Happy Freaking New Year - Ninety Second Post

I don't have any new years resolutions. At least, I didn't when I started this post. A new year is just a new day, after all, and I don't have the money to initiate any radical lifestyle changes just yet. I'd like to eat healthier and exercise, but winter isn't the best time to start trying to motivate yourself to do something unpleasant, like exercise in the cold, and my paycheck comes in a few weeks, so no fancy expensive health food for me until then. So, no big resolutions are really possible for me at this point.
I don't really get the whole hubbub around the new year. Yeah, it's a new year, but I'm not that old and I've already experienced 23 first days of new years. Now those years are old and gone. in a few years, I probably won't be able to recall anything more about 2014 than I can about 1994 (that is, a few snippets that blur together). There's a statistic floating around the internet that says that 8% of New Year's Resolutions are actually kept, so according to that, I won't be able to keep a resolution worth beans. Why bother with all the pomp and circumstance? I'll just bide my time and enact small but important lifestyle changes when I can gather up the motivation and funding necessary.
2014 is going to look different from 2013, mostly because I have the full time job that is grad school. No graduation in the spring this year, and no moving from state to state and panicking over the lack of housing. I'll still be scrambling to pay school fees and wishing I had more time to do outdoorsy stuff, but it'll be with the promise of a regular, salary-dependent paycheck coming soon.
No  more Whitworth, except via the mail they send me in hopes that I'll cough up more money (and heaven help the poor kid doing phonathon who has to call me).
Some similarities are to be expected. I'll be teaching labs again and enjoying that warm feeling inside when a student gets excited about science. The difference is that now I know that I like teaching, whereas I started 2013 not knowing.
I suppose I do have resolutions, of a kind, for the year. I want to save up and buy a new computer, since this one is slowly and steadily breaking down (the DVD drive went out, and the CPU is always running at 90% or higher). I also want to save up for a car, but that will have to wait for the computer. I can live without a car, obviously, but this computer is going to kick the bucket sooner or later and I can't afford to live without a computer. Being in charge of other people's grades is a huge hassle when you think your computer might die.
Just for the heck of it, I'll resolve to try indoor rock climbing this year. This way, when someone asks what my resolutions are, I can give them that one. Plus, I started off 2014 by eating chocolate while writing blog posts at 2 AM. I don't think any "healthy living" resolutions would have lasted past that little set-back.

Anyway, happy New Year if you're into that sort of thing!

Graduate School, Part the First - Ninety First Post

I write this post from the groggy depths of the third month of my first year of grad school. I have three weeks of ungraded lab reports and five weeks of ungraded quizzes littering the floor of my room along with a bunch of junk that needs to be cleaned up.
Grad school has changed me, man. I'm not saying that I'm the most socially competent person at the best of times, but I'm pretty sure that I've only gotten worse.
I usually have any number of conversation topics to which I can contribute: movies and TV shows I've watched, school, plans for the weekend, weather, books, food good and bad, love interests, nail polish and makeup, working out, etc. Now, however, I'm down to only a couple: Class, research rotations, students, and grading. Fortunately, I only hang out with other chemistry and/or biology grad students and my gen-chem students, so these topics are completely acceptable. I'm practically a socially competent person when I hang out with other science grad students. Other than school topics, I can kind of contribute to weather and food, but all my weekend and evening plans can be summed up as "grading and homework" and as far as love interests go, everyone I know is either already in a stable, long-term relationship or has no desire to complicate their life with that right now because OHMYGODSOBUSYGAH. I fall into the latter category. Honestly, I barely have time to take care of my fish, who needs to be fed about every other day, so how on earth would I have the time to devote to a romantic relationship? That seems like a massive time commitment that I'm just not in a place to make. Also, responsibility. Man, I feel like a kid again. I mean, I cook my own food and make more than $500 a month, but a distressingly significant subset of my high school and middle school compatriots are married; an even more distressing number have actually procreated.
I struggle to take care of a fish and a couple houseplants and still get all my shit done; kids?!


I actually have several first-year chemistry program classmates who are married and/or have kids, and oh, man. If I am stressed, how do they even live?
And stress: I've got the classic symptoms. I really do have things undone all the time, so there's always that on my mind; I sleep poorly when I do get to sleep; and I'm not just groggy from lack of sleep but also from a delightfully persistent head cold.
Normally, I can go to sleep and wake up around 8 hours later, maybe as many as 10, on my own. Last night, I fell asleep at 7 PM and woke up reluctantly at 7:30 AM when my alarm went off. Accounting for the brief interludes where I remember waking up and rolling over, I slept for no less than 12 hours and was still kind of sleepy when I got up. I blame this on the constant stress and the fact that I normally sleep fewer than seven hours a night.
I do sleep regularly during class, though. I'll be taking notes one second, then the next second, I wake up! Or I'll be taking notes and my eyes will shut all by themselves. At that point I usually give up and hope that I wake up before everyone leaves and that no one calls on me to talk while I'm still asleep.
As far as classes go, my classes are all literature-based. Literature-based classes are easy, from an "absolute minimum of effort required on a weekly basis" standpoint. The hard thing is taking in all the information and getting a coherent response to it ready in time for class. Then there's a mad rush to read a bunch of papers so you can write a paper summing up and extrapolating new information and opinions from the papers you were supposed to be reading all semester. Really, what you get out is proportional to what you put in, so I probably won't be getting a lot out of my classes this semester.
Well, that's not entirely true. I know a lot more about how to read papers and how to avoid falling out of my chair while napping than I did at the beginning of the semester, and I did learn things about proteins, DNA, and polymers from my classes, which is what the classes were supposed to teach me. But there are students who I know were super motivated and who read every single paper and who spent hours and hours on any homework assignments we happened to receive, and then there's me who read only the papers that we had to write papers about and spent maybe an hour on that homework assignment including research.

I feel bad. I feel like grad school isn't about scratching the surface, but it's what I'm doing every day. I scratch the surface with my gen-chem students, because what is gen-chem but scratching the surface of all fields of chemistry? I scratch the surface in class because I don't have the energy to fulfill my TA duties, complete homework assignments that aren't too bad, and also gain deep understanding of all the dozens of topics we cover in class. I scratch the surface in my research rotations because I have too many jobs (teaching, classes, etc.) to really get into a project. Finally, I only scratch the surface in my nascent friendships because I don't have the time to really get to know people.
And it sucks. I have a lot of introvert characteristics, like I hate making small-talk because it feels like a waste of energy and I only get close to a few people, but I feel like an extrovert right now because I do need those close friends to be happy. I need people to talk to, or I get all out of balance and can't focus on things.
This post was supposed to be funny, like "OMG grad school makes you crazy! Mad scientists! Lawls!" but then it turned into this depressing monster that has a funny gif in it.

Okay, positive thinking. I really do like teaching. I hate grading a lot, but teaching has been a pleasant experience so far. Since I'm a fyoung and relatively diminutive female (age 22 at the beginning of the semester, 5-foot-six in hiking boots), I was afraid that I would get douchebags in my class who would reject my authority and make trouble in class. However, all the guys are at the very least respectful to my face. None of the older, non-traditional students who I feared would have a problem with my age have posed any kind of a problem; they're typically the best of the bunch. I even have a couple students who really like science, which was more than I expected. Probably the best moment since moving except for when I found my favorite egg drop soup mix online was when a student brought her experiment over to me to show me that it was working. That same student once emailed me excitedly to tell me that she finally understood the material.
Here is a play-by-play of how these sorts of interactions go for me:
Student: "I am excited by this science!"
Me, internally: (dances with joy) YES! YES! A FLEDGLING SCIENTIST! MAYBE THEY WILL DO GREAT SCIENCE OMG OMG THEY LIKE SCIENCE! I WIN AT TEACHING! (dance, dance, dance!)

Me, out loud: "That's great!" or something boring to that effect.


Most of my subdued response is probably because of the fact that if I freaked out and started happy dancing in the middle of lab, I would probably scare all of my students and have to take drug tests.