My undergrad is leaving at the end of next week. At this point it's no longer surprising that the first thing I mention, upon catching up to my posts, is her -- I worried about my undergrad even while I was in Greece. She has had enough time to generate data for the 15min talk she's required to give for her program...buuuut her data isn't very clean and the negative controls (and sometimes positive controls) failed so I'm not really sure what to tell her. She does need to present something but I can't think of a way to say that the data is unconvincing nicely.
However this is a nice lead in to the sheer, alarming, amount of "advise" that I have been imparting lately to various undergrads in our lab. Most of this is probably due to the fact that I am currently the only grad student in lab. I think I may make up a list of "Things An Undergrad Who Wants to Become A Biologist Should Know", including an item along the lines of "everyone arrives to grad school at their own pace, through different paths -- don't freak out if you think your path is not the one that you originally planned."
Otherwise, I have finished my first NIH fellowship application! And by finished I mean I have submitted it by the internal deadline (as a grad student my app must be submitted by a representative of the grad student office, not me), and it got submitted through eRA Commons, the app organizing website of NIH, and despite of the flood of error messages that took over my inbox as the representative (apparently) made errors during submission, it did manage to go through! So now the only left is a reference letter, the writer of which sent me an email on Friday to let me know that he hasn't forgotten it and that he'll have it by Monday (the final deadline).
All of which led me to blink slowly in awe and astonishment because somehow, despite of the NIH agency staff being gone on vacation and my inability to locate anyone there who can answer all my questions adequately, despite of the fact that our finance manager for the lab who is supposed to help me calculate the financial aspect of my application is on maternity leave and that the temp had no idea what was going on and sent me to a website that was updated the past year, and the hyperlinks no longer worked, and despite of the fact that the rep over at the grad office who is supposed to deal with this is no longer there (she took another job and boy was that a fun discovery to make, somehow it looks like everything will get submitted on time.
It's a minor miracle. But.
Learn from me: do NOT apply to fellowships over the summer. Everyone, from staff to collaborators, will be on vacation (most infuriating experience: waiting two and half weeks for an email that came between 11am and noon, while I was in the tissue culture room, stating that the staff will be absent for the next few days -- up to the internal deadline due date-- starting at noon, because she will be at ComicCon) (of course I didn't see the email until after noon) and there will be no one there to help you. One of my favorite quotes these days is "if you can't set a good example, it's your obligation to serve as some kind of horrible warning", so let me be your warning.
Whether or not the energy taken to wrangle with paperwork has affected my written proposal remains to be seen, but in the mean time, I have time again to do things other than stare mournfully at my laptop over the weekends, and THAT's always worth celebrating.
We also defrosted one of the lab freezer on Friday. It was one of the shared ones and we kept on discovering random, poorly labeled tubes as the layers of ice thawed (there were about two inches of ice coating all surfaces and half of the sample boxes were frozen to the shelf and needed to be chipped out) (yes, it REALLY needed defrosting, but because it's shared space we need to coordinate everyone in lab to move the contents in order to defrost, so it doesn't get defrosted very often). And lots odd enzymes from who-knows-when that may or may not be expired. This left us at a loss: enzymes are expensive. Should we try them out and risk losing an experiment because the enzymes have expired? Should we toss away thousands dollars worth of enzyme because we can't tell when the expiration dates are? Should we test each enzyme and waste valuable time that should be spent on our experiments?
Mostly we just repacked everything and put them back in the freezer. Not ideal, but really, there is no ideal situation to be found.
My God that was a LOT of ice.
As I was joking to my undergrad, such is the excitement of research -- earth-shattering discoveries and sorting through unlabeled tubes of stuff in ice!
We are taking our undergrads out for frozen yogurt next Monday, before they depart.
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