Multi-tasking Madness

"I hate running PCRs to type mice, because I could have been doing X experiment instead."

No I could not have done X experiment instead. I have two hands and one head and unless I can master the usage of my toes, its one thing at a time. The typing of mice (or testing of serum for tissue culture, restocking of boxes, running of FACS samples) is as essential as anything else, despite being boring as hell. This feeling of "I could have been doing something else, obviously more useful or constructive" is a fallacy, and a stressful one at that.

I feel such a strong impulse to multi-task all the time, but often its the multi-tasking that slows me down. I am naturally a quick mover and I tend to dart around doing things, keeping myself busy. This tendency goes to the extreme in lab, where I don't feel occupied unless I have three threads running. And guess what? I make mistakes and have to repeat things, which adds to my not-inconsiderable work load (I have a particular PCR jinx).

There is this drive today to get things done, faster and better, now instead of soon. Lab work is easier and research is more competitive, so it's easy to see how this has come about. Is it constructive though? If something takes a certain amount of time to do, what is the point of rushing it or wishing it along faster? Or, inserting other tasks into the gaps? One does get more done eventually, but at more cost to oneself. And is that really efficient in the end?

I have discovered that I do not like operating at full stretch all the time. Sometimes I really enjoy it, I am in the zone and buzzing. But the rest of the time, I think my research would be better served by my working with more discipline. Unfortunately, when one can work in the zone, one starts to expect it of oneself always, and that is just not realistic. So I am going to run PCRs and DNA gels, and only those, this Saturday and look out of my window at the sunny trees.

(I might reshuffle my papers, read a few, trackback a few references, no matter.)
(And yes, its Saturday, I know)

Postdoc as Domestic Goddess (or God)

Skill 1: Combines ingredients with precision, follows instructions to the letter, but adds the occasional touch of improvisational flair with interesting outcomes. Occasionally works with the reagents at hand instead of what may be ideal, with perfectly acceptable results. Not afraid to use alcohol as necessary.

Skill 2: At the end of a process, puts everything away in its allotted space, wipes down all work surfaces, neatly collects trash. Surveys area, spots missed spots with the eagle eye trained by years of experience. Has no patience with others' sloppy work areas, is disgusted by ill-maintained and unclean surfaces. Is zealous about the weekly wipedown. Again alcohol accompanies as needed.

Skill 3: Monitors the health, diet and breeding habits of several small dependent creatures. Always has a mental map of which little creature is where.

Skill 4: Plans menus and processes days ahead. Has activities allotted to each day, to be carried out according to a strict schedule. Adheres to said schedule with admirable focus.

Skill 5: Does the shopping for supplies as needed. Prefers to do so on a regular schedule (schedule is important), but is willing to pop down to the shop when running short. Combines trips to shop with transport of laundry.

An alternative career maps itself out...

Paranoia and the Destruction of the Soul

I wanted to write a happy post today since I'm in a really good life-mood (research mood is low-level fatalistic tending towards zen acceptance), but I've been thinking about paranoia a lot lately. A good friend and colleague is having a really hard time in lab because they feel like slices of their project are being given away without their consent. And they are right, the project is hard to partition in the first place, and there are three bright, invested individuals working on it at the same time. However my friend has made particular innovations, and is uniquely qualified to do some things, that they had suggested in the first place. This slicing and dicing has been going on for nearly two years now.

Enter full blown, pull out all the stops paranoia. Behaviour-altering, mind-bending paranoia. I won't share reagents, I'll never discuss a good idea in lab again paranoia. It's getting to the point where they are saying and doing things I don't think are characteristic or believable, and they are morphing into human jelly. And I just want to stand up and scream at them to stop it. I have tried to bring up the subject more gently and constructively than that, but an unavoidable side-effect of paranoia is that one perceives judgment and betrayal in what everyone says. So what do I do?

I think paranoia is the single most destructive emotion one can give in to. I know this regarding emotion from deep personal experiences; and regarding work from having been scooped three times in grad school. I have worked with many brilliant and paranoid people, and the one thing that always leaps out at me is the amount of energy they waste in spinning their paranoid wheels. It is such a waste of all that brilliance, all those (rapidly diminishing) neurons firing salvos of negative emotion. It drains you, makes you bitter, changes you in fundamental ways, alters your equation with everyone you work with, and is utterly pointless in the end.

It is both insulting and patronizing to tell someone they are being paranoid when they feel, legitimately or otherwise, that they are being deprived of what is rightfully theirs. However protecting one's territory can go too far, and when that line is crossed, it really messes things up. Academic research as it is today relies on the goodwill and respect of one's peers, and paranoia and its close companion suspicion, are the surest way to erode all goodwill and respect that anyone has for you. And in the end, it destroys your own self-respect, and no paper is worth that.

One Week at a Time

So my last post was about how charged up I am about an academic career.
With that in mind, let me describe my week:

Saturday: Transfected cells, let's say A cells, to use for experiments. Fed them, put them away, felt very good about the adventurousness of the experiment being undertaken.

Sunday: Realized while 40 miles away that I had completely forgotten to get another set of cells, call them B cells, ready for the experiment. B cells are needed for the final step of the experiment. Crap. Bummer. Well will just have to get them ready on Monday.

Monday: Got B cells, and third and final type of cells, called C, ready. A cells, of course are nice and confluent and ready to use, only I am not going to use them. F*cking A. Efficiently set up more of A cells to start the whole things again, but nested so I don't waste any time.

Tuesday: Set it all up, A cells, B cells and C cells. They are happy in the incubator, ready for me to read them tomorrow. Whew, that didn't work out too badly did it?
Transfected second batch of A cells.

Wednesday: Started off readings, all negative. Completely, and it doesn't even look like A cells make the protein I transfected into them (which is the whole entire point of transfection!). Double sh*t. No f*ck it, triple sh*t. Then the blinding realization dawns that I threw away my leftover B cells after using them yesterday, and I don't have any more going. There are no words, only anti-endorphins.

Thursday: Started round 2, with some alternative B cells. Also, smartly decided to check whether transfecting served any purpose this time, since I screwed up the previous time and let A cells go much longer than they should have. Turns out that transfecting A cells doesn't work when I do it (though it is routine procedure in my lab). Nothing, nothing at all. There's no point in doing the next step, with alternative or otherwise B cells. Now what? Blog, I suppose. Maybe some beer.

Friday: Strategize? Re-evaluate? Retire?

I am a shining example, I tell you.

Managing Time

Long blog absences generally mean that someone isn't doing a very good job of managing their time. Sighs. It's been a busy-postdoc phase, which is a good thing because it means that I actually have work to do on multiple projects. It also means, however, that I have really had to re-evaluate how I manage my time.

As an experimental scientist one's single greatest asset is the ability to manage time. I've always been a fan of schedules, I used make little timetables for my day even as a little kid. I don't make schedules because I like to, I do it because I am chronically lazy and unless I set myself concrete targets to meet (preferably in writing), I will waffle and procrastinate. As a young grad student I was high on "doing science", and thrilled with the maverick aspects of research and liked to "go with the flow", "see where my data lead me" etc etc. It didn't work out so well as you can imagine.

So, I started making monthly schedules with the invaluable help of iCal. First big roadblock: my work computer and home computer did not have the same calendar entries or alerts. I tried synchronizing them, then decided that the best possible way was to have a paper copy. And that system has served me extraordinarily well ever since. I print out a monthly calendar with standing meetings on it, and then add all my experiments and other things on it. In pencil, because I do chop and change my plan a lot. I post that schedule on the corkboard above my desk and it stares balefully at me all day.

That worked really well in grad school, where I usually had to plan my experiments up to three or four weeks in advance, coordinate cell sorting schedules, GM-CSF addition, FACS time (the bane of all immunologists) etc. Now I find that I need to plan three months ahead because of the nature of the experiments. Three months! It's crazy and more anal than I'd like, but the whole house of cards is distinctly precarious when I don't plan that far ahead.

It really irks me to have to map out so much so far ahead. I detest feeling circumscribed by my schedule. Seriously, I am now one of those people who has to check their calendar all the time. There aren't FACS time calendars printed for the time I need to use them. The plain truth is, however, that my productivity has shot up since I started planning so far ahead. And I can say now, with relative confidence, that we can go out of town at X time since I won't have a pressing cell commitment then. Along with the calendar, I make a list of objectives for the next two months. What are the questions that need to be addressed now, how can I prioritize them, and what should I do when to optimize the use of my time. Together with the calendar, I felt really on top of things, on top of my game and in charge of my science.

Then I find myself mentoring two rotation students (first year grad students checking out the lab) and all my carefully made plans crumble. I am here all the time, rushing rushing rushing, trying to perform mad feats of time-juggling and trying to keep four projects and three people on track. And I have to say, it's not going to happen. This has exposed the crucial flaw in my scheduling system: inflexibility. If you're just one person, you can organize your time perfectly, plan all you need to do and execute with all the precision your heart can desire. You can't do that when you're mentoring other people. So I suppose the choice is whether you mentor people or not, and I feel very strongly that one should mentor, having been the recipient of some kickass mentoring myself. I am forced to conclude therefore that while planning and time management and the key to being productive in lab, I must schedule some wiggle room.

D'yer Mak'r

The inner dialogue: confessions of a Friday evening.

This postdoc's inner dialogue tends to be frenetic. "Was that 12 or 14 microliters? 12? no 14? How much did I add? ???? Sh*t forget it, its X.03mM instead of XmM" "Okay finish finish, Next Postdoc is signed up to start in the hood in ten minutes. Do all those cells really need to be split yet? Can all those cells be split in ten minutes? F*ck no way. So f*ck it, these cells will survive overgrowing better than those, so be it." "Ugh only halfway through the injections, ten more to go..." "F*cking A, the meeting with the Boss begins in three minutes, can I process three flowjo layouts in three minutes??" "F*ck f*ck F*CK"

And so on. There are calendars and to-do lists to remember, mice to take care of, experiments to design, papers to read, meetings to be gone to, socializing to be done and the special people to see and talk to. The average postdoc treadmill, and I love every minute of it-surfing deadlines, the pace, the multi-tasking, the nearly constant motion.

That said, the best inner dialogue is the silent one. It's 5.30 on Friday evening. The postdoc picks up all her detritus from the hood, puts it away. Mops up her bench, puts the media away. Sits down at her desk, collects all the little yellow stickies with cell counts, concentration calculations, dates of births and general experimental miscellanea and pastes them into the current lab notebook page. She looks at the calendar on the cork board in front of her, and everything is crossed out. The to-do list is similarly complete. All the mice are happily asleep or running around in their cages. The fluorescent lights hum, the lab is nearly empty, the radio plays on, for once not the driving rhythm of work but just music in the background. And the postdoc squirrels further into her chair and just listens to the sound of silence, the inner voice quiet.

When the Levee Breaks

Plug it as best you can and keep going.

This is probably the best, and only advice I would have to give to an emerging scientist. This is also the most valuable lesson I have learned over the years from my various mentors. I don't think it was explicitly stated as such, and certainly not in the words of Led Zeppelin, but it was a strong message I got.

I did my Ph.D. in a fairly unusual situation. I was one of very very few students where I was, in a very postdoc-heavy environment. Some of the labs in Ph.D. place didn't had only postdocs and technicians. It was an intimidating environment in the beginning, especially when I was a mousy first-year. But what happened over they years is that I ended up having a plethora of mentors.

I learned how to do FACS from one postdoc, dissect mice from another, inject mice from yet another. I developed a deep respect for "bullshit detectors" and a strong seminar habit (which I really don't get enough of here), learned to ask "Why?" instead of "How?". I learned to think ahead, to plan for figures, to never run out of mice. I learned how to deflect tantrums, how to stand up for myself, how to speak at conferences, all from my Ph.D. advisor and various postdoc mentors. I didn't really have any interaction with student peers, didn't have a student milieu, but it turned out to be a phenomenal experience overall.

Not that it was all happy days and everybody being helpful. But when times were hard and feelings were hurt, the people I really admire kept going. They put their heads down, ignored their feelings of being neglected by the boss, ignored ridicule from other lab members (yes, ridicule) and kept working, and working smart. That's the best thing to do- let the work speak for itself. Don't let yourself drown when the levees break. Swim.

Some of the nicest people were the most useless as mentors and some of the most seemingly curmudgeonly the best mentors. The hard lessons are not learned easily. The mentors I have the most respect for now, in retrospect, are those who told it like it was. Directness can be unpalatable, but it is the only way to clarity, scientific and otherwise.

Another thing I feel strongly about is that you have to pass mentoring on. If you have been treated well, you have to treat people well. If you have not, you have to be extra vigilant not to take it out on people who you will be mentoring. Everyone starts somewhere and impatience is absolutely incompatible with mentoring. This may be seem obvious, yet it is surprisingly easy to forget.

Its easy to resent time taken away from experiments, its easy to be annoyed by constant interruptions, I certainly am. That doesn't mean that one should indulge that annoyance.

So as a mentor, I want to be direct, firm, hopefully gentle, accessible. But most of all, I would like to be constructively critical, and pass on the importance of a bullshit detector. Let's see.

scientiae-carnival

Communication Breakdown

I'm having some writer's block, partly because I have resolved not to complain and partly because the postdoc work curve is on the upswing. Up up towards the ceiling, a good thing overall except for the constant ambivalence towards said work.

Anyway, to make this more fun, October is Led Zeppelin song titles month. I'm going post with Led Zeppelin song titles and incorporate the title into the post. It should serve to repair the communication breakdown (see?) of this past month. Oh, and did I mention that the posts will continue to be about postdoc-ing and Immunology? Let's see how it goes-I see vistas opening up. No quarter, Over the hills and far away, Rambling on, the Battle of Evermore... If you have a song you'd like to challenge me with, go ahead, leave me a comment.

So the major work upswing has been because my boss and I have somehow resolved a major communication breakdown. I have been miserable here because I have been feeling underappreciated and fundamentally not respected. By my boss. Also, said boss has also been dismissive of my ideas and has not been receptive to me branching off on my own or following my instinctive interests, which are in infectious diseases and has been pushing me to work on boss's own interests, which are classical and molecular.

Suddenly boss is listening to me. And seems ok with, even very mildly encouraging of my pursuing something at the juncture of infectious disease and classical immunology. Not too much improvement in the overt respect and appreciation department, but that may be a function of temperament. I am flabbergasted, and thrilled! It's a little sad what I consider an improvement, given the aforementioned lack or R&A. But I'll take anything!

What caused this? Is it because I stood up for myself? Mildly and politely, but I did. Is it because I was direct and stated (repeatedly) that while all the classical stuff was all very well but since it is the boss's thing I couldn't possibly take it with me to start my own lab (if and when)? Because I said that I was interested in this and would like to take it with me? Because what I am suggesting will be a hot thing to put in grants? Because the boss is happier with life and therefore finds it easier to interact with us?

A combination of these I think, with grants and mood probably higher on the list than the rest. Food for thought, complaining does not achieve much, communicating does. Hm.

Onwards...

The Lab Wardrobe

I played against type today, I am wearing a skirt, pretty shirt and cute shoes. To Lab. It's a good thing I have a lot of computer work planned!

Ah dressing like a scientist. The bleach-proof scruffy eternally dreary clothes. To be honest, there is something to be said for jeans, t-shirt and sneakers, after all that takes care of the general ick factor of exposed skin in the animal room or the slight overall scariness of working with radioactivity. But how long can one go on dressing "like a scientist"? Company t-shirts, jeans from six seasons ago. I'm tired of it, I have a whole wardrobe that doesn't get worn enough.

I think the true revolution is the ballet flat. They are great! Closed toes, flat, comfortable and go with everything. Practical and attractive, imagine that, whole new worlds have opened up. Bringing on the new wardrobe...

Back in Lab in Under 11 Hours

Sighs. It has been a busy couple of weeks, and I have been back in lab in under 9 hours even, the intervening time covering sleep shower and breakfast.

Now that's a good thing. It means I have things to do, it means that there are Experiments in progress. There may even be a Paper coming out of all of this in two years. Hours of endless echoing puke coloured hallways, dirty linoleum, fluorescent strip lighting, latex gloves, laminar flow hoods, the smell of FBS-it's all worth it in the end right? Who would want a squashy couch, hardwood floors, books, food and company instead?

Funnily enough, half the time I don't want the couch etc. instead. Its the postdoc Zone I guess, nothing like the prospect of experiments working to bring one back to the lab. Even though they may only be prospects at this point, a tiny possibility is better than none at all. There's something zen about the eerie echoing hallway, the lab chair fits my spine better than any couch and the world starts to be clearer under those fluorescent lights.

Its the Zone people, the Zone. Research in the zone-let's see how long it goes.