3 websites every PhD student should have bookmarked

Sometimes you have 15 minutes to kill during an incubation, time point, or exposure.

Here's 3 pages I recommend you click on while you wait.

1: PhD comics: Piled higher and deeper.

This comic strip follows the life of a nameless, bespectacled, engineering grad student as he and his friends struggle with procrastination, the endless quest to find free food, ridiculous supervisors and trying to have a life outside of the lab. Always good for a laugh, and so easy to relate to.

2: What should we call grad school.

"When someone brags about how late he stays to work."

One of those great giffy tumblrs, constantly being updated, always accurate, often at summer student's expense. If only there was a way to print these out and post them on the lab bulletin board.



3: Stuff by Matt Might, particularly the Illustrated Guide to a PhD

I came across Matthew Might (@mattmight ) 's stuff just the other day. Someone had share a FB link to his illustrated guide to a PhD, and well for me it was inspiring rather than just sad and funny. Then I spent another hour or so reading other articles like his 'How to get into grad school' his recomended books and papers every PhD student  should read and his team fortress related guide to the 9 types of students. Anyways, this is a great place to procrastinate and still feel like you a developing yourself into a better scientist.

Today I: am back to class, and learning NMR

OK, so I just had to share this real quick, because it`s got me feeling a little like this kitty:

 source

SO I`m doing a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, so it stands to reason that I might have to take a couple graduate level biochem courses, tonight I have the first lecture of possibly my last class ever. The topic for the evening, metabonomics and pharmacology. The papers assigned to read in advance feature a lot of techniques, and a lot on NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance)  of which I previously know very little about... having coming from a physiology based undergrad (not biochemistry). The moral of this story is, in reading one of these papers I came across this sentence....and subsequently feel like the above cat.

``An NMR spectrum of biofluids can be thought of as an object with a multidimentional set of metabolic coordinates, the values of which are the spectral intensities at each data point, and the spectrum is therefor a point in a multidimensional metabolic hyperspace.``

 (Lindon JC, Holmes E and Nicholson JK, 2006)

So there you have it.....hopefully tonight`s class goes better than the reading of the papers did... looks like I`ll be working double time this semester.

Today I...A much better day

Today I...

• Woke up at 7AM and felt ready to get out of bed (as opposed to dragging myself around my apartment with my eyes closed)
• Pressurized a vessel...with tone...and got some real, usable data points!
• Ate some very tasty chocolate cookies
• Debated over a weekend meeting/fund raising event... came to a conclusion...maybe
• Made some hepes buffers 
• Attended my first ever class as a TA.

Before the student's left they were asked to answer some questions about themselves on a card and hand it in. I looked some quickly, and saw reasonable responses, some that made me chuckle (answers intended for humour), some that reminded me of me, and one specific one that was truly inspiring.

So I eagerly look forward to getting to know these students better, and dread the first pile of marking I'll be taking home.

Tonight I will.....

• Buy apples to make this apple sharlotka
• Buy some carrots and cream cheese to make these inside-out muffins
• Type up an abstract from all my jotted down notes
• Have a drink damn it!
• And see a friend play a show with his band

Ah Grad school

Bossypants and no pants days

Just finished reading Tina Fey's autobiography, Bossypants (really only stared it 2 days ago, so it's fast reading people, especially if you are enjoying your summer of unemployment as I am).

From her introduction:

If you are a women and you bought this book for practical tips on how to make it in a male-dominated workplace, here they are. No pigtails, no tube tops. Cry sparingly. (Some people say "never let them see you cry." I say, if you're so mad you could just cry, then cry. It terrifies everyone.) When choosing sexual partners, remember: Talent is not sexually transmittable. Also, don't eat diet foods in meetings.

*And if that paragraph makes you laugh, chuckle, smile, or even just continue breathing normally, then definitely read her book. In fact even if you stop breathing altogether in reaction to your perceived lack of comedy in that paragraph, read it anyways, just because.

And me, as a woman about to permanently enter a male dominated workplace (academia yeesh) by starting grad school next year; loved it.

Anyhow, today I am not wearing my bossypants (do I even have those? yes, they're burberry pants that I got for 30 dollars at a thrift store, and they are bad ass, in a norwegian curling team kinda way, has it been too long since the last winter olympics for that reference, yes, but I don't care). Today so far is looking like "no pants day #2". Does this mean I'm currently wearing a pair of boxers instead of pants, yes, but also more importantly, it's part of my summer plan of wearing shorts skirts and dresses as frequently as possible, befor heading back into the lab in septemeber (mandatory full length pants!).


Anywho, getting back to blogging, hope that was moderately funny for you, if not refer to the * above, and follow those suggestions for my blog.

Free beers!?

So they say that where ever there is free food, or a free drink, grad students will be there.

And although today's guest lecture was excelent and very interesting (especially for someone who does love imunology despite being in a smooth muscle lab) at the end of the champange reception, there was just a crowd of drinking students staying until they closed the bar out.

And since I can't find an appropriate PhD comic to support this, here's a good one anyways

Things to do while waiting for an experiment to run.

Picked a PhD

So I've decided who really needs a master's degree? I mean I've worked in a lab for the past 8 months, and had several excellent lab positions/experiences before that. And I've just let Long Hair (my boss/supervisor... who does in fact have long hair for a man) and one of his colleagues talk me into just applying right into the PhD program next year.

Well there's a 4 year commitment decided upon in a hour.... well not really an hour, this is something I've been talk with myself about for the last 4 months. So hurray! it's all decided and stuff.

In other news, I moved up to my new lab today... going to take a break (kinda) from mesenterics and spend some time learning about myometrium. Here's a look around.

Well not really a look around, labs are all confidential and stuff... so instead it's just a generic back drop style shot. As for that totally awesome shirt I'm wearing, it's vintage liz claiborne, picked it up for 5 bucks on ebay. The belt is from pac sun.... its was cheep... that's all I know about it. Oh I found it here.

Anyways, this is the face of someone committed to being a student till she's 27 (minimum).