YOLO and other time saving acronyms.

If, like many people in the modern world, you are overwhelmed by a long list of important tasks then you are probably short on a valuable asset: time. Time is so precious to us, and yet it slips through our fingers so quickly! As scientists and busy individuals we are continually looking for ways to optimise the use of our time. But how can we do this? And how can we decide where to direct our time saving efforts?

Well let’s approach this logically. When we are short of time what is it that normally suffers the most? Do we start cutting down on quality time in the lab? Do we cancel our late night appointments with that difficult to book equipment? Do we refuse to meet our supervisors for progress meetings? No. We cannot! These things are too important. So what does that leave? What else is there? While many of you may argue that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, as important as your world changing research there are probably some people who may not have spent enough time with loved ones lately. So I would like all of you to participate in a brief and straight forward mental exercise. I want you to close your eyes and try and remember when you last saw your partner, best friend and/or parents, children etc.

I have a ranking system which has been designed by a team of experts who shall remain nameless, like many researchers in the scientific community:

1.  I saw them last week. 
2.  I haven’t seen them in person for ages as I am overseas/out of town but we are in touch frequently via email, facebook, skype and 7 other social media sites. 
3.  I saw them last month (I think). 
4.  We meet up once a year on Christmas for an allotted time of 30 minutes. 
5.  I last saw them before I started my PhD in 2003.
6. I cannot remember the names of any of the people mentioned above. I don’t think I have any friends/parents/children.     

• If you answered 1 you are doing really well! And unusually for someone in a lab based profession you seem to be giving your relationships the time they deserve.
• To those who selected 2, you need to understand that anything which happens on social media, or in the ‘virtual world’, has to be supplemented with a healthy dose of person to person interaction. This is not second life! This is your ONLY life.
• From 3 onwards is where things get more serious. A month or more without seeing the people you care about, or who care about you, is too long! You only live once friend and talking to your lab equipment or ranting in the lab does not equate to a functional relationship.
• For answer number 4. Once a year, tut-tut! While your friends and family may overlook this for a while expect a lifetime of recriminations and angry letters. Children and spouses do not appreciate this kind of treatment.
• You answered 5. Wow! The people in your life are due for a surprise when you emerge from the cocoon of your PhD. Unfortunately, the time you’ve been away has allowed your parents to replace you with a foreign exchange student who came to stay with them for a while, your significant other has married and had 3 children, and there’s a strongly believed rumour in your circle of friends that you are dead and buried. So sit back and enjoy the show as you attempt to re-enter their lives!
• If you answered 6 you are probably too far gone. Stop reading now, nothing will help you in the relationship department. Instead keep working towards your Nobel prize, friends and family are totally over-rated anyway, they’ll only hold you back.

Sadly, this lack of time affects all of us and means that however hard you try relationships and communication will suffer to a certain extent. But, never fear! Here I will provide you with a means to communicate effectively in a fraction of the time that would otherwise be required. The answer is Acronyms!

YOLO: You only live once. (Yolo should be said bitterly on the nights when you’re alone in the lab or when you’re trying to encourage someone out for a social evening).

ASL: age, sex, location. (This one is for those who have become so disconnected from their family and friends that they essentially have to start again as they are no longer aware of their loved ones age, gender or location. Worry about names later).

LOL: laugh out loud. (Yes, if you’re with them they can see you’re actually laughing out loud, but nothing is more encouraging to a jokester than a well-placed LOL. Use with caution as the periods of social isolation endured by many PhD students can affect the humour sensors in your brain).

AAS: Alive and smiling. (A good one to say to parents just to let them know you’re ok).

TBH: To be honest.

IMO: In my opinion.

IMHO: In my humble opinion. (Use when you’re not feeling that humble).

TTYL: Talk to you later.

FYI: For your information.

BRB: Be right back (In just three letters you can reassure and comfort your friends, before heading into the lab once again, that you will indeed be back soon!).

D&M: Deep and meaningful.

DF: Dear friend. (This one is good to emphasise how important someone is to you, especially if you haven’t been putting in the effort to back it up lately).

DETI: Don’t even think it.

DITYID: Did I tell you I’m distressed. (Good for slipping into innocuous conversations allowing your inner circle to realise your happy face is masking a world of pain and fear).

DWBH: Don’t worry be happy. (Enough said).

ATM: At the moment

ETA: Estimated time of arrival. (Good for reminding someone, that although you’ve cancelled on them at the last minute previously due to experiments running overtime, today you will be there on time).

FWIW: For what it’s worth.

TMI: Too much information. (While this is extremely handy in the context of everyday life, in academic circles it can be utilised for silencing those who spend too long vocalising their research successes).

TY: Thank you.

So there you go folks! Some useful acronyms guaranteed to make your communication more succinct and save you some precious time whilst still maintaining those important relationships! TY and remember YOLO.

An Academic Event

Today the lab has been cleaned. It is SO clean in fact that we are no longer able to work there. We were driven to this point because tomorrow the Chancellor of the university and various other important personages are coming on a tour of our building. This is very interesting and it raises the question of how students and people lower in the university hierarchy should behave around those who are academically above us? Before we can decide this the nature of the visit should be determined, we need a comparable real world situation. In the scheme of things, is the Chancellors visit equivalent to Queen Elizabeth II hitting the streets to greet her people? Or is it like President Obama heading to a political rally to give a speech peppered with witty remarks? Or is the arrival of the head of your academic institution a more sombre occasion where celebration is not appropriate? Is it, in fact, more like a health inspector arriving on your premises to suss out what is happening?

Another aspect of this event is what should we, as a department provide? Should we procure cheering crowds and security? Or maybe just light snacks? Do we have a moral duty, as members of the academic community, to present things as they are? To tell them that we don’t like feeling insecure in our positions, that our papers came back 7 times before being accepted, that our labs are in fact often messy. But no, as in all things in life, the charade continues, and all labs will be straightened up, students will be swathed in lab coats and visually pleasing, but useless, experiments will be set up to entertain and amaze our guests.

All speculation aside there is a lot of excitement about this visit. And why is this? Why is a visit like this so exciting? Is it because… 

1. We don’t get to meet many important people.
2. We had become so consumed with the politics and intrigues of our own department that we had actually forgotten we were affiliated with a group of departments called a university. Hence, the arrival of these bigwigs forms a welcome, albeit surprising, reminder that we are part of a bigger picture.
3. Being acknowledged by the governing body of the university is like someone sitting you down and saying, “Yes! You are important! Your research matters! See, would we be here if it wasn’t?!!” And the answer is no, if your research wasn’t important (or at least if it wasn’t producing results) they certainly wouldn’t be here, and neither would you! As your funding would be non-existent. Sigh!
4. We have spent so long locked away in the lab that the thought of seeing anyone who doesn’t work in our building is thrilling. (All departments should be aware that this situation can be a little too thrilling for some of the more seasoned professors and if the school wishes to avoid embarrassing scenes, sending people on fully-funded ‘fieldtrips’ on important days is extremely useful for maintaining the departments dignity and reputation).
5. There’s a free afternoon tea for one and all. A note of caution here, certain prestigious institutions, who shall remain nameless, have found an inverse relationship between the number of snacks and the likelihood of a postgraduate stampede. By spending a little more money, your department could save thousands in repair costs because as the saying goes ‘Hell hath no fury like a hungry PhD student’.

But whatever the reason behind the excitement in the department, it is certainly here. Redolent of scenes from many historical BBC dramas, where the villagers hang flower garlands around the town and leap joyfully through the rolling green fields, the department is being cleaned and decorated within an inch of its life. Staff members who spend the whole year in the same pair of khaki shorts and a tattered shirt of uncertain origin will suddenly appear in suit and tie (also of questionable origin but still – a suit and tie people!!). PhD students who haven’t been seen in the hallways or tearoom for months will suddenly end their stint in the lab as they forage for any free food this special occasion might provide. Undergraduates emerge from the dusty corners where they have been forced to do menial laboratory tasks to bask in the glow of the academic communities brightest minds.

Personally I feel sort of like the staff greeting their returning master or mistress in those old British mansions. If this was really the case all the undergraduates, PhD students and lecturers would have to line up out the front of the building in order of rank and importance and bow or curtsey as the Chancellor strolls by smiling benignly upon us all.  Someone would rush forward to get his bags, someone else would take his coat and then we would all troop excitedly into the building some distance behind him, never taking our eyes off this important personage.

I wonder what things will be like in the department tomorrow when they actually arrive? I sure hope the snacks are good.

Dinosaurs and Your Career.

When I was a little girl I used to imagine all the things I was going to do when I was grown up. Interestingly, life as a biochemist did not feature on my list. Even more interesting neither did ballerina or fireman. What I really wanted to be was a palaeontologist. This is a slightly weird obsession for a 7 year old, but let’s face it, dinosaurs are cool and if you could dedicate your life to digging up their HUGE horrific bones then why wouldn’t you? Sadly, this passion faded by 10 or 11 and I started to aim for what I imagine is a slightly better paid and potentially long-lived field, medicine.

I say long-lived because as long as there are people and the world as we know it doesn’t end, we will always require medical professionals. This means as a Doctor or nurse you will always fill a required and important niche. In contrast there don’t seem to be too many dinosaurs around these days. This seems to suggest a problem of epic proportions. I don’t want to alarm anybody but there is a definite possibility that one day, hopefully not in our lifetimes, we may actually run out of dinosaur bones to unearth! This would be catastrophic and I want to emphasise that this is purely speculation and the likelihood of such an event happening is highly dependent on a range of complex factors. For example we would need to know how many dinosaur bones are actually out there and then determine how quickly they get dug up. In the long run, this may not even be a problem as we could always rebury a few skeletons and not tell the palaeontologists. Then they can have all the fun of digging them up again and again in new and interesting locations. 

On another note, lots of scientists in many fields dedicate their whole lives to researching a hypothesis which is never proven. This means that even if all the bones were safely out of the ground there is sure to be room and funding for those who still believe (and more importantly who have the publication record to beef up their claims) that there is something out there.

Another and more sinister possibility for the demise of palaeontology is that we may, in future, successfully clone multiple dinosaur species from a single amber preserved mosquito like on Jurassic Park! If this happens we will probably be too busy running from the snapping-jaws of these new aged reptiles to dig up the remains of their ancient ancestors.

But for those of you whose dream of digging up dinosaur bones is not to be thwarted by the possible difficulties and slim pickings of the field I include the following useful link:

Helpful Tips for the Future Palaeontologist. 

These scientists, judging from their outfits, glasses and facial hair, are clearly serious and passionate about what they do. If only I had seen this video before my dream was replaced by other childhood fancies how different things may have been! One, I could have had my own collection of tiny dinosaur skeletons and two, I could have been staring into the lifeless jaws of a tyrannosaurus rex instead of planning out my next set of experiments incorporating dangerous microbes. Sigh. Better luck next time.

Hedging My Bets.

It’s day 341 in the lab. And everything is the same. No, scratch that, it’s more like 1155 days. Hmm, man, I’ve been here a long time, I need to graduate. But it’s not as easy as it sounds because separating me from this goal is an extensive list of results yet to be obtained. This means to stay on schedule I either have to have a massive increase in successful efficiency or the stars need to align in my favour.  I’m not sure which option, if either, is more likely. 

So just in case neither of these events take place, like the typical PhD student that I am, I have started hedging my bets. Phase one of this process is what I like to think of as a Retrieval Mission. This mission is not dangerous (except potentially to morale) and will allow you to assess the, ahem, situation of your PhD. For me it involved flipping through 3 years of lab notebooks and making a summary of what I had actually done. Comfortingly, things were not as bad as I had once feared. Sadly, they were not as good as required either.   

The second phase is no longer about retrieval but a bit of healthy comparison. In this case you have two options. One, you can source an extremely successful, robotic PhD student who is only 6 months in but near to completion (with a Nature paper on the cards) and try to emulate them. Or two, find a PhD with an extremely mediocre, poorly done thesis which was passed!

There are several advantages to each of these options. In option one, while you may not be able to change your ways at this late stage, maybe some of the ‘science lucky’ will rub off on you, and your experimental work will miraculously yield results to awe and amaze even the most jaded supervisor.  If this doesn’t happen, never fear! Your successful peer is on the highway to scientific success and will no doubt be in a position to hire you as a research assistant in the near future. The final positive is that when you realise how much time that student spends in the lab, and how few friends they have, you will probably feel blessed to be you and not them in spite of the chasm that separates the quality of your research from theirs.* The advantage of finding a mediocre passed thesis is two-fold. Firstly, it provides a beacon of hope that if they could do it so can you. Secondly, it shows you what NOT to aim for. You don’t want to be someone whose science is remembered only as a comforting contrast during peoples moments of crisis.   

Phase three is a fun phase. I call it the Revolution, where you no longer believe in the ethics of the lab, and enlist several third years to help you complete your work. Sadly, things can go wrong, so proceed with caution here. While there are some disturbingly conscientious and talented undergraduate students potentially they are not the ones who want to work for you in your lab. This means that while it may appear you have been provided with a free work-force you could be the one doing most of the work as you demonstrate again and again how to do things you’ve spent 3 years optimising. The flipside to this is that one of these eager students could, by doing something weird and unusual when you’re not looking, accidentally pave the way to solving long term problems in your experiments! Such good fortune may only come once in a lifetime, so if this happens, enjoy the moment and do not stop to question why a third year with limited lab experience was able to do what you have battled with unsuccessfully for longer than they’ve been at uni!

Collectively each of these phases sum to what I like to think of as an activity whose air of desperation should be savoured if you cherish even small hopes of pursuing a career in the arts. As everyone knows angst and suffering is a valuable asset in many creative fields. As an aside it is probably best to keep your ‘arty’ side out of your thesis. From what I’ve heard examiners are not fond of flowery chapters full of emotion and wit, they seem to prefer results and concise interpretations. Boring.

So what now? Personally, I will continue desperately trying to scrape together enough world changing data for a thesis. Just give me a few more days/weeks/months (dependent on both the availability of funding and my supervisor’s ability to overlook my continued presence in the lab far, far, far beyond the expected timeframe of my candidacy).

 *This point does not apply to certain individuals who happen to be successful in ALL aspects of their life. It is recommended that you avoid these socially apt over-achievers as you may not recover from the encounter and all of your remaining motivation will wither away, paralysing you in front of your laptop never to type again. 

8 Years Later.

If, like me, you soldiered bravely on straight from an undergraduate degree to a postgraduate course then as things finally start to wrap up you may find yourself apprehensive and afraid. Apprehensive, because there’s a big world out there beyond the confines of the university campus, and afraid, because frankly speaking, alot of education without much practical experience can feel like a disadvantage rather than an advantage when trying to get a job.

Doing a PhD in science the main career choice promoted avidly by enthusiastic supervisors is the dreaded post-doc. But do not be fooled my friends! If you have not enjoyed your PhD lab experience, then you should consider your next move carefully. While the general consensus in the academic world seems to be, just try it out, this blasé attitude could end in tears, your tears, lots of them. Instead of an excuse to go overseas and work in exotic locations a post-doc should be seen as an amped up PhD. Let’s scratch that, let’s call it a PhD on amphetamines. 

Your drugged up post-doc will expect you to be more efficient and productive, suddenly entering the realm of a qualified scientist. Your studentship now behind you, you will embark on a journey which many begin and few end. The pinnacle of scientific life, professorship, an elusive but much coveted title, feels like a possibility in moments of euphoria but when your experiments lie in ruins around you climbing the academic pyramid feels like an insurmountable task. 

But for those set on seeing the view from the top, fear not! If something has been done before then being able to successfully emulate it is a possibility. I say possibility because, as anyone who has tried to repeat a protocol from a paper has found, often significant changes have to be made before it (hopefully) works for you in your lab.  But ranting and philosophising aside there must be more to life than academia? Surely, there is a world of possibilities for someone who has spent 8 years and extensive amounts of blood, sweat and money on tertiary education? The jury is out people and I will keep you posted on the ins and outs of my transition from the lab into the real world.