Room for Improvement

There are plenty of times when I feel out of place at school. Our classes and the research building are part of the medical school complex, so most of the time, it seems like I have more encounters with medical students than with biomedical graduate students. When I walk through the hallways in my lab coat, it’s knee length and branded in the corner with the name of my lab (probably so that if I’ve escaped and am hanging out in the hallway, all the PIs know to which lab I belong and are able to drag me back to make sure I get back to work). Meanwhile, the halls are full of medical students, decked in short coats labeled with their own names, stethoscopes around their necks, dog-eared pocket guides to pharmacology shoved into their pockets. The residents from the cancer center walk by occasionally, and the scrub-clad surgical residents can sometimes be found passed out on the couches, enjoying the few moments before their pagers call them back to work. Among the 3^rd and 4^th year medical students, there is the steady buzz about who got to assist in what procedure on whom. Yes, as a research scientist, it is quite easy to feel insignificant, overlooked, and out of place in a clinical setting. Today, however, I stuck out even more than usual. I was like the proverbial sore thumb… or, more specifically, the clean forehead.

As the good little Jewish girl that I am, I had forgotten what today was. I didn’t realize until lunch, when I noticed a person with a blob of schmootz on their forehead. I was wondering if they were aware of the dirt and contemplating if I should say something when it dawned on me that what appeared to be a thumbprint was actually a cross, drawn on in a rush, and that it was, indeed, Ash Wednesday. Considering that I now attend a Jesuit university, by mid-afternoon, 70% of those surrounding me had crosses on their foreheads. The priest who roams the halls of the medical school even jokingly offered to draw a Star of David on my forehead if I was feeling left out, although he was afraid his artistic skills were not up to the task.

Along with Ash Wednesday comes the start of Lent, which meant that I overheard the conversations of all the students discussing the objects which they would be giving up for the next forty days. Responses ranged from chocolate to watching American Idol, to my personal favorite – a girl who said that she would be giving up sleeping with guys whose last names she had not yet learned (now that’s staying in line with those Catholic values!). I thought about my friends and what they had sacrificed from the past, and how, for forty days, I would hear them bitch and moan about how much they missed chocolate or Diet Coke or mint chocolate chip ice cream, and then Easter came (I think Lent is over at Easter but my Catholicism knowledge is not up to par) and an entire chocolate bunny would be consumed in two minutes. I may not be Catholic, but I feel like the point of sacrificing something should be to improve yourself as a person and to change a negative aspect into a positive, and I’m not exactly sure how giving up vodka or Oreos for five and a half weeks really does that.

Lately, I’ve been feeling somewhat down about my experiences thus far in graduate school. Not that I hate my lab work or my classmates (quite the contrary on both instances), but more down because I feel like I’m not getting the most out of my educational experiences. I’m not doing as well in my classes as I would like to be doing, and while I’m learning new techniques in the lab, I often feel like I’m not retaining and understanding everything as well as I could be. My PI has done nothing but praise me throughout my time in his lab, complementing me most recently on my time management skills and the ease with which I can handle a tough course load and many hours in the lab. Whenever I meet with my PI to discuss progress with my project, he likes to show me data that others in the lab are generating and quiz me on it – asking me to interpret what I am seeing and how I would troubleshoot the problems, without having a great deal of knowledge of the project. Last week, after responding with the ‘correct’ answer, a grin spread across my PI’s face and he congratulated me on really thinking like a scientist. But… I don’t feel like a scientist! I know I’m still years away from my PhD, but when I think about the vast difference in knowledge between myself and a sixth year student, I can’t imagine learning that much information in that time period. I really feel like I’m not getting as much as I should be out of my experiences thus far.

While hearing everyone else today discuss Lent, I started thinking about what I could do to improve myself. I decided that the area which needed the most improvement right now was my training to one day become an actual scientist – I needed a way to expand my knowledge and feel more confident about what I am learning. And so I decided, in a completely non-religious but perhaps inspired by Lent fashion, that I would make my own personal sacrifice in order to further myself as an oncology graduate student. A bad habit which I have developed over the past few months is the abuse of the snooze button on my alarm clock. Lately, I have started setting my alarm for a half hour before I actually have to get out of bed, so I can just lie in bed, under the covers, and muster up the courage to face the day. It’s a terrible use of time, and I’ve been very displeased with myself for continuing this. Therefore, I am making the pledge to myself, the scientist in training, to redirect this time in a way that will further my education and training… to my absolute least favorite part of science thus far – the journal article. I hate reading articles because to understand a single article, I find myself doing five literature searchers for other articles to attempt to figure out a method used in the paper or a pathway being discussed, often getting frustrated with everything I do not understand. However, I also realize that the best way to increase my knowledge in my particular area which I am currently researching in the lab is through papers, and have an entire binder in the lab of papers which I need to read. Therefore, I have decided that to improve myself, I am going to be getting up when my alarm goes off the first time, and dedicating at least a half hour every morning before I leave for campus to tackling part of paper. Sure, maybe it will take me a few days to make it through an article, but if I take the time to actually understand everything, I am confident that it will pay off in the end.

I may not be Catholic, but I think Lent has helped me realize exactly what I need to do to get myself back on track. Sometimes I feel a little awkward at a Jesuit school, but today I was glad to be here. There is always room for improvement, and I have found my way to make myself a better person and hopefully a better researcher.