Inherited someone else’s research project and got stuck in grad school hell? Make a Lady Gaga parody!
MRS this week
This past week I have been blogging for the MRS conference as well as narrating my experience on twitter with the hashtag #mrsfall10. It was a great experience and has inspired me to write more on my blog here.
There were 5 other bloggers and I encourage you to check out what they wrote as well at http://materials.typepad.com/
I was able to meet some of the other bloggers and they were all pretty awesome. Please check them out.
Graduate School and the Shawshank Redemption
(image from IMDB)
A couple of months ago, I hit a real low point in my graduate school career. A lot of things started going wrong at the same time I was expected to pick up more responsibilities in the lab due to graduation of senior graduate students. Combining this frustration with the constant thoughts that I wasn’t really cut out for grad school/research made it a pretty dark time. Basically, my thoughts on grad school were that it was shit.
Pacing around outside the lab at 1 am, I kept thinking the same thought, “grad school is shit.” Knowing that I still had work to do, I tried to motivate by thinking about all the positive things about getting a phd. The best thing I came up with was that at some point I would get said phd and then be able to move on. Once I get my phd, I get to start fresh and begin my career as an independent researcher.
Obviously, the phrase people generally use to describe these types of situations is “light at the end of the tunnel.” I don’t think that really captures the essence of what it can feel like to wade through the shit of graduate school. The best description I can think of comes from the character Red in The Shawshank Redemption movie. This is one of my favorite lines from my favorite movie:
“Andy Dufresne, who crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side”
Well, I still have a lot of shit to crawl through…here’s to coming out clean (with a phd of course)!
On this blog’s title
There are basically 2 reasons for calling this blog “Student T” (same reasons for the twitter: @TheStudentT):
1. I am a graduate STUDENT and when I was a little kid, people sometimes shortened my name (Trevor) to just “T.” My college roommate (another Trevor) also called me T.
2. Student T is a reference to the student’s t-test in statistics. I like this reference not because of statistics (not a subject I am fond of) but rather the story of the history of this test. The test was developed by a guy working for the Guinness brewery! (It’s true, ask wikipedia) As a beer lover, I am always happy to remind people of how important beer is to science or history or your health.
Keeping in mind reason number two, do not be surprised to see beer inspired articles here (if you want more beer, you can always check out my other internet personality, @beerpancakes on twitter). Of course, not everything will be about beer, but I will try to keep the science talk to the level of what you would talk about in a bar…a very nerdy bar, but a bar nonetheless. Hopefully, this will let me talk about areas of science outside of my expertise, without getting into too much trouble.
-T
