Graduate school is a lot more than school. Yes, there are classes, and yes a degree is involved and there is most definitely tuition being paid for class credit. But graduate school is most definitely work—it is a full time job. It involves deadlines, duties, bosses and a small subsistence stipend, which is aptly named. [...]
Posts tagged medicine
Chapter 13a. Planning a Future and Making a Discovery
For a poor graduate student, vacations were a luxury that was hard to afford, although they are something everyone needs for mental health. Ann said that if we did not get away together soon, one of us was going to go nuts. We planned an affordable 5- or 6-day getaway (Thursday to Tuesday or Wednesday) [...]
Chapter 12c. My First Scientific Meeting
Attending a big scientific convention like The Biophysics Meeting was an opportunity to meet some of my heroes in person. I was giddy with anticipation at the prospect. I searched through the list of names and abstracts looking for names and subjects that might be related or important to my work. There were lots of [...]
Chapter 12b. My First Scientific Meeting
Dr. Dillon and I talked at length about my work and what I wanted to present at the meeting. We wrote up an abstract of the research data and started making plans to attend the meeting. Planning to attend a meeting like this takes time. The written abstract is submitted in October for a meeting [...]
Chapter 12a. My First Scientific Meeting
Chapter 12. My First Scientific Meeting The physiology graduate students and I formed a nice little study group to relate our trials and tribulations to each other concerning classes and the physiology faculty. We could compare notes on classes, make suggestions as to classes or faculty advisors and just listen when things were going wrong. [...]
10c. Moving In
A few days after my little spill in the cold room Dr. Dillon summoned me to his office. He asked me to repeat to him what had happened, when it happened, what I did about it, and whom I told. Dr. Dillon was an efficient person and wanting to hear something twice was not consistent [...]
10a. Moving In
I was working in my “office” associated with Dr. Dillon’s lab. It wasn’t really an office, it was desk space in a busy, cluttered shared lab next to his lab. The door on the lab to my “office” was a huge, heavy, solid wood door that seemed to choose to open or close at random. [...]
Chapter 9d. Research: Data Are Plural.
I finished prepping the arteries, cleaned up the lab a bit, and we went to lunch. Deli sandwiches in Michigan are not as good as they are in New York, but it was a good lunch. I went back to the lab after lunch very happy and ready to get on with the experiments to [...]
Chapter 9c. Research: Data Are Plural.
Ann came to the physiology lab one day when I was freezing the arteries. She had never seen liquid nitrogen, so I went outside and picked some wildflowers and leafy green ferns to show her how fun research can be. I dipped a bunch of flowers into the liquid nitrogen and when they came out [...]
Chapter 9b. Research: Data Are Plural
The rest of the season went fairly well for us too. We had a better than 500 season and won our first game in the playoffs. Our inconsistent play was largely due to scattered attendance of the science people, many of whom had experiments going on at all hours of the day, night and weekend. [...]
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