Although perhaps you shouldn’t.

That’s it. It’s over. I am done with graduate school. Short of a few minor revisions to my dissertation, the event which from now on will be referred to as My Big Fat Russian Defense is complete. Big and fat it was, tell you what (and I am not even talking about the ensuing celebration(s)). My entire family was in attendance: Mom, Dad, grandmother, aunt, uncle, complete with 8 year-old cousin. My people took up the back row during the defense. My advisor flew in from Arizona to give me away, so to speak, for which I will be eternally grateful. Friends from high school, grad school, and beyond were scattered throughout and somehow, the room was packed.

I was panicking, as I am wont to do on many occasions, and had been all morning and night prior. My body had decided that it no longer needed sleep and should instead toss and turn all night, pausing to nap only long enough to entertain bizarre and creepy anxiety dreams. The morning of the defense was fraught with last minute seminar practices and dashes to the department store for stockings. I had just enough time before the defense to worry myself into an ulcer. Please take my advice and schedule your defense for the first thing in the morning, if you can. There is nothing worse than not sleeping all night and having to wait until 3PM to get the show on the road. That hurt everywhere.

The seminar went off without major hitches. I was three clicks past nervous and the nervousness failed to fade after I began speaking, which for me is highly unusual. I was convinced that my voice was shaking in a completely un-doctorly manner the entire talk, but I have since been told it was perfectly steady. Good thing the freaking out was restricted to the inside of my own head. I did not break down in tears as many people do during their acknowledgments. I think I was too loopy and disconnected at that point for crying to be physically possible.

After I was finished speaking, I fielded a few really interesting questions from the audience, shook many hands and was hugged many many times. My examination committee then cleared the room and asked me to step out. The ground rules of the defense were set in my absence. [Oh how I wished for those extendable ears they have in Harry Potter. I was always dying to find out what they were saying about me before committee meetings. I think those closed conversations should be recorded and transcribed, unsealed like court records following graduation.]

I was then invited back into the room – the examiners had arranged themselves around a table to make themselves seem like less of a firing squad (they failed). They then went around the table asking me questions they had prepared having read my thesis. And you know what? They actually read it! all 230 pages of it. I was shocked. I honestly didn’t expect them to read the whole thing. But read it they did, picking up on minor details (apparently, discrete and discreet are not the same thing. Who knew?? Don’t answer that, Richard) and data fluctuations.

I can’t say that the exam really felt like it was a scientific discussion – it was much more controlled than that, with only one examiner engaging me at a time – but it also wasn’t a quizzing session. No one asked questions they already knew the answer to (I think that would have infuriated me. I don’t need to be treated like a peer, but I am not in elementary school). The questions ranged form the nitpicky to the global and occasionally terrifying. I answered most from actual knowledge, some from conjecture, and others prefaced with, “Well, in my own head, I think of it like this…” I only had to cry uncle (without actually crying, thankfully) on one question – I couldn’t remember how it was shown that heat shock factor (HSF) is activated by the denaturation of the heat shock protein (HSP) that sequesters it in the cytoplasm of unstressed cells (whew). In the grand scheme of things, and taking into account the hundreds upon hundreds of papers that I had read in the preceding month, I don’t think that’s so tragic

After about an hour into the exam I heard a quiet click going off inside of me – kind of like that sound the pump makes when your gas tank is full. I was done. My brain was stubbornly refusing to process any more information. Response times lagged, many more umms were inserted into my answers. Luckily, this occurred toward to end of the exam. I was asked to step out again, I suppose so that the committee could come to a decision regarding the outcome of my exam. I like to think this was perfunctory and mainly symbolic, but the fear of failure was still very real for me. I was asked to come back in after only about 3 minutes of sweating (eve more) and shaking in the hallway. Upon coming back into the room, I was greeted by smiling faces and a hand held out toward me with, “Congratulations, Dr. Kushnir!” I know that a lot of people would have shed a tear or a expelled a huge sigh of relief upon hearing those words, but all I could think of were my sweaty palms and how real PhDs don’t have sweaty palms and they will all soon find out I am not doctorly at all.

I would like to blame that particular reaction on the lack of sleep and overall nervous upheaval. I would also like to be able to say that it has all sunk in since then, that I am really done, and I really have received my PhD after 7 years of not always fun work, but I am not quite there yet. It’s not entirely real to me. I have yet to sleep a full night. My stomach is still positioned somewhere between my insides and my outsides at all times. My anxiety level is, however, slowly dropping. I don’t know if I will ever be referred to as Dr. Kushnir again, but maybe one day I will be able to look at my plaque without a wave of disbelief and squeak of panic.

Overall, I have to say that my defense was an overwhelmingly positive experience, one that I have no need to repeat ever again, big, fat and Russian as it may have been.

The plaque in the picture above was a present from my aunt and uncle. Once I make myself stop staring at it, I will find a place for it… perhaps mounted on a wall in a prominent spot in my house.

Here goes. This is going to be a total overshare™. The last seven years, my friends and I have kept Pepto-Bismol in business. We periodically suffered, and continue to suffer, from a condition we refer to as “Grad Student Stomach.” It is a form of severe gastrointestinal distress brought on by lack of sleep, severe stress, and lack of fresh air and sunlight from being locked up in lab for hours and hours on end. The symptoms peak around major presentations, committee meetings, and at the end of 55 day-long animal experiments. I am now curious to find out if there is an actual name for this condition, one derived from Latin that sounds all smart and M.D.-like. Something along the lines of Stressus maximus. Anyone know?

I have had grad student stomach to the n-th degree this last month while writing my dissertation and getting ready to defend. My stomach has not liked me in a really long time. I ate my way through the week before my dissertation was due and ran for the week before the defense. Turns out my body doesn’t take kindly to either approach. I think I just need to suck it up and wait until after the defense has come and gone and wait for the symptoms to fade away. Hope there is no lasting damage. Guess I will know once my celebratory hangover wears off on May 7th. Or perhaps the 8th.

On a more positive note, my school requires the student to be notified if there is a serious problem with the dissertation 72 hours before the defense. The 72 hour mark passed at 3PM today, Saturday the 3rd. Guess that means the defense is a go! Calm stomach, here I come. Until then, the Pepto is staying close to me at all times.

It’s so surreal. I am done. I finished writing and have handed my completed dissertation (all 230 pages of it) to my examiners. I will defend in less than two weeks and then I am completely done. Done done. It’s just not computing. Seven years of my life are coming to a close. I never expected to get nostalgic at this point. I have been dying to get out of academia and out of labs for at least half of my seven years in school. Now that it’s actually happening, I find the moment to be bittersweet.

I realize now what happened in my graduate career. I went down to the wrong path. It was no one’s fault, it just happened, as it so often does in science. I came to grad school a devout cell biologist with a strong interest in cell signaling (feel free to gag. Most people do) and of course, viruses. I love the stuff. I read signaling papers like candy, like little logic puzzles that fit together into a giant signaling poster from Cell Signaling Technologies. I worked on neurotrophin signaling and NF-κB, until the former failed and the latter was published out from under me.

I was left with gene expression, promoter bashing, and a cloning-based project that I swore would never be my fate in life. Here’s the thing though – I hate gene expression, I am not interested in it in the slightest, I find some of the approaches taken to assay it (especially in the herpes field) to be somewhere left of physiological. Annoyingly (is that a word? Richard?), I had no choice but work on if I wanted to graduate in any sensible amount of time. So here I am, three years and 230 pages deep into a gene expression thesis. I think the process drained me a little, not to sound dramatic. I didn’t like the work, I didn’t like the subject. I am now starting to think that had I been able to work on something I love, I would not have been running for shelter from lab life as I have been the last couple of years. That makes me really sad.

I came upon this grand realization as I was writing the last chapter of my thesis, the out-of-nowhere chapter that summarizes the first three years of my work on a partially-failed neurotrophin/HSV-1 reactivation project. Sick as it may sound, I actually enjoyed writing that chapter. I loved reading the background papers and let my discussion get longer and longer as I rhapsodized about all the possible pathways leading to HSV-1 reactivation. Importantly, I did not feel a single tooth being pulled in the writing process, as I had with the other two chapters and two appendices of my oversized monograph.

So maybe I am not leaving for good. Maybe one day I will pull a Jennifer and return to science. Lord knows I never thought those words would come out of my mouth. Right now though, I need some recovery and recuperation. Maybe now the real world will become my temporary shelter from the scientific one.

It appears that life has a sense of humor.

As I sit here, frantically preparing for my defense in three weeks on the topic of HSV-1 stress-induced gene expression, I have… Yes, I have a cold sore. It’s almost poetic, really.

On a side note, this defense is messing up not only my body, but also my apartment.

Yes, those are beer bottles on the coffee table. What of it?

I can’t wait to be done!

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So wish I could delete posts…

... you wash your hands BEFORE you go to the bathroom.

Of all the habits I will have to break once I leave grad school, this one’s not so bad.

No point is backing off from controversy now, so I might as well plunge head first.

A dear friend of mine is a newly minted PI in Texas (the fact that I have friends that are actual PIs is doing absolutely nothing for my firm intention to remain 12 years old on the inside). He has recently applied for his very first big NIH grant, an RO1. Besides the regular gigantic ball of worry, work, and stress that accompanies the writing of a grant, there was also the small issue of compliance with brand new NIH regulations.

Apparently, in order to be considered for funding this year, PIs have to submit a signed affidavit stating that they will refrain from using brain-enhancing drugs, such as Provigil, in the course of their research. Does that not strike y’all as slightly Big Brother-ish? Forgive me for gliding down a slippery slope, but what’s next? Are we only going to be allowed to drink decaf coffee while at lab? Perhaps LASIK will be forbidden so that some researchers don’t have an unfair advantage over others when it comes to microscopy or micro-surgeries?

Provigil, from my limited understanding, is pretty spectacular. Quinn Norton said (sorry, haven’t read the literature myself) that soldiers who were given Provigil performed better on tasks after three nights of staying awake than they did on the first day. Provigil basically eradicates the need for rest, while simultaneously enhancing cognitive abilities and general brain awesomeness. The problem arises when one takes too much of the drug. Rats who were administered Provigil for an extended period of time needed no sleep and performed well on tasks… until they dropped stone cold dead. No explanation and no warning. Just dead. Oy. Looks like you can’t fool Mother Nature for too long.

I am willing to look at the flip-side of the issue, for once. Perhaps the NIH is not simply trying to even the playing field of science (in the process potentially slowing the development of life-saving and world-shattering results), but also to protect a new drug abuse epidemic from taking hold in the scientific community. Drug abuse in other fields is well known and little concealed. The rumors of investment bankers doing lines of coke to stay up and alert for their 20 hour work days has been bouncing around for ages. I, unfortunately, know people who have fallen prey to it. Stock brokers on the market floor, not to mention long distance truck drivers, are no strangers to amphetamines of all colors and flavors. Are scientists next in the wave of “drug” abuse? Is Provigil going to be the scientists’ (or scienticians’, as I like to refer to them) crack cocaine? Are there going to be Provigil Anonymous meetings at every university? Not if the NIH can help it, it would seem.

Needless to say, my friend the PI signed the affidavit and with what I hope was not too heavy a heart, submitted his completed application for NIH funding. I am keeping my fingers crossed that he receives the grant and never ever needs to use Provigil, or enter a 12-step program for anything but his inherent – and endearing – dorkhood.

It is possible that I am about to preach to the choir, but I am going to come right out and say it anyway. I hate PubMed. I hate it with a burning passion. For a site that is as vital to scientific progress as PubMed is, their search engine is shamefully bad. It’s embarrassingly, frustratingly, painfully bad.

I have spent an absurd amount of time on PubMed recently and can say in no uncertain terms that it is making my dissertation writing way more painful than it needs to be. I can hold a paper in my hands, search for two authors’ last names and have PubMed come up with nothing. My friend searched for microRNAs and her virus of interest. The search engine (can I even call it an engine? It’s more like a tricycle) came up with papers dating back to 1997. I am pretty sure no one knew about microRNAs in 1997. Yet another friend was only able to find publications about his compound of choice after empirically defining one of its functions in the cell… which is when he found out this information had been available all along. He couldn’t pull up the relevant papers without searching specifically for the compound and that one effect on the cell.

Science cannot proceed at a decent clip if researchers cannot find the most basic necessary information. Has this study already been done? What else has this author published? What papers are related to the one I am reading?

I would now like to mercilessly butcher a quote from John Wilbanks from a talk he gave at the recent Publishing in the New Millennium forum. It went something like “It’s unacceptable that the web is better suited to searching for pizza than it is for furthering scientific research,” or something to that effect. Hopefully, he can correct me. But his point stands. It is way easier to search successfully for restaurants and pizza deliveries than it is for papers relating to neurotrophins and herpes, as thrilling as that topic may be.

Why is PubMed so behind the times? Why? How does it even work? Does it search only the abstract? Does it also search the body of the papers that are available online? Why does it get so massively confused by an author’s initials and last name together, in one search? Why can’t it alert me when papers relevant to my work are published? When is it going to get better? Is there any chance this might happen before my dissertation is due? Because frankly, it’s driving me more bats than the dissertation itself.

There are a lot of things I miss about my old lab – the budget, the giant windows, the equipment, the people. But most often I find myself missing my nap room.

So ok, the room wasn’t exactly intended for my blissful naps. It was a windowless room the size of a small closet that served as an outdated computer cemetery /repository and as the home of our fluorescence microscope. I spent the better part of two years in that dark, airless room, staring at glowing neurons till I saw spots and/or became nauseous (have you ever noticed that gliding through multiple fields under the scope gives you motion sickness? It does me).

For a long time, I was the only person ever to use that scope, ever to sit in that room. Every couple of days or so (especially if I was in lab until midnight the night before), I would sneak off to the scope room, take the batteries out of the wall clock to stop the ticking, shut the door, turn out the light, set a timer for 15 minutes, and embark on the most satisfying nap you could imagine. I woke up feeling refreshed and ready for more bench work… or at least ready to remain vertical for a couple more hours. I knew what I needed to achieve maximum productivity, and that was a power nap.

I feel like labs are divided in two – the nap friendly labs and the nap hostile labs. Some have couches or easily locked rooms, while others have bright overhead lights and no place to hide. That must be at some level, up to the PI. I guess some just don’t see the beauty and benefit of napping. Well, they should. I wonder if there is a study out there correlating researcher mid-day napping to publication output. I hypothesize that if every lab invested in a (clean!) couch, productivity would rise dramatically.

I miss my nap room and I miss my productivity boost. Then again, maybe that’s just my excuse for getting sleepy while slogging through my thesis.

It was only a matter of time before it happened. Dissertation writing has taken over my life. In fact, it is running my life. Whenever I am not writing, I am feeling guilty about not writing. And whenever I am writing, I am feeling guilty that I am not being more productive. And when I say “writing,” I mean squeezing in a couple of sentences between checking my 15 email accounts, reading blogs, and generally wasting time as only the internet can make possible.

I realized that I was a gonner during a fire alarm in my building today. There was huge beeping, blinding flashing, panic close at hand, and what did I grab in the few seconds I had before fire alarm-induced deafness set in? Not my wallet, not my house keys, not even my warm woolen mittens. Nope, I grabbed my laptop and ran down the stairs clutching it tightly to my chest. While at the moment nothing seemed more important to me than ensuring the well-being and safety of my laptop (and the dissertation within), reflection has revealed to me that perhaps the wallet would have been a good idea.

You’ll be happy to know that the building didn’t burn down (I think some toast met a fiery end in a microwave, setting off the fire detectors), we were let into the building after only a few minutes in the freezing cold – I didn’t even need to hide at a friend’s house until I was allowed access to my house keys (and beloved mittens!) again.

All is well that ends well. And it will end well on May 6. I hope.