guess which opaque intersection of planes just presented some WORM SCIENCE to a bunch of WORM SCIENTISTS
it’s me. i did
well my boss looked at the (¾ths of a) poster i was able to assemble by myself and seemed to be of the opinion that it was a good presentation of the data/an interesting story which is holy shit an unbelievable relief to me, i’ve never assembled a poster before, i have no idea what i’m doing
like on some level i’m aware that i’m actually possessed of some degree of expertise as far as my research subject is concerned, and also that i do in fact know how to write and frame a narrative, but i’m so constantly aware of all the ways in which i am a total knowledge&experience-free infant that it’s hard to put any weight on it
but oh my god, i’m actually kind of good at biology, and the thing is i really love it, i like figuring out how to think about these problems and i like thinking about complex systems and talking them over with other people and i like working with data and microscopes and i especially like figuring out how to communicate things about this to other people, i can actually do??? my job????? in the field i am planning to pursue even more years of specialized training in? so uh that’s a relief lmao
anyway bragging. so the volunteer thing i do, i’ve maybe mentioned before, is for high school & college students, selected on various axes including being underrepresented in science, to do a summer cancer research project in a lab on my campus; and my role is to act as a peer mentor, meaning for ~¼th of the students i’m their most direct contact on the program side/a general reference person for issues w their research, or anything even vaguely associated such as college apps etc, incl after the program ends if they want to stay in contact/most specifically there to help them learn to present, publicly, about science. i also was in this program the summer before i started college, and my peer mentor was useless– i saw him once, got like two emails, received functionally no support. (he is no longer a volunteer). since then i’ve been a mentor every year so this will be my third.
and anyway, i was at the start-of-program meeting, and we were discussing the role/expectations for volunteers for the new people, and the longest-running volunteer, who started the year before i was even a student in the program, said that last summer he had shifted from emailing his group of students once every week or two to check in as he’d been doing in years previous, to instead having lunch with them weekly. and that they had had dramatically increased engagement/attendance/had been more likely to come to him with their issues in the program, and done it sooner, than when he’d just been contacting them by email.
and the thing is that, as he actually mentioned in passing, i’m the one who started doing that– bc of the time commitment involved, weekly meetings were never pitched to us as an expectation of the role or even really suggested as a way of doing it; i introduced that, in my first year mentoring, because i remembered how hard a time i had not being engaged/comfortable bringing up my problems in my lab in the program, and wanted to be way more hands-on and more of a resource for my students than the suggested level of contact seemed to involve. so: i, an at the time 19-y/o w no formal teaching or mentoring experience, tried a thing, it worked well, and the highly-experienced late-stage grad student picked it up from me the next year, and now has decided to continue with it and recommend it to the organizers & other volunteers as the best way to do things.
i feel so good about that! i feel so good about that. i am not only above-and-beyond engaged/committed to this thing i care about, but i figured out a better way to make it work, and now other people in the program are also doing it so that it can succeed more and be more helpful overall. what an uncomplicatedly good thing!
singular bright side so far: skype chat revealing other students in fellowship to be majority women, one (currently talking) clearly knows what she’s talking about and has a blue-green bob and a camo patterned men’s jacket, so you know
meeting them this summer might be nice
hgksfjhs i have the first meeting for my fellowship cohort today and we have each recorded a ten minute “podcast” discussing a seminal paper from our labs and are supposed to listen to each podcast and then discuss it for five minutes
and for the past month and a half of knowing about this i’ve just been like “yeah, ok, a silly activity, clearly not designed for the people who’ve already been in their field of research for a while, but sure, i’ll suffer thru it for money, maybe it’ll even be interesting”
except that i just finally counted how many students there are and mathed it out and i will be in this meeting for AT LEAST FOUR HOURS
FOUR
HOURS
IT STARTS AT 7PM
WE ARE MEANT TO SPEND IT LISTENING THROUGH EACH PERSON’S RECORDING AND THEN DISCUSSING IT
and that’s if there are no technical difficulties! not only does it require successful audio file playback– fifteen separate instances of successful audio playback– but the majority of the other students will be skyping in from hong kong
Winter, image of age, who like a great belly Eats up the whole year’s substance and heartlessly Swallows the fruit of our unstinted labor, Had gone into hiding deep below the earth. For Spring had arrived and driven him under. Spring Source of the world’s life and glory of the year, Had returned, and was wiping away the ugly traces Of greedy winter and restoring to ailing fields Their former loveliness.
A purer air was now beginning to herald Fine weather. Plants stirred in the zephyr’s path Thrusting out from their roots the slender tips Which had long lain hidden in the earth’s blind womb, Shunning the frost they hate. Spring smiled In the leaves of the woodland, the lush grass on the slopes And the bright sward of the cheerful meadows.
But this little patch which lies facing east In the small open courtyard before my door Was full—of nettles! All over My small piece of land they grew, their barbs Tipped with a smear of tingling poison.
What should I do? So thick were the ranks That grew from the tangle of roots below, They were like the green hurdles a stableman skillfully Weaves of pliant osiers when the horses’ hooves Rot in the standing puddles and go soft as fungus.
So I put it off no longer. I set to with my mattock And dug up the sluggish ground. From their embraces I tore those nettles though they grew again and again. I destroyed the tunnels of the moles that haunt dark places, And back to the realms of light I summoned the worms.
Then my small patch was warmed by winds from the south And the sun’s heat. That it should not be washed away, We faced it with planks and raised it in oblong beds A little above the level ground. With a rake I broke the soil up bit by bit, and then Worked in from on top the leaven of rich manure.
Some plants we grow from seed, some from old stocks We try to bring back to the youth they knew before.
must a sport be entertaining to watch? 