This a “public service announcement”.

State College happens to have some fun things going on this summer and it seems that sometimes being a full time scientist doesn’t leave a lot of room for extracurriculars. Or, if you do get some free time maybe you don’t keep a pulse on local happenings and might miss out on some summer opportunities. That’s right, I just used FOMO to get you to go out and do something fun. You’re welcome.

Here are a few highlights in the area for those that felt the first chill of fall in the air yesterday and are thinking about making the most of these last few days of nice weather. There is a strong bias toward what interests me (music and local food), so please add your own favorites as comments. Let’s make plans to meet up and enjoy some summer fun before students return!

Thursday nights until September there is Wingfest at Tussey Mountain with music at 5:30pm (and hikes in Rothrock anytime), First Friday at Downtown State College every Friday, Friday night concerts 7:30pm on the Lemont Green, Farmer’s markets all over the place most days of the week (including Tuesdays  2-6 at the Boalsburg Military Museum and even through the winter indoors, and Wednesdays in Lemont 3-7pm), Farmfest this weekend in nearby Centre Hall, music on Sundays at Webster’s cafe, Shaver’s creek raptor center is cool and had and nearby hikes, and lots of other fun places to hike, birdwatch, or swim.

I hear work-life balance is important…

Do you want a meaningful life or a happy one?

Though the meaning of life might be a little heavy for the lab blog, I’d still recommend reading this article. One of the central themes of the piece is that although happiness and meaningfulness overlap, they are not the same. As doctors of philosophy or on the way to this distinction, a little philosophical discussion seems appropriate for the blog.

If you aren’t inclined to read the whole thing, search for the word “research” on the page – it’s about us. Choosing to devote a majority of our lives to conducting research, we have chosen a life rich in meaning. The flipside is that because experiments often do not go as planned, our collective foray into the great unknown is inherently stressful, which can decrease happiness. Happiness was described as more of a fleeting and perhaps empty enjoyment – one comparison is the difference between a working life and a life after retirement. Retirees are often happy, but didn’t feel their lives were as meaningful as when working. (As an aside, often retirees will volunteer their time – an activity that enriches the feeling of living a meaningful life).

Just something to think about, and maybe discuss at the pub.

I am told that everyone in life is a storyteller. Regardless of skill set or career path, we share a commonality: a social compulsion to have a story. Our histories and future directions motivate us to progress, justify our actions and remind us of why we continue on the paths we are on.

The way people phrase this notion varies with perspective. I bought my first car a week before moving to State College and car shopping has enlightened me on the brutal honesty of what the car salesperson told me: we are all sales(wo)men.  Naive and ignorant of how the car business operates, I will first tell you what it is like to buy a car without an idea of what a car costs. It begins with looking at cars with price tags, wondering whether a car will be in a grad student’s price range. “Give me a number,” the car dealer will say. And if you are willing to ask stupid questions, you will ask (as I have done): why not tell me what the car actually costs and explain to me what is a fair and reasonable price and then I will agree with you and pay whatever exorbitant sum that may be. When I asked this, the car sales lady told me that that is not how the system works. She laughed when I looked surprised that the inexperienced, virgin-carbuyer would be naming a price for an item of which she has no idea of the value. She told me life is like this: we are all salespeople. We are all selling something. When I told her I was a scientist, she told me that car dealing is like that too. One person sells cars, another person sells their ideas. Whether we are selling our research, or our science, to an audience/a publication/the public, or selling cars to a future driver, we are still required to play the same game. She may say we are salespeople, but I say we are storytellers; perhaps they are same thing but with a different spin.

I am new to the lab (and excited to be here!) and I am coming to a place with stories embedded in the people already here and stories that will develop during my time. Finding my self in new places and new life stages I like to mull over a story that I think applies to most situations in life: the allegory of the long spoons. Maybe I am trying to “sell” you a perspective with this story, but I’d prefer to say I am storytelling.

The allegory goes something like this (in my mutated version):

A man is walking. As he continues walking, he gets farther and farther from home and loses track of where he is going. Eventually the man walks straight into hell. Arriving in hell he is surprised at what he sees. There is a long banquet table filled with food, centerpieces, whatever you can imagine is at a great holiday dinner. There are people sitting around the table and though he wonders how this could be hell, when he gets closer he sees that despite their surroundings, everyone at the table is miserable. Their bodies are withered and their faces, tormented. He walks closer and notices something else is odd: everyone has long wooden spoons for arms. Where most people have shoulder joints, they have the tops of spoon handles and where most people have fingers they have spoon ends, and they are entirely lacking elbows. Faced with a table full of things to eat, they are unable to feed themselves as their spoon-hands can never reach their mouths. Recognizing the hell he is in, the man continues walking.

The man walks until he reaches heaven. Arriving in heaven he is surprised at what he sees: heaven looks exactly like hell. A long banquet table, good things to eat, people gathered, sitting just the same as the people in hell. He looks at their arms and again the people have long spoon-arms. He gets closer and realizes that one thing is different. The people here are happy; there is conversation, their faces are smiling and their bodies are not starved or decaying. Wondering how this can be that the people are not miserable in the face of the same obstacles as hell, he ventures nearer to the table. The people here are clever. Elbow-less spoons are too long to feed one’s own mouth but just long enough to feed the person opposite. Each person takes turns feeding another person. The situation of hell is overcome by the people in heaven. Seeing this and realizing that heaven’s approach is a simple solution to the problems in hell, the man runs back to hell to share with the people the secret to solving their problems. “Feed the person across from you and he will reciprocate,” the man says to a person sitting in hell. The person responds “I will never feed someone until they feed me first.” With this attitude shared by everyone at the table, no one can change the situation. The man realizes that heaven and hell are not necessarily defined by the situation one is in but the response to that situation and how we deal, collectively, with the problems at hand.

I like to think of this story because it reminds me of two things: (1) there is no such thing as a stressful situation, only a stressful response to a situation, and (2) most problems require the admittance that we cannot operate entirely by ourselves. We need to work together, recognizing our dependency on others at times. I’m hoping this applies to a new life event (hmmm…a new job in a new place with new people?) and that it can remind me that despite what I have been told about the stress of completing a PhD and potential obstacles facing a young scientist, attitude and perspective can contribute to the experience in terms of whether we find ourselves in a situation like heaven, or one slightly less pleasant.

Thanks for welcoming me to the lab!

…that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone? Or in my case, going. This always happens to me, and right around this time too. For instance, it wasn’t until two months before moving here that I realised how much I absolutely loved Edinburgh and was going to miss it terribly.

A very sad Nicole on her last day living in Edinburgh

Today I had a surprising realisation: being a postdoc is pretty great. Courtney and I spent an hour talking to grad students who thought that we might have something useful to say. We were invited to a GWIS (Graduate Women In Science, although I noted a Graduate Man there too) ‘Inside the Scientist’s Studio’ event, where they invite two scientists and ask them various questions about getting through grad school, applying for jobs, finding balance, etc. They seemed interested in what we had to say, and we both seemed to find relevant pieces of advice in our brains. I got excited about the possibility that I’d actually have something to say shortly before heading over for the event.

Grad school, for me, was all about not having a clue what I was doing. My postdocs haven’t been much different, actually, but one fundamental thing has changed: I now have a PhD. I managed to make it through the whole process and largely with an absentee (yet endlessly helpful and supportive) supervisor. I can say that I have clearly achieved something. Naturally, this doesn’t stop me from devising theories about how my brain has deteriorated since then and I may never be able to do anything again. But there is some information stored up in that decaying brain, and it’s possible that I know some of it better than almost anyone else.

So, as a postdoc I have slightly more confidence in the fact that I do have a (small) clue about what’s going on and I don’t yet have the enormous burdens — teaching, sourcing funding, managing people and personalities, to name a few of the most terrifying — that come with being a PI.

Up until today, I thought being a PhD student was better than being a postdoc, mostly because it’s absolutely clear what you need to do (hint: finish that thesis!). But now I realise that having fewer bounds on what you need to do, as well as having some ideas stored up about what you’d like to do and the time to actually do it, is pretty freaking awesome. I’m glad I didn’t rush off after being offered a faculty job, but now I wish that I couldn’t count down my remaining postdoc weeks using only my fingers.

UPDATE: I’ve just read the post from Becky Timms and it seems that I’ve simply managed to rephrase her Point #3. Well, folks, it must be true!

At some point Andrew was going around with a video camera asking people why they do science. He actually never asked me with the camera, but I thought about my answer in case he ever did (see Eleanore’s post).

I do science for the same reason that a painter paints, a musician plays, and a dancer dances.  For me conducting science is an act of pure joy.  When I design an experiment or think on a problem I feel a glorious clarity. It feels certain that I’m doing what I was made for. I feel my purpose align with my practice and a deep calm comes over my often scrambled brain. Science brings me great happiness.

For me this sense of peace is addictive. I can even get a contact high when listening to other people talk about doing science.  I just finished leading a graduate student seminar and (despite my boss’s distaste for graduate student course work) found this to be an extremely rewarding experience. These students are in the earliest part of their scientific careers.  It was fantastic to watch them debate ideas with each other. At times, I literally had to sit on my hands and bite my lip to stop from interjecting. They are just starting and I am excited for them.

So for all the bullshit, the hideous funding, the long hours, and an upsetting interaction between my confidence and many of the realities of this line of work, I’m hooked. I am posting this sentiment to our lab blog for a particularly selfish reason: I can easily look at it whenever I need to.