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livI've been much less present on DW than I'd like the last few weeks. I've abandoned several really good comment discussions in mid-flow, which I hate doing. And I've been reading lots of really important personal or thinky posts from various people and bookmarking them to comment later but not getting round to it. And I have several big posts queued up in my head:
The main thing that's happened is that I managed to wrangle a summer student working in my lab for a month. Until this year, I've not been in a position to take on summer students, because that needs an ongoing project from them to be able to join in, as well as at least a small amount of money and I had neither. But taking on summer students is a really important way to get on the radar and convince the various departments I belong to that I'm worth having. It's also something I believe in; I would never have got into this career if I hadn't had the opportunity to do some summer work experience in labs both as a teenager and during my summer vacations as an undergrad.
So I was especially pleased that I managed to design a project and attract a medical student who is interested in a research career, and between us we won a scholarship so that his project was partially funded. The funding issue is horribly fraught; it's becoming increasingly the case that you have to do unpaid "internships" to get into pretty much any high-level career. But only very rich young people can afford to spend a summer working without pay; even if expenses are covered it means giving up the opportunity to actually earn money. I don't find this morally acceptable, partly because it excludes anyone who isn't rich from many careers, and partly because it essentially exploits even the people who are rich enough to do these internships. Why should they give up their labour for nothing more than nebulous "experience" or "CV points"? At the same time I don't actually have any money; I can't afford to pay someone an actual full-time salary to work in my lab over the summer, and I can't really even afford the reagents consumed in such a project (even if someone is willing to work for free) because I'm on such a shoe-string budget, I'd be effectively stealing from my PhD student if I put any money into a summer project.
So when students started approaching me asking for summer projects, I told them all the same thing, that I'd love to have them but don't have any money, so they'd have to look for scholarships. I was rather busy during summer project application season anyway, so I asked the students themselves to do the initial search for available funds, and promised I'd help them apply for anything they did find. I hadn't planned things this way, but it acted as a really effective triage mechanism, because the students who were just dutifully trying to accumulate CV points but weren't really serious about summer projects all melted away, leaving me with one particular second year who genuinely wanted to come and work in my lab and was willing to take a bit of initiative. The scholarship we achieved between us was not great; we got £600 in living expenses for him and £400 in experimental costs for me, but at least working for £120 a week is better than working for free, and the student happened to have accommodation covered by a different scholarship and had a weekend job to supplement the award. Not great, but somewhat less unfair than simply taking on an intern who happens to have rich parents.
The project was really successful, right at the top end of what I hoped for. The student turned out to have a real aptitude for research as well as enthusiasm, in spite of having essentially no lab experience before now. (He's been too busy getting the degree of caring experience you need to get into medical school and have a competitive CV once you're in the programme. Besides, the undergraduate labs in our course are not meaningfully a preparation for research, they're recipe-following exercises designed to help illustrate concepts from the course.) The problem with running a summer project for a student with absolutely no lab experience was that I had to pretty much baby-sit him from 9 to 5 every day, I couldn't just get him set up and leave him to do his own thing as I would with a more experienced apprentice. So that meant I had to use the evenings and weekends to do all the other aspects of my job, because I can't actually get away with simply not answering any emails for a month or blowing off the planning for next term's teaching. And that meant I had only minimal time for DW; I was essentially in read-only mode and even that meant carving time out of sleep because I had more urgent things to do in most of the time I'm officially supposed to be awake.
I've also been utterly hopeless at fulfilling social obligations. There are several dear friends I've wanted to visit at weekends throughout the summer and I have just completely failed to do so, I didn't manage to write emails to deal with logistics and I didn't manage to free up enough weekends to overcome geography and see people even if I had been able to plan things. I feel like a really awful friend, particularly because several people have explicitly invited me to get together and I have simply not replied to their overtures, which really looks like brushing people off. I wish I'd even managed as much as a short email saying, I still love you but I'm mad busy, I'll get back to you when I can. I should say now, there is absolutely no-one I'm ignoring or avoiding intentionally, so if you haven't heard from me you can assume it's because I'm disorganized and definitely not because I don't like you.
The couple of social things I have managed are: a visit toangelofthenorth and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gwyddno, where I helped them move house and we had a really thrilling drive across the Brecon Beacons in alternating brilliant sunshine and dramatic torrential rain. And even though stressful packing and house-moving was going on we managed to have a surprisingly fun time together. There was jack's housecooling last weekend, which included some excellent conversations, a rare sighting of megamole, and bonding with alextfish and woodpijn's toddler. (I don't universally get on with kids that age, so I was pleased she seems to like me.)
And this week, after the summer project was winding down so I didn't have to be in the lab all day every day,highlyeccentric came to visit with her bf so that we could visit the Saxon gold exhibition. It was really cool to meet highlyeccentric in person; the afternoon felt very relaxedly social and not at all awkward. The gold itself, well. I saw it when it was a new discovery and they just had miscellaneous stuff, straight out of the ground and still covered in dirt and not really characterized at all, and it was awe-inspiring like that. Now they have a flashier exhibition; more of the pieces have been cleaned up, and they've taken some really good quality photos so you can see more detail than is visible to the unaided eye. But what they haven't done is provided informative explanations about the (admittedly still ongoing) research into the interpretation and context of the objects. Especially with a National Geographic film playing with the sound turned up a bit too loud, and the exhibits having iPads instead of plaques, it felt more like a superficial multimedia Experience than a museum exhibit. I felt the iPads were kind of wasted, really; it would have been a perfect opportunity to provide optional in-depth information without overwhelming people who just wanted to look at the bling. But they didn't, they just had glossy photos of some of the exhibits with no explanation at all. Luckily highlyeccentric and her bf are in fact Mediaevalists, and J happens to be an academic who has taught the Hoard in his course so he was able to fill us in on cutting edge scholarship beyond "look at the shiny".
I wanted to take everyone to dinner at Hanging Mangoes, but we were very disappointed and sad to discover that the restaurant is closed up and has eviction notices on the door, dated only a couple of weeks after I went there with the interfaith group for our end-of-term outing. So we ended up in Noah's instead, where we had three different and very good fish dishes, a swordfish grill, a tuna steak and a salmon and smoked haddock risotto. In between we had lots of conversation about anything and everything, so that helped to replenish my depleted stock of social energy.
Anyway, I have one day to myself (today) which I'm trying to use to catch up with DW a bit as well as doing some of the looming stack of abandoned chores. Inconveniently I'm working the Open Day tomorrow; we all have to do two weekend days a year and I signed up for this weekend months ago, before I realized it would be the day before I go away on holiday. Which brings me to the other point of this post: I'm away for two weeks from Monday, visitinghatam_soferet and rysmiel yay! I am really really looking forward to a holiday as well as seeing two of my favourite people who usually have far too much geography. And when I get back I go straight in to running High Holy Day services, so I might not get to continuing those conversations or writing those posts for a while yet. I'll probably have at least some limited internet access via borrowing my hosts' connections, but I likely won't be online much because I want to spend time with my people in physical reality.
- intersectionality and the causes you're not an activist for
- the post I promised pretty_panther about antisemitism
- mmmaybe religion and homophobia, but I'm not sure if this is actually a post yet
- introduction to epigenetics (I've been meaning to write this for years but it floated to the top again because I found myself explaining X-inactivation in
#dreamwidthrecently) - a proper discussion about alternative medicine, to follow up my rather flip comments from when I was being deliberately controversial
The main thing that's happened is that I managed to wrangle a summer student working in my lab for a month. Until this year, I've not been in a position to take on summer students, because that needs an ongoing project from them to be able to join in, as well as at least a small amount of money and I had neither. But taking on summer students is a really important way to get on the radar and convince the various departments I belong to that I'm worth having. It's also something I believe in; I would never have got into this career if I hadn't had the opportunity to do some summer work experience in labs both as a teenager and during my summer vacations as an undergrad.
So I was especially pleased that I managed to design a project and attract a medical student who is interested in a research career, and between us we won a scholarship so that his project was partially funded. The funding issue is horribly fraught; it's becoming increasingly the case that you have to do unpaid "internships" to get into pretty much any high-level career. But only very rich young people can afford to spend a summer working without pay; even if expenses are covered it means giving up the opportunity to actually earn money. I don't find this morally acceptable, partly because it excludes anyone who isn't rich from many careers, and partly because it essentially exploits even the people who are rich enough to do these internships. Why should they give up their labour for nothing more than nebulous "experience" or "CV points"? At the same time I don't actually have any money; I can't afford to pay someone an actual full-time salary to work in my lab over the summer, and I can't really even afford the reagents consumed in such a project (even if someone is willing to work for free) because I'm on such a shoe-string budget, I'd be effectively stealing from my PhD student if I put any money into a summer project.
So when students started approaching me asking for summer projects, I told them all the same thing, that I'd love to have them but don't have any money, so they'd have to look for scholarships. I was rather busy during summer project application season anyway, so I asked the students themselves to do the initial search for available funds, and promised I'd help them apply for anything they did find. I hadn't planned things this way, but it acted as a really effective triage mechanism, because the students who were just dutifully trying to accumulate CV points but weren't really serious about summer projects all melted away, leaving me with one particular second year who genuinely wanted to come and work in my lab and was willing to take a bit of initiative. The scholarship we achieved between us was not great; we got £600 in living expenses for him and £400 in experimental costs for me, but at least working for £120 a week is better than working for free, and the student happened to have accommodation covered by a different scholarship and had a weekend job to supplement the award. Not great, but somewhat less unfair than simply taking on an intern who happens to have rich parents.
The project was really successful, right at the top end of what I hoped for. The student turned out to have a real aptitude for research as well as enthusiasm, in spite of having essentially no lab experience before now. (He's been too busy getting the degree of caring experience you need to get into medical school and have a competitive CV once you're in the programme. Besides, the undergraduate labs in our course are not meaningfully a preparation for research, they're recipe-following exercises designed to help illustrate concepts from the course.) The problem with running a summer project for a student with absolutely no lab experience was that I had to pretty much baby-sit him from 9 to 5 every day, I couldn't just get him set up and leave him to do his own thing as I would with a more experienced apprentice. So that meant I had to use the evenings and weekends to do all the other aspects of my job, because I can't actually get away with simply not answering any emails for a month or blowing off the planning for next term's teaching. And that meant I had only minimal time for DW; I was essentially in read-only mode and even that meant carving time out of sleep because I had more urgent things to do in most of the time I'm officially supposed to be awake.
I've also been utterly hopeless at fulfilling social obligations. There are several dear friends I've wanted to visit at weekends throughout the summer and I have just completely failed to do so, I didn't manage to write emails to deal with logistics and I didn't manage to free up enough weekends to overcome geography and see people even if I had been able to plan things. I feel like a really awful friend, particularly because several people have explicitly invited me to get together and I have simply not replied to their overtures, which really looks like brushing people off. I wish I'd even managed as much as a short email saying, I still love you but I'm mad busy, I'll get back to you when I can. I should say now, there is absolutely no-one I'm ignoring or avoiding intentionally, so if you haven't heard from me you can assume it's because I'm disorganized and definitely not because I don't like you.
The couple of social things I have managed are: a visit to
angelofthenorth and gwyddno, where I helped them move house and we had a really thrilling drive across the Brecon Beacons in alternating brilliant sunshine and dramatic torrential rain. And even though stressful packing and house-moving was going on we managed to have a surprisingly fun time together. There was jack's housecooling last weekend, which included some excellent conversations, a rare sighting of megamole, and bonding with alextfish and woodpijn's toddler. (I don't universally get on with kids that age, so I was pleased she seems to like me.) And this week, after the summer project was winding down so I didn't have to be in the lab all day every day,
highlyeccentric came to visit with her bf so that we could visit the Saxon gold exhibition. It was really cool to meet highlyeccentric in person; the afternoon felt very relaxedly social and not at all awkward. The gold itself, well. I saw it when it was a new discovery and they just had miscellaneous stuff, straight out of the ground and still covered in dirt and not really characterized at all, and it was awe-inspiring like that. Now they have a flashier exhibition; more of the pieces have been cleaned up, and they've taken some really good quality photos so you can see more detail than is visible to the unaided eye. But what they haven't done is provided informative explanations about the (admittedly still ongoing) research into the interpretation and context of the objects. Especially with a National Geographic film playing with the sound turned up a bit too loud, and the exhibits having iPads instead of plaques, it felt more like a superficial multimedia Experience than a museum exhibit. I felt the iPads were kind of wasted, really; it would have been a perfect opportunity to provide optional in-depth information without overwhelming people who just wanted to look at the bling. But they didn't, they just had glossy photos of some of the exhibits with no explanation at all. Luckily highlyeccentric and her bf are in fact Mediaevalists, and J happens to be an academic who has taught the Hoard in his course so he was able to fill us in on cutting edge scholarship beyond "look at the shiny". I wanted to take everyone to dinner at Hanging Mangoes, but we were very disappointed and sad to discover that the restaurant is closed up and has eviction notices on the door, dated only a couple of weeks after I went there with the interfaith group for our end-of-term outing. So we ended up in Noah's instead, where we had three different and very good fish dishes, a swordfish grill, a tuna steak and a salmon and smoked haddock risotto. In between we had lots of conversation about anything and everything, so that helped to replenish my depleted stock of social energy.
Anyway, I have one day to myself (today) which I'm trying to use to catch up with DW a bit as well as doing some of the looming stack of abandoned chores. Inconveniently I'm working the Open Day tomorrow; we all have to do two weekend days a year and I signed up for this weekend months ago, before I realized it would be the day before I go away on holiday. Which brings me to the other point of this post: I'm away for two weeks from Monday, visiting
hatam_soferet and rysmiel yay! I am really really looking forward to a holiday as well as seeing two of my favourite people who usually have far too much geography. And when I get back I go straight in to running High Holy Day services, so I might not get to continuing those conversations or writing those posts for a while yet. I'll probably have at least some limited internet access via borrowing my hosts' connections, but I likely won't be online much because I want to spend time with my people in physical reality.