Seminar Notes

Yesterday I went to a seminar from a faculty candidate - we're trying to hire a biochemist and a biophysical chemist (I think there might be a third position, but I'm not sure). I'm assuming this was a candidate for the biophysical position, as he is a theoretical chemist. Not gonna lie, I don't have a whole lot of use/patience/interest for/in theoretical "chemistry." If you combine it with experimental data, ok. It has some value as support or motivation for experimental work, but in my mind means just about squat on it's own, especially when you say stuff like this:

"...transition states only a theorist could love."

"...the theory works really nifty swell."

"...which goes to show that in our country money can buy you anything, including an article in Science." [Apparently some company R&D division had an article in Science that I gather contradicted his conclusions.]

"If somebody held a gun to my head and told me to pick out the important vibrations by looking at a structure, I'd make sure my affairs were in order." [Ok, so this isn't completely absurd scientifically, but who says that?? Especially during a job talk. Actually, I'll tell you who. Somebody with a Napoleon complex who thinks he's a lot funnier than he is.]

And my favorite:

"I'm way too shy to show you these [experimental] results, but let me assure you it's working."

Seriously?? Right there you've just lost any credibility. You know it's bad news when I spend the seminar writing down the completely ridiculous stuff you say. It's like I'm back in gen chem writing down Chuck gems like, "now give yourselves a temporary partial lobotomy..."

Hm. What next? Part III

So a while ago, I explained why I'm quite sure I don't want to be an academic, and then I wrote a bit (ok, a lot) about what I think I want from a job. While I have only minimally narrowed down my options, I'm feeling somewhat less overwhelmed at the thought of deciding what to do next, and even have a plausible "front runner." As I'm sure that you really love reading my stream-of-consciousness wandering thoughts, here are some thoughts on various still-in-the-running options.

"Industry" seems to be the most obvious alternative to "academia," however that's still an incredibly broad and vague descriptor. The subcategories that I can see in this (at the moment) include:

• large "manufacturing" companies (stuff like Proctor & Gamble or General Mills)
• large pharmaceutical companies (Merck, Pfizer, etc) or "small" pharmaceutical companies
• chemical and/or chemical equipment companies (Sigma-Aldrich or Fisher Scientific for example)
• bio-tech

I'm sure there are pros and cons to all of these types of companies, and I have to admit I don't have many specific thoughts as to whether or not I'd like working for them. Lunch with VeryBC was really quite helpful in getting an idea of what kind of career path and projects I might expect. It didn't leave me super gung-ho to work for that sort of company, but it certainly didn't dissuade me from it. One upside of working for a really huge company could be job stability - if your project gets cut for whatever reason, assuming you don't suck at your job of course, there is much higher likelihood of being able to keep your "job" by transitioning to another team or project. Another bonus in my mind is a large company is more likely to have many locations world-wide...in other words travel opportunities.

Working for a pharmaceutical company (especially a huge one) seems like the epitome of "working for the man" as far as chemistry jobs go, and I'm not really sure why that is. It's not any more profit- or product-driven than almost any other company. One such company sent a recruiter in about a week ago, but unfortunately the "informal Q&A" session he held wasn't very helpful. They only currently have one PhD opening, and he spent most of the time talking about that one specific position (only 2 people out of about 12 were close enough to graduating to apply) and flipping through the corporate slides he had. A pharmaceutical company sounds like a fine option, I have nothing against it. I just don't know much about it and the visiting recruiter didn't give a whole lot of insight into what the pharmaceutical industry is like.

Working for a chemical company frankly sounds rather boring. But to be fair, I have no idea what (if anything) they do besides synthesize/isolate/purify/characterize compounds.

Bio-tech could be very exciting in terms of the most cutting edge developments in Science, but it seems like it could also be quite risky. An awful lot of small bio-tech companies seem to come and go more often than I change the sheets on my bed. At the moment "settling down" somewhere (i.e. moving somewhere with the intention of staying there indefinitely) is really weird and not particularly appealing, I assume that someday that will be a desirable thing, and that I will want/need a stable job to allow that.

Any of those job options could allow me to continue in mass spectrometry, with bio-tech probably being the least likely to specifically want a mass spectrometrist (unless we're talking about a mass spec-based technology). I'd probably have travel opportunities in any of these sorts of companies, least so probably in chemical industry. I think in any of these it would come down to what project(s) I were actually working on, and the people. Big manufacturing or pharma are the most appealing of the "industry" options. The recruiters that have come from VeryBC and the pharmaceutical company have made annual trips here for several years now (a perk of being in a highly-ranked chemistry program, especially in analytical). I'm hoping more people from different companies and different types of companies will come visit to help me get a better idea of what I want...

As a mass spectrometrist, a somewhat related option would be to work for an instrument company. I honestly think anything except the R&D aspect of this would get boring pretty quickly, so let's go ahead and ignore/eliminate the sales and demo lab type positions. Even something like a field engineer position would probably be boring pretty quickly as most of your users will be of the "black box" variety - i.e. use the instrument exactly as intended, never take the covers off, don't actually know how it works... If I could spend my time helping research/instrumentation labs (like mine), now that would be different. Probably much more interesting. Instrument or application development could be fun. My advisor thinks I'd enjoy working for the company that makes the instruments I currently use for a few years and then be bored. Who knows. I've made lots of good contacts in various divisions and geographic locations with that company to keep that option on the table.

A sort of middle-of-the-road option between industry and academia would be to work in a national lab. I don't know a whole lot about this, although I have a bit of a better feel after talking pretty extensively to one of my former labmates (and current national lab employee). Depending on the lab and the division, it seems like this could be almost like academia minus the teaching and university-related B.S. My labmate's particular position doesn't sound like this, but rather closer to industry (less research- and more figure-this-out-for-us-based). So it seems like there's some variety. I don't think I really want to do pure research anymore (not that what I do now is terribly "pure" science), but this would be a good option should I change my mind. It seems like it could be a somewhat more "industry"-like job in a more "academic"-like setting. One thing that surprised me about this option is that the pay seems to actually be pretty good.

A slightly different option is working for a government agency, like the FDA or EPA. This would likely be less research- and more quality control/problem solving-based. The pay generally isn't as good as private industry or national labs, but the job security and benefits are supposedly excellent.

Another government, but totally unrelated job is one I heard of from one of my committee members via one of my classmates. Apparently all (?) congressmen and senators have "science advisors" - PhD-level scientists whose job it is to be up to speed on relevant science/policy issues in order to advise (duh) politicians how to vote. This is something that I think could be really fascinating to do for a couple of years. Politics have become more interesting (and aggravating) as I pay more attention to what's actually going on. It could be a blast to live in DC for a couple of years and learn about all sorts of different Science. I could also see becoming really disenchanted, but that's why I think I'd only do something like this short-term.

During a recent "what do you want to do with yourself" conversation with my advisor, she asked me (with the faintest hint of exasperation), "What do you have against teaching??!" Nothing actually! I really, really enjoyed TAing in undergrad. There's something incredibly awesome about the moment you see a concept click for somebody. I swear, you can see it in the student's face, and it's just so cool to witness that and know that you had some (small) part in making that happen. The thing is, I don't want to teach, and run a research program, and do all the miscellaneous other B.S. that comes with being a professor at a research university. I'd really rather teach or do research. NOT both. There are lecturer (or adjunct, depending on the university's current needs) positions, but the pay and job security are mediocre at best as they are non-tenure track positions. A teaching position at a community college would be more stable, but they seem to pay absolute crap. It would be one thing if I had a family and wanted something fairly "low" time-commitment for that reason, but that's certainly not my situation. With a PhD I'd be "over-qualified" to teach at all but the most elite of high schools. Teaching at a small and/or teaching-focused college would be a possibility. However if that's what I want to do I'd need to realize/decide that soonish, and take appropriate steps to actually be qualified to do that - i.e. ask for a teaching assignment (I haven't TA'd at all in grad school as I've been on fellowship the entire time) and possibly take a teaching "post-doc." A variation on this that could really be quite fun would to be a lab coordinator (preferably for upper division labs that use more instrumentation). Many large universities will have lab coordinators for gen chem, organic, and "upper division" (usually analytical and physical chemistry) labs, who oversee and train TAs, manage/maintain/troubleshoot instrumentation, and do a bit of more "traditional" teaching. (I've also considered the possibility of teaching high school full or part time after a career in industry. One of my favorite teachers in high school retired after 30+ years as an engineer, decided retirement was boring, and came to teach math and science at my small, all-girls, Catholic high school. Needless to say he had NO idea what he was getting himself into, but we had fun with him and he was a good teacher.)

One last job option that I'll only mention briefly because I'm pretty sure I don't want to do it (even if it does sound interesting) is to work for a scientific journal. Not as an editor - all the editors (that I know of anyways) are big name professors in their own right, separate from/prior to being an editor. My advisor was recently visited by a PhD chemist who works for an analytical journal essentially as a scout and blogger. She attends conferences, reads, and travels in search of cool science for the journal to feature in print and/or in her blog (through the journal, not a personal science blog). I really don't think I enjoy writing nearly enough to do something like this, but it's a neat, off-the-beaten-track option, and I'm sure there are others like this that I wish I knew existed.

I've rambled long enough. I'll write another post later about post-doc-ing and what I think my currently most-appealing career/job option is.

Periodic Table of Awesomeness

In my department there is a huge number of seminars to attend. As students we are generally required to attend the departmental colloquium, which is typically an outside, invited speaker, and the student seminar series of our division. In the analytical division, students usually give two seminars, a mostly literature-based seminar in their 2nd year, and then a research-based final seminar shortly before graduating.

At analytical division seminars it is customary for the speaker (or friends of the speaker) to provide snacks. A few weeks ago my labmate Slim gave his 2nd year seminar, and E and I jumped on the excuse to bake. Because we're dorks and ridiculous, we decided to make a periodic table of cupcakes for Slim's seminar. Here's the finished product laid out on my dining room table the night before:


Before the event, there was some curiosity and discussion as to which elements would be snatched up right away, and which would be left until the end. To satisfy inquisitive minds, I collected a few data points throughout the cupcake selection process. Here are the numbers extracted from the raw data (Periodically taken photographs, and I apologize for the mediocre quality of the images - it seems I can't make tables in blogger. I can't imagine why not.):


First, a few points about how the data and elements have been organized. (By the way, here's the periodic table we used for reference.)

• For the d- and f-blocks, the first number is the number of elemental cupcakes, while the number in parenthesis is total number of cupcakes in that flavor, i.e. including the 2 place-holder asterisk cupcakes indicating where the f-block inserts into the table.
• While La and Ac are more d-block-like in their electronics, they were included in the f-block seeing as the elements in the f-block are collectively named for them (lanthanides and actinides).
• Lu and Lr were included with the d-block because electronically they are more d-block-like.
  
• Including the unnamed, somewhat suspect elements at the bottom of the periodic table, there are currently 118 elements.
• The skinny, blank row in the table indicates when the seminar actually occurred - in other words, the division between cupcakes that were selected before seminar and those taken afterward.

Given that each block was a different flavor cake and frosting, the contributions from elemental preference and flavor preference are convoluted, making it difficult (ok, impossible) to draw any solid conclusions. Also, as one of my committee members pointed out, this experiment would have to be repeated to have any validity (I think that was a hint for more cupcakes...).

Sorted by flavor/block, the earliest cupcakes/elements selected:

Chocolate jumped out to the early lead, with 10 cupcakes, or 23% being taken early. It's not surprising that precious metals (Ag, Au, Pd) were selected early. Tungsten's (W) popularity is also not surprising, as it is an odd, but widely used metal. Toxic metals also seemed to be quite popular for the novelty of eating a "toxic" cupcake (Cd, Hg).

Seaborgium (Sg), and some other elements, might seem like an odd early-round selection, but I believe this to be due to the remarkable popularity of Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg among those in attendance. Seaborg won the 1951 Nobel prize in chemistry, and is the principal or co-discoverer of ten elements, including seaborgium (actually the last element to be named for a still-living person/discoverer), plutonium (Pu), americium (Am), curium (Cm), berkelium (Bk), californium (Cf), einsteinium (Es, also named for a still-living person), fermium (Fm), medelevium (Md), and nobelium (No).

As elemental/cupcake selection was a highly individual process, some observations on various subjects' methods:

• Many seemed to choose which flavor they wanted, and then select an element within that flavor block.
• The male post-doc who selected carbon works with carbon specifically.
• One female, 5th year graduate student, selected lithium, in case the seminar drove her crazy (2nd year seminars are frequently quite boring).
• One male, 2nd year graduate student selected seaborgium due to the previously discussed appreciation for (cough cough obsession with) Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg.
• One female faculty member selected a gingerbread cupcake (element not recorded) due to a recently upset stomach and the wishful thinking that a cupcake containing ginger would be more agreeable to her stomach.
  

Having considered which cupcakes/elements were selected early, now let us consider the cupcakes/elements which were not selected. Again, sorted by flavor/block, the cupcakes/elements left to languish (until the next day anyways):

Ultimately 100% of the red velvet cupcakes were consumed, however no firm conclusions can be made as to the popularity of the cupcake flavor or s-block elements as there are the fewest s-block elements. Ultimately the f-block, or gingerbread cupcakes had the highest percentage leftover (33%).

Some of the unselected p-block elements seem surprising (He, S, Ar, Po in particular), and I suspect a higher percentage of p-block elements would have been selected had they been a more "exotic" flavor rather than vanilla cake with vanilla buttercream frosting. The popularity of chocolate cupcakes was expected, however some of the specific elements left behind were surprising (Sc, Ti, Y, Os, and Ir in particular).

Despite the complete lack of justifiable conclusions, we're going to call the periodic table of cupcakes a success. :)

Hm. What next? Part II

So in thinking more about what I want to do "when I grow up," and in seeking advice/information on various options, I've decided it could be helpful to think about what I want in a job.

Based on my last post on this subject, it's fairly clear that I want a job where:

• I generally like my co-workers. I realize there's always going to be the one (or more) person I absolutely can't stand, or drives me up the wall, but it's important to me that for the most part, I like my co-workers and enjoy working with them. It would be the pits to loathe the people with whom I spend 40+ hours a week.
• It is feasible to have balance between work and family/private/home life. As I said before, my career is important to me, but so is family - the family I already have and the family I someday hope to have. Both my parents have advanced degrees and have/had high-level, demanding jobs. Granted Dad's job has always been considerably more flexible and "9-5" than Mom's (night and weekend call is certainly an obstacle to flexibility), but I never felt neglected, or like I didn't see my parents enough, or like they weren't there for important things. So I guess my point is I know it's possible to have a successful career in science and still have a family, therefore I won't take (or stay in) a job that doesn't leave room for other priorities.
• I never become completely removed from the lab that my expectations are ridiculous. A lot of PhDs get sort of pushed into a management track, where it seems all too easy to lose understanding of what it takes to make something actually happen in lab. On one hand I like to be in charge because I like to be sure things are going to get done right (um yes, I can be somewhat bossy at times). Although the older I get the less I care because less and less often do I think the stress and pressure are worth it. Maybe someday management will be more appealing than it is now. I guess it's a good recent grads wouldn't start out in a position like that anyways. I also discovered during grad school that I really like to tinker. I enjoy disassembling, trouble-shooting, replacing parts, and reassembling the instrument. For now at least I want to be able to continue getting my hands dirty.
  

I think those factors will go a long way towards me being happy in my job. There are some other things to think about too.

• Travel. If you know me or have been reading this blog for a while, you've probably figured out that I'm a wee bit addicted. I love going to and experiencing new places. Most business trips likely wouldn't really allow time for sightseeing, but you still get the chance to meet and interact with people from somewhere different - something I almost always find interesting and valuable. And maybe I'm weird, but I always get this thrill just walking through the airport looking at all the gates as pass thinking, "Oo! I could go to Seattle! Or Memphis! Or Montreal! Or Tokyo! Or Cairo!" And the list goes on, and on, and on. Dad commutes to DC (from Boston) almost once a week. I don't think I really want to do that; it just seems draining. He takes a 6 or 7 am flight down and then gets home between 9 and 11 pm. And then goes to work at his normal 6 or 7 am the next morning! Besides, who wants to go to the same place over and over and over again? :P
• Benefits. Growing up we were very fortunate that we always had great health insurance as part of one parent or the others' benefits package. Now in grad school, paying too much for pretty mediocre insurance makes me really, really appreciate the value of good benefits. I'm really looking forward to having better health insurance, hopefully with vision, dental, and prescription included!! While we're at it, let's admit that money is nice, my travel addiction is expensive, and I'd like to think I will have toiled through let's not think about how many years of graduate school to make more than $30,000/year. Oh, and a decent amount of vacation time would be appreciated.
• Mass spec vs "other" analytical chemistry vs "other" chemistry. I'm pretty sure that I want to stay in mass spec. Most chemists seem to wind up in positions drastically different from their dissertation work. That's not necessarily a bad thing - I most definitely don't want to do the same thing forever. That said, I really like the wide variety of applications, instrumentation, and problems encountered in mass spectrometry. Which brings me to my next point,
• Variety. I absolutely do not want to do the same thing everyday for the next year, let alone the rest of my life.
• Learning opportunities. Whether that's in the form of in-house seminars and classes as very-BC talked about at lunch, attending conferences, training from instrument companies, and who knows what else. I certainly don't know everything I'll ever need to know, nor will I when I've actually finished this stupid degree.
• Interaction. As much as other people drive me crazy sometimes, I ultimately do want to interact with lots of people in my job. Working by myself all the time would get really boring really quickly. Fortunately science doesn't happen in a bubble.
• Application. I like coming to specific results or conclusions that can be of use to other scientists or people in the near-ish future. I loathe strictly theoretical or computational work. As an analytical chemist this isn't likely to be a problem. After all, the whole point of analytical chemistry is to measure stuff. I'm also really not attached to doing true research. I'm ok with more application-oriented problem-solving.
  

I'm sure there are other things I'm not thinking of now, and probably things I won't realize I care about or should have been thinking about until after I've had a "real, grown up" job for a while. This is a pretty extensive list though, and hopefully thinking about what I want from a job will help me decide what will be a good choice for me.

Eventually I'll get around to musing over various options...

Canadians are so awesome.

A smattering of the awesome exchanges/remarks I've heard today.

During various 1st year student advising sessions this morning:

Professor: Tell us about your interests.
Student: Well, I like photography, mountain biking, hiking...

Professor, advising a student on which physical chemistry class to take: Well, it depends, do you prefer wave functions or partition functions?

Student, on whether or not s/he might enjoy the course on statistical thermodynamics: I follow the Mark Twain viewpoint on statistics. There are lies, damn lies, and then there are statistics.


Chatting with my sister this afternoon:

Little sister: Canadians are so awesome.
Me: Hahahaha why are Canadians so awesome?
Little sister: Are you serious? They're Canadians. No explanation needed.

Confession

I'm working late tonight. We're finally tackling this (hopefully little) side project that the Queen has been pestering us about for over 2 years now. It could be interesting, but has just never been deemed important enough when we always have so many other experiments that just seem more urgent. We figured now was as good a time as any to devote a couple of days to it, run experiments like crazy, and hopefully be done with it. This is probably wishful and delusional thinking on our part, but that's the goal.

Anyways, doing these experiments means that we vented this morning to modify the instrument. So the afternoon was spent twiddling my thumbs (I may or may not have watched last week's episode of The Bachelorette on Hulu...Confession #1) while the instrument pumped down and the MCPs conditioned. Eventually I left to hit the gym (can't look like a whale in everybody's wedding photos) and have some supper. My labmate stayed to make sure everything works ok and tune the instrument. Everything checked out, so I'm back running at least one sample, hopefully two tonight. We'd rather get the instrument back to its "normal" configuration sooner rather than later, so it's going to be an intense couple of days of running constantly.

Since I don't have family out here working late isn't all that terrible. Sometimes it sucks - many nights I'd certainly rather being hanging out on the couch with my roommate(s) or doing something with friends, but working late definitely has its advantages. One HUGE plus being that hardly anybody else is here, so people aren't pestering me to fix this, help them with that, proofread this, or just talking at me. Don't get me wrong, the random chatting and nonsense that goes on at school during the day is quite possibly the best/most fun part of grad school, but it certainly doesn't help productivity. I think I enjoy the nobody-else-here-to-pester me more as I become a more "senior" student. (Although I think my grad school career has been somewhat warped in that respect - I swear somehow I became a "senior student" sometime around the beginning/middle of my second year. Definitely before my time.)

I think my favorite part of working late though - is that since I'm alone in the lab, I can blast whatever music I want and sing at the top of my lungs if I want. At the moment I happen to be singing along to the mash up of It's My Life and Confessions from Glee. Don't judge.

TWIMS - The mostly non-business end of things...

Ok, this is going to be much more convoluted than the other conference post. Sorry!

Travel on both ends was smooth and uneventful, so not much to say on that front. Both Albuquerque and Salt Lake City get big thumbs up for having free wi-fi in their airports though! And Southwest gets props for not charging me an arm and a leg to check a bag. I really hate lugging all my stuff through the airport...

Our hotel was pretty flipping sweet. We had a 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom suite for 4 of us, so no hassle over who's showering when. And extra perk, breakfast and dinner (even if we usually didn't make it back for dinner) were included as freebies with the room rate. :)

The first sign of ridiculousness was when I woke up Monday morning and look out the window. What did I see?? SNOW. EFFING SNOW. Unless you live in the southern hemisphere, snow during the last week of May, even if it's not accumulating, is completely unacceptable!! Even if it didn't accumulate on the ground, it accumulated on ME! By time we got to the conference center (a 15 minute walk from our hotel), I had a layer of snow all over my jacket. I realize the below picture of the snow from our window isn't all that convincing, but I promise. It was snow. I may live in the desert, but I remember what it looks like still.

After the morning oral session I ran into my friend Martin - he's finishing up his degree in the lab in Scotland that I visited about a year and a half ago. Since he was at the conference alone I insisted he hang out with our group (while giving him the option not too if we were too scary - an option he declined and may have regretted later in the week!). It took him a second to recognize me at first - probably a combination of having a different haircut, wearing glasses, and being dressed up - all things he definitely never saw while I was working in the lab in Scotland. But as soon as he did he told me I looked "right sharp", which was not only super cute because of it's British-ness, but very nice because I'm pretty sure I really just looked like death on toast at that point in the week. (The use of phrases such as "right sharp" is going on my "pro" list as far as post-doc-ing in England is concerned!)

Monday night we had a group reunion dinner - everybody at the conference who's ever worked for VW or in her lab comes. It was cool to meet people who pre-date my time here - people I've heard about and whose papers I've read. As usual there were shenanigans to be had. :) One of my Chinese labmates doesn't hang out with us socially very much, and he's pretty quiet in general - although way funny when he does converse with us. My other labmate Ashley had told him before the conference that he HAD to drink with us during the conference, and he agreed that he would drink one night. Well before this occasion it seems he'd only had beer, because he received an education in the great tradition of taking shots. He had his first, and second, shot that night. VW was not only present for this "education," but condoned it. We've been seeing a whole new side of the queen lately...and I have to say we like it!

The hospitality suites were an experience unto themselves. All the big instrument companies have suites - free food, free booze (!), lots of random freebies and ridiculousness. Perkin Elmer had a stroke of genius and had a photo booth, with lots of hats and glasses and other silly accessories to use.


Bruker had the best freebies of the conference hands down. The first night we were there we noticed these awesome champagne flutes with blinking LEDs in the base. The awesomeness can not appropriately be put into words. Traditionally in the VW lab, we have champagne to celebrate defenses and successful oral exams, so logically we needed a full set of these glasses for the lab. They only had a set number of them for each night, and they ran out before we actually got there the first night. Egged on by VW herself, we found ourselves scrounging around, swiping abandoned glasses off tables. After three nights of hitting up the hospitality suites, we collected a set of 20 glasses. They're now clean and lined up on the shelf in my office, waiting for the next oral or defense.


Here's two of my labmates and me enjoying the Waters hospitality suite. Waters also had blinking glasses, but pint glasses rather than champagne flutes. (I know my hair's pulled back, but that's my new haircut btw...bangs...Not entirely sold on keeping them yet...)


Martin hung out with us in the hospitality suites a bunch, and introduced us to his friend Ross. Let's just say he's super nice and cute, and that it's really quite tragic that Manchester, England is so freaking far from Tucson, Arizona. (I may have sent one or two less than 100% sober texts the night we all went out without him - hence the alternate definition of TWIMS...)

Tuesday afternoon my former labmate and mentor, Chris, and I escaped the conference for a bit to go check out Temple Square. It's nearly impossible to get out of the square without somebody (likely a pair of girls in ankle length skirts) accosting you asking if they can tell you about the Church of Latter Day Saints. I could never be Mormon, and nothing against them, but man do they have some weird history. We saw the Lion House, where Brigham Young kept most of his wives and children. It looks like a dormitory. They had a free tour of the house he actually lived in with I guess a select wife or two and a few children. The finishings in the house were very nice, but it was just creepy and weird feeling. You could totally tell everybody on the tour really wanted to ask questions along the lines of how many wives?? and how many children??! But nobody dared ask anything at all due to the extremely scary, angry looking woman bringing up the rear of the tour. She seriously looked like she would stab you in your sleep if you so much as made a peep. At the end they have you fill out a little comment card with your contact info, and you can request that a missionary come talk to you about LDS, Jesus Christ, the Book of Mormon... Did I put my contact info? Absolutely not. I put E's boyfriend J's contact info. I'm very hopeful he'll be getting a gift from Utah in the mail...

The social highlight of the week was the outing to a dueling piano bar around the corner from the conference center. (Very similar to the Big Bang...) When we got there around 9 we were nearly the only people there, but it was still fun because we were a big enough group to be rowdy and make it fun. Things got plain ridiculous when the hospitality suites closed and a ton of people from the conference came to the bar. A bar completely packed with (mostly drunk) mass spectrometrists is one of the funnier things to experience. :) There were several Bruker top hats floating around the bar (the other excellent freebie they had), and the inventor of DART may or may not have bought some of us several drinks and then been disappointed that we couldn't go play beer pong in his hotel room after closing time because there was no way to get beer at that hour! Martin came out with us, and I think may have been a bit scarred by the experience...dueling piano bars are not known to be the most um, polite, settings! He said it was definitely an "experience" but that he enjoyed himself.

One final little anecdote - my labmate Erin was walking back to the hotel one night, past the bum park across the street (see the snow picture), carrying a carryout box with leftovers from dinner. A woman asks Erin for the food, and she willingly hands it over. She's about to take a step away, when she realized she had left her gum stuck to the inside lid.

Erin: Um, I just remembered I left my gum stuck to the lid.
Bag lady, with look of utter disgust: EW.

The lady held the box open at arm's length while Erin removed her gum from the lid. Apparently beggars can be choosers after all.

TWIMS - The business end of things...

TWIMS 1. Traveling Wave Ion Mobility Spectrometry 2. Texting With International Mass Spectrometrists

The conference last week was awesome on lots of fronts, and TWIMS of both sorts were definitely factors. :)

So you might recall me being pretty stressed over this conference, well more specifically my talk, the last time I actually blogged. At that point I had the slightest twinge of a sore throat. Just a slight scratchy feeling every now and then, no big deal. Well come Wednesday afternoon, I find myself with a splitting headache and raging sore throat. The timing could not have been worse - I stayed home Thursday (although I didn't exactly rest...I worked from home and got a new haircut) and went in for as few hours as possible Friday. Come Sunday morning when it was time to fly up to Salt Lake City I had next to no voice and felt like my head was being squeezed in a vice.

My talk was Monday, and go figure my voice/cough/runny nose were by far their worst that day. Murphy's Law right? At some point during the morning oral session I blew my nose, and my friend Chris who was sitting next to me leans over and whispers, "Man, that was HOT." Previously I had only worried about having a voice, but apparently I also had to worry about sniffling and/or coughing. I sounded like some terrible combination of Marge Simpson, a 20-year chain smoker, a phone-sex lady, and a frog. It was awesome.

The talk actually went ok - my voice sounded terrible, but apparently I was comprehensible. Several people came up to me after the session to talk about my data. It was really nice to meet several people whose papers I've read and research I've really admired. It was even nicer to have them talk to me like a peer, and a legitimate contributing research scientist who knows what she's talking about (well as much as anybody does anyways - it's called research for a reason). It was awesome. One really big name professor from Oxford - arguably the biggest name in my relatively narrow field - even came and introduced herself to me and told me I gave a very nice talk. :D

Apparently that's not all though. After my talk she asked my advisor, VW, if I were a grad student or a post-doc. As if that weren't an awesome enough compliment, she told VW again later in the week how impressed she was with my data and presentation!! VW emailed me a couple days later passing along Oxford Prof's comments, and saying she thought she'd welcome me as a post-doc if I were interested when I graduated (which admittedly is still a good 2+ years away). EEE!! Not only would I love to work for this prof, but I'd LOVE to go live in England for 2 years. (Think of all the places I can easily fly to from London!! And crazily enough, it's easier - although not cheaper - to fly home to Boston from London...)

This morning I sent Oxford Prof a brief email thanking her for her kind comments, and mentioned that while I have 2 years left, I'd be very interested in talking to her next year about the possibility of post doc-ing for her. I wasn't exactly expecting a response, but mostly just wanted to make sure I'm on her radar even if peripherally. Well she replied this afternoon saying it would be great to have me in the group!! And that I should contact her a year before I plan to graduate so I can apply for some Royal Society fellowship! (The Royal Society is the British equivalent of the National Academy of Sciences.)

SO excited. The idea of post doc-ing at Oxford is super exciting, but it's a very long way off and a very remote possibility. And I have a LOT of work to do here in the meantime. Especially if I want to be competitive for a post-doc fellowship. So for now I'm just going to be very excited that Oxford prof thinks I'm doing good work. :)

Seminar Highlight/Disgrace

Yesterday's seminar was generally pretty good (even if I was nodding off anyways...) - all about single molecule enzyme kinetics. At the beginning of the talk, the speaker is talking about the Michaelis-Menton equation, the sort of be-all-end-all equation for enzyme kinetics.

And he says, "Michaelis, he was a really famous enzymologist. Menton, she was Canadian."

Seriously? I know you're a big famous researcher-dude, but really? He's an enzymologist? And she's Canadian? Wtf.

New Toy! Lab Edition.

There's been a lot going on around here lately...including the arrival of a new toy for the lab. A few weeks ago this showed up.


It's a combination ion mobility-mass spectrometer. It's a brand new instrument; we're one of the first few academic labs to get one. We haven't even used the instrument yet and it's already been an adventure. The site prep guide that the company sent gave the footprint dimensions, how much floorspace it takes up. However it didn't tell us how big the shipping crate is. Turns out its HUGE. So huge that the only door it fit through was the service door that had an 8" curb in front of it.


We eventually got the thing into the lab and out of the box.


It's so pretty. It even has a "new instrument smell." If you're shaking your head thinking I'm crazy now, go ahead and mock, but it's true. It's like "new car smell," but for a new instrument. :) If it makes it any less ridiculous, it cost WAY more than a car. Even a really nice car.

All this week an engineer has been here installing and spec-ing the instrument, and next week we should be trained on it. And then it's data time. Hopefully lots and lots of data. So maybe someday I can graduate. :)

And exhale.

Things have been pretty crazy & hectic lately.

The bulk of the craziness was finding out about 2 weeks ago that I was giving a talk to my entire department. That's a big deal on it's own, but making it more difficult/time consuming were the facts that this is the first talk I've given on my grad school research outside of my research group, and the fact that it had to be understandable to a VERY diverse chemical audience. It had never occurred to me how difficult it is to give a (good & complete) talk to a general audience in a very short period of time (only 20 minutes). I almost think the standard 50 minute timeslot would have been easier. While I was in ok shape to give the talk when I first found out about it, I still found myself working 12-16 hours days for a stretch to try to tie everything up for that protein system. The talk was actually one of two fellowship competitions my department has. I didn't win (travel money in this case), but I gave a good talk and didn't make an @$$ of myself in front of my entire department. So I'm happy. :)

One funny story from the past couple of weeks - one of my friends and classmates (finally) passed his oral the week before last, so there was the usual bar outing afterward to celebrate. There were promotional folks from Budweiser there organizing a quarters tournament. Not being a huge drinker, logically I'm also not particularly into drinking games. Several people from our group signed up in pairs to play. One guy, Joel, signed up to play with a friend who hadn't yet arrived from teaching lab, figuring he had time. Well, they got called and she wasn't there yet, so I played for her. We won. Not only that round, but the entire little mini-tournament. Joel's a frat boy, so not a huge surprise, but me? Winning a quarters tournament? Who knew? And before you start assuming Frat Boy carried me, I'll have you know I held my own. Yes, Joel definitely got more "quarters" (actually poker chips) in than I did, but I definitely got my share in too. We got Budweiser t-shirts for winning (which I'm actually wearing today hehe), and supposedly they're going to call us to play the winners from other mini-tournaments at another bar in town. We'll see. :)

My brain might explode.

One of my officemates is sick. Like there's an open bottle of Robitussin sitting on his desk. If you're that sick, GO HOME! I do not want you here. Nor do any of the other dozen or so people who work in our lab. The Queen (aka VW, our advisor) will be the first person to tell you to get the hell out of here (in much more polite, motherly words and tone of course). I don't want whatever you've got, nor do I have time to get whatever you've got. LEAVE.

I went to a graduate student speed dating tonight. I wasn't really expecting to legitimately meet anybody interesting, but I was absolutely expecting a good story or two. I was sorely disappointed. There were a couple of undergrads who had the balls to show up. If you're 22, and nowhere near done with your bachelors, and you don't have a particularly good reason for that, I'm not interested. Call me a snob, but I'm not. Especially when I see that your pants are belted around your @$$ and I can see 6" of your underwear. The only other guy of note was from the same department as one of my former roommates. He was very nice, but had I met him on the street, I would have SWORN he was gay. That's totally fine if you're gay, but as a heterosexual woman, if I'm wondering whether or not you might be gay, I don't want to date you either. Sorry.

The talk I'm giving to my entire department is just over a week away now. I'm starting to be rather stressed about it. Hopefully that won't be a lasting feeling of stress and just a passing, come-and-go feeling of stress. This will be the first talk I've given in graduate school on my research (other than group meetings, which are a totally different ballgame). It's good and bad that it's to a VERY broad chemistry audience. So one major challenge is making what I do comprehensible to people who have no idea what I do without dumbing it down (too much). So as I dig through my data to put this presentation together, I'm discovering that my results are even more interesting that I initially realized (yay!), but I'm also discovering a lot more work to be done (what else is new?) and some questions/results that we can't fully explain. On one hand, it's not really a problem because there's always more to be done. Good research leads to more research. And my biggest irksome question doesn't detract from the big picture of what I'm trying to do (thankfully). If it's an issue next week, it'll be because there are people in the department that are hugely skeptical of how valid gas phase protein measurements are. That at least is an argument I encounter regularly (after all, life happens in solution). What scares me more is the more nit-picky (although possibly valid) argument I KNOW I'm going to face at the national conference at the end of May. I know I have some time before the end of May, but I'm pretty sure this particular question isn't going to be resolved by then. I could be wrong. If I get a poster for that conference, odds are I'll go unnoticed. But because I work on something that nobody else in the world works on, and because people have been waiting for results to follow up my group's initial results in this area, odds are also quite good that my abstract will be selected for a talk. I know I should be excited about that prospect - after all, it's good if people are excited about what I work on, and a talk is a lot more prominent and puts me on people's radar for when I start looking for post-docs/jobs. It's just a heck of a lot more stressful. End rambling.

I'll leave you with this. I'm paranoid about a lot of random things. One of them is locking myself out of my office/lab when I'm here alone late at night. Let's hope that paranoia keeps me from actually doing it. :P

You Have My Blessing to Start a Blog

My sister is a strong contender for funniest person I know. She's hilarious. Absolutely ridiculous. All without even trying. She's 15 - a sophomore in high school. At the same all-girls, Catholic high school that I went to actually.

Our primary means of communication is Facebook chat. Lame, I know, but she's 15. We do somewhat regularly talk on the phone as well, mostly when she has a particular question (I being the brilliantly wise and benevolent elder sister) or when I'm bored while walking home from work/school. I haven't lived at home since she was 8, but she was probably about 13 before she would actually call me herself. At some point when I was in college, and before she had her own cell phone, I was talking to Dad at some point, and she was pestering him for a chance to ask me something. When she got on the phone I'm like, You know, Sarah, you can pick up the phone and call me whenever you want. Mom and Dad won't care. She replies that she doesn't know my number. Sarah. It's in the list of phone numbers taped to the wall next to the phone...

Behold the most recent example of her awesomeness:

Me: yo
are you home?

Little Sister: hi
why'd you call last night?

Me: i was considering starting a blog and i wanted to see what you thought

Little Sister: hahahahahahahaha

Me: and i had another thought while i was on my way home, but it was like 2 am there, so i didn't call

why is that so funny?

Little Sister: what would you blog about?
and who would read it?
and why would you want to?
what spurred this?

Me: most likely nobody would read it, and that's ok
i would blog about my life

Little Sister: why don't you just keep a diary?

Me: grad school, traveling, etc
well this would be like a diary, just online
so inherently cooler

Little Sister: haha say you have a blog and you blog some stuff, random creepers are gonna comment on what you're doing

Me: well i don't have to let people comment. there are a handful of blogs that i regularly read that i like a lot. i was intrigued by the idea

Little Sister: you have my blessing to start a blog

as long as you don't go into details about chemicals and $h!t [alternative title for this post]

Me: hahahahaha

Little Sister: and how hydrogen bonds are not true love and covalent bonds are true love or some $h!t like that

Me: what kind of details about "chemicals and $h!t"?

LOL

ah, because true love shares everything, so therefore only covalent bonds are true love. but what about ionic bonds? where one element has given its electron(s) to another element? isn't selfless giving part of true love, too?

Little Sister: ionic bonds are salty [too true, little sister, too true]
mum says hi
well she wants her laptop back right now so i'm going
so
i willlll talk to youuu uatllekrjleka
bye

She may be 10 years younger than me, but she's the first person I call for a pick me up. She's awesome. She makes my day every time without specifically trying. Here is my current all-time favorite picture of her: