These days I'm a graduate student, and I'm finding that I have less and less time to post.

I'm doing well; my research hasn't made any obvious, tangible progress yet, but I'm slowly getting there...working on it bit by bit. I have a great group and a great boss and really that seems to make all the difference. The classes are going ok and TAing is fine, but I'm just swamped with work to do all the time as is the graduate student lifestyle.

The more I read about the field I'm studying in grad school, the more I realize that my knowledge of this field is so ridiculously small.

It's not that I didn't expect this to be the case. Generally the more you learn, the more overwhelmed you are by how much you just don't know.

But these systems all have a lot of nuance, and it's a lot to wrap my head around. I assume much of the details will become second nature as I dive into projects and am surrounded by the terminology in lab meetings and have been reading these papers for many years...but as it stands I realize that I just don't know much at all.

In the past all my projects have been constrained by time; usually a summer, a semester, or (for my undergraduate thesis) an academic school year. This means that there is very little to loose, because it's obscene to expect that anyone gets results in 3-9 months. If you do, you're lucky. If you don't, you learn from the experience and that's what it's mainly about anyway at the undergraduate level.

Graduate school is going to be different, though. In graduate school, there's going to be time to see through a project to completion. I'm not going to abandon my babies half-finished. Of course, there's the whole idea of never really completing a project...and always having a follow-up project, but there will be five, maybe more years to make it work. And this is exciting and scary, because you never really have the excuse "oh I didn't have enough time to make it work."

It either gets finished or abandoned, I guess.

One of the few ways I know how to lift myself out of depression is to go to lab.

Of course, this strategy is somewhat less effective if you're working and working and never seeing any results...but even the act of working towards a result can help me sometimes.

I was feeling overwhelmed about various personal things in my life, many of them related to anxieties about moving and starting a new phase in my life. Right now I'm kind of still working in my undergrad lab in a very low-expectation, lackadaisical kind of way, and I very nearly didn't go in at all because I was feeling kind of shitty.

I finally got up the energy to go in at around 3 pm to check up on some stuff, and I realized a ligation had worked when I screened it by PCR. It was one of those surprise ligations where only one colony on the plate grows, but that one transformant is the right transformat. It was enough to lift me out of my funk.

So...after dinner I came back and started working on this more. Re-doing the ligation that didn't work, and transforming the miniprep of the ligation that did work into an expression strain. I'm going to be here until 10 pm. It's totally illogical for me to be working like this. I should be coming in at 9 like a normal person. And for that matter, even if I do get a soluble expression of this protein, I'm leaving town in less than two weeks. There's not enough time for me to play with this.

But I can't help myself. I have to do that transformation. I have to see.

It's an addiction.

So one thing that I've run into lately in applying to graduate school and trying to decide where to go next year is that--because I'm interested in natural product biosynthesis, especially polyketides--this has made my search for a lab a lot more focused than many people in that in general, I'm looking at specific PIs and specific labs. None of the places I'm considering has more than one or two people who do what I want to do.

I find that I have to defend my interests a lot. "Are you really not going to get sick of polyketides?"

This weirds me out in some ways because really what fascinates me about science are the questions. Of course I like going in lab and trying to troubleshoot problems and I like working with my hands, but I don't feel wedded to techniques which I have always been able to pick up as they are required and which are constantly changing anyway. If I were to say "I'm sure I want to be a crystallographer" or "I'm sure I want to be a synthetic organic chemist" I don't think anyone would question me as much as people do right now. I want to do any techniques I can to explore the chemical/biochemical questions I'm interested in--which is how can nature effect such fantastic chemistry with such extreme stereocontrol from very simple molecules in a modular fashion? How are these small molecules that have captured organic chemists' fascination from the start synthesized? How can we learn the "rules" of biological catalysis for small molecules?

There's a lot of chemical biology out there that I think is just gimmicky crap. This is one of the areas of chemical biology that truly absolutely has to be interdisciplinary. It requires a solid understanding of the logic of organic chemistry and a working understanding of how biological systems work to do. It absolutely has to be that way, and there's no interdisciplinary for the sake of being interdisciplinary and capitalizing on chemistry-biology interface grants and nanogoldparticleconjugatedtocrapplusaclickreaction in cells. There are many many ways to approach these questions from synthesis to crystallography to genomics to isotope labeled feeding experiments to mass spec and on and on and on...endless applications of areas of chemistry that I like in their own right.

So anyway, I'm sick of defending myself on this front. I've been exploring various fields of chemistry and biology and working in different types of labs since I was 18 years old. I've wandered around in my coursework. And now I think I've finally settled on something that's right for me.