Protein Harlem Shake!

I think at this point, everyone has seen some variation of the Harlem Shake meme. For all you science geeks out there, I decided to make one with a protein! Enjoy!

Link

As many of you are aware, there is an impending deadline (March 1st) for Congress to reach a budget deal for the next year or automatic cuts will go into place. These includes deep cuts to federal research funding agencies such as the NIH and NSF, and will be detrimental to scientific research. Most research labs rely on federal funds for every aspect of the labs ranging from student stipends to lab equipment. The disappointing part is that these are not deliberate cuts due to policy changes, but rather an oversight while politicians are bickering and trying to save the military budget. There are a number of things we can do to help bring this to the attention of the right people. The simplest is to sign the AAAS petition which will be passed on to members of Congress and the President:

http://membercentral.aaas.org/speakup

If you want to take it a step further, you can contact your congressional representatives and urge them to protect biomedical research funding:

http://www.contactingthecongress.org/

Please help support the scientific community in this country by passing on the petition to anyone who may be interested!

Lessons From My First 14 Million Seconds in Grad School

Let’s face it: I have failed my New Year’s Resolutions already. Actually, it’s just the blogging that’s hopelessly behind; two out of three resolutions isn’t too bad. On the bright side, I am from a culture that celebrates the Lunar New Year so I always get a second chance some time near the end of January.

Since the graduate school interview and decision season is now in full swing, I thought I share my lessons from my first ~14 million seconds or so in graduate school (roughly 5 months). I don’t proclaim to be an expert, but I just wanted to toss out a few thoughts:

1. Tick Tock, the time is yours: it’s a pretty simple math problem to do: 24 hours in a day, minus sleep, eating, hygiene, transportation and you are left with a little more than half of the day. Subtract 2 or 3 hours of class and you are left with about 12 hours to use how you please. Graduate school is one big balancing act. You can always skim by with minimal time in lab but if you do that, you won’t get nearly as much out of it. The same can be said of watching TV vs. keep up with current literature. Other than being unemployed, you rarely find this level of independence so it’s really up to you to set a well prioritized schedule.

2. Read/Write/Meet/Listen: there are ton of extra opportunities to meet new people, listen to seminars, teach a class, review some papers…etc. and it will be easy to convince yourself to avoid taking on extra responsibility (see #1). Once in a while though, consider putting your homework or lab duties off for an hour or two, and go make a new connection or help someone out. I like to think that little bit of networking or self-improvement will be worth it further down the road. If not, at least you got a free lunch out of it.

3. Free stuff, especially food: The stereotypical image of grad students surviving on Ramen while stuffing their face with free food is a little exaggerated, but why turn down a good opportunity? I’m not suggesting listening to medical seminars for the food (I don’t know how some people can stomach food while looking at surgical images), but there are plenty of actually relevant talks around campus. Almost every department, research center and interdisciplinary program will have its own weekly seminar/journal club. Find out when they are….and what they’re serving (intellectually, of course).

4. Exercise: it can be tough finding time to exercise once you are in graduate school, and that could be a bad combination with the poor diet and/or stress eating. It helps though if you just find little routines throughout the day to get a little more exercise…going a little out of the way, or taking the stairs are good starts. Alternatively, there are usually intramural leagues where you can band together with other graduate students and compete vs. far more athletic undergrads. Oh well, it’s the smarts that count right?

There are a lot more tidbits I could throw in there, but I think I’m going to save those for when I’m older and wiser. I’m still learning the ropes myself and trying to live life by my own rules. Feel free to chime in if you have some comments on what I have said or if you got some advice for me as well.

New Year’s Resolutions

I’m back! I took an unplanned hiatus from blogging last semester mostly because I was busy and didn’t have much to write about. I have settled into a fairly regular schedule now though and next semester shouldn’t be so bad, so going right into my first resolution…

1. Keeping up with blogging: I’m going to set a goal of writing something at least once a week. Chances are it will be about research since I’m taking a foray into mass spectrometry and proteomics, which I find fascinating but know almost nothing about.

2. More reading: I decided to make a Goodreads account (profile) to keep track of books and catch up on years of reading, although I realized I have actually read much more than I give myself credit for.

3. Workouts: I’m going to start limiting how much basketball I play when I go to the gym, and actually get some workouts done. This shouldn’t be too hard if I just go when no one is around or when the gym is jam packed.

I think that’s enough resolutions for the new year, now I got to go pack my bags for my trip back to Nashville.

Thanksgiving Dinner

I stayed in Nashville for Thanksgiving and had a potluck dinner with some friends that stuck around as well. Needless to say, it was delicious and I ate way too much. Now, back to TV marathons interspersed with exercise.

Hope everyone had a good break!

I Voted!

This year is the first year I voted in a presidential election, which probably just means that I did something half of all eligible Americans did. Of course, I voted for Obama and for the democratic party in general. Since I voted in California, I went along the winning side in 12 out of 14 major things. Now, we can all go back to the status quo and not really caring about politics for four more years.

Halloween 2012

Happy Halloween Everyone! Personally, I already celebrated over the weekend/last week by going to one of those science museum late night events. I’m busy now with my new research rotation working with molecular modeling of various protein mutants, but who knows…maybe I will wear my lab coat to a computer lab as a costume. I figure I share my two Halloween costumes for the year; one was for the science museum event where you are supposed to dress up as a game character. It was kind of sad that no one knew who Ness was though….except for the one random person (pictured below) that wore the exact same costume. My other costume should be obvious to anyone who has been on the internet in the last few months, it’s the rapper Psy, although I was mistaken for James Bond once.

Ness

Psy Costume