All you ever need to know

I never really learned to work well with others. I suppose that was one of those essential skills I should have picked up in kindergarten, but never quite got to. This lack of teamwork skills plagues me to this day.

My crisis du jour yesterday was putting together an abstract for a conference coming up. I didn't realize that the abstract solicitation had come out, and this particular conference is limiting the contributions to 240 posters. 193 abstracts had been submitted. Mine was written in an hour and out to collaborators by mid-afternoon. Here's where I begin to vent.

I've had some serious issues with some of my collaborators. Authorship, for one. My advisor is part of a pretty large collaboration and this group has collected the data that I am using for my thesis over the course of the last 4-5 years. So I appreciate that they all deserve authorship and the opportunity for input on my papers. (And I get over the fact that none of them add my name to their papers despite my having been part of the observing team since I started here.) But I have been chastised in the past for putting too many authors on an abstract for a poster at a bi-annual meeting. We're not talking about an earth-shattering Nature paper here. It should not have been a big deal. Yet I got a serious email-bitch slap for that "mishap" of mine. I've also been instructed to add a former undergraduate student of one of my collaborators as an author to a journal paper that I wrote. The claim here is that this undergrad did some work similar to mine a while back and deserves to get some recognition. Never mind that I have neither met this student nor used any of their work or results in my paper. Their former advisor just want to get them some published credit.

So imagine my joy at sitting here still, more than 24 hours later, waiting patiently for my collaborators to get back to me with their critical reviews of all 250 words in my paragraph and a half-long abstract. All while there are 32 spots remaining for the conference. I seriously do not like working with other people sometimes.

The social calendar

I had quite the eventful weekend. I hosted a wine tasting party at my moderately tiny apartment on Friday night. (It was sort of like a Pampered Chef party, but with wine!) I was pretty excited at the prospect of making lots of appetizers and desserts to go with the wine; I like to be creative in the kitchen. And I think the food went over pretty well! I made quite the spread. I'm not sure what my friends really thought of the wine tasting, though. They said they liked it, but you never know. Sometimes I think your friends are the least honest people around, what with the sparing of your feelings and all. Regardless, I very much enjoyed the wines and spent probably too much on restocking my own wine cabinet.

I was invited to a dinner party by one of the faculty members in my department for Saturday night. Up until that point, I was pretty sure he really disliked me. He didn't really speak to or acknowledge me all that often, and when he did it was usually something critical. In addition, he is a very political guy; when he tries to turn on the charm, you can be almost assured you have something that he wants. So I was rather thrown by the invitation. I couldn't imagine why he would want me of all people at his home, nor could I figure out what it was that he really wanted from me. To top it all off, the guest list appeared to be me and three couples. (I am S.O.-less, in case that part wasn't clear).

Turns out, I was rather wrong about the whole thing. He didn't want anything from me and it turned out to be a rather pleasant evening! There were a few awkward moments in the conversation, but I expected nothing less from a roomful of astronomers and their spouses. :) All in all, I now feel like I really need to rethink my opinion of the host. (Then again, he could help his case significantly if he didn't intentionally look away from me when walking past me on campus).

I also dogsat this weekend. But that experience requires an entire post of its own after a sufficient recovery period.

On the Plus Side

I have decided, after reading my last several posts and the associated comments, that I have become entirely too negative. There are good things about graduate school after all and I will highlight some now.

I took a two hour lunch today. And no one cared. I went down to east campus where there is a lovely sitting area and met a bunch of other students to grill out. It was a beautiful day, people ate much grilled meat (I had some lovely steamed broccoli and brussel sprouts) and all in all it was as pleasant occasion. Then we went for ice cream at the fantastic homemade ice cream place in town. By about 1:45 pm, I headed back to work for the afternoon.

When my advisor is out of town, I can work at home. And again, no one cares. I can sit at my glass kitchen table, drink some tea, wear my pajamas and slippers and just work all alone in my house.

And while on the subject of hours, I could frankly keep pretty much whatever hours I want. There are the urban legends of grad students who evolved onto 36-hour schedules while writing their theses. Plus, there are even researchers here who roll into the office at 2 or 3 in the afternoon and work until midnight.

It's summer now (university-wise, at least). Around 25,000 people left town last week. It's nice. Quiet. And there is more parking available.

I study the things that interest me. No one tells me what to do; it's up to me to figure out how to answer the questions that pop into my head! I find a problem that intrigues me, I figure out what data I need to solve the problem (or at least how to start to get a handle on the problem), and I follow where that data leads me. That's pretty cool. To me, at least. There is a lot of freedom in science research.

Bored Now

I have decided that success in graduate school is dependent on about 10% intelligence and 90% motivation, ambition, and fear of faculty realizing they made a mistake in admitting you. I used to be very ambitious. It's unclear to me where that ambition went, but I think it's deteriorated slowly, replaced bit by bit by fatigue. My motivation used to come purely from the love of astronomy; like 90% of other grad students in astronomy, my application essay started something like "Astronomy has always been my passion." (And I can say that with some authority, having served on the admissions committee for two years. I have read a solid 300 application essays over the past few years and except for the guy that wrote about his pet alpaca, they've all been more or less the same). Yet even my motivation has gotten lost in the math and the sheer dullness of what I do on a daily basis. I'm running purely on fear anymore.

Graduation was last week. All but one of my friends is leaving this summer. They all have real jobs or post-docs and are heading out into something new and fabulous. I'll say this up front: I'm so excited for them! Truly, I am. The same kind of thing happened to me, though, a few years ago, the first time I went to graduate school. All of my friends graduated a year before I did and I was left more or less alone in my final year finishing my Master's degree. It was really, really depressing. It's a little different this year, in that I have about 47,000 times the amount of work to do in my final year of my PhD. (as compared to the M.S.), but the sadness remains. And not a little bit of envy. I wish I had a clear view of the job I want (or even the one that I don't want), but it's not like that. I look at my job prospects and I have to admit that unless I want to leave astronomy altogether and end up running a Starbuck's (which is not out of the question), I have no idea where I will be in a year. Speaking of jobs, here is the one thing that nobody tells you early on: in astronomy academia, pedigree is everything. Everything. One of the first things anyone asks you is where you are from. And it matters. It matters a lot.

It's strange how your priorities change in grad school. I used to have grandiose ideas about the incredible discoveries I would make as a graduate student. I was going to change the whole field with my new insight. Four years in, a big deal to me anymore is new office space (which, thank the heavens, I have managed to score starting this summer). Conference travel used to super cool, a chance to get out of the office and go somewhere cool. Now it's just time that I won't be working on my thesis. (Not to mention the amount of time and effort that goes into planning said travel, let alone figuring out how to pay for it!) All in all, I guess grad school is just much more real than I had imagined. It's hard, and it's often mundane and tedious. I have made no huge discoveries and have barely scratched the surface of what people in my field already know. Reality really does bite sometimes.

Guilty Pleasure

Confession: I love the movie Drumline. I spent too many years in marching band not to. And unlike a lot of people I know, I actually really liked marching band. For me it was just fun. Secretly (well, not so much now) I miss it sometimes.

And the movie? It's no great cinema, but it's fun. You should watch it. Regardless of whether you were ever in the marching band.

Small Rant

For the love of all that is holy, would it please stop snowing??? It is May for goodness sake. I'm done with this.

There. I have said my peace.