We're All Insecure Here

Greetings from that annoying place inside your head that constantly makes you feel self-conscious!

I've said before that I can't rightly express how much I'm looking forward to getting back to school.  This is both true and not.  Along with the excitement of goals finally being realized comes the knowledge that I'm realizing them about 5 or 6 years behind most of these new students.  And that's truly daunting.

Throughout my academic life (thanks in part to where my birthday falls along the academic calendar), I've always been the youngest in the class.  This didn't matter so much in grade school or even middle school, but it became apparent (and a nuisance!) once I got into high school.  By sophomore year, all of my friends were driving, and boy I wished that I could be there, too.  Senior year, everyone was turning 18 (which was a big deal since it was a presidential election year).  I was always at least a year behind and wished I could be older.

During college, things evened out a bit.  There were a few other people I met who were in the same situation as me, and some who had skipped years and gotten to college at 16.  It took a little adjustment to get used to the fact that I was no longer automatically the youngest of my group of friends or study partners (though this was usually still the case), but it wasn't a big issue.

Now, having taken a five-year hiatus from school, I'm finding the age gap to be more of an age chasm.  My "peers" are, by and large, kids who have been able to (legally) drink for maybe a year.  This thought has been stewing in my mind, making me ever more hesitant to go back and be the old lady of the class.  I had thoroughly convinced myself that the rest of my incoming class would be far smarter and more prepared than I could ever hope to be, and that I would end up being left in their collective dust after a couple quarters.  But then something happened that put my mind a little more at ease.

Yesterday, I ended up spending a good chunk of my day showing another new student around.  She is going to be starting up her projects in our lab over the summer as well and needed some orientation, and I was the one here.  I gave her the quick driving tour of University-area Riverside, some tips on where to eat (and where not to eat), and showed off some of the secured labs where my projects are running.  She's fresh out of her undergrad and very bright.  And so... young.

Spending several hours with her yesterday afternoon drove that point home in a way my overactive brain had never processed before.  Yes, she's "on track" and going straight into grad school; yes, she's obviously very smart.  But she's also very green.  She's full of book-learning, but has very little applied knowledge.  She's full of questions as to how the world of academic research works, and how to function in a lab setting.

And that's the advantage I have.  I doubt I ever appreciated my five years as a lab tech more than I do at this moment.  I may be nervous about starting back with classes, surrounded by kids half a decade my junior, but  I am completely at home in the lab.  I've been doing research on my own for so long now that I don't have to check with someone whenever I encounter a problem with one of my experiments.  I don't have to go through training (and hope I remember everything) on experimental design, setup, and how to use basic equipment or methods, all while loading up my plate with my core curriculum.

Classes will still be challenging, but realizing just how much more knowledge than a majority of my new peers I have makes it seem a little better.  During my first finals week as a grad student, I'll be able to focus on my exams, not staying in the lab late into the night trying to correct an experiment I accidentally set up wrong the week before because I didn't know the proper procedure.  And while others are trying to figure out exactly what direction they want their project and potential research to go in, I'll be writing up my thesis.  Thank you very much.

So, good-bye annoying place inside my head that constantly makes me feel self-conscious!  I'm sure I'll stop by for a visit from time to time, but I'm planning on spending most of my grad school days near that place in my head that makes me feel like I can do this, after all.  Good-bye grad school granny.  As River Song so eloquently put it, "Oooh hello, Mrs. Robinson!"

Having a field day

Greetings from beautiful Manhattan Beach!

Unfortunately, it's not as glamorous as the name would imply.  Instead of a beautiful, scenic beach with palm trees gently wafting in a perfect first-day-of-summer breeze, I got a sweltering downtown parking lot surrounded by a sea of asphalt.

Sure it was hot and a long drive through hours of LA traffic, but I'm not complaining; it got me out of my dark little hole and I got to experience the sun on my face and shoulders for several hours, instead of minutes as I walked from the lab to the neighboring building (or vice versa).

Today's expedition was spent hunting down an elusive insect that I'll be testing in August.  Along with a couple techs from the lab, I was able to gather up several hundred adult insects from a tree in the middle of a strip mall (Urban Entomology: We Have Exotic Destinations!) that I can now mate in a controlled environment so that I have a large population to utilize once my experiments begin.

I really do love fieldwork.  I am never as satisfied as when I've spent the whole day outdoors doing research, sweating, and getting sunburned.  All in all, it was a good day, and we were able to find exactly what we were looking for.  Something I'm still getting used to, though, is the public interaction.  Since we were working in a strip mall right outside one of the more popular shops, we had plenty of curious patrons stop and ask why we were shoving ladders into a planter full of waist-high lavender, climbing into the tree and shaking things off the branches into small buckets.  Thankfully, one of my coworkers is far more social than I am, so she was able to field a majority of the questions while I just stayed in the back and continued to beat on the tree with my stick.

There was one thing that perplexed me, though (and this is not the first or even second time this has happened): most of the people that stopped to ask what we were doing had no idea what my coworker was talking about (this is not the perplexing part, FYI), but they all listened politely, since they did ask, and then every one of them nodded and said, sincerely, "Wow, thanks for doing what you do." (This was the perplexing part.)  Not to bee (too) cynical, but this is really never the reaction I expect.  Honestly, I would think reactions like "Oh, interesting." or "That's cool." or "Huh..." or even a blank stare would be more common.  But it seems like, without fail, people seem to pick up on the fact that this is important research, even if they don't understand exactly what it is.  I mean, I know I'm doing important work, I guess I just don't really expect other people to understand it's important, too.

Then, there are the people that try to pass off as knowing exactly what you're talking about (I'm looking at you, fast-food-server-lady we met at lunch).  And they're just funny.

Pro tip: instead of acting like you're super smart (like looking at the cage with the clear top and saying, smugly, "Those are plants, aren't they?  I studied those when I went to college.") admit you're not entirely sure on the topic, but you're interested and want to know more.  Otherwise you just end up looking like an idiot to those people who actually do know what they're talking about.  And then they laugh all the way home and write a blog about it.

And I think I'll leave it there for today; I've plants to tend and bugs to mate now that I'm back in my little hole.  Maybe I'll see daylight again someday...

You're In!

Hi! I'm Aidan. I'm a gamer, a total fantasy & sci-fi geek, and generally a world class nerd. I love to bake (but more on that later). And I'm a recently admitted Masters candidate at UC Riverside.

For the past several years, I've worked as a lab technician. It wasn't always (okay, it was rarely) the most glamorous job in the world, but it was a steady paycheck when the economy got all wibbly-wobbly, and I kept telling myself that it was only a temporary deal anyways. Just until I got into grad school. Yep, any day now I would be done with lab chores and on to research that I was actually interested in... aaaany time now...

I spent the years just biding my time. I would be lying if I said it was a waste of time --don't get me wrong, I really did learn a LOT, and got tons of research experience besides-- but every Fall, as I watched all the new grad students infiltrating campus, I couldn't help feeling a little pang of desperation that I wasn't among their ranks, on this campus or anywhere else. 

But now my time has finally come. I was somehow lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time to take up the project that will get me through this leg of grad school. After half a decade of being stagnant, I find myself hurtling forward at breakneck speed (which I'll admit is a little terrifying) toward reaching my dusty yet still-intact goals.

I don't think I'll ever forget the first time I read my acceptance letter (or rather, acceptance email nowadays): "We are pleased to welcome you into the Entomology graduate program as a Dean's Distinguished Fellow..." Wow. Me? Distinguished? Two years' full funding plus stipend?  All the rejection letters from previous years seemed to just melt away (except for CSUSD, that one hurt).

So now I'm on my way, but I'm predicting my road to enlightenment will also drive me a bit insane. So this is my SOS to the world, my message in a bottle.

Greetings from Grad School! Weather's beautiful, wish you were here!