In which a professor goes AWOL and I will soon have mice-free weekends

How shall I start? Several things have happened within the past week that I would like to mention but have yet found the time to, and though all (or almost all) of them are related to graduate school, they are not a connected series of events. In the order that they appear in my mind then. I'll claim artistic license with punctuation and it should be easy enough to keep organized.

//And now we start:

First of all, I've had my annual committee meeting on Friday. There are several points of distress, one of which being that one of the professors who had initially answered that he could make it that day failed to show up. Not late. No email. No excuse. And not even an answer to the email query I sent later that day. At this point I have emailed our program coordinator asking whether it's absolutely necessary for all members of the committee to sign, or whether missing one is okay. Wendy claimed that she only ever needed three signatures. However, due to the various changes in the program over the years, neither I nor my thesis adviser are certain what the current requirements are. Hence the email. Furthermore, because he is on my committee and has missed the once a year update, he can theoretically request a separate meeting with me, which means that yes, I have to go through the presentation two separate times.

Even not taking into account this unpleasant development, the actual presentation itself was...well, it was less traumatic than the candidacy exam, to be fair. The second time around being picked apart does serve as a proof of principle for desensitization to all kinds psychological abuse (only mildly exaggerated -- have you ever given a 50 slide presentation that you've practiced and practiced to get the flow of just so only to be interrupted every five seconds during the actual presentation and then have someone make a subtle dig about the lack of flow?). In theory, I can also appreciate the fact that it's better to go through and get used to this process now, with people who are smarter, more experienced than me, who are genuinely trying to help me rather than deal with harsh reviews later on on my own. In practice being verbally grilled for just over two hours is, even with a decrease in overall trauma, still a gruesome experience. Especially given that most of the complaint is about the format of my slides and not the science (for which I suppose I should be grateful) (I kid you not, one of the comments was about moving one of my labels down the slide by about 1/5 of the slide length).

On the bright side, my adviser was very nice about the whole thing afterwards (to a degree that I actually found a little unsettling because is he trying to placate me? Why? Did he think I will get discouraged about my project? Which depends on my skills as a bench scientists and has no link at all to my skills at public speaking?) and two different people told me that it's an odd compliment of sorts when that particular professor (most of the objection, for the length of two hours, came from one person, yes) decides to fire question after question at you. They think it may mean that I may have promise. Which would be promising but you can see the level of tentativeness we have to associate with interpreting the opinions of PIs, fickle creatures that they can be.

And in any case, I'm done for another year. In any case, absentee professor or not, I still get my end-of-the-quarter udon, the acquisition of which involved a rather large dose of sympathy from Wendy, who also reminded me that one of the reasons why we should graduate is so that we no longer have to deal with committee meetings.

For the short term, at least, it seems like a pretty good incentive.

... ...

I want to briefly mention that for the snacks for this week's lab meeting, the PI bought us "Susan's cookies". Lucy will know what I'm talking about. (Yep, they're from Vons.) Needless to say there was some teasing.

Oh my god my labmates can be such dorks. They are awesome. And apparently Wendy's children will one day rebel by not liking chocolate. And genes are weird.

... ...

I am getting an undergrad on Jun. 20th. I have narrowed possible projects for her down to three though at this point it's mostly uncertain because I have no information about her aside from the fact that she's coming from New York, and I'm going to try to tailor projects to her interest. People have been giving me advise on mentoring (most of which are, discouragingly enough, along the lines of "there's no right way to do it" and "it's a skill that you'll never be done learning"), which mostly boils down to the same advises as TAing, except with the added benefit of potential bodily harm if the student does something wrong. I have concluded from this that there has to be another level of project tailoring done once I know how good she is with her hands. Not all brilliant theoretician are, after all, good with physical tasks. My only hope is that I would get someone who still retains memory of enough high school chemistry that I don't need to explain how to dilute a solution one to ten.

It is very discouraging to find people who have trouble figuring that out in a research lab in one of the top universities in the country.

But speaking of discouragements and undergraduate students. One of the undergrads in the lab will be applying for grad school next year, and she is thinking of applying at the level of UCSD to MIT, just to give you an idea of the height of her aims. However, she is one of the undergrads who have more trouble with the concepts of dilution, still contaminates her reactions after nearly two years of doing the same type of experiments, and has a GPA of around 2.0. Recently she received a B on a exam and was thrilled to bits, while Wendy and I, both from a program full of straight-A over-achiever variety students, looked at each other and tried to decide what to tell her when she comes to us for advises on grad school application. We didn't want to be too harsh, but when a good portion of the higher tier programs claim that people need not apply if their GPA is below 3.2-3.5 range...well, what should we say? She has lab experience, which is an excellent point in her favor even if she is not the best student we've worked with, and if she can get in contact with a specific professor she keen on working with in the specific institute, it is apparently (according to some) possible for them to forgo the GPA requirement enough to look at her application...provided the rest of her app is top par.

Now, I think there may be a correlation between GPA and GRE score, based on what I hear from my classmates and the fact that both are measurements less aimed at applicability and more aimed at how well you can do a specific kind of task for the sake of doing it. (Some classes are not like this, but I think the overall way GPA works / is used is.) Which means she's likely to not perform as well in GRE either, though I hope I am wrong.

She could have a stellar application. I'm not entirely sure what weight the increase-student-body-diversity program she's in has. It's mostly a limbo of "we don't want to crush her dream but...we're not really sure if she has what it takes..." and we suggested safety schools. She is really set on grad school, so if anyone has any idea of better advice to give, please let me know.

Then we reflected if this is what professors feel toward their grad students, specifically toward the grad students who obviously are not cut for the academic track.

It was a thought depressing beyond belief.

... ...

I got one of my experiments to work! Maybe! I am waiting to hear back from my collaborator since I am not an expert on fruit fly anatomy, much less fruit fly embryo anatomy when I'm looking at embryos that are a mixture of all 16 stages of development. (To be honest, half of the time I have no idea where the head is, even.) Ah sweet anticipation. I have waited three days now. If I don't hear back in a week I may have to poke her with emails.

I am also almost done with the behavioral tests that I'm running. Specifically, everything that I have to run, long-term, ends next Tuesday so there will be no more weekends where I absolutely have to be in lab (though there will always continue to be weekends where it'll be more advantageous to my project if I were, but life's not perfect), hallelujah. Which means this is my last 7-day work week that is essential for my data for the foreseeable future. I celebrated the ending of the candles-burning-at-both-end-or-so-it-feels-like phase of my grad school career with ice cream.

... ...

I need to sleep now.