So, I have a stack of lab reports sitting on my desk... I've been working on them for a ridiculously long time. Mostly, I have been finding ANYTHING to do which will keep me from grading. I washed all of the dishes in my house, I spent extra time in the lab, I read papers... anything but read through a bunch of lab reports.
Well, my PI threw another great procrastinating tool at me today: http://ori.hhs.gov/TheLab/
A training tool about research misconduct! Yay! Really, it could have been awfully boring, but I would have thought it was a blast compared to grading... What's neat about this website is that its like those "Create your own Adventure" books, only with a story about a lab with a post-doc who publishes altered data! Doesn't it sound exciting?
What I learned from this adventure in research misconduct is- my department is apparently not the only gossipy department out there! Also- graduate school and research can lead to an awful unbalanced life full of disappointments... boo. If you play as the post-doc, prepare to be depressed. Not only has this post doc been post doc-ing for 4 years, but he ends up doing an additional two. Six years as a post doc? Thats another PhD! Yikes! Another thing I noticed, things seemed ridiculously competitive! My group is not so cutthroat, but goodness, I cannot imagine if it were...
Well, back to grading... maybe...
Friday, February 18, 2011
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Recruitment
This past weekend was the first of two big recruitment weekends that the Chemistry department has in the Spring. Recruitment weekends are one of the handful of nice things about graduate school in the sciences. While if you are applying to graduate school in something... not science you may apply to schools and then have to fly yourself out there to see what the school is like, in Chemistry (and I am assuming other sciences do this as well) if you get in they will fly you out for a recruitment weekend.
With recruitment weekends they really try to give you a feel for what life there is like in a period of a couple of days. They also really try hard to get you to want to come here for grad school. My university has one excellent selling point about it: in February (when the first recruitment weekend happens) you can wear a t-shirt and flip flops if you so choose. Many prospectives are coming from the midwest or pretty much anywhere else, where the cold, miserable weather is not close to stopping. Flying in here and seeing the sun shining is a major plus. We usually send the prospective students out for a hike to really show them how excellent our weather and location really is.
While recruits get to go on adventures around town and have parties thrown for them, its also a really mentally draining experience. Your first full day in town you go on tours around the facilities and then you go to a poster session where you talk with graduate students and PIs about their research. From this poster session you are expected to pick out 6-ish faculty that you want to interview with. You get to start your 2nd full day with those interviews. It is a pretty fast paced visit, you do a lot of stuff, and by the end of it all you just hope that you can finish your homework that may or may not be due the Monday after your crazy graduate school visit adventure. Oh yeah, and you also hope that you make the right decision on what you do for the next chunk of your life.
It's really fun to be a part of recruitment weekends now as a graduate student, and it is hard to think that I was one of those wide-eyed, fresh faced students wandering around asking, "What is a good question to ask in my interviews?" It is important to give them a good but real impression of the place that they will potentially be spending the next 5 or more years working on their PhDs, and it is also important to get an idea of who will be showing up the next August in the new group of first years. I just wonder what sort of impression I made as a recruit, and what sort of impression I make now on the other end of that interaction.
With recruitment weekends they really try to give you a feel for what life there is like in a period of a couple of days. They also really try hard to get you to want to come here for grad school. My university has one excellent selling point about it: in February (when the first recruitment weekend happens) you can wear a t-shirt and flip flops if you so choose. Many prospectives are coming from the midwest or pretty much anywhere else, where the cold, miserable weather is not close to stopping. Flying in here and seeing the sun shining is a major plus. We usually send the prospective students out for a hike to really show them how excellent our weather and location really is.
While recruits get to go on adventures around town and have parties thrown for them, its also a really mentally draining experience. Your first full day in town you go on tours around the facilities and then you go to a poster session where you talk with graduate students and PIs about their research. From this poster session you are expected to pick out 6-ish faculty that you want to interview with. You get to start your 2nd full day with those interviews. It is a pretty fast paced visit, you do a lot of stuff, and by the end of it all you just hope that you can finish your homework that may or may not be due the Monday after your crazy graduate school visit adventure. Oh yeah, and you also hope that you make the right decision on what you do for the next chunk of your life.
It's really fun to be a part of recruitment weekends now as a graduate student, and it is hard to think that I was one of those wide-eyed, fresh faced students wandering around asking, "What is a good question to ask in my interviews?" It is important to give them a good but real impression of the place that they will potentially be spending the next 5 or more years working on their PhDs, and it is also important to get an idea of who will be showing up the next August in the new group of first years. I just wonder what sort of impression I made as a recruit, and what sort of impression I make now on the other end of that interaction.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Softball Rant
Since I started graduate school I've found myself in need of a good de-stresser every few days or so. I've tried baking, walking my dog, meditation, gardening, sewing... there is a long list. I am missing a very important component that I had throughout the rest of my young life, which is a steady softball team and league to play in. There is something about throwing, hitting, and running (short sprints, of course) which is the best way to forget about how crappy your day has been. I miss that. Not only was softball my main de-stresser, but it was my favorite way to exercise.
Now for my (probably short, I have to get to the lab pretty soon) rant. Parks and Rec decided a year or so ago that they just could not afford to run various sports leagues anymore. They got rid of women's fast pitch softball, along with a summer slowpitch league, and who knows what other sports were ditched. This completely ruined my hopes for playing what I like to call "Old Lady League" over the summer. When asked how to fix the situation, the parks and rec folks told us that even if money came in, women's softball would only feel a small trickle of the funds, and probably would still not be happening. What the heck?
My main issue here is that there are not enough opportunities for women's fast pitch players to play their sport once you get over the age of 18. If you were lucky, as I was, to play fast pitch in college then you got to tack on an extra four years to the lifetime of your competitive softball career, but then what? I have been subbing in slowpitch softball for my true sport of choice, fastpitch. Slowpitch is alright, it has kind of the bare basics of the sport in there, but hitting a ball that was pitched up into the air probably about 12 feet high? So not what I had trained, almost 16 years of my life, to do. Nope, I'm craving fastpitch, where playing in your sneakers is not okay, and batting helmets and catchers gear is a must.
I was recently offered a volunteer position to coach JVB at my old high school. This would get me back into my sport! I thought, what an excellent opportunity! But coaching is a job which requires you to be at practice 5 days a week, probably around 4 or 5pm... I thought about it some more. There is NO WAY that I can get myself out of the lab by that time, and there is no way that practice would ever be over in time for me to get back to campus and teach two night labs. Shoot. I had to turn down the gig. And boy, it was depressing. I dont have the time to get the practice in that I used to get. Man, high school and college were awesome. I was "forced" to practice 5 or 6 times a week, and I whined crazy bad about it. I wish I had someone forcing me to practice now!
I was recently offered a volunteer position to coach JVB at my old high school. This would get me back into my sport! I thought, what an excellent opportunity! But coaching is a job which requires you to be at practice 5 days a week, probably around 4 or 5pm... I thought about it some more. There is NO WAY that I can get myself out of the lab by that time, and there is no way that practice would ever be over in time for me to get back to campus and teach two night labs. Shoot. I had to turn down the gig. And boy, it was depressing. I dont have the time to get the practice in that I used to get. Man, high school and college were awesome. I was "forced" to practice 5 or 6 times a week, and I whined crazy bad about it. I wish I had someone forcing me to practice now!
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| "the good times" playing college ball. |
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