Advice: Don't get really sick when in grad school.

So I got ER-level sick on Wednesday. This led to me taking Thursday and Friday off. And getting little to nothing done on either of those days. (I am back to 100% now.)

But you know what? That's ok.

I talked this over today with a fellow first-year labmate and while he asked me if I felt guilty about getting less shit done (yes), we both agreed on this fact: I have 4.5 years of grad school left. It's ok for me to take two days (yes, I did go in both days of the weekend) off. There is plenty of time left.

Also, people are very helpful when you use the phrase "medical emergency." The prof I TA for found me a substitute, the prof I owed a take home exam to gave me an extension, and my boss was completely understanding.

Crashing and burning.

I'm feeling burnt out. I can't give 100% to each aspect of grad student life still, and I'm not really even getting any time where I can be less stressed.

I do take at least one day off a week where I do less work. I refuse to go into lab at all on that day, and usually just grade or do homework + one fun thing (yesterday I went to a museum with the boy). I'm falling behind on my running schedule hardcore due to a slight injury/constant working. And lets be honest, it's more due to the constant working.

I'm hoping that it gets better soon. But since this irritating quarter system means that I have a repeating cycle of one week without midterms and then two weeks of midterms, not likely. I'm mostly looking forward to classes being done with (unless a fellowship requires me to take more) at the end of next quarter. TAing continues until this time next year.

Ok, here's hoping for less pointless, time-wasting experiments this week to make me feel better. There's nothing more discouraging than making slides for the weekly meeting with the boss and seeing how few experiments I actually did, let alone how little worked.

Missing my undergrad friends hardcore today. That one's not going to change anytime soon though.

Happy two days from half priced chocolate day!

I hope that you all celebrate in your own way. My way of celebrating Valentine's Day (making pancakes for a bunch of friends, whether I'm single or not...which is a good time to bring up that I have been seeing a fellow biochem first year) will have to be postponed until later this week, as I have a midterm Wednesday and an ongoing take home midterm for my inorganic NMR course.

Boo. Thanks, grad school.

And now, back to my massive pile 'o grading.

Favorite wombat fail of the week: When doing distillations, I had 3 flooded hoods due to wombat antics.

Fun.

Not going to lie, feeling pretty down right now.

I just returned home from the lecture for the course that I TA. It's a huge lecture hall, and it's late at night. Understandably, the lecturer for this course tries to grab the wombat attention by being a wee bit risque---not terribly so most of the time.

But sometimes, what he says just makes me really uncomfortable. Tonight was one of those nights.

He asked the wombats if there were any chem engineers in this course. One girl raised her hand. After asking her if she'd heard of a concept, he proceeded onwards in his lecture, occasionally asking her if she'd heard of other concepts. After the third concept, he asked her if she knew anything and if she was really going to be an engineer (none of these concepts were covered until today). Then he directly launched into a story about how home moms used to be referred to as "domestic engineers."

WTF.

First of all, you singled out this student and then implied that the sort of engineer she'd become was a "domestic engineer" because she doesn't know everything about engineering yet, which of course she should as a sophomore. Secondly, if you've already apologized to the whole class before due to your previous terribly inappropriate/sexually charged comment about a specific female student, why would you continue to push the envelope too far? Plus, he even stopped himself going, "I shouldn't say this." LISTEN TO YOUR DAMN SELF.

Maybe I'm the only one offended by the implication that this female student would have to be a housewife to be a type of engineer. But no matter his intentions---even though he clarified that he knew that statement was inappropriate---a student went home and probably is questioning her major choice right now due to his actions.

Help a biochemist out?

Are you doing mol bio or biochem or anything where you're trying to get a mutation to go into a genome?

We've got this system where we can easily get a plasmid with our copy of the gene with the mutation. However, we have to transform into a system where this mutated copy of the gene needs to get into all of the copies of the gene within the native system (otherwise we'll have 75% mutated protein and 25% wild type protein). We've already got antibiotic resistance as a selector, but cells that transform partially still grow. We've got another type of nutrient related selection. But we keep on getting not the full mutation back when we sequence it because our screening system isn't selecting for just the cells where the mutation is in every copy of the gene.

Anyone out there got some awesome ideas for screening? I'm looking and racking my brain, but this is not my field of expertise.