Fresh Literature, Daily!

(NOTE: This really wasn’t very funny near the end. I apologize, but it felt good to talk about it. On Monday we resume with stupid jokes and laughing at dogs.)

And here we are at the thrilling conclusion of The Shumate Guide To Graduate School! Will I get my Ph.D.? Will I get a job? You already know the answers, but read on anyway!

I had already spent five years in graduate school, gleaning what data I could from instruments that spent more time being broken than not. I knew that my time would be over soon, but I didn’t understand what circumstances would finally push me through the door. My graduate advisor was more than willing to give me a little incentive.

“Well, I’m out of money, you need to get a job.”

But I couldn’t get a job! I still had a dissertation to write, and teaching positions to apply for! Thankfully, another professor had some money available, and he hired me as a sort of graduate student mercenary: research for coin. I would work mornings in his lab and spend afternoons writing my dissertation.

The dissertation. It strikes fear into many the heart of a graduate student. I had to take a seemingly-unconnected set of data and build it into a coherent document. I did what any wise scholar would do: I put a lot of graphs into as many pages as possible and wrote around it. I ordered the graphs using the reliable method of putting the prettiest ones first. I also had lots of sentences that began like “Figure 1 obviously shows the importance of the experiment, in that Figure 1 clearly illustrates the relationship seen in Figure 1, namely that Figure 1 is indeed, in fact a graph that shows…”

This is the most important lesson in graduate school: you can never repeat yourself too much.

You can never repeat yourself too much.

When I was finished, I had a 150-page document that my advisor and I proofread. And proofread again. And finally proofread a third time, fixing mistakes we made the first two times. The thing was ready to print and distribute to my committee.

The committee had a few weeks to look at the dissertation, and then we convened for the defense. “Defense” is far too mild a word for it: I was locked into a room with five men who all had Ph.D.s, and they were intent on finding reasons for me not to get one. It wasn’t being mean-spirited, they just wanted to make sure that they didn’t let any old goober into their club. I spent four hours defending my work. At one point I think I started crying a little bit. But it was over, and we had drinks and congratulations.

Just in time for the money to run out and for me to take one of the first jobs available.

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Part 2 of The Shumate Guide to Graduate School saw me struggle through classes that, while objectively designed to be understood by human beings, might as well have been presented in Klingon. I now present my journey through chemical research.

I was finally in the lab. There were all sorts of new instruments to play with, new solutions to make, and all kinds of research papers to read. I sat down with my advisor to get my first assignment. I’d already read a few papers he’d published, so I had a decent idea of what to expect.

“You’re going to use the STM.” Oh boy! The STM, or scanning tunneling microscope, was the scientific equivalent of Santa leaving you a Nintendo. You could actually take pictures of molecules with it. My first day, and I was already on the cutting edge!

“Great! When can I start?”
“As soon as you fix the STM.”

And thus, my career as a researcher was interrupted as I became a mechanic. The STM wasn’t a complicated instrument: it was a small measuring device that hooked to a computer. The actual microscope sat in a dark box, suspended by bungie cords to eliminate vibrations from the outside. There was a set of instructions under the computer. Awesome, I thought, I get to actually see the inner workings of this instrument!

I’ve never been a good mechanic, and I didn’t magically grow engineering prowess, sitting in front of the STM. The manual was obviously translated from Japanese, via Russian, into English, and it made no sense. I did what I do in every fix-it situation: I jiggled every wire I could find. Thankfully, one of the wires WAS loose. I put it back in, start up the instrument, and it started imaging.

“Hey boss! I fixed it!” And in only one afternoon!
“Just wait.” I would grow to hate that phrase.
“Wait?” What, was it going to spontaneously break?
“You have to have absolutely no vibrations to get good images. That means there can be nobody in the building.”
“Nobody in the building? But there’ll be people in here all day.”
“Until about 2:00 in the morning, yeah.”
“It’s 1:30 in the afternoon, now! I didn’t bring dinner…”

And so I sat, for twelve hours, to get one good image. I showed it to my boss the next day, and he was somewhat pleased. “I need at least five more of these.” And there went all of my nights for the next week. But, that was over, and I was onto something else.

Another instrument to use, another one to fix before I could use it. And they got harder to fix: I once spent four months fixing an instrument that I had to use for five minutes. And it broke again as soon as I was finished. I wasn’t getting a degree in chemistry as much as a lesson in instrument repair.

I got some data during that time, though. I never thought to actually think about what that data might mean, I was just happy to see some numbers. The last year of my graduate career made me pay for that mistake. It was time to write my dissertation, and decide just how badly I wanted that Ph.D.

Oh yeah, and I had to get a real job. That part was crap, too.

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And now we’re at Part 2 of The Shumate Guide To Graduate School. Part 1 was all about the orientation. That’s over, now it’s time to get researchin’!

If you fully believed that, go smack yourself with a two-by-four until you can’t hold the board anymore. Sure, there were a few gifted grad students who’d already found a lab and somehow managed to sneak in the time to do some research, but most of us were bogged down by a heavy class load.

Classes? In graduate school? Who’d have thought, right? But we had to take classes according to what field of chemistry we were going into. I was setting myself up to be a physical chemist, and that meant loads of classes that looked more like Calculus V than actual chemistry.

My first class sounded easy enough: Atoms and Molecules. Hey, didn’t we cover this on the first day of general chemistry? Heck, I knew about atoms and molecules in high school: atoms were itty bitty things, and they combined together like Legos to build bigger things, like ammonia, DNA and a dump truck. VROOOOOM this is gonna be so easy, I thought!

Then I got the book, and wondered if I’d suffered from spontaneous illiteracy. Sure, these words were English, at least they looked it: I just had no idea what the words actually meant. I had to assume my way through a lot of it.

I say “assume,” because that word appeared twenty times per page. We were assuming that two hydrogen atoms were in close proximity. We were assuming that ammonia was formed from its component atoms. We were assuming that the wave function of lithium could be approximated through its Hamiltonian. I assumed that none of this would earn me big bucks once I got my Ph.D., and I knew none of it would get me any of that fine, fine grad school lovin’^*.

I still did the homework, took the ten-hour tests, and got out of that class with an A. The classes didn’t get any easier, though. I had a class in inorganic chemistry, and all I remember from it was that carbon can sometimes pi-bond through graphite stacks. I don’t even remember what pi-bonding is, though it didn’t involve any tasty, tasty sweets.

This whole process took eighteen months. I was tired of classes by this point. I had a dream I was beating my Electrical Designs partner in the head with a really big diode. I just wanted to get into the lab and do some research.

We had weekly seminars my first year, wherein each professor would give a long speech about their research, and why we’d all be the King Dog Studs of Chemistry if we joined their groups. Al this sounded nice, but dang it all if I didn’t have these classes!

I managed to find a research advisor during this time, but never got into the lab. That all changed during that fourth semester, with all classes done. I proudly stepped into the lab that summer and proclaimed, ‘I AM YOUR KING, LOWLY INSTRUMENTS! YOU SHALL BEND TO MY WILL!”

And then, of course, that dream got crapped on, too.

^*Yes, I’m making that part up. All the hot science chicks went into biology.

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(NOTE: I wrote this while suffering from a cold. I had a fever of 101, so this may not be my most coherent piece. I would apologize for any factual errors, but I’ve never done that before, and wonder why I should begin now.)

My students often ask me about graduate school. “Is it really that hard?” is a common question, as is “Just what can you do with a Ph.D. in chemistry?” I have really good answers for them, until they add “Besides teaching?” to the end of that last question. I can still tell my students about graduate school, though, and why it’s the best choice for them.

Instead of having to re-tell the process of graduate education, however, I thought it’d be best to just write it down once, and reference it later. This is something I learned in graduate school, naturally: how to do as little work as possible. Without further adieu, here it is:

Walter Shumate, Ph.D.’s Handy Guide To Graduate School, Part 1

I’ll assume you’ve already chosen a school. You can do what I did and research the schools that are performing the research you’re interested in, or you can do what my best friend did: send a drunken email to a professor, asking him if you can join his group. Both methods are equally valid in that they get you into graduate school, and the latter shows you’re capable of working while impaired.

You have to take a few tests when you get to graduate school, to show that your Bachelor’s degree wasn’t just handed to you for showing up to class for four years. I had to take four tests, each one covering one of the four main disciplines in chemistry. I did particularly badly in organic, to the point where the test committee asked me if I actually knew what organic chemistry was. “I think it has to do with carbon, and the Grignard reaction^*.” That was a good enough answer to let me stay in graduate school, provided that I never took an organic class.

The tests passed (or spectacularly failed, as is the case with organic), the entering class moved onto orientation. All graduate students in all fields had to do this. I think we were supposed to learn our way around the campus, be given important phone numbers and review the chain of command for academic disputes. I only remember a lengthy discussion about sexual harassment that made me, as a man, feel slightly dirty as I left the room. It may have been recommended that we just go ahead and dip into the stockroom’s saltpeter supply, just to be sure.

That was the end of the first week, and I was already tired. What lay ahead, though, was the cornerstone of my graduate education. Tomorrow, we discuss classes, teaching and the fledgling research efforts you can expect.

I may also talk about how to handle the occasional flirt, if I can clear it with HR.

^*Grignard reaction is almost always the answer to a question about organic chemistry.

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WARNING: There’s some coarse language in this one. It’s cool, my granny said it.

I watched professional wrestling when I was a young boy. Don’t take this as any kind of qualifier on my current intelligence: I was in Southeast Kentucky, so it was either this or Kentucky basketball. Basketball season isn’t that long, so we had to bide our time with wrestling. Besides, my Granny Overbay watched it with me.

We would watch Smoky Mountain Wrestling^*, which looked like it was produced on a budget of $15 and a case of Mountain Dew. The intro to the show was a grainy picture of Atlas, holding the world above his head, while Also Sprach Zarathustra^** played. It was a lot more emotionally engaging than cartoons, to be sure.
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All of Angie’s family is coming up to Shreveport this weekend, to help us move out some furniture and rearrange what’s left. I like to believe that I can look at the glass and see it both half-full AND half-empty, and there are definitely pros and cons to this situation.

Pros – Angie’s dad is bringing a desk, and I will finally have a home office. Now I get to waste time but look like I’m actually doing something important.

Cons – Angie’s dad is also bringing the rest of her family to help.
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Sunday night, the New Orleans Saints made it to their first Super Bowl in team history when they defeated the Minnesota Vikings, 31-28 in overtime. The city of New Orleans, and most of the state of Louisiana, is excited about the opportunity to play the Indianapolis Colts for the Vince Lombardi Trophy. I think it’s safe to say everyone here would be happy to see that trophy make its way down to the Big Easy.

Everyone except me and Angie, that is. We’re hoping the next two weeks blow by as quickly as possible.
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