grad school jitters

aka FREAK OUT.

I sent this email to my pops yesterday.

i'm starting to get nervous about starting my rotation. 

like, how do rotations work?? do they just give you a project? when am i supposed to start thinking for myself? how much am i supposed to talk with the PI? how much do i have to do on my own? am i going to have a harder time over the summer with L because it will be harder to work on weekends and things? 

POPS am I making the biggest mistake of my life?!?!?!?!??!?!?!?!

Apparently, I am starting a summer rotation and also having a panic attack. Luckily, I've got my pops.

He sent me back the most rocking awesome of all emails. 

Remember stay calm, there is absolutely no question that you can do this. Don’t forget that. What you’re really asking is whether you’re going to be a “famous” scientist, trust me, you can get a Ph.D. 

This is so on point. Because I think I am worried about not being good enough to be a PI, or writing a nature paper, or some other bullshit like that. But that's not what I'm here for, right now, at 25 years old. I'm here to learn to do good science and get a PhD. And I can do that. I'm good enough for that, right now. I got into the grad school I wanted, they wanted me. This is the right thing.

Pithy answers:
like, how do rotations work??
Random, they work how you want them to.

do they just give you a project?
Yes, typically they give you a grad student or postdoc to shadow

Oh, big help, pops.

when am i supposed to start thinking for myself?
Day 1, but the hardest part is to not be too annoying. I wouldn’t say be demure, but don’t be ashamed to ask questions, and get over whether they are stupid or not.

The word I think he's looking for is "modest". Got it.

how much am i supposed to talk with the PI?
Depends totally on whether you even see them. See how s/he interacts with the other students and use that as a gauge  Don’t be shy, it’s your relation with the PI that will dictate your degree. If you are comfortable I think that trumps everything else.

am i going to have a harder time over the summer with L because it will be harder to work on weekends and things? 

Nope, the best scientist I know, John Carbon was an 9-5 guy. It’s called efficiency. What you will miss are the endless hours of wasting time and schmoozing. You  might have to develop tricks to make yourself the most efficient. [Redacted] in my lab was master of that. She would get her reading done, when most people (today) would be texting and social mediating. Literally, she’d be living on the scope and have a little reading light to read papers while she was babysitting the scope.
Don’t worry about weekends and things- focus on being efficient-
[Redacted] works about 10-4 on average and she’s a great student, it’s really called working well and efficient and not to fall into the grad student trap of being there all the time. That is one of the biggest myths that is still perpetuated. That said, you do need to be thinking all the time and really probing deeply into the problem

Can I just pause for a second and point out that my dad calls it "social mediating"?  Gotta love that guy.

I'm starting my first rotation June 3rd. I won't go too detailed into why I chose to do a summer rotation, suffice it to say, it's getting my feet wet, and I am really excited about starting grad school. I'm really nervous. I've never been a grad student. I've been a technician for 4 years, and while I started out thinking very highly of myself and that this was a great preparation for grad school, I'm not that confident anymore. (A good thing, probably.) I'm nervous about getting to know new people, seeing how a new lab works, learning new techniques. (What if I have suddenly forgotten how to pipet!) I'm nervous, but it's the good kind of nervous. The kind of nervous that means you're really excited, that means you're on the right track. It's like learning to swim for the first time. Or riding a bike without training wheels. You're wobbly at first, you can put your feet down at any time to stop, but you can tell it's going to be a thrilling ride.


Any other PIs or grad students or post docs have good tips or tricks for first rotations? Is anyone else as freaked out as I am? So far I have decided that I am going to be modest, hardworking, inquisitive, and efficient. Oh and not annoying.

Controversy in science

Had this email exchange with my pops yesterday:

From: Pops
To: me
Subject: another controversy
You don’t want to be part of:

Indeed, he declared war on molecular biology, seeing it as evolutionary
biology’s Scylla. The Charybdis was the Modern Synthesis, which hedescribed as “the private domain of a quasi-scientific movement, whosecreted it away in a morass of petty scholasticism” [3].

From: me
To: Pops
Subject: Re: another controversy
'liberating biology from the Procrustean bed of dogma on which it has been cast for so long,'
I'm not sure what a 'Procrustean bed of dogma' is, but I'm pretty sure I don't want to be there.
me

 This was regarding this article: 

How the Microbial World Saved Evolution from the Scylla of Molecular Biology and the Charybdis of the Modern Synthesis

doi: 10.1128/​MMBR.00002-09

Microbiol. Mol. Biol. Rev. March 2009 vol. 73 no. 1 14-21

I'm really not sure if this type of article is the zenith or nadir of a scientific career, but I'm pretty sure I don't want to be on the receiving end of this article. 

**

Scientific controversies are really interesting to me. At one level, I think it's exciting to be at the cutting edge of a field where there is the chance to be controversial. At another level, it's probably really hard to fight against dogma. And then, everyone says "oh science isn't personal", yadda yadda yadda, but you know what? Sometimes I think that's a bunch of bull. Yeah it's not personal, but if you've put all your time and energy into developing an idea and someone publishes something against your idea, then of course it's personal. (Except it's not.. I dunno. It's a fine line. Work-life balance, and all that.)

My dad is in a cool controversy (from his perspective, because he thinks he's right) about...oh gosh I'll butcher it...number of proteins at the kinetochore? *ducks*. My PI has forever been defending GWAS in the GWAS vs candidate gene/sequencing camp. Somewhat recently there's been some controversy regarding the claims made by the ENCODE project. It's interesting because some of these are more or less just matters of semantics. Some are less about the real science, and more about competition for funding and publishing in high profile journals. Some are actually about the science. 

**

I really think my dad is one of my personal heroes, despite the fact that we didn't get along all throughout my middle and high school years. He said that his graduate adviser told him something along the lines of this:

You can disagree with a conclusion, with a method, with a whatever, but you can't argue with the data. Because it's all about the data. And nature doesn't lie.

Nature doesn't really do us that many favors though either, so, there's that. 

(I double-checked what pops's grad adviser actually said about the data vs conclusion thing, and got this email back:)

From: Pops
To: me
Subject: Re: hey what's that thing 

Yep, exactly. So if you’re writing a paper, you should cite the author’s data positively, rather than citing their conclusion in a negative way

It's a pretty good way to go about life too, if you think about it.