Reactivating
Mixing Metaphors with Meaning
As a budding biologist, I am familiar with the way metaphor is employed to effectively communicate scientific concepts. For example, the molecule of the moment is messenger RNA, whose name represents the fact that mRNA is a transient molecule that transports information from the genome to the ribosome (the protein-making machinery), where it is translated […]
How to hang in there
For one grad student, holding onto their scientific dreams involves more literal grip strength than you might think!
I was skimming the schedule of a conference last week when I saw the last thing any 6th year PhD student wants to see: a title that could describe my project, on someone else’s abstract. I froze with dread. Did I just get scooped? No: the other project used a different experimental approach in a […]
Whales of quals
Prioritizing my mental health over qualifying exams
This is my story of how I prioritized my mental health over qualifying exams. When I was studying for quals1, my phone kept autocorrecting quals to whales. I thought it was funny and poetic, because the stress of quals felt like a whale on me. Before reading this, I want to mention that what you […]
Escape MIT for a weekend
My favorite weekend getaways around New England
What will you do if you have a weekend free? Netflix? Video games? How about getting out of your (dorm) room and travelling to another state? During my undergraduate study, I spent one seminar in a small town north of Boston doing a co-op (i.e., a 6-month internship). Away from campus, I was free of […]
Nurturing yourself by nurturing some greens
How growing an indoor vegetable garden from scratch became a life-affirming engineering project during the COVID lockdowns
Grad student life is filled with significant transitions like qualification exams, new roommates, selecting PIs and committee members, and more. But the uncertainties of grad school life suddenly became much more prominent with COVID-19. As an experimentalist who does my research in a lab, I was incredibly lost, especially in the first few months of […]
