5th year PhD advice (and updates)
This week marks the start of my 5th (and hopefully final) year as a PhD candidate, so I thought it’d be a good idea to post a general update on things and include some advice for new grad students.
Laboratory visit to The Scripps Research Institute
Me next to the “Flame of Knowledge” monument at Scripps. Who knew a kid from Dodge City, Kansas would make it here.
A few weeks ago, I visited Dr. Marisa Roberto’s laboratory at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA to learn more about her work and to meet her lab members. Dr. Roberto is an amazing electrophysiologist and a dedicated alcohol researcher. A huge thank you to Dr. Roberto for showing me the lab, and a thanks to her lab members as well! They all took time to answer any questions I had (many!), and even demonstrated some of their electrophsyiology experiments. Also, a special shoutout to the American Foundation for Pharmaceutical Education (AFPE)! Without their Pre-doctoral fellowships, these kinds of trips (and this website) would not be possible!
New Publication
When I originally joined the laboratory in 2016, I was asked to work with a group from Stanford on testing an compound that targets GABA receptors (anesthetic), and I’m happy to say that this work was accepted in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS)! The oocyte work was performed in our lab, and was a great learning experience for me. The 1st author on this paper was Noëlie Cayla (in Dr. Edward Bertaccini’s lab at Stanford) which means that she took the lead on designing/performing experiments, analyzing data, and writing the manuscript. In the coming months, I hope to submit my own 1st author publication, so stay tuned!
New business class
This semester, I’m taking an MBA course in the USC Marshall School of Business called “Leadership and self-management”. I like to think of myself as a competent scientist and have taken leadership roles before (Chair of the student chapter of AAPS-USC in 2017). That said, I’m sure there are things I can improve on, and I owe it to the students working in lab to be a better leader. I’m especially excited to get feedback from the students who work with me in lab. I teach them about science and research, and I’m hoping they can show me what I should work on to be a more effective mentor.
New Equipment
The amplifer/digitizer for our brain slice rig finally arrived! I’ve been anxious to start recording from neurons ever since I left Dr. Mark Brodie’s lab at the University of Illinois, Chicago (UIC) last summer, and now we finally have (most of) the equipment I need to build a slice rig. Stay tuned for more updates on the project in the future too!
Advice for new graduate students: invest in yourself!
In grad school, its really easy to become hyper-focused on your project: planning experiments, reading articles, and collecting data. All of that is important, but those things shouldn’t be the main thing you get out of graduate school. These things were the focus of my first year, but around my second year, I started doing other things; I spent a huge amount of time applying for a bunch of grants, mentoring undergrads in lab, rebuilding equipment for fun, taking a bunch of regulatory science classes, becoming AAPS-USC President, etc. Grad school is different for everyone, but the common theme is that its tough, for a variety of reasons. When stuff wasn’t working out in lab (to no fault of my own), these activities helped give me a different perspective, i.e. “you are not your project/data”. Throughout my third year, I took more control of my project and got more data, but I still put a lot of effort into things outside of lab: I was admitted to (and quickly completed the requirements for) the Management of Drug Development (MDD) regulatory science masters degree at the USC School of Pharmacy, I took classes at the USC Marshall School of business, and I traveled to different alcohol research centers. I started my 4th year after a summer/sabbatical in Dr. Brodie’s lab (UIC) and began transforming the lab. These things didn’t make data collection any easier (at first), but I felt like it was the right scientific thing to do. Halfway into my 4th year, I submitted my F31, with a decent amount of data, but I hated how it seemed that the only metric for success was publications. I’ve learned an insane amount of things in grad school, but all my 4 years boiled down to unproductive because I didn’t publish yet? No, I 1000% disagree, but I couldn’t “show” the reviewers anything but my (unpublished) data and my research plan.
So I started this blog.
I’ve read some great publications, but they didn’t help me when I was struggling to get my cells to express my proteins. They didn’t talk about the detailed cloning strategy they used and problems they ran into, and why would they? We take for granted the optimization and troubleshooting that goes into papers. Ironically, the hardest part of science is getting the methods right, yet this is one of the shortest sections in academic papers. Hopefully this blog can help at least one person; maybe with electrophysiology/cloning, or maybe it’ll help people understand what it is I do, why I do it, and who is doing it. At the very least, its an investment in myself. It’s something I can take with me after grad school is done. Its something I can be proud of regardless of what happens in lab. The same goes for my regulatory science training, and my business courses; I did those things for me and my career goals. It’s not that I don’t care about my dissertation, but I recognize that my dissertation is part of the bigger picture.
TL;DR new graduate students: invest in yourself, in your own way. You aren’t your project and you aren’t your data. Your protein can denature and your cells can get contaminated. Do grad school in a way such that 90% of your experiments could fail (because they will) and you’ll still come out on top. You’re never as free as you are right now.
