student, I'm a technician and thus think myself vastly superior to anyone that dares enter my domain.)

There is something oddly comforting when grad student interviews come around. Maybe because it's a mark of the passage of time, a subtle reminder of our own mortality, a pang of nostalgia for those new beginnings. But mostly it's just amusing. New graduate students are like middle schoolers, and is there anything more awkward than witnessing a 13 year old's transition through puberty? Answer: it is matched only by watching naive 22 and 23 year olds fresh from college with a shiny biology degree transition into the cold, hard, alternate reality that is graduate school.

To make the most of this, I've devised a drinking game. It is always best to capitalize on other people's distress for one's own amusement. For legal (or practical) reasons, I will go on the official record and recommend that we start off this game in the morning playing with coffee, and maybe in the afternoon we'll switch to something harder. Remember--you can never be too caffeinated or too judgmental. Tech life forever.

The let's-make-fun-of-new-grad-students drinking game.


Take one (1) sip for every time you see:

• Navy coat and khaki pant combination. (What, does your mother still pick our your clothes or something?)
• Any ill-fitting suit on a guy. (Extra sips for a tie who's last appearance was probably at a grandparent's funeral)
• Non-lab appropriate footwear on women. (Add Bailey's to your coffee and drink if later in the afternoon she's hobbling barefoot and holding her shoes.)
• Combination of well-dressed prospective grad student being led around by a seasoned veteran in shorts and a t-shirt. (Extra sip if it's a PI, and they are wearing jeans.)
• Face frozen in perpetual smile of interest and understanding. (Oh, frozen face. We feel your pain. Except we don't.)
• The blind leading the blind. Drink every time you see a PI walking someone to their next interview...and getting lost and walking back by you.
• A pack of three or more, and only one is talking, and the rest are awkwardly following along. 

Got any other ones to add? Let me know!

And trust me, I don't usually judge people solely on the way they look. Only on Fridays. I'm sure once I get to know all of the new graduate students I will stand corrected and find that they are even more incompetent than I could have ever imagined. 

Cheers!

I AM SCIENCE kickstarter

Gosh, my pal Aspen says this best in this post on sort of the power of the internet to bring more people together for a certain cause. Some call it crowd sourcing, people on Tumblr call it signal-boosting, but the short of it is with the internet it's hard not to be connected.

Kickstarter is one of those amazing products-of-internet-connectivity. It's a new way to find funding; projects include everything from public art to app development to children's books, and Kickstarter allows you to connect with those projects, and donate in anyway you see fit.

And here's where the science comes in. So obviously Kickstarter is not going to replace the NIH when it comes to funding options, and I think if a post doc ever told his PI, "No, instead of working on my K award I'm just going to put this project up on Kickstarter," that PI would think they were crazy. (Don't mark my words on that, maybe that's what science will come to eventually.)

But here's a science kickstarter project we should all get involved in.

The #IamScience hashtag was started on twitter a month ago, and the day it started I watched with glee as my twitter feed became this science confessional of sorts. I was nothing short of inspired, and I cannot say this clearly enough, this is one of the most important messages for young scientists to hear.


In the microcosm of my lab world, I'm surrounded by a lot of people who did take traditional paths to end up as postdocs or PIs. You go to college, you major in biology, you go to grad school because that's what people that major in biology that don't go to med school do, you get a post doc after grad school because everyone goes and gets a post doc after grad school, and then you look for a faculty position somewhere. Oh I am so glad the next 15 years of my life are already planned out.

This isn't me. And the fact that this wasn't me, until about a month ago, when I started reading the #IamScience stories, scared me. And now it's exciting.

I had my daughter my junior year of college, and I've always had kind of a lagging work ethic, and I'm not sure if grad school is really for me--yet. And now I know that that's ok. And this is the message we need to be sending young people. Or older people. Or all people that have a love for discovery and logic and creativity. To know that "science" isn't this unobtainable ivory tower of people that just want to be shut up in a lab all the time. Science is accessible. And meaningful. And useful. And really freakin' exciting. And an amazing community to be a part of. 


So I was in a bad mood the other week, and I bought a pair of shoes. Because I thought that would make me feel better. (And it did!) But holy hell, this is way more important. And by funding this project, I hope that I will be able to make a difference, and inspire other people like me. Other techs that are lost in their jobs. Other people wondering if they can do it.

I'm donating now. It would be very very awesome if you would join me.

I can't wait to write my own story. And to hear all of yours.

How do large cells solve geometry problems

Sketchnotes for 2/8/12, Tim Mitchison.


Also, excuse the ants by "E.B. Wilson" I was temporarily confused between him and E.O. Wilson. C'est la vie!

I also need to figure out a better way to get these online. The only scanner that's big enough doesn't scan in color.

Sketchnotes: Epigenetic Events in Chromosome Segregation

I sketchnoted my first talk!