We're not worthy! We're not worthy!
Finishing up this Ph.D. thing is going to kill me. My undergrad slave joked with me this morning about his senioritis. He knows nothing of senioritis until he is less than three months away from defending his doctoral dissertation.
It is so dumb. I have marked how many days till my defense on my calendar at work, and you would think this would motivate me to write till my laptop keys fall off. But instead, I require that the hubs come pick me up a half-hour early each day because my thesis is making me...snnnnnnnnnnooooooooooooooorrre...Wha? Oh, sorry. Dozed off there just thinking about it.
I am a protein crystallographer, which means I grow crystals of proteins for the purpose of understanding what they look like. It is cool -- different proteins assume radically different shapes and sizes, depending on what they do. For the most part, form = function, which means you can come up with neat and occasionally revolutionary ideas from knowing the structure of a protein. For example, I published a bunch of structures in a paper that together helped unravel a bit about the manner in which cholera toxin (which causes cholera) becomes active. Here's the abstract to my paper, in a bit of shameless self-promotion. I have been doing this for the past four years, which is actually not so long in the scheme of Ph.D.s, and unfortunately this is the problem. Despite what I know is a reasonable body of work -- yon paper + a paper in submission to Science (score!) -- I now realize just how much I don't know, how much I never will know and, even worse, how much I never want to know. Compared to my colleagues, there are lots of things I never learned how to do, which makes me feel highly inadequate. Surely what I have done is not enough to qualify for (insert angelic sound here) a PHD (/angelic sound). For example, who even remotely cares about the manner in which cholera toxin becomes active?
My husband and I commiserate in a certainty we have learned as we both reach the end of our stint as grad students -- you will never feel stupider, or have your writing feel more useless, than when you are writing your thesis, mainly because you are required to synthesize so much information from literature that others have written into something relevant to your research. It is highly frustrating. Every day has to start and end with me bowing towards Delaware and chanting the name of my future position "Domestic coordinator" three times, or I will just curl up in a ball of futility and die.
All of this, plus attending our Monday morning meeting, has made me realize why I can never be in academics. My friend Jan quoted a famous protein crystallographer this morning: "If no crystals result, throw the samples in the sink and curse in the darkness." The quote is hilarious, but it really captures the solitude of it all. Because all of your progress relies on your work and only your work, it's all so lonely. At times your work is so arcane that nobody can understand what you do. And I think nobody can really understand this more than someone who is finishing up their doctorate, somebody who is supposed to be the world expert on this teeny tiny little aspect of science. Three more months, yo. Make it go fast.
It is so dumb. I have marked how many days till my defense on my calendar at work, and you would think this would motivate me to write till my laptop keys fall off. But instead, I require that the hubs come pick me up a half-hour early each day because my thesis is making me...snnnnnnnnnnooooooooooooooorrre...Wha? Oh, sorry. Dozed off there just thinking about it.
I am a protein crystallographer, which means I grow crystals of proteins for the purpose of understanding what they look like. It is cool -- different proteins assume radically different shapes and sizes, depending on what they do. For the most part, form = function, which means you can come up with neat and occasionally revolutionary ideas from knowing the structure of a protein. For example, I published a bunch of structures in a paper that together helped unravel a bit about the manner in which cholera toxin (which causes cholera) becomes active. Here's the abstract to my paper, in a bit of shameless self-promotion. I have been doing this for the past four years, which is actually not so long in the scheme of Ph.D.s, and unfortunately this is the problem. Despite what I know is a reasonable body of work -- yon paper + a paper in submission to Science (score!) -- I now realize just how much I don't know, how much I never will know and, even worse, how much I never want to know. Compared to my colleagues, there are lots of things I never learned how to do, which makes me feel highly inadequate. Surely what I have done is not enough to qualify for (insert angelic sound here) a PHD (/angelic sound). For example, who even remotely cares about the manner in which cholera toxin becomes active?
My husband and I commiserate in a certainty we have learned as we both reach the end of our stint as grad students -- you will never feel stupider, or have your writing feel more useless, than when you are writing your thesis, mainly because you are required to synthesize so much information from literature that others have written into something relevant to your research. It is highly frustrating. Every day has to start and end with me bowing towards Delaware and chanting the name of my future position "Domestic coordinator" three times, or I will just curl up in a ball of futility and die.
All of this, plus attending our Monday morning meeting, has made me realize why I can never be in academics. My friend Jan quoted a famous protein crystallographer this morning: "If no crystals result, throw the samples in the sink and curse in the darkness." The quote is hilarious, but it really captures the solitude of it all. Because all of your progress relies on your work and only your work, it's all so lonely. At times your work is so arcane that nobody can understand what you do. And I think nobody can really understand this more than someone who is finishing up their doctorate, somebody who is supposed to be the world expert on this teeny tiny little aspect of science. Three more months, yo. Make it go fast.
posted by Claire at 4:36 PM
4 Comments:
Jeaner: WORD. But I promise you that real world people are cooler. Know why? Cause they have lives. And vacations. Read: they have better things to do than work.
Mom: So. Tired. Deserve opportunity to bitch. Degree is harder than baby because degree = so stinkin' esoteric. Everyone cares about my beautiful baby. Who cares about protein crystallography? Of course I will finish -- there is no doubt. However, writing my thesis sucks every molecule of fun out of the atmosphere. It makes me want to sleep and watch TV and drink some beer. But not too much beer so that I may continue to deliver my baby non-alcoholic boobie twice a day. More importantly, it makes me want to complain about how much thesis-writing sucks. So here I have. I am not the only one in the universe who has come to the same conclusions -- Dada and I have met others like us who agree that getting a PhD means realizing just how stupid you are and how futile and meaningless your dissertation research really is. And it IS, believe me. No drugs will ever come of my research, of that I am quite certain for many biochemical and political reasons that would make them terrible drug candidates. But soon it will be over, and I will be Dr. Mom, and that, as they say, will be that.
I feel very stupid just reading about what you have to write about!! Way over my head!
Claire.. when I was finishing my Masters (already accepted to the PhD program at OSU) I almost said screw it about fourteen.. no.. fourteen hundred times a day. There *is* nothing more humiliating than writing that damn research. Or doing it. Or having to read all of it.
Here's the thing, though.. you're now a full four years ahead of where I am and it's something I'm still pondering nightly PhD with a baby? Crap. Girl, you've done more in your field than lots of people. I'd say "It'll make you more well rounded" but I don't think that's more true than cleaning up poop off your baby (and your nice jeans) in the middle of the parking lot. It does, however, in the end give you something nobody can take away. And it's not all for not.
By the way: What more stimulating conversation at the playgroup than Protein Crystallographers? ;-)
Mom: You said it...you told me to have a beer. That's what I'll tell the judge, anyway.
Monkeygirl: You are not stupid. I am stupid, for enmiring myself in this silly little exercise. Well, maybe that's a little over the top -- of course I'm sure the day I defend my dissertation I will heave a big sigh of relief and think it's all worth something, but in the meantime I will just bitch as loudly and as often as I can. Just ask the poor hubs. Please don't feel dumb -- I can't understand half the HTML you guys are using to hold up your fancy-pants sites!!!
Leslie -- Word up. It is so nice to have a fellow mommy who's really been in the trenches. But I must ask you...you wouldn't say "Oh, that's nice {ahem change subject please}" if you ran into someone who announced themselves as a protein crystallographer on the playground?!?!?
Please don't feel like I'm "ahead" of you. Perhaps I forgot to mention that I don't have a master's? In my field, it's straight from your bachelor's to your doctorate, and if you get a master's you must have major cooties. Not to imply that you have cooties, just to illustrate that biology/biochemistry/chemistry is a little strange like that.
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