Playing Doctor

Straight Postdocin'

I have secured another year's employment, and this month marks the beginning of that second term. I am particularly happy about this because Yale is going though some budgetary restructuring due to endowment shrinkage. The subsequent laceration of the operations has not extended into research thus far it seems. Additionally, I am now a postdoctoral associate for real, having my PhD proper now.

I was really stressed a little while ago about getting my J-1 status renewed here. This was not a problem to fix, but I will have to get a new Visa if I leave the country so I can get back in on my return. How long might that take? Perhaps a good excuse to get back to NZ. But long story short: Immigration issue resolved.

Currently research is at it's frustrating best. Experiments don't yield the expected (previously published) results so what could I be doing wrong? Reading upon reading with a side of reading is a sure prescription! I am feeling a particular impetus to get on with these things so I can get to a conference!

Also some how it is May already, and I am still trying to get on with work left over from my PhD! Cripes.

Yes indeed, this is the (glamorous) life of a postdoc.

Bar: raised

All other things being equal it seems reasonable to expect the net research output of a postdoc, per unit time, to be greater than the same of a PhD student. I'm not sure exactly how you might measure research output, but this imaginary scale might be reasonably considered to exist (perhaps publications per unit time?).

Now that I am effectively a postdoc, this simple assumption either helps make me focused in the lab or acts as a horrible tyranny imposing anxiety and tension. Guess what it is this week?

Done?

Shortly after hearing the news that I had to submit that thesis corrections rejoinder I decided that I should make some more of the suggested changes. That has been done, the letter compiled, and both sent back to the university.

I don't feel any sense of completion, a job well done, or even being finished this time. It is just another item crossed off the to do list. Perhaps I am waiting to hear about the next heretofore unknown (or invented!) hurdle I must clear.

Stockholm syndrome

I received an email this morning to the effect that I must now also submit a rejoinder letter with my corrected thesis for with a point by point defense for each of the points that I did not correct, which Reviewer One had asked for. I was a bit miffed given that my supervisor had told me to change only a few points, and now I must defend his decisions. I should have taken ownership over the corrections in the first place and made all the changes I thought were appropriate.

Funnily enough, reading the corrections list now, there are many that I agree with. The overall integrity of the document seems more important now than merely having done with it. Perhaps it is pride, or something else?

I stand corrected.

Criticism, science has to have it. It can be hard at first but works out better for everyone in the end. The more I looked at the list of corrections the less I resented it. Some of them were even suggested with a humourous tilt.

I have completed and submitted all my thesis corrections which turned out to be less onerous than I had thought. My super helpful (old) lab back in Australia is taking care of the printing and binding then submission to the library there. How good is that? This means that very little stands in the way of graduating in December! YES!

Are you prepared?

This is turning out to be a good week. With a thesis accepted, and now a paper accepted. Well, with a small proviso as follows:

"[The Editor] feels that your manuscript could be accepted for publication should you be prepared to incorporate minor revisions."

This particular paper is an invited review in Photosynthesis research. The revisions that must prepare myself to accept are for the most part punctuation and formatting errors. I am grateful for those fixes, but surprised that there wasn't more in depth comment on how the actual content was covered. Perhaps I should choose my reviewers more carefully?

Without question

The examiners' reports arrived back today. They were suitably impressed. In fact, I am surprised at how much.

"His investigations are at the forefront of [the area] and will have a significant influence on the field... ...[The] thesis is of high quality and without question he should be awarded the title 'Doctor of Philosophy'."

-Examiner 1

"The thesis from the very beginning to the very end is of outstanding quality."

-Examiner 2

Despite this, one reviewer suggested 95 changes to the document. The University will enforce a large fraction of those be made before any degree is conferred.

Nothing about any stage of this document has been easy. So I consider it completely appropriate to bask however briefly in the (small?) amount of pay off that results from its submission.

Systematic behaviour

I'm having a frustrating time with recent experimental work. The system won't behave. I need to model an injection kinetic, which should fit to a single exponential curve. It does for two smaller injection volumes, but not so well for a third, larger volume. It might be that I have to accept that the system does not behave in an ideal fashion. I don't want to.

My insistence basically keeps me in the lab till late doing repetitive work to get the data that I want. It isn't happening. When I get home I'm usually tired, fatigued and worn out, cooking is the last thing I want to do. Dinner last night was two minute noodles and a measure of rum. I don't like rum very much. I'm not like this guy.

(In)dependent

I was having a problem with a computer controlled trigger box. It should simultaneously activate a solenoid and emit a trigger pulse but it seemed to be sending the trigger pulse exactly half a second after actuating the solenoid.

I spent two days trying to figure this out (admittedly half days since I was only able to be in the lab during the afternoon. I was the only one in the house 'available' to be there while workmen fixed the dryer one day and the leaky tap the next). I was having a hard time trying to understand why there would be a delay of exactly half a second repeatably. There was nothing wrong with the oscilloscope I was using to detect the trigger pulse nor the system that detected the solenoid function.

It turned out to be that the trigger pulse was more complicated than I thought. The pulse had a leading falling edge then a trailing rising edge half a second later. The oscilloscope was set up to detect only a rising edge. A quick modification the oscilloscope setup solved the problem.

After my supervisor figured it out in 15 minutes (he's done this sort of measurement before) I remember feeling really stupid. How come I didn't think to examine the trigger pulse via the oscilloscope? I don't really know much about electronics, but I could have just tried it. I could have figured it out. It was so simple.

Is it a problem with doing a PhD that any time someone has to help you solve a problem it makes you feel incapable? Is it implicit that somehow you should be smart enough to figure it out for yourself? The ab absurdum reduction would be that if that were the case a thesis should be done without any supervisory capacity, which seems ridiculous.

I  just think it would be awesome if I hadn't needed help to solve the problem. Part of the point of this work is to become an independent researcher. I'm not sure I could have looked up the home-baked electronics of the trigger box in a book, however. Sometimes the best answers are just from someone else in the lab.

It still bothers me that I had to ask.

Ego massage

If you are feeling a bit down with your research career, ask your supervisor(s) to write you a reference. I had to recently for a few travel grants. Since it is de rigeur to go beyond superlative in these short letters it has the entirely agreeable side effect of stroking your ego. It is admittedly short term and a bit false. However it is recommended to try at least once.