One catastrophe unexpectedly (and miraculously?) averted...

The grades from my "catastrophic" molecular biology test have been posted, and I'm apparently not as dumb as I look because I didn't fail it. Scores were posted by student ID number and I must have checked and double-checked the spreadsheet against my ID card a dozen times. I got an 83%, which is passing (there is no grading scale anywhere that I can find, so I'm going by the one I found in the graduate nursing bulletin). I had expected to see maybe a 50%, and certainly nothing above a 70%. I'm still half-expecting to be told that someone made a mistake and that the poor sap who scored a 52% was actually me. I feel a little bit relieved that I didn't fail horribly. Now I have to wait and see how I did on the cell exam.

Tomorrow is Graduate Student Research Day (sort of like EMU's Graduate Research Fair, but bigger), so my usual classes have been cancelled so that everyone can go to the talks and poster presentations. The associate dean of the med school's graduate programs made a personal appearance at the end of lecture this morning and said that he expected to see all of us there tomorrow. I can't get out of it because he knows who I am, plus most of the other Immuno & Micro students are presenting, and they'll expect to see me there too. This thing is an all day event, and I don't know how long I'm expected to be there. I really don't want to be there from 8 to 5, but I didn't want to ask because it implies that I don't want to go. This would be true to a point, but I think it would be bad form to admit it outright.

School is going to start picking up steam in October. My first rotation is scheduled to begin Oct. 10th in Dr. N's lab, possibly either working on capsule production in Group B Strep or looking at lantibiotic production in Group A Strep. Each rotation is about 8 weeks long, so this first one will end the first week of December. My next rotation, beginning January 9th through March 2nd, will be in Dr. W's lab. Here's the funny thing about that: Jim will be doing his sabbatical next semester in Dr. D's lab, working on cholera toxin regulation. At the same time, I'll be doing my second rotation in the lab of Dr. D's former post-doc, Dr. W, also likely working on cholera toxin regulation. Weirdness. My last rotation is March 5th to April 27th with an immunologist/virologist, Dr. R. He studies proteins that may be involved in helping HIV replicate in host cells. I'm nervous, but kind of excited about doing rotations. I'm not really sure what to expect.

Our departmental seminars begin on October 11th (and occur every Tuesday for the rest of the term) and go from 12-1. The PhD students, not faculty members, are responsible for making arrangements for seminar speakers, so this should be interesting. Also, journal club (called RDP for research data presentation) starts on October 19th (Wednesdays), also from 12-1. Everyone has been assigned a date to present something, and my day of reckoning is March 14th.

Gotta get to bed so I can get up super early for Graduate Student Research Day. But more importantly, I need to rest up to go the Corner Brewery tomorrow afternoon.

Meltdown showdown

As much as I'd love to write about my life being all rainbows and puppies and butterflies, I just can't. One reason is because it isn't. And let's be honest - who wants to read about someone whose life is "perfect"? I don't. And apparently neither do you, otherwise you wouldn't be reading this sentence right now.

Yesterday I stayed at school all day trying to cram for my cell biology test. Overall, I don't think that test was quite as catastrophic as my molecular biology test was. Still not great though. This time, I gave up about two hours in, instead of taking the entire three hours. That's progress, right? I really need to start studying for this stuff. So after I got home yesterday evening, I actually did what I should have been doing for a month now - I cracked open my textbooks and read ahead. Yes, you read that right. I read ahead! I'm not sure I've ever really truly done that. And I'm doing it again today too. Yay, me.

Today hasn't been the greatest day. This morning got off to a rotten start when I hear whining and crying coming from the living room. This is at 7:45. Chris takes him to school and he's not out of the shower yet. I think the first bell rings at 8:05, so there's not much time for them to wrap everything up and leave the house. Elliot's crying because he can't build a Ninjago Lego guy. I am not a morning person, nor am I a very patient person even under the best of circumstances. I am especially cranky and impatient in the morning, particulary in response to whining and crying. I tell Elliot to put the Legos away and finish getting ready for school. He's got about 1000 (I'm not exaggerating this figure) Lego bricks spread out all over the floor. Have you ever stepped on a Lego brick? On a hardwood floor? In bare feet? IT HURTS. He cops an attitude with me, so I raise my voice. Chris finally comes out of the bathroom, Elliot's still bitching and whining and generally acting like a brat. I'm annoyed with Chris because he's running late, therefore I'm now running late too. I don't remember the straw that finally broke the camel's back. All I remember is being very pissed off and yelling at both of them and storming out of the room. Elliot and I both had temper tantrums this morning.

Later in the day, I have to pick Elliot up from school so Chris can go to the store. I don't know what the fuck took him so long or why he wanted to be the exalted shopper, but he ultimately didn't get home until almost 8:30. All we had in the house to eat was stuff to make a grilled cheese. So at 7:00, I'm about to make one for Elliot for his dinner and see that the unopened (yet somehow expired) loaf of bread is slightly furry. I try calling Chris, but he doesn't answer and his voicemail isn't set up, so the call automatically disconnects. I am not happy. I end up driving to McDonald's to buy Elliot and myself dinner. I am still not happy, and I'm intensely unhappy enough that I haven't attempted to talk to Chris because, well, it just wouldn't be prudent. Maybe tomorrow. And that's all I have to say about that.

I had intended to talk about more academic type stuff, but this is what poured out of me instead. I'm exhausted and still feeling kind of upset. Maybe tomorrow will be a better day to talk shop. Let's hope tomorrow is a better day period.

No rest for the wicked

I was all super motivated to write a few minutes ago, but now I'm just not. I'll do a quick recap of events since last Wednesday, and perhaps elaborate (or not) tomorrow.

Wednesday in a word SUCKED. I had my first molecular biology exam. Some of it went okay, I guess, but the last section (which counted the most towards my grade, of course) was catastrophic. Like, I'm going down in flames and no one is gonna survive this wreckage kind of catastrophic. I was COMPLETELY unprepared for the shit that got lobbed at me on this part of the test. Fucking enzyme kinetics, and math, and equations, and mechanisms, and the stupid pushing electron arrows, and bonds flying all over the place. Oh and the regulation! Can't forget enzyme regulation! You know, if I really wanted to draw pointless arrows around a bunch of dumb ball and stick molecules, and if I was just fascinated by Km and Vmax and half Vmax, and half equilibrium arrows - I would've been a fucking chemist!!! But I'm not, and do you know why? Aside from the fact that I'm a biologist, it's BECAUSE I FUCKING HATE CHEMISTRY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I HATE IT, I HATE IT, I HATE IT (jumping up and down and screaming now)!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And I'm sure the feeling is mutual.

Thursday wasn't as horrible. There was a new student reception for me and the lone master's student in the Immuno & Micro department. It basically consisted of a meat and cheese tray, lots of potato chips, some fruit, and some veggies that no one touched. Oh yeah, and pop. It was only mildly awkward. There were no formal introductions of the "new students" to anyone. It was basically a game of "The unfamiliar faces must be the new students. Huh. Where's the rest of the food?". Okay, it was mostly me wondering where the rest of the food was. I was hoping for at least some pizza or something. What a let down. So I ate a bunch of cantaloupe that gave me gas and made me feel a little nauseous. This, in turn, made me worry that the low-rent melon I just loaded up on was contaminated with Listeria. The department secretary did give me my first key, though. I think she told me that it opens the office, the lounge, and the library. Woot. Boy, was I happy to go to the Corner that afternoon. I look forward to Thursdays more than I look forward to just about anything else. It's just enough of a pick me up to keep me from going completely batshit crazy. I'm holding steady at just a little batshit crazy, and I think that's as good as it's going to get for now.

Friday. I really don't remember Friday at all. I didn't think I was THAT hungover. Oh well.

Saturday we finally got our new mattress delivered and Chris finished building the frame for it. It's a crazy-expensive TempurPedic and honestly, it was more comfortable in the store. I sleep just as poorly on it as I did on my old mattress, except now I have a hard time flipping over because I have to climb out of the memory foam chasm my body has carved into the bed. I have a hard time turning over and so I wake up 3 or 4 times a night. Then my back still hurts when I get up in the morning and it still takes me a few minutes to limber up before my range of motion extends beyond "shuffle". But the cat is totally in love with this bed, which I really didn't expect:

That night when Zeus (the aforementioned cat) came to bed, he established his cat groove under the covers as usual. And he didn't move an inch until late afternoon Sunday - some 16 hours later. He was just a non-moving lump under the comforter, which I really should have taken a picture of. I was starting to wonder if he was dead, because he NEVER sleeps all day - especially when I'm there for him to yell at and generally harass. I checked on him. Nope, not dead. Just annoyed that I woke him up.

Alright, this was supposed to be a short post, but it isn't. I'm just not very trustworthy. Sorry. More tomorrow.

Word of the day, b*tches!

It's Friday night, I'm studying, I've had a beer, and I feel feisty. So the word of the day today, children, is "Hyperbaton": inversion or transposition of normal sentence structure, often for emphasis and/or dramatic effect. English translation: to talk like Yoda. For example, standard English uses a subject-verb-object sentence structure as in the phrase, "Jim covets Glenn's sheep". The subject is "Jim", the verb is "covets", and the object is "Glenn's sheep". In hyperbaton, the structure might get switched around to object-subject-verb as in, "Glenn's sheep Jim covets". In this case, the emphasis is on Glenn's sheep that Jim is coveting, in contrast to the first sentence where the emphasis is on Jim, who is probably less interesting than the sheep. I tried to find information on the psychology of why people might talk or write like that when it is normally out of character for them, but gave up when all I could find were Star Wars fan sites. Obviously, nobody takes this shit seriously but me. Well, that is all for today. Tune in tomorrow or Sunday for my recap of the last half of this week. The word "catastrophic" features prominently...

A report from the trenches

Today is the big molecular biology exam and I feel mostly unprepared. Because of the exam, we didn't have mol. bio. lecture at 9:30, but we still had cell bio. at 10:45, so I still had to drag my ass down here this morning. It doesn't make sense for me to waste an hour or more driving home and back for the test at 4:00, so I'm just going to stay at school and study. After lecture, I tried to find the medical library so I could camp out. Naturally, I went the wrong direction coming out of the stairwell and the hall ultimately came to a dead end at a classroom. I didn't realize that the hallways on some floors don't make a full circle around the building. So I turned around, found the bridge to the other building and went down a different stairway. I popped out just outside the cafeteria ("The Vital Signs Cafe" - yeah) in Scott Hall. WTF?? I didn't see a certain med student who usually flags me down in the cafeteria, so I slowed down and checked for the presence of microwaves, so I can bring my lunch next time. Check. There are several. Lots of vending machines, although I didn't check to see how outrageous the prices are. They have an area with sandwiches, salads, and cooked stuff, so I picked up some chicken salad scoops (no bread) with grapes. Now I have until 1:30 (when the cafeteria closes and I get booted out) to sit here listening to and watching med students. They're almost cute, what with their medical-ese and entitled student grousing about the presentation of concepts in their lectures. They look so motivated and energetic and very very YOUNG. I am tired, want to go home and veg in front of The Peoples Court, and I am, um...thirty-something. Sigh. By the time I finish this and do a post-doc, Elliot will just about be an adult, and I will be close to retirement age. Maybe Jim can hold off on retiring for a bit so he can give me his job. Then Ashley can replace Kurta and maybe Jen can take over for Clemans. No one can replace Walker, so he's gonna have to stay. When he dies, we'll have to freshen up his cardboard cutout and then we'll just stuff his corpse into a wall during the next remodel. I've got it all worked out. If only I devoted this much time and energy to studying. I tried explaining to Elliot the importance of doing a little homework everyday so he doesn't end up all extra-irritable and frantic like his mother who waited until the last minute to do her homework. I showed him all the amino acid structures I've been drawing over and over and over again and you know what he did? He laughed. I told him that I wasn't kidding and he just laughed harder. Maybe I should quit school and go into stand-up.

The changing of the guard

Writing is exactly what I shouldn't be doing and really don't have time for now, but it was either procrastinate this way or by cleaning up the kitchen. I had an 8:00 am meeting today to go over requirements and what is expected of me as one of the 6 recipients of an NIH training grant (Minority Biomedical Research Support Program aka IMSD) that will fund my tuition and stipend for 2 years and give me a little bit of money for research supplies and conference travel. Basically, the message is "no pressure or anything, just don't screw up and you'll be fine!". The program director sent out an email with the date and time of today's meeting and closed with the request to please be on time. I left the house at 7:15 and was delayed this time not by rain, but by some moron who couldn't figure out where the brake pedal was and rear-ended the car in front of him. In bumper-to-bumper rush hour traffic. In the left lane (which has no shoulder). I just about came unglued. I finally got clear of that and raced up to my exit only to get tied up in construction on John R at Warren. Are you fucking kidding me??!! The light cycle for traffic on John R trying to cross Warren is ridiculously short. The light stays green for no more than 15 seconds (I've timed it), just enough for 4 cars to get through - at most. Unless someone just has to turn left onto Warren (no Michigan left turns here!), then only 2 cars get through. After a few light cycles, I got through, got to school, and yada, yada, yada I ended up being 5 minutes late. I hate showing up anywhere late. Especially for the first meeting of the semester. I had even called the program director's cell phone to let her know, but she didn't answer. ARGHH!! Deep breaths...

Lucky for me, one of the other 5 recipients of this training grant is D, who I've met a couple of times before and is a 2nd year student in Immuno & Micro. I had emailed him yesterday asking about the content and format of the molecular biology test and we chatted a bit about the tests today. After this morning's meeting got out, we went up to his lab and he grabs this HUGE stack of old cell bio and molecular bio tests off a shelf and basically tells me that I am now the keeper of the exams. I guess the stack is added to every year and passed on to the next newbie. There's stuff going back to 2002 in this pile - it's amazing!

My pile of salvation.

I feel like I don't know anything, even though I've had this material before. It seems like for every new bit I can cram into my head, something else that I really needed falls out. Are PhDs just really good at faking like they know shit or do they really and truly learn it? I'm not talking about "learning" something to get a passing grade on a test and then promptly purging it. I always viewed the PhD as the stage where you finally and permanently master all of this crap that you spent umpteen years in undergrad or other grad work practicing with for when you have to learn the stuff for real. The depth and breadth and magnitude of the knowledge that I always thought PhD students were gaining is not possible!! It can't be, especially with the amount of material we have to know and how fast we have to learn it. It's like trying to create the philosopher's stone - the substance that would magically transform ordinary metals into gold. Every alchemist thought every other alchemist had a leg up on them; racing to unlock that final key step that would to allow them to make the stone, and thus become infinitely rich. When will I figure out how this whole system works?? That is, the PhD/learning thing, not the alchemy thing. Although I may end up having to resort to that.

Water water EVERYWHERE! And some academic stuff too.

Okay, I should start out by saying that I'm pretty obsessive about checking the weather forecast both before I go to bed and first thing after I wake up. As far as I knew last night, we were supposed to get rain today, but not early in the morning. So you can imagine my horror at 7:45 am as I lay face-down in bed blindly swatting at the snooze button and I hear it raining outside. I've mentioned before how long it takes me to get to school when it's raining. Right. Somehow, I manage to eat something, shower, and leave the house by 8:30. Traffic wasn't quite as bad as I expected and I made it to school 20 minutes early. Awesome! Had class and didn't fall asleep. Yay. This is about as good as it gets. That is, until I tried to get on the freeway to go home. Bah. Traffic was stopped up because just the middle lane wasn't under a foot of water. Only idiots in SUVs were driving in the heavily flooded left lane. Opposing traffic traveling in the left lane made wakes so big that water was splashing up at least a foot higher the concrete median - it was unreal. I'm basically sitting in the middle lane creeping along when some jackwagon in an SUV comes barreling up the left lane - through the pond of water. I've never had my car be completely doused like that before. It sucked. I don't even want to think about how bad my commute will be when it snows.

Anyway, I have a test in molecular biology on Wednesday evening. It's from 4-7 pm in one of the med student lecture halls, which is not at all where or when I normally have class. I think that's weird. In anticipation of the grade I'm likely to get on this exam, I decided to do online evaluations of the faculty that have taught so far, which will get me 10 extra points. I'm desperate. These aren't done the way EMU does it. Evaluations for molecular biology are online and apparently done at the end of each "block" of material (which I explain below). And they have to be done within a week of the end of the block. After a certain date, you get locked out of that evaluation. You get an email that tells you who you're evaluating, along with a PIN and a password. There are 24 multiple-choice type questions, along with free text fields for comments that go along with each question. All 3 faculty I had in the most recent block are evaluated at the same time. My answers are supposed to be anonymous, the only thing the course director can see is whether or not I completed the eval.

The structure of the courses here is pretty different from that at EMU also. Here, at least in the 2 classes I have now, material is broken up into "blocks". For example, Block 1 was all about the structure of biological macromolecules, Block 2 was enzymology and protein function, and it keeps going until Block 15, which is genetics. Different faculty from various departments come in and teach different portions of the block or sometimes the entire block, based on their area of expertise. The material I'm being tested on was taught by 3 different faculty members. In the case of molecular biology, a total of 15 faculty members will have taught a portion of the material over the course of the term. This can be a positive thing if you get someone who is good at teaching and if your learning style meshes with their teaching style. It can also be very very bad. And of course they're all different - some are straight lecturers, some assign problem sets, some assign journal articles, etc. The prof. who just kicked off Block 3, membrane biochemistry, does a mix of chalk-talk and PowerPoint. Amazingly, none of the faculty - 4 in molecular bio and 3 in cell bio so far - have fallen behind with any of their lectures. That's impressive. Overall though, I think having that many different people teaching is going to make the class harder no matter the level of the stuff being hurled at us.