Seminar Sadness

Anyone else get a tad irrationally pissed off when a big name comes to your school, you plan your afternoon around attending the seminar, and then, 20 minutes in, you realize it's one of the worst seminars ever?

I fully recognize that I'm a total seminar snob, but I feel that presentations are such an integral part to a scientist's life that we should all be capable (certainly after 20+ years) of giving at least a semi-decent lecture.

Thesis Defense: in numbers

Well, my fellow academics, 196 pages, 48 powerpoint slides, 1 beer, 3 tequila shots, 3 buttery nipples, 2 girly rum drinks, 1 oatmeal cookie shot, and 1 evening spent in misery on the couch/ in the bathroom (big props to NA for dealing with the not-so-pleasant after-effects of defending) later.....and I'm (almost officially) a PhD!

So yes, I might have made some bad drinking decisions, but I haven't done that since I started grad school....so I don't think I'm doing so badly. Besides, now that I'm (almost officially) not a grad student anymore, I'm not so certain that I can use "I'm in grad school--we're all borderline alcoholics!" as my excuse to drink a glass (or three) of wine a night. (yes, alcoholism is a terrible disease but so is graduate school).


At any rate, for those of you wondering about the actual details of my defense, here is (in honor of my powerpoint presentation) a run-down in bullets:

~room filled to capacity (granted, I had a VERY small conference room, but still, there were some unexpected people in the audience)

~the snacks were well received by all (anyone else have faculty that don't like to eat the food? 'cause mine avoided all execpt for the bottled water, but once the public portion was over, they all filled their plates with cheese, cookies, and fruit and spent a good five minutes eating before continuing with their questions)

~talk took 45 minutes, with ~20 minutes of public questions (more on that in a future post)

~ my thesis was accepted as is, without any requests for revisions (I'd like to believe that this is due to my brilliant writing and not due to a lack of thorough reading on the part of my committee)



So all-in-all a very good defense! Now, I believe that next up to bat is Yajeev, so head on over to Land of Yajeev and send some well wishes!!

Let them eat....nothing?

This time tomorrow, I'll be busy de-thesising with the help of Dr. Cuervo and Prof. Rum and Coke.

This evening, I came home when it was still light out (!!!!), picked up the last food items for my defense, did one last practice, and settled down for some relaxation (!!!!) with my computer and TV.

NA pointed out that in his field, people never bring food to their defenses. In my field, however, it is very odd NOT to bring snacks and drinks for those that come to the thesis defense. I think that regardless, it's kind of nice to provide some sugar for those that are willing (committee excepted, as they are forced) to listen to my body of work for 50 or so minutes. It's nothing big, just a little fruit, some cookies, and cheese.

But NA's surprise at my plan to provide food to my committee (who will likely ignore it) and my friends/coworker (some of who fall into both sections of the Venn Diagram of Unreaction's Acquaintances) gave me pause. I'm still going to bring the food tomorrow, but it makes me wonder: is it standard practice to bring food to defenses?

You know you're ready when...

With my defense only three days away, I can hardly get two steps out of my office without someone asking me some variation of "you ready?"

I know that the proper response is to say "oh yeah!" or just give a thumbs-up, you know, to assure the students behind me that once you finally reach the end, you've finally figured things out.

About half of the time I can give an enthusiastic thumbs up.... ...the other half? All I can muster is a half-grin while my mind whirls, as I think about all the things left to do.

For example, I've been stressing about the size of my seminar room. It's on the small side, and a lot of people have (I have no idea why) decided that they want to come hear my talk. Maybe I should move the conference table out? How many chairs can I fit? Should I try to switch rooms?

But then Coworker pointed out to me, "Unreaction, if your biggest concern right now is the size of your room, I'm pretty sure you're going to do alright."

Hmm... point taken.

A female graduate student by any other name...

Many of my fellow female scientists are eventually faced with the decision of changing their surname. Here at LargeU, most of the women that get married before they have publications change their name, while the ones with publications hyphenate.

NA and I actually have had the Name Talk already. (I know. So fast. The next thing you know, we'll have a family-share cell phone plan.) We both have multi-syllable last names, so he agreed that hyphenation was dumb. Our nonexistent kids will have his name, while I will keep mine. (NA is very progressive and not at all territorial, but I had to give up something--in this case, our non-existant kids' last name-- in order to have his promise of me keeping MY last name upon our nonexistent wedding).

While most think that I'm keeping my name because I'm staying in academia or because I have several publications.

Nope, I just like my last name. I think it goes very well with my first name, and, barring marrying into a royal family, I just simply don't want to change it.


My mom (don't even ask how this whole thing came up) thinks NA is extremely awesome for being so agreeable about me keeping my name. I don't particularly understand why guys would care either way.

What about you? Guys, do you think it's important for your wife to take your name? Fellow female scientists, are you planning on changing your name? Have you have problems with pubmed, etc if you hyphenated?

Presentation Pet Peeves

Sigh.

I have so many pet peeves when it comes to seminars. While some might call me a tad neurotic (true) or a little demanding (um...also true), I like to think of my presentation standards as...um....well, standards that I would hope everyone would stick to.

At any rate, here are a few of the things that seminar speakers do that really irk me:

Gross misuse of laser pointers. Please do not play the musical bouncy ball game with the laser pointer and your bullet points. You know, when you bounce the laser spot over each word or draw a laser line underneath each as you talk.

Really tiny figures. The point is to show your freakin data. What is the point if it is so teeny-tiny that I cannot make out the axes labels, or worse, make out the actual data points?

Really going over time limits. Yes, I can always take the next bus. And yes, you won The Most Important Prize Ever for the Most Insignificant, Specialized Science Area ever. But seriously. You are now at minute 75 of your alloted 50 minute seminar slot. There is a reason that no one is asking questions; we've all been worn down by the previous 85 slides.

One-size-fits-all presentations. I hate hate hate it when some famous or pseudo-famous or not-even-close to famous guy (yes, sorry, but I've never gone to a LargeU seminar by a female that fell into this catagory....although I'm sure there are women out there that do this) gives a 50 minute seminar from a 100-slide powerpoint...you know, where they go through 20 slides, skip over 8, stare at one and then move on to the next 10...UGH! It's not that much effort to delete 40 slides and resave, people!




What are some of YOUR pet peeves when it comes to seminars? (maybe I'll come to realize that my "perfect" (HA) seminar techniques are actually bothering some people....

Home before 9?

Yes, that's right. I got home before 9 pm today....only 13 h in lab today?

That could only mean one thing: I finished my freakin' thesis!


Now I have a week to tweak my defense presentation and catch up, in no particular order:

- sleep

- N.A. time

- cleaning

- data analysis (yeah, I know)

- blogging

good news....

my thesis is actually not due until next week.


But wait....

is that good news....or the worst news ever?


I'm so very tired of working on this. It's quite telling that I'm looking more forward to drinking after my thesis defense than the whole Dr. title thing.

thesis exile

My thesis is due in 5 days. I have, therefore, taken a necessary break from...um....life?...until I get this sonofabitch done.


So I will leave you with two more items of Things I Will Never Do in Lab:

1. Leave my 15 flasks of autoclaved LB media in a very high-traffic, open-access hallway for more than 24 hours (or any hours).

2. Perform a low temperature growth by filling the room temperature incubator-shaker with ice, propping the door to the shaker open with a styrofoam test tube holder, and proclaiming to the world via sharpie on a paper towel: keep lab door closed-- temperature-sensitive growth in progress.

toilet tetanus

Well, N.A. and I made it through our first trip. More on that later.

Surprisingly, Sucky Airport International only gave us minor delays. The real problem with our trip was having to go through Nasty Northeast Airport (NNA).

I don't get along with NNA. NNA is the same airport I connected through on one of my interviews. It is my enemy forever because my first moment in the airport (in the bathroom, of course), I caught my finger on a loose piece of metal in the (only) bathroom, ripping a huge gash in my finger. Did I mention that I don't clot quickly? So I had to ride an hour to my interview, with just a paper towel around my bleeding finger since neither the driver nor I (and I always carry bandaids) had a bandage.

So you can imagine my apprehension when I was faced with the NNA bathrooms on this trip. Although I might knock SAI, I must say that it does have some pretty sweet bathrooms. (For all you guys out there, I define "sweet bathroom" as a bathroom that is clean, has lots of stalls, and doesn't smell like a dead squirrel.

NNA bathroom meets none of my "sweet bathroom" requirements. It's one of those bathroom that you just know you're going to catch a disease from.

....good thing I was up-to-date with my tetanus shot....especially when there's dangling metal!