First, how is it the middle/end of July already?!? This is crazy. I'm currently working on multiple projects in lab, trying to finish revisions of my big "dissertation proposal" that will hopefully be approved by faculty within a month, and gearing up to teach some new classes in the fall. I'm avoiding the fact that it's been approximately a million years since I've written anything blog-related but I often miss it so I'm giving it a go. I'm currently participating in a 14-day writing challenge through a Faculty Success group in order to boost motivation and progress on my academic writing projects, but I think tonight this blog is a worthy use of my dedicated writing time.
I've recently had multiple people ask me a little bit about what I do all day (including my mom) and it always reminds me how vague my overall role as a graduate student can be (often to me too!). I'm starting my 5th year (so I've now officially been in grad school longer than either high school or college...and no degree to show for it ;) My grad school life has changed quite a bit across the years. The first two years of my program consisted largely of taking classes, learning about the projects in our lab, reading literature on topics like memory, exercise, and aging, running participants through cognitive tests on the computer, running neuroimaging sessions in the MRI scanner, reading literature and writing grants (very few of which got funded, but it's all about the experience, right?). I also theoretically learned how to do basic analysis of neuroimaging data but I'm still not convinced I have this skill. After passing my comprehensive exam in 2014, my work load changed and became much more research based. This means that I take very few classes (if any) each semester, sometimes I am a TA (Teaching assistant) for a class (so far I've only done Elementary Psychology) and I instead spend the majority of my time organizing, conducting, analyzing or writing up experiments. This translates to:
- writing introductions (the part where you talk about the previous work and why the current work is so freaking important), methods (where you meticulously describe what you did during the experiment), results (lots of stats and figures), and discussion (where you try explain what you found and, again, why it is so freaking important)
- organizing data and analyzing it with various programs and statistical methods
- running experiments (though I don't do this nearly as much as I used to since many of our Undergrads get to do that during their lab hours...but I do have one project where I continue to run an exercise protocol with epilepsy patients)
- going to meetings with either my boss, my lab, other labs, or committees
- attempting to troubleshoot things that I don't understand
- being frustrated with the things I don't understand
- making (or attempting to make) decisions about how to analyze certain data in a way that makes the most sense to answer the research question we want to ask
- creating presentations about either my own research, somebody else's research (such as presenting other published papers), or other psychology topics (ex., just today I gave a lecture about my path to college and grad school to students in the Upward Bound program here at Iowa)
I know this post hasn't been super exciting, but I hope it kind of helps to visualize what a grad student who sits at her desk all day is actually doing. Just for kicks and giggles, here are a few of the concrete things I have done in the past year while in grad school:
- written (in conjunction with my boss and another colleague) a chapter on how cognitive and physical exercise change the hippocampus, a part of the brain critical for memory formation and other cognitive functions. I was most proud of the figure (image) that we created that we developed from an initial idea of mine. I'll let you know when that's published :)
- learned and taught others how to analyze massive amounts of movement data from accelerometers (watch-like devices that track movement and activity)-- seriously, each person has like hundreds of thousands of lines of data, and we have to make sense of that!
- learned how to use a analysis program that segments different parts of the brain from an MRI scan and calculates their volume so that we can look at individual differences in the size of certain brain regions (the hippocampus, for example)
- written an 80-page document that lays out my plan for my dissertation. It includes 3 "aims", which are basically goals/questions that can be answered with specific experiments (2 of which are in progress, one of which I'm working on starting now)
- taught 4 classes per week, each of 30ish Elementary Psychology students (same lecture material, just 4 times a week)
- organized Professional Development events for Graduate Women in Science (GWIS)- an organization I was president of last year. This year I will be a "national liaison" and assist with developing a national mentorship program for women in science
For more kicks and giggles, I also was just brainstorming some things I didn't know coming in to grad school that I wish I had:
- my life would be better if I had better posture because I spend 80% of my time sitting at a desk
- google really knows a lot and being able to "google well" is a valuable skill
- time management. I thought I was good at it because I was always so "busy" with activities. But NO. Real time management is managing to work efficiently on 5 different projects when you have a long amount of time to uninterrupted time to work in one day. Bad time management is starting one project in the morning, getting lost in a rabbit hole of previous literature, my facebook feed or pinterest, eating lunch for 2 hours at my desk while absentmindedly reading and answering emails, chatting with colleagues, doing some actual work on the actual project, and realizing it's 5 pm and you never got to any other project all day. Still working on this.
- how computers work. I do recall giving a speech during high school in which I described the parts of the computer (thanks dad for letting me take apart your computer and teaching me about it :) but I still wish I understood how important computer science would be in my current "career". You just gotta know how to use different programs, how to learn new coding languages, and, more importantly, you gotta know how to ask questions when you have no clue how to solve a problem with a computer. There is probably a solution. You just have to find it (again with the googling).
That's all for now! Happy July 20th.
