The End

I’ve heard from so many people that somehow, magically, things just come together all at once at the end of your Ph.D., even if nothing has worked for years.  Of course, I didn’t believe them.

I was wrong.

In the past four months, I:

• submitted a manuscript
• had said manuscript accepted five days after submission
• wrote my dissertation, start to finish, in two weeks
• defended my dissertation
• graduated
• went on post-doc interviews
• accepted a post-doc position, after agonizing over my options for weeks

Suffice to say, it’s been a bit of a whirlwind these past few months, but, to quote a 90s staple, it finally seems like everything’s coming up Milhouse.

Correlation vs. Causation

Husband dropped by the lab to visit this week and take advantage of the free food and beer following a poster competition in which I had to present.  Last night, he commented that science must be really stressful, because he noticed most of the younger females (mid 20s-30s), especially in my lab, all had lots of grey hair.  Being a good little (rude) scientist, I immediately interrupted him mid-sentence, reminding him that correlation does not imply causation.

I offered up the alternative that, perhaps, lots of women in lots of fields are developing grey hairs by this point in their lives, but they are more proactive about hiding them.  I have a lot of friends who started experimenting with their hair color by the age of 14 and never stopped; they have no recollection of their natural hair color.  If you've been regularly dyeing your hair for 15 years, how would you even know if you had grey hair starting to come in?  Perhaps scientists, widely stereotyped for being fashion-challenged, never played around with hair color in the first place (I only tried once, attempting to dye my hair with purple manic panic in a hotel in Virginia Beach on a high school trip, but my hair was far too dark for it to show up).

Once those grey hairs show up noticeably, perhaps women in other more conservative, formal professions start scheduling regular 6-week appointments to cover up those greys.  Here in science, though -- well, if you could feasibly show up to work in a stained shirt and ripped jeans (frequently observed on male graduate students in the chemistry department), certainly no one is going to bat an eye at a few (or many) grey hairs.  When you're working 80+ hours/week for less financial compensation than anyone else you know working a normal 40 hour work week, there really isn't time or funding for regular hair appointments.

So, what are your thoughts?  Does working in science cause premature greying?  Or are scientists just too busy and/or unmotivated to keep up appearances as women in other fields?

And, most importantly, is this my husband's way of hinting that perhaps I need to take time out to do something about 4-months worth of grey roots?

Beginning of the End?

Last week, I submitted my manuscript (fortunately, I was not doin' it wrong and received compliements from coauthors regarding how well it was written), officially received permission to start writing my dissertation, set my defense date, and discussed possible postdoc labs with my boss.

This week, I hide in an undisclosed location far away from the many, many distractions in lab and hunker down and write.  A completed draft of my dissertation is due on Thursday.

After 6 years and 8 months, there is finally, finally, a light at the end of the tunnel.  My escape plan is in motion.

Manuscript Writing

At my last committee meeting, at the beginning of the month, I presented my figures for my proposed manuscript to my committee and received the thumbs up to go ahead and start writing it (while finishing up a few loose ends and getting one additional experiment to hopefully work).  While seated around the table, my boss declared that he would like the draft of it by January 1st – exactly one month later.  The committee sat around joking that on the 31st, I’d be buying a plane ticket to California to get those extra three hours of writing in… and then hopping another plane to Hawaii to buy myself a few more hours… but oh, be careful and don’t cross the international date line!

I know that the comments were all in jest, a result of previous graduate students who were unable to meet deadlines and used all sorts of excuses.  But when I returned to the lab later and mentioned the deadline to other labmates, they all furrowed their brows and made comments about how a manuscript in a month is no easy feat.

Yesterday, two weeks before the imposed January 1st deadline, I emailed my boss my manuscript so he could take it on his trip to Europe (what better to do with 14 hours on a plane than edit it?!).  It took me a week to find the time between experiments to write a two page outline, and then four days to go from my outline to the finished draft, and one more day to get my figures polished.  I suspect the reason the writing went so quickly for me is because I have been working on this project for so long – I already knew everything there was to know about it, inside and out, so I did not have to waste time reading through lots of papers.  I also just gave my yearly data presentation to my department, half of which was on this project, and if I can stand up and speak about the project for 40 minutes, then I’d expect I could sit down and write about it as well.  However, I still can’t drop the nagging feeling that I’ve done something drastically wrong, since I finished writing the draft so quickly and with such ease.

Now the worst part: the wait.  Boss returns from Europe the end of next week.  Will my draft be returned with some minor edits, or a giant “MANUSCRIPT WRITING: UR DOIN’ IT WRONG!” scrawled across the top? 

Non-Academic Careers

I’m helping a post-doc in our lab take over the career development seminars for my program.  Our program really offers no support to students looking at options outside academia, and many of the investigators actively discourage trainees from pursuing other opportunities.   We are trying to help fill this gap by bringing in speakers from a variety of non-academic scientific careers to share a bit about what it is they do, how they got there, and give everyone some other career opportunities for down the road.
I’ve spent the past year or so conducting informational interviews with everyone and anyone who will sit down and talk to me about what they do, but unfortunately, I’m averaging only about a 10% success rate in regards to emails sent to actual phone conversations had.  I recently sent out another wave of emails to those in the area who were willing to talk to me about possibly coming in for a general career chat with others in my department, but I’m looking for more people and more careers to explore.
So, this is where you come in.  Throw those ideas at me – no matter how off the beaten path.  Once you have that Ph.D. in biomedical sciences, what can you do with it?  Super duper extra bonus points (and cookies sent in the mail) if you have an actual contact in the greater Washington area who might be willing to come talk to a bunch of senior graduate students and post-docs!