Blogging on the Brain

Caroline, my older sister; Angie - the bride - my younger sister; and me

So 2009 was a pretty good year – not nearly as productive as I would have hoped (as usual),but full of a lot of good things too. I’ve now been with the ATL for a full year – and what awonderful year it’s been! I also got to end the year by celebrating my little sister’s wedding out on the North Shore of Massachusetts on New Years’ Eve, which was a great way to ring in the New Year as well.

So after being absent here for FAR too long, it’s time to start, well, everything up again. Generally I try to keep some amount of productivity going over break, but this year I failed spectacularly at it.

Ah well, all I can do now is do it now…which brings me to the point of this inaugural post of 2010 – my to-do list for the year!

Far from being a way to depress myself with work I have to do, I find I work much, MUCH better when I can see what it is I need to accomplish, and then there’s also the added benefit of being able to cross things off once they’re done – which for some reason I find deeply satisfying.

So 2010 needs to be a big year. I feel like I’ve been in neutral for quite a while now, and it’s seriously go time.  So it’s time for the list:

1. Finish collecting my dissertation data. This should set me up to defend early in the spring semester of 2011…there is a very, very faint light starting to show at the end of this extremely long tunnel

2.  Run the Oliver Sacks reading group for the ATL. I’m very excited and also very nervous for this one, but it should be a good time, and at the very least a great learning experience!

3. Re-vamp the Behavioral Neuroscience lab. New instructor = new lab. We’re going to use primarily case studies to teach students about some general neuroscience as well as neuroradiology and diagnostics.

4. Work with the BIC (Baylor Interdisciplinary Core) on their “Natural World” course. This is the science course the non-science majors have to take. Interesting challenges everywhere in that!

5. Get at least one paper published. I am seriously behind the pub # I should be at at this point, and I’ve had a manuscript in the works for about 6 months now. I need to get on that!

6. Develop a new Seminar for Excellence in Teaching. I’ve given my “Neuroscience and Learning” one a couple of times now, and it’s time for something new. Maybe learning disabilities? Effects of technology on the brain? We’ll see what happens.

7. Present a poster at Society for Neuroscience. If I complete #1, this shouldn’t be a problem – and this year, SfN is in SanDiego – WIN.

8. Figure out what I want to do when I grow up. I’m currently thrashing back and forth about whether I want to look for a faculty position right out of the gate or look for postdocs, etc.

9. Start looking for a job. Clearly, this is contingent on #8.

10. Start my 3x a week blogging resolution again. It’s one of those things that I enjoy when I’m doing it, but as soon as I stop there seems to be some sort of a block from getting started again. Hopefully I can just stay in the habit this year!

Okay. I should get to work!

This week I was introduced to a concept by a colleague of mine that I found quite interesting. She mentioned a student that didn’t have a “learner’s attitude.” I had never heard that phrase before, but I immediately loved it – and for anyone who has encountered one of these students, it may mean something a little different to each person, but I think it probably carries the same sort of tone.

When I consider a student without a learner’s attitude, the first thing that comes to mind is someone who assumes (regardless of how ridiculous it may seem) that they essentially already know everything. I think this gets to be a problem mostly for juniors and seniors in undergrad. They already have the basics, and are now watching younger students struggle through those first steps which, understandably, can give way to some ego issues. The funny part then as a senior graduate student is that I know they don’t know everything (or anything close to everything), but they still walk around assuming nobody (even someone more educated) could really offer them any useful information anymore.

I think I’ve always fallen toward the other end of the spectrum – mostly falling prey to the “imposter syndrome” that plagues many graduate students. There’s a great line in a Ben Folds song (I love Ben Folds, if I’ve never mentioned that on here) that says (please excuse the profanity):

You get smaller while the world gets big, the more you know you know you don’t know shit. “The Whiz-Man” will never fit you like “The Whiz-Kid” did…

That line is pretty much what I felt like for at least the first three years of my graduate career (and I still often feel that way now). While it doesn’t feel great to feel like you don’t know anything, and under-confidence generally doesn’t work so well either, feeling like that does serve to develop a couple of important characteristics that I think need to be present to have a “learner’s attitude.”

1. Humility: This one is huge – and also very rare in academia. I still often find myself wondering what would happen if the scientific community would drop its collective ego and actually cooperate and collaborate with each other. Even if we could all simply allow for the possibility that we’re wrong or that there will probably always be someone out there who understands something more thoroughly or who has a different way of thinking to offer, I think any given discipline would benefit. As far as the individual learner, this too is important. The seniors in undergrad don’t yet know that in large part, the material in their classes – yes, even the upper level ones – has been simplified for ease of learning, but if they can hold on to some humility (or perhaps rediscover it in graduate school), they’ll make much better learners than those that continue to think that they know everything already.

2. Respect: This is an interesting one for me to think about as a graduate student. I have lots of undergrads that I teach (both at Baylor and the community college). Like I mentioned above, many upper level students are starting to get a little bit of an ego going, and they can be very disrespectful toward me as their teacher – I don’t know if it’s because I don’t have my PhD yet or I’m relatively young, but I’ve often had students speak to me as if they know more than I do. Now I, for my part, try to remember that paragraph above about humility, but I also have to wonder what is going through these kids’ heads that they speak to a fifth-year graduate student as if they’re more educated than I am? In addition, I think there needs to be some respect for whatever field you’re working in/studying as well. Do these kids really think there’s nothing more to neuroscience than a few undergraduate courses? Be serious.

3. Curiosity: This is obviously necessary to be a good learner, and if you assume you already know everything there is to know about a subject, there’s nothing driving any further investigation or even interest in looking into what might be going on.

So I know I talked about most of these in the context of undergraduates, but I think it’s equally (if not more) important for graduate students, post docs, and professors to maintain this learner’s attitude – because I think most of us lose it somewhere along the way.

I’d be interested to hear what qualities anyone else thinks would be part of this learner’s attitude too!

So this week was pretty busy. I’ll admit to taking Monday off, but somehow having a four-day week didn’t seem to help much. I’m at the point in my program where the vast majority of my time really should be dedicated to data collection. I’m not sure if I’ve talked much here about what I do, but I use a technique called whole-cell electrophysiology to look at physiological properties of neurons in vitro. In my case, I’m looking at pyramidal cells in the lateral amygdala and looking at measures of excitability (essentially how easily they fire action potentials) in the presence of a couple of different chemicals.

So the technique is very prone to glitches. There are several compounds that I have to make very meticulously, a whole collection of potential mechanical issues, and, well, a lot of normal human error that goes into every day in lab. It’ s been a frustrating week in this department. The way the technique works is that you “look” for a cell to suction onto (looking for deflections in an oscilloscope reading to show you when you bump up against something in the tissue slice), then rupture the cell to make a continuous aqueous environment with your recording electrode so you can control either voltage (and record current) or current (and record voltage).

The main problem is that once you obtain a decent cell, you have to be extremely careful not to bump, brush, or breathe wrong around the table that the setup sits on or you’ll lose the seal to the cell. The bummer is that I have to change solutions about six times throughout my protocol – each time just asking for a bump to the equipment. The other bummer – it usually takes anywhere from one to six hours to find and seal a good cell, so if you lose one it may mean that the possibility of collecting good data that day is out… and that’s what every single day looked like this week.

I don’t mean to complain; I know that it’s not supposed to be easy to be a graduate student, but it’s rough to go a whole week where it feels like you’re working really hard, only to realize on Friday night that you’re not even a tiny bit closer to your goal and you might as well have taken the whole week off and at least enjoyed yourself. Oh well. Here’s to hoping a quiet, rainy weekend will restore my motivation for next week.