Yr 1 of a PhD (2003)

I used to (and still occasionally do) write mass emails to all the people in my address book. This used to piss them off endlessly, and now I see why. I dug this email out from way back, and I present this gem of bad writing to you.

I used to be one angry kid back then.


So you've been wondering what I've been up to?

PhD, Hopkins, Baltimore. Waste of time and effort.

For all the work (yes, there was lots), I barely broke the curve in most exams (for the record, I didnt get a single A+ ; these were handed out to 5 people out of some 180, and we had about 15 asian students. So I didnt even try.) but I was enthusiastic enough in class that people invented a card game where the backbenchers would bet on most questions asked, worst dressed, loudest in class etc. I'm proud to say I was a star card ("most questions asked" category). Always the popular one...

Not so popular with the TA.

Me: Uh, you know, I could give you something really nice if you give me an A on that exam...

She: Scram,kiddo.

Me (persistent): Ahem, you know what they say about Indian men...

She: Yep. I know. THEY'RE TINY. HAHAHAHAAAAAA.

Me: Sod off.

I got a B-.


Still, as part of a PhD, you get to do a lot of lab work in addition to cramming or meaningless exams. I'm doing Immunology, so this has involved (at different times) staring at flourescent cells for hours on end on a microscope in a dark subterranian cubbyhole, injecting afore mentioned cells into the tails of very uncooperative mice - this, being a novice, I did horrendously - and then analysing survival curves, which basically means you watch the mice waste away and die a painful death as a result of your experiment. You note which day each one died, and plot these data. All this will somehow magically become a cure for cancer few years from now.

In addition to all this, there is this steady stream of

- talks (where you go for food and sleep/pick your nose for an hour as some idiot blathers on about how he's been wasting his time and his boss' money and ended up with crap results anyway),

- presentations (where you watch ingrate colleagues stuff their faces with free food and sleep/pick noses in full view for an hour as you try to explain to the imbeciles on about how hard youve been working and utilising your boss' resources in the pursuit of higher scientific goals),

- journal clubs (all of us pseudointellectuals trash some poor sod's data)

- lab meetings (we trash each others data, but more politely)

- happy hours (sad meetings of lab rats where we drown our sorrows - mostly ruined experiments and singledom issues - in an ocean of alcohol to the sound of 80s pop) These are the only gettogethers that last way more than an hour - unless you have a gel running - and where you learn more about anything than anywhere else. Lurid gossip about co-workers? Happy hour's your place, baby. Boss ran out of money? This is where you cry your heart out. Plus of course, all the women look vastly prettier after 4 beers...

So thats pretty much how a first year in a grad program in an elite university in the US looks, academically.

Right now, I'm settling in one of these labs (the only one that would tolerate me), working on something called "antigen presentation". The learning curve is steep. Of course, I've made a great start - I screwed up my labmate's experiment by swapping labeled tubes (honest mistake, I swear), and I also got caught by my boss looking at a pic of a naked woman - an attachment sent lovingly by one of my moron middle school friends. So clearly, they love me here already.

And I got 5 more years of this.