A Hopeful Turn of Events

As my friend Beth recently reminded me, it's been a long time since I've posted anything at all on my blog. And even though I'm not traveling anywhere cool, I suppose maybe some of you are curious about what I'm up to...so here we go on a brief tour of Mindy's life for the last 3 or 4 months! I guess, now that I'm done gallivanting around the world, I can take up the banner of the Boring again. ;)

Let's see, what did I do with the rest of my summer? Well, I somehow forced myself to go back into my lab again and do some research. It was hard. Really hard, actually, after having so much fun seeing spectacular places, to have to resign myself to my icky blecky life of frustrating lab work. But, I was already treading on thin ice with my advisor, having taken SO much time off this year for travel, so I had no choice but to show up and get to work. I can't say I worked particularly hard all summer--it was a constant trial to force myself into work every day, but I did at least show up.

I've been working on a new strategy to get my project to work. It's basically the last idea I have for what to try on this project--the last glimmer of hope for getting anything out of the last 4.5 years' worth of research. Actually, I still think it has a chance of working, but I ran into some snags (as always) as I was trying this new strategy. It involved building a whole new confocal microscope setup, which was giving me weird data, so I had to do some controls which also turned out weird, and now I have to do controls to figure out why my controls failed...you get the picture.

Some of you may be wondering why I have been working on one project for so long. Basically, it's because my advisor doesn't like to consider projects that aren't very high impact (meaning they can get published in Science or Nature, or maybe PNAS). And high impact ideas usually mean super impossible ideas. Such is the case with my original project. It would be a very big deal if only we could get it to work, but obviously getting it to work has not been a walk in the park. I've asked a couple of times, admittedly without much forcefulness, if I could pursue some interesting tangents or side projects that have come up along the way (which could have yielded papers in some lesser journals, but hey, at least it would published!), and each time my advisor has said he'd rather I just worked on the main "big" project and get it working. It's a good strategy for him to advance his reputation, but it stinks for his students because it means we have all our eggs in one basket and most of us aren't getting the publications we need to graduate. While my advisor is a good guy in general, he's also not that useful in terms of offering help and practical advice. But I won't go into all of the reasons why our lab is dysfunctional just now. Suffice it to say, it's been frustrating.

But, the good news is that I have recently (like, just a few days ago) acquired a new project which has much more promise. This is what happened: Paul (that's my advisor) saw a couple of interesting papers that he thought we should talk about at group meeting, and assigned a couple of my coworkers to give presentations about them. During one of the presentations, Ben (currently the most senior student in the lab--he started a year before me) suggested a couple of simple experiments we could do based on the ideas in the paper. Paul got really excited about these experiments (you never can quite predict which ideas will get him excited and which he'll turn down flat, but I digress...) He said if any of the new students (who didn't have real projects yet) were interested in working on them to let him know.

I thought the new project looked very promising--and simple, with a good chance of actually working (kind of a novelty in our lab). This is the kind of projects we dub as "gimme" papers. I was jealous of this gimme paper being given to some new student, but I didn't think Paul would really let me switch projects since he's so enamored with the idea of getting that original one working. But, with some encouragement from Ben (good old Ben), I decided to ask Paul if I could work on it. Ben's reasoning was thus: even if Paul said no (which we both found likely), I would have at least put my oar in, and in a few months when my original project (probably) finally bit the dust, I could ask more forcefully for a simpler project, pointing to his earlier denial to help me make the case that he owed it to me now. But, to my surprise, Paul thought it was a great idea for me to work on this project and handed it right over. (And, it turns out, Paul said no to another student--one who is not nearly as senior as me but is not new either. Which makes me feel specialer than him. Ha!)

I'm excited about it. Hopefully, it actually pans out. If not, at least it will be obvious in the first few months and then I can abandon it as opposed to spending years on it before knowing if it's ever going to work. I am not actually giving up on my original project yet--I'm going to work on that too, and train one of the new students on it in the process (which I think means Paul is thinking I will graduate relatively soon and that he still wants a student on that project after I leave, which is a good sign--the fact that Paul is thinking about me and graduation in any sort of proximity of time).

It is a little sad because the project is on an entirely different subject than my original one, and there's a whole huge body of research I have to get familiar with, and FAST. But at least it's interesting and, dare I say? even exciting! for once. I haven't felt excited about my research in a veerrrrrry long time. So, hold your breath everyone, and say a little prayer for meee!