Your life in PhD (Part 1)

If you spent 5 years writhing the book this thick, you're out of luck becoming a earning writer.

Today I want to ink my PhD experience as I’ve already spent 5 years of my life doing lab works and what not, mundane jobs of cloning and sequencing plasmids. Since I still have my fond memory of PhD student life and vivid lab experience, I will share with you in details. 

I will break it down into 2 parts that I managed to achieve during my PhD years. 

(1) Mindset and thinking.

(2) Doing experiments. 

There is no doubt that there are more talented, more productive PhD graduates out there who can easily figure out how to succeed in research life. I'm just laying out my take on how to manage to survive and if luck and your efforts are in your favor, eventually succeed in your PhD years. This is neither to serve as a PhD bible nor an acid test to see if one could stay in academia. It's solely based on my opinions and I hope some of my opinions will be helpful when it comes to dealing with lab environment and politics.

1. Mindset and Thinking

As a graduate, the first one or two years will be gray years when nobody really knows each other well. Everyone is excited and believes that they deserve their place in their graduate programs. After all, they were chosen. The feeling that "You were chosen" sometimes give you an illusion that everything you're going to memorize as a graduate student will be fruitful in PhD years. A part of that is true that you need to memorize some famous proteins in your study; their molecular functions and mechanisms. The other extreme end of memorization is you become so obsessed with all proteins functions and spend most of your time reading papers after papers that you don't get your experiments done. In PhD years, I'm going to be blunt here; Getting your ass off the chair is the first determinant of how you would succeed in PhD years. You can regurgitate Beethoven's symphony right off the bat; you can improvise your witty humor in a second, but if you can't produce your own data, there is no way to slog through PhD years with PCR data. 

This is where I wanted to emphasize here. Both PI and a graduate student possess 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It's only a matter of seniority and experience that each of them has different responsibilities to fulfill their needs. Only when you can think like a PI, or at least become familiar with the PI thought process, you will find it much easier to cope with PI stress and level of confidence and trust. The frustration that you had with your failed cloning experiment is not the frustration that you expect to see from your PI. No matter how much you keep complaining about cloning, it will not matter to PI ears as his frustration is entirely on a different level of research hierarchy. A graduate student is not stressed with whether or not their PI will get tenure, nor he's worried a bit that he will get funded, nor he's worried that his research will make an impact. Those are purely in the domains of PI stress.

A tug of war between a graduate's and a PI's directions of thinking has to be balanced. Otherwise it's doomed. PI constant need of data and a student constant need of guidance is what you'd call "A disaster" that not only affects parties in concern, but it also takes a huge mental toll on other lab members as well. 

Here's one of my mindset I have had ever since I was in high school. 

- Never try to be someone's else favorite; just be yourself and do your best. Everything is secondary. 

Remember PIs need someone who can do their area of research and fulfill their requirement. They're not looking for someone who can fill up their heart as a lost child in the lab. Now the first part of mindset and thinking during your PhD years is what future PhD students should prepare for, but it's also relevant on my second part of "Doing Experiment". They are not mutually exclusive, but I categorized into two for easier assessment. 

Philosophy

There always will be someone in the lab who won't reciprocate the way you treat them. It always will be the case. Don't take them personally. Don't take their behavior as an attack on your integrity, personality or whatever. The fact that we all are here in the lab is to DO experiments. That's it all. The rest of the lab environmental matter is just a perk. If the lab environment is good, you feel good. To change the lab environment is not your onus to earn a PhD in the first place. The reason why I mention this is because sooner or later you'd find out you are in a deep shit environment. The people you don't like, the people you don't like to communicate at all. My experience in the previous lab also taught me the same thing. There always will be someone you don't like in the lab. 

Let's face it. I don't know who is reading this. But if You and I were in the same lab, you might not like me either. Who knows? The bottom line is just because I don't like someone doesn't mean that I'm good and the other bad. It's just a fact that Fire and Water elements don't stay together but they're on their own merit. Neither is right nor wrong. 

The worst scenario you can imagine is people tend to group and shun you as some sort of unworthy personnel. In this case, reflect yourself. If you're doing something seriously wrong, there tends to be some sort of gossip passing around. Otherwise, just ignore others opinion. 

A guy who always talks about sensitive topics: religion, racism, sexism, etc etc etc. I do not have the slightest idea of who they are. We are not in the political science program, we are not in the social science program either. We are in the hard-core scientific fields. Occasional dose of reality is good for us since we are always struggling with troubleshooting in the lab. But constant recount of sensitive topics is off putting for me. 

I can easily piss you off or please your inner sanctums just by asserting something that you don't like or you find it uneasy. Either I agree with my assertion or not, either I practice my own preach does not matter here. Just by being a mere mouthpiece of the assertion that no one likes to hear, I can be a giant pain in anybody ass. So beware of making yourself Mr. Pain-In-The-Ass instead of showing off Mr. Knows-it-All.