We're Moving!!

We’re a movin’ on up,
To the east side (of the research building)
To a deluxe apartment (more lab space) in the sky.

At the lab meeting yesterday, we received the official word that WE’RE MOVING! We’ve been granted the space occupied by the former director of the cancer center… the one who left and moved on to supposedly greener pastures at another research university. I cannot begin to express how thrilled I am at the potential for more space, seeing as how with our current lab situation, I have neither my own lab bench nor a desk (or a computer, for that matter, since a desk is a prerequisite for that). Our lab is growing quickly (in addition to me as the newest thesis student, a new post-doc just came three weeks ago) and we’re spread out throughout the building, in three different rooms on two different floors, and it does get to be a pain to run up and down the stairs twenty times a day when you need something (or someone) from the lab on a different floor. While I’ve been able to get by with sharing bench space with the new post-doc and mooching off of others when they are not at the bench and I’ve adjusted to sitting hunched over typing away on my personal laptop on an unoccupied chair… frankly, it doesn’t exactly make me the most productive. But the opportunity to get my own desk, where I can actually keep things so I don’t have to haul them back and forth from the lab all the time, where I can spread out my work… it will make me feel like I really have a home in the lab! And maybe, just maybe, if I have my own horizontal surface area, I’ll work up the courage to ask if the lab can supply me with a computer, because I’m not the hugest fan of dragging my laptop back and forth with me everyday (although I am very glad to have gone with the 12” version for this very reason). Mostly, it would just be nice to have a computer on the actual network. We have wireless set up in the lab so I can access the internet, but I can’t print anything from my own computer, and since I have a PC and most of the computers are Macs, the programs aren’t always compatible (i.e. I use pDRAW and they use MacVector, and if I want to print out a plasmid map, I have to wait until I go home at the end of the day, print it out, and hope I remember to bring it in the next day. And if I actually need it for something during the day, well, then I’m screwed, because pDRAW isn’t on the one other PC in the lab and I don’t know the master password to install it). So basically – I’m just relieved to finally have someplace to call my own. Maybe I’ll even get my own set of pipettes – oh, the little things that bring joy to nerdy graduate students.

That aside, I can’t believe it’s approaching the end of March already. Seriously, where did the time go? I feel like I never get half of my to-do list completed in a day, and yet I spend all my time in lab or studying… so I don’t know where the wasted time winds up. Thankfully after an exam on Friday there will be a bit of breathing time until the first week of May, when I have two exams, a take-home exam, and two papers all due within four days. And after exams, then I am shipped off to the National Cancer Institute to complete a rotation which will train me in molecular pharmacology work, so I can bring the knowledge back into my lab and hopefully use it for my thesis project. But in the meantime, I’m slowly sneaking out of lab for the week to study for Friday’s exam (and I must question who would possibly be cruel enough to schedule an exam during March Madness? This is like the most religious holiday for sports fanatics like me – how am I supposed to care about ephrins and Wnt signaling and epithelial-to-mesenchymal transformations when there is basketball to watch and brackets to follow? Sheesh!).

Happy Spring, everyone – nothing like bringing in the new season with a day of snow (and to think, it reached 81 degrees two weeks ago, and today the high won’t be above 35).