Uncle Don...

...was a sight to behold. Here he is at my wedding two years ago, the last time I saw him. Mustard shirt and all. Of him, it is truly a perfect picture.


Yesterday, he left us. A heavy smoker and drinker, his fate, perhaps, was a forgone conclusion. Lung cancer took his life, but I bet it never took his candor.

At my wedding, he pressed me to his smoke-scented lapel and told me that, when I was younger, he had always thought I was a real stick-in-the-mud. And that he was so pleased to see that, as an adult, I had finally managed to find the joy in life.

I will miss him.

Princeton: Will Pay for Postdocs' Booty Calls

Earlier this week, after my supervisor expressed doubt about sending me to a particular conference that I think would be really beneficial for me... I decided that I would take the bull by the horns and try to flush out some kind of postdoc travel grant opportunity on the interwebs.

Hahahaahahaaa!!!

Let's get serious, people, nobody wants to send postdocs anywhere. Well, if I was a black French woman doing a field study in southeast Asia, I might qualify for something, but I just never seem to fit all of the specifics for these elusive travel monies.

Anyhow, as I was searching around, I came across this (in my opinion) remarkable website at Princeton. In short, Princeton subsizes travel for postdocs who are part of a long-distance relationship with another academic. With help from the Elsevier Foundation, they will provide up to $1500 per year in travel grants to 1st and 2nd year postdocs whose spouse/domestic partner is a grad student or postdoc at a university >150 miles from Princeton.

I am genuinely impressed by this. The two-bodied problem is becoming increasingly common for academics, and this seems to be a very good-hearted attempt on Princeton's part to ease the pain of separation for academic couples. To me, this says,

"Dearest Postdoc, we realize that you are so excellent and maybe you could do your work just about anywhere, but we'd really like to have you here because you are completely superb. And so please, let us facilitate happiness in your life by enabling your booty calls with your significant other. We realize that you may also wish to emotionally reconnect and/or discuss finances (or lack thereof) with your partner, but we also realize that a well-sexually-satisfied researcher is a productive researcher. With love, xoxo, Princeton."

OK, well maybe sexual satisfaction wasn't their #1 goal, but whatever. Probably a very beneficial side effect.

I think this is just great. Postdocs often get shafted by their universities in terms of benefits, pay, infrastructure, programs, etc. But this is really a step in the right direction. Kudos, Princeton!

Irritation Yields Clarity

I constantly waffle about my fate in academia and whether or not I'll actually take the plunge into a tenure-track position. But after this torturous week, my future seems clearer than ever.

Top five reasons why it's time to be the motherfucking PI:

1. I no longer have much interest in being the person who physically performs experiments. Is this laziness or am I finally realizing that I didn't get my Ph.D. to pipet and rotavap all damn day? I much prefer having someone else just put the data on my desk so I can work my brilliance on it.

2. I've decided that I'm very good at bossing other people around providing superior mentorship for my students. Also, I am an excellent communicator. Also, I am always right.

3. I am sick and tired of working at a desk that is placed in the middle of a war zone. No matter if I am writing or reading or doing some other activity that requires the use of my brain, I am subject to the whirring and buzzing and ding-a-linging of instruments; fierce, excellence-quenching headaches brought on by foul-smelling chemicals; and certain labmates who chatter like chipmunks and find everything so fucking hilarious that they squeal like eels all through the damn day. I am fed up with these moronic disruptions. How am I supposed to be efficient working like this??? I want my own goddamn office.

4. I am tired of being told what to do. (This is really just me bitching, because nobody really tells me what to do). I guess this is better put as just wanting to be in charge of myself. I want to run my own program and oversee my own grant monies. I want to be the big kahuna.

5. I am realizing more and more that there are many different ways of approaching research. There's the right way (my way) and the wrong way (the highway). And sometimes (aka, this week) it is absolutely infuriating to work in an environment that does not work towards the goals that I see as being important. Most weeks I have more patience, but this week has been tough.

6. I was reading a journal editorial this week about the shift of pharmaceutical research from industrial labs to academia. The author highlighted what they saw as the #1 reason why this shift is a good move for the pharmaceutical industry: Academia is rife with postdocs, postdocs are "experts in their fields" and are paid "well below industry standards". Ahahahahahaha!!!!! At least somebody got something right this week.

And for all of you smart-asses out there, an ability to count to five is not a necessary skill for being a principal investigator.

The Candid Trainee

I haven’t been writing lately. Primarily because I’ve been busy, irritated, and only in the mood to complain. Some of the complaints would be didactic, it’s true. But there is a large part of me that is loathe to grumble about this and that when, really, I have a lot for which to be thankful.

I sometimes dislike meeting with my supervisor. Our meetings are infrequent enough that I am usually somewhat nervous, although in a very vague sense, about how he will judge me as a result of our interactions.

I am, by nature, a very straightforward person. I am an open communicator, I do not beat around the bush, and sometimes this can result in me being harsher or more abrasive than I need to be.

Most postdocs in my lab don’t speak particularly candidly around our supervisor. They are submissive in person, although they may complain about all sorts of stuff behind closed doors. They don’t offer strong opinions. If they disagree about something, they won’t say that they disagree, they will just try to ignore whatever it is that they are disagreeing about.

And I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that. It may be a better way to keep one’s supervisor happy, I don’t know. It’s just not my approach.

Yesterday, my supervisor was trying to get me involved in a project that I felt had the potential to be a waste of my time. Not because the project wasn’t interesting, but because it is closely related to what others in our lab are doing and to what our collaborating industrial partner is doing. I’m quite busy right now, and I have little to no interest in sinking hours and hours of time into a project that will just be stolen out from under me at the end of the year. So I told him, straight up, of my concern. I explained to him that as our lab gets bigger, it’s becoming more and more difficult for all of us postdocs to keep our projects differentiated from one another, and that this makes most of us pretty nervous. I told him that I was here for two primary reasons: 1) to learn new and interesting things and 2) to publish very good first-author papers.

Even though these points are all fairly obvious, he still sometimes looks at me with big eyes, like he’s talking to an alien or something. And then I want to hide in the closet.

After that little conversation, we moved on to discussing a manuscript on which I am tangentially involved. He wants to submit it to a high impact factor journal. I was (maybe too?) straightforward in discussing why I didn’t think it would get into the journal in its current format, and why I thought the experiments were incomplete, and why I can’t imagine the thing getting through review at said journal.

Again, the deer-in-the-headlights thing. Again, me wanting to run out of the room.

(It is worth noting that, later that night, he sent out some emails to the relevant parties requesting one of the experiments that I had suggested.)

Is it useful to PIs to have a trainee who is so candid? Do PIs appreciate this kind of trainee, or do they consider such trainees a major nuisance?

If I really had to classify myself, I’d consider myself an extraordinarily useful pain-in-the-ass.

Pictures from the Other Side of My World

My husband is in Taiwan for a few weeks right now, sadly away for too long, but he has been sending me plenty of photos to help me understand how different the Taiwanese culture is compared to the U.S. Because I was entirely too amused, I had to share with all of you:

Figure 1: He ordered coffee at the mall and this is what he got. No grab 'n go here. The napkin says 'Good Coffee Smile', example #1 of strange use of the English language.


Figure 2: Who wouldn't want to go to a nightclub with this name?


Figure 3: This one had me laughing my ass off. Looks like fat and old people are out of luck.

And, perhaps, most disturbingly, here is a picture of the hotel guest book located at the front desk of his hotel:
Figure 4: Taiwanese hotels are more than happy to accommodate condom and personal lubricant needs. WTF!! Why is this on the front page of the guest book??!?!?!!11!!

On Ideas, Getting Scooped, and Nervousness

As a graduate student, I worked in a field of research that was very specific to my own lab and not widely studied by other groups. When I developed new ideas, I knew that they were genuinely novel ideas, and I worked at a reasonable pace, never fearing that I might be scooped.

When I first came to my postdoc lab and started studying Mangoes, I was completely unfamiliar with the field, and so I embarked on a number of lower-risk projects in order to get my feet wet. A year and a half later, my feet are feeling pretty fresh and my Mango knowledge base has grown substantially.

And I'm ready to develop my *big idea*, some kind of groundbreaking study that builds upon what I've learned about Mangoes while taking advantage of my background as an engineer. Some kind of big idea that, if it pays off, will land me a Glamour Mag publication and help to launch my career.

But the problem, you see, is that everyone and their mother works on Mangoes, and many of my ideas get scooped before I even begin.

I am not someone who has a natural gift for fabricating shitloads of original ideas. I am not even sure if this type of skill is a gift or something that needs to be developed. But I'm betting on the latter, and as such, I've made a marked attempt in the last 4-6 months to brainstorm excessively. And honestly, I've been really impressed with the novelty and excitement behind some of my ideas. Until, you know, I get my 'Mango slicing' PubMed alert the following Monday and find that someone else has published on my marvelous idea.

The most depressing part is that these people must have thought of the idea years ago in order to be publishing on it today.

About a month ago, I had one idea so delectably enticing that I couldn't wait to get started... until I found that something close to my so-called idea had been an active area of research since motherfucking 1994. People, in 1994 I was learning geometry and trying to figure out how best to concel pimples with makeup. I wasn't in the game. I wasn't even thinking about the game.

So what am I supposed to do? I have been a goddamn idea-generation factory for the last several months to little avail. I do have two completely hot ideas right now, one of which is halfway on the path to completion and another that is just in baby stages, but I live in continual fear that someone else will be publishing on my work in Nature next week. I honestly dread getting my PubMed alerts. I think that's kind of fucked up.

And it's made me reconsider what my career is going to be like working in a field like this. I have generalized anxiety disorder, and I don't know if it's the best idea for me to be working in a field where ideas get scooped like ice cream. Because it will only be a matter of time before I develop a stomach ulcer and a nervous facial twitch. And last time I checked, nobody wants to work with the crazy lady down the hall.

Matronly Duties

There are absolutely no circumstances in which it is flattering to be referred to as a 'matron'.

Completely inappropriate statements include:

1. "Here comes the matron."
2. "Wow, that is the prettiest matron I've ever seen."
3. "The matron has a big mouth."
4. "Why is the matron shit-can wasted?"
5. "The matron is completely out of control."

I think being referred to as a matron would be enough to compel any woman to drink like a fish.