Blessed by the Potato

Well, I’m fast approaching the end of my first year in PhD studies. So far, it seems to be going a lot better than my Master’s ever did. I never got a scholarship for my MSc (aside from tuition support), and there was even some disagreement about whether or not I was eligible for one. The applications take a long time to write (think days), especially if it’s your first one and you don’t have anything writen to work off of, no choice quotes to incorporate. So I checked and asked to make sure I had the minimum 80% average (despite how well I did in some of my classes, my overall average was just scraping 80). I checked to see if my 2nd year organic chem or 3rd year biochemistry (taken in my 3rd and 4th years of undergraduate respectively, the years that count for calculating scholarship averages) would count against me, and if my 1st year anthropology would count for me. I was told the 1st and 2nd year classes wouldn’t count (which was good: orgo hurt me far more than anthro helped), and was especially bouyed by the 90% I had in my graduate level stats class. Needless to say, I was shocked to receive a letter after submitting my applications that I had basically wasted my time and wasn’t even eligible for a scholarship — apparently it wasn’t the average of my 3rd and 4th year classes like they said, but rather the courses I took in my 3rd and 4th years (so 2nd year orgo did count), and what’s much crazier, is that the MSc course I completed didn’t count, because they don’t start counting graduate courses until your second year (due to a preculiarity of starting in January, I was pretty much the only first-year MSc student with a graduate class).

So, in case you haven’t already heard, I’ve been offered 3 Ontario Graduate Scholarship awards already for my PhD (only one of which I was able to accept — it’s a neat trick of chronology and starting in May that let me apply twice for my first year :) and was just recently awarded an even more prestigious NSERC scholarship. Not only is it worth a fair bit more than the OGS, but it’s also a 3-year scholarship that’ll take me right to the end of my PhD. No more wasting a week in the fall just writing the application essays!

The first year of my MSc was neat, I learned a lot and got some neat prototypes built for another project… but had made no progress on my own research (just wasted some time trying one technique that didn’t work). In fact, a lot of the PhD comics cut a little too close to the bone for my MSc. By contrast, now I’m using clinical equipment (harder to schedule time, but it also has a much more comprehensive support plan — we can’t afford to have it go off-line) and there’s a lot more expertise within the group so I have resources to draw on. Already we’re running subjects and collecting data, which is really exciting! (Beyond the fact that I’m actually running subjects though, I can’t tell you what the data is, because that would be premature disclosure). In fact, one of the biggest obstacles I’m facing now is just getting people to come in late in the evenings or on the weekend as volunteers. It’s tough now that some of the first year students are minors, so we can’t just force them to volunteer to get marks in first year psych :(

I’ve even got some teaching experience now (as painful as that was at times)

Oh, and I now issue a public shaming for Joce & Steve. They were going to come to London and be our first visitors. We cleaned the house, got the guest bed set up, and even ordered in some nice weather… but they inexplicably cancelled on Thursday. For further background, Joce lives outside of Toronto, and Steve outside of Windsor. London is of course halfway between the two, so it wasn’t even hugely out of their way. The reason I got was “Also, by the time Sunday rolls around I just want to drive straight home and sleep in my own bed.” That’s pretty weak Joce, and for that: shame. I mean, here we’ve got this really cute house closer to Toronto than most of cottage country, halfway to Windsor and Detroit, and no one’s seen it. I just want to show it off (especially before summer sets in and we might have to face the prospect of bugs) and see my friends :( I mean, am I being unreasonable here? We’ve got friends who moved across the country to Vancouver, Ft. McMurray, Halifax and Thunder Bay, and they’ve all had more visitors than we’ve had in London. Would it help if I said that London has an airport, so you can fly if you’d rather not drive?

All kidding aside though, I can’t really blame you for not coming in, Joce. I mean, my own parents haven’t come in to see the place yet, and I’m the only one of my siblings who’s moved out so far. In the 4 years I lived in the apartment, I had 3 visits from each of my parents, and one of those was the move in! So if my parents, who regularly drive the same distance to the cottage (often going there and back the same day) haven’t come to visit, I can’t very well hold anyone else to task for not visiting. Like we say around here “London’s a great place to live, but I’d hate to visit there.”

At first, I vigorously opposed Windows XP as an operating system. It just moved so many things around, buried settings in the control panels behind a number of extra layers of opacity that one simply didn’t have to bother with in 98/ME. It wasn’t just something else to get used to — it was a pain providing long-distance support for relatives, and even to this day I still sometimes wonder why it is that after finding my way down to the network connections page (and not internet options), then clicking properties on the connection whose IP I want to change, I still need to go through another level of clicking “properties” when having to change IP settings is a pretty common task…

However, over time, it really grew on me. In particular, its stability. I always used to have to plan on when I would have to shut everything down and reset the system; could I safely leave it until morning? If I pushed it, then I might lose a bunch of open work, or at least suffer through a lot of slowdowns until I did… with XP, a lot of those concerns went away. I can pretty reliably leave it going for weeks at a time now (though sometimes I’m limited by the automatic updates that install themselves and then want to reset the computer right then, user input to the contrary or not). In fact, I’ve gotten a little too cocky sometimes in terms of forgetting to save my work frequently.

Tonight, though, all that good will went down the toilet as I faced several old school Blue Screens of Death. I wasn’t even doing anything to get them. I was running BrainVoyager, and with the program idle, walked away for something, and when I turned back there it was.

BSOD.

Of course Brain Voyager is likely to blame since it is limited-production scientific software, but nonetheless, XP generally handles errors better than completely seizing up and crashing. Ordinarily, I might have just thanked whatever minor office deities were around at the time that I had saved my work just before getting up, but tonight I got really mad at the computer. What right did it have to force me to hard boot it and start from scratch? Even saved, it takes time to load all the brain images back into memory, and time just for the system to come back to life. Time to click on the annoying “your system recovered from a serious error, tell MS about it!” message. What’s with that message, anyway? I wish there was a way to turn it off, because I never send my error reports to MS. It’s not like they’re going to up and try to fix XP now, or try to make 3rd party software cooperate better. It’s just more time before I can recover from the error and get back about my business. I am, of course, lamenting all this lost time because I’m still at work and it’s closing in on 3 am.

A lot of the bitterness, though, I suspect comes from the Animal Crackers. It has been my experience that Animal Crackers are an angry food (though this is a realization I’ve only come to tonight). Almost every time I eat them, I find I get excessively annoyed at almost everything. It’s strange, because they sort of start out as comfort food, and they’re just so cute. They’re also somewhat bland and easy to just keep popping in your mouth in an unthinking way. But before long you’ve got this whole cookie menangerie in your insides, seething with hate and rage.

(Part of that, I suspect, may come from the fact that I really only ever eat them when I’ve got all-nighters… but nonetheless, I’m not impressed with the BSOD tonight.)

Last year we had to deal with BEMs selecting a hurricane-devastated area of Mexico to hold the conference. We had deep fears all along that the hotel would not be ready (2 weeks of margin-of-error for their opening was not a lot of time for repairs that stretched out over 8 months) — and indeed, it wasn’t. We had to go with the hotel next door at the last minute, which over-charged us, and was suffering from some residual damage itself (periodic hot water and air conditioning outages, and the internet never worked in the rooms).

This year, we’re going to an undamaged part of Japan, so there shouldn’t be any of this nonsense. However, we’re still having issues being confident that this meeting will actually take place, so we haven’t booked flights or anything yet. For one thing, the deadline to apply for student travel support was last friday. As part of the application, they wanted your paid conference registration and a copy of your airline ticket (so they could estimate how much money they needed to find from sponsors for the travel awards). There was no registration form yet, so we couldn’t do that. And since there was no registration form, we hadn’t booked our tickets yet — they said that was fine, nobody had yet. Instead, they just wanted us to send in the page of the application with our contact information so that they could get an idea of how many students there would be.

I find this a little troubling, but even more troubling is that they haven’t yet picked a hotel to host the event. I don’t know about Japan, but in many other cities where we try to have conferences, you can’t leave booking out 150 rooms to the last minute. At least, not if you want a decent rate and/or to be close to where the conference will be. And not having any hotel information makes us cautious about booking flights. Despite not having anything done yet, we’re pretty sure the conference organizers will eventually book rooms for the conference itself, but what about the days before and after? Many of us from Canada are planning on arriving a day or two early to get over the jet lag before the conference begins. Many people are planning on staying afterwards for a bit of vacation, but if it turns out the rooms are a few hundred dollars a night, those plans might have to change, so we can’t very well book flights until we know how many days we can afford to stay in-country.

Two solid days of travel (24 hours in a plane or train, each way!) for 5 long days of work. I don’t know why I didn’t just outright refuse to go long ago. I don’t need the stress of worrying about this nonsense for two months in advance… not to mention the flying halfway around the world to be bored to tears by smelly, unwashed scientists. Though a really good suggestion was to try to get Febreeze to sponsor the conference, and we could mist everyone down as they entered…

Grad students really shouldn’t be classified by graduating year class, it’s just not fair. Sure, for undergrads and high school students, those are reasonable, attainable guidelines and classifications for the vast majority of students (there are exceptions, of course). People know when they’re going to be done, and that at that point their lives will change rather significantly. But for grad students, a graduating year is nebulous. A rough guideline at best, but more practically a goal to work towards, with the full understanding that delays are a fact of life. Even then, the work you do after grad school is often not all that different from what you do during grad school, it might just require a change of scenery. So I find it odd that the first question out of anyone’s mouth when I say I’m working on my PhD is “when will you be done?” I look through sites like Facebook and see people with these classifications beside their name, and wonder how many of those are not just hopeful, but wildly delusional? I know that when I’m forced to put something in that box, it’s not much more than a stab in the dark. I might, if I’m lucky, get the year right, but I really doubt the month/term will be spot-on. Of course, it was so with my own MSc: I started in 2003 and would have expected to graduate as part of the class of ’04, possibly slip into ’05 if my expectations for being above-average fell short; little did I know that it wouldn’t be until halfway through ’06 that I’d finally see my thesis printed & bound. Even scholarship applications and the like require that information, and they really should know better. They asked when you started, they can do the math. In fact, it might be quite interesting and informative to gather up all the OGS applications over the years and contact the students to find out when they actually did graduate, or how their estimate has changed over time if they’re still in grad school….

The question of the day is “What do you do with a PhD?” (After you’ve already gone to the bank and insited they put “Dr.” on your cheques, that is).

Graduate school is a long, arduous process, and it can be all the more demoralizing when there’s no clear goal at the end of it. Heck, the “default” career option, continuing in research, doesn’t even really have much of an end, at least not within a tangible timeline. After doing a PhD and getting a small handful of papers published, you’re typically expected to do a post-doc, which is basically doing a PhD all over again on a yearly contract while writing your own grants. You look constantly for professorship openings, which can be at some pretty far-ranging universities… and if you do land one of those, there’s still no real security for a decade yet, until you magically get tenure. And the whole time you have to deal with the peculiar headaches of research: broken equipment, misleading results, constant racing to get results out ahead of the nebulous “competition”, the grant cycle, funding shortages, not to mention short-term contracts, moving around, and research-dollars salary. Whoa, no thanks folks, if we learned nothing else during the PhD, it’s that the academic research path is not for us.

The other side of the academic coin is a good option though: teaching. Research makes you plumb the depths of a subject, looking to push the boundries of knowledge and explore all the subtle pitfalls that it contains (even if that is through a process of falling in every one of them). Teaching forces you to take something and break it down into its components, constantly looking for new ways to view, explain, and apply it. The two complement each other rather well: you can get so bogged down in details in research sometimes that you forget what exactly it is you’re doing; teaching can help bring that back into focus (and also provides you with a constant stream of new questions to investigate from fresh minds). The two complement each other well — but you don’t have to do research to teach. In fact, the vast majority of the teaching that goes on is done in elementary and secondary schools by people who only need a bachelor degree and a teaching certification. So really, the time spent getting that graduate degree really wasn’t necessary… seems kind of a waste, and if you’re in the middle of your PhD, it’s no way to stay motivated to finish.

Back to university research: being a tech is an option. You trade upward mobility and self-direction for stability. Again, actually finishing a PhD isn’t always necessary, though.

There are lots of opportunities in industry. Researchers, of course. Job stability can come a lot sooner, and you can settle in since moving around isn’t typically necessary (most companies only have one research park working on one topic, and would hate to lose an egghead to the competition). While funding is usually a vastly different game, with equipment magically appearing before the desire is even uttered aloud, the research can be very results-driven, which can be extremely stressful. Especially if you haven’t seen 7 am as anything but “really really late, man” for decades. Beyond that, being someone who can talk the talk can be useful in the middle-management type roles; someone to talk to the engineers so they don’t have to talk to the customers. A “people person”. Along the same lines, if you’re good at interviewing and padding a resume, you can try to leverage your decade of higher education into some vague form of legitimate experience and catapult up the ranks (even in completely non-scientific fields). But god, can you imagine being 30 years old with no experience in corporate life (or life in general!) and trying to jump right in to any kind of management role? That leaves sales, which can also require someone who can talk the talk, especially when it comes to pitching high tech things like drugs, medical equipment, or long distance plans (shudder). This route can lead to the pitfall of being “overqualified” though — it can be tough to convince an employer that you want to work outside your field out of anything other than temporary desperation.

Then there’s the stay-at-home option: cookbooks sell better if written by someone with a PhD. Discounting that, more school is an option sometimes as well. Extra training can take one from medical research into actual medical practice, or medical physics (that’s a very competitive alternative, though).

Unfortunately, I don’t have any answers — I don’t know what I want to do myself when I “grow up” (though suggestions are welcome). It can just be a little demoralizing sometimes not really knowing what’s ahead (or worse yet, seeing the path ahead and realizing there isn’t enough hair left to lose). Some have suggested the old trick of asking yourself what you’d do if you won the lottery and didn’t have to work. In that case, I’d probably still tinker with science, still keep up-to-date with Scientific American and maybe even Nature, and likely even keep my brain sharp by doing obscure calculations (like figuring out the time for a hybrid car to pay itself off, or the real-world speed vs fuel economy curve)… but there is no way I’d keep up the discipline to go through with rigorous experiments or hinge my hopes and dreams on something likely to go horribly wrong due to random chance. Plus any science writing I did would likely be of a fictional or popular variety (or even advocacy?) rather than technical.