I wrote this up after noticing that critical thinking, which is pretty much all you do in grad school (and sometimes do in medical school) pretty much ruins your ability to take any arguments from laypeople seriously. Our culture has a thinking problem. More specifically, our culture has a lack-of-thinking problem. The scientific thought process, which will become your life in the grad years, makes you painfully aware of this.

------------------------------------------

I want to briefly ramble about a bane of the first two years of medical school which, as I have emerged from my cocoon of WUSM II, I have also noticed a great deal in popular media:

The scourge of plausibility

In med school (especially 2^nd year), you go through some pretty specific and complex physiology and pathophysiology. You often find yourself trying to reason through complicated questions imposed by other students trying to figure things out, especially in topics like cardiology, nephrology, and neurology. Instead of wading through pages of text, you might find yourself coming up with an answer and justifying it with a plausible mechanism that you derive from other knowledge that serves as “common sense.” One example I remember is as follows (skip if you don’t care):

A friend and I knew from lecture that acidemia causes hyperkalemia, but we didn’t understand why. We thought that the increased acid secretion by the kidney would go hand in hand with potassium secretion… but this wasn’t the case. So, we tried to back-reason mechanisms for this apparent paradox. Here’s the scourge:

We had some pretty interesting solutions, all sounding “plausible” with our medical knowledge at the time, and all totally wrong. Once we got it straightened out, I felt a little silly. This happened other times with problems that were much more difficult to resolve.

Here’s a real world example: I am going to make a pair of contradictory statements, and back them up using stereotypes that you probably have. If you read only the first or only the second, you might believe either.

1. Heavy online video game players (think World of Warcraft addicts) are generally overweight. Their constant grazing on high calorie foods and soft drinks, in addition to their sedentary lifestyle, shifts their average BMI well into the overweight range.

2. Heavy online video game players (think World of Warcraft addicts) are generally underweight. Their constant inactivity, nutrient-poor diet, and low sun-induced vitamin D synthesis leads to muscle and skeletal atrophy and shifts their average BMI well into the underweight range.

These statements might invoke images from your memory (http://tinyurl.com/cjjeoz from South Park http://tinyurl.com/n6fznk, the mac guy/ hacker from Live Free or Die Hard), enforcing your belief in the “truth” of each statement. But which is right? I don't know, but a really fast pubmed search found this http://tinyurl.com/mkaerc which seems to suggest that neither is (clinically) true.

The popular media, I’ve been noticing, is HORRIBLE with this. Anything sounding plausible is reported as fact, especially under the pretense of stereotypes/generalizations. It’s gotten to the point where I just stopped believing anything vaguely “scientific” that I haven't read in a true scientific publication*. This is especially true when it comes to health, psych, or behavioral research. If you hear anything, and I mean ANYTHING, in the health/news/tech newsmedia, don’t believe it. Don’t even regurgitate in bar chatter with friends unless you’ve looked into it further.

If you want to know if it’s true or not:

- go to the article/news story

- find the researcher mentioned or interviewed

- go to their lab page or do a lit search

- find their most recent article pertaining to that topic

- skim the abstract and conclusions or, better yet, read the whole thing

If you don’t care enough to at least glance at it like this, it isn't interesting enough for conversation fodder anyway.

And I swear, the next person that says something like “I heard about a neurological study that shows that facebook and myspace are actually making kids stupid” is going to get chewed out.

*: Journal, review, textbook, book, or (with caution) science reporting outlet.

Calling a new place "home"

I went to school down in Texas, and I remember how odd it felt when I noticed 6-9 months into my freshman year that I was calling Houston it "home." I went home this weekend, and I felt the same odd feeling as I realized that I missed St. Louis and all of my new friends here. Definitely during college, I got used to the idea that I could have more than one "home," but I think that this seemed odd to me because I've been here for such a comparably short amount of time. I haven't decided if this is the result of the large amount of time that I spent in St. Louis as a child visiting family, or the warm/welcoming atmosphere of St. Louis and WashU. In reality, it's probably both.

On a separate note, it was quite glorious to be able to drive home (4hrs) and see my family without having to plan months in advance (as I always had to do to plan flights back from Houston). I could definitely get used to this! =)

On a less philosophical note, I thought that I would comment on a few points made by my fellow bloggers:
1) I really like my lab, and I have not had nearly the same problems as R has experienced in orienting myself and acclimating to my new surroundings; however, I am in a lab that is pretty much one large open space with our office very nearby. However, I have found that the post-doc that I work for, as well as the other people in my lab have been very friendly and helpful, which I think can really make or break a lab experience. It's weird that my rotation is already winding down, but I'm excited to get started and to meet everyone who has not been here this summer.
2) In terms of public transportation, I have been a bit disappointed as well, but more in terms of the schedule and duration of train service. KC doesn't really have any public transportation and Houston has a very limited lightrail system, so I've actually been quite pleased with the variety of areas that you can go on the metrorail. However, I don't like that late at night, the train only comes about every 20 minutes (although it seems to be quite prompt if you plan it) and that it only runs till about 12:30 am (althought if you're a real partier they do start back up around 4). This definitely makes it difficult to use the train when going out on the weekends. However, I have been using it to go to work everyday, which has been really nice!

Ok, well I guess that's all for now. I brought another load of stuff from KC to St. Louis, so I have a bit of unpacking to do.

PS. you northerners are wimps, and it's definitely not that hot or humid. although, I know i'll be whining once it gets cold, and then you can laugh at me. =)

1:6 Ratio

I’d like to share an anecdote I have been using with my fellow MSTPs in the last few days:

For every 1 minute of research I have done, I have spent 6 minutes looking for stuff or finding someone to ask.

Frustrating! I know that this comes with being new to any lab, but in my particular one the problem is inflated. First, the lab itself is the older, closed style. It occupies a series of rooms, each with one bench, a fume hood or two, a series of cabinets and drawers, and a computer. Four-ish people use each room, but at any given moment there is at most one occupant per room. Because everything is so compartmentalized, most of the constant-use stuff (tips, pipettes, tubes, etc.) is in each room but in entirely different places. Other equipment (like cryotubes, tissue culture bottles, repeater pipette stuff, stuff for the centrifuges/specs, etc) is spread out in different rooms. Which rooms? Well… I have no idea. There is no central list. There is some, but not enough, rhyme and/or reason to what goes where. The cryotubes should be with the huge stock of microcentrifuge tubes, PCR tubes, and culture tubes, right? Well yesterday I thought so, but for the life of me I couldn’t find them. On Saturday there’s nobody around to ask, so I looked for about half an hour before resulting to yoinking some from somebody’s personal stash and leaving a note of apology.

But on weekdays, it’s easy to ask, right? Wrong. Our offices, where everyone works up their data and does other science-related (or not science-related) computer stuff, is on the 3^rd floor. The labs are in the basement. The transit time from B to 3 is long and usually results in somebody feeling the need to go with me back down to B to show me in lieu of just saying “top left shelf in the back of room 209”. This makes me reluctant to ask anything because I feel so bad about making them get up, go to the elevator, walk through the maze of hallways, and point to the shelf where the glycerol bottle is hidden away (there is not one but two chemical rooms, one for organic chem. and one for molecular bio, and only one organized A-Z! Gah!).

This is not an accurate picture of all research here. We are in an older building. I know that most of the newer labs are the open style: one huge room with rows and rows of benches, offices right around the corner, and a long line of all-purpose, multi-user shelves and storage. This is how my old undergrad lab was layed out and I loved it. Got a question? Stroll down the rows and ask. Or just yell. Either way, it saved oodles of time compared to running the stairs every hour or so. A good example is on the left (I just googled open lab.)

Don’t get me wrong, I like my current lab. In fact, I am already thinking of joining it when my pre-clinical stuff is through. How will I manage with the closed lab style? I won’t have to. There’s a new building in the mix and word has it that the MIR (the radiology institute of which my lab is a part) will be centralized there. Open labs for everyone! Groundbreaking is slated for later in the year, time of completion is spring of 2009 if my memory serves correct. Perfect timing for my graduate training to begin on a pristine, unused lab bench.

More on open vs closed labs, complete with pictures.

(Ro)tatertot

Flashback to my interview at WashU: Andrew Richards (who is no longer an MSTP guy but a PhD guy) was telling us interviewees about the possibility of a summer rotation in a lab or two and that about half of the MSTPers take it their first year. Back then, there was NO chance that I was going to do any such thing. Why the hell would anyone want to sacrifice their last summer before 7-9ish years of schooling began in order to sit another 2 months at a lab bench? No thank you. I’d rather work my relaxing undergraduate jobs, go out every night with my friends, etc. I wanted to milk my last summer for all its worth.

Well, I write this from my new apartment in StL. My rotation starts on Monday. Why the change of heart? Well, over the months between my interview and my graduation things were changing:

-I wasn’t enjoying my old apartment as much. Tensions between the 3 girls I lived with were rising constantly and it made living alone in StL much more attractive

-My undergraduate research project had been dragging on and on for months. It was supposed to be published over a year before I graduated, but it wasn’t yet. This was a real morale killer at the lab.

-Honestly, I was beginning to become partied out. I lived it up quite a bit my final semester and my wallet/liver were feeling it. They didn’t need to spend an extra 2 months doing the same.

-I realized how stressful it might be to learn a new city while learning about a billion other new things in my first semester as a med student.

-Early stipend = money to buy books and stuff.

So, here I am. Excited? You bet. Regret leaving my home early? Not at all. Plus, my apartment turned out to be pretty sweet. That certainly didn’t hurt the situation at all.

-R

Life in St. Louis

So, I've been living in St. Louis for about 2 weeks now, so I thought that it was time for a post.

I decided to buy a condo, and I found a great one-bedroom in the DeBaliviere area, which is just North of Forest Park, right by the metro stop. It was a bit overwhelming and stressful to buy a condo, but I think that a large part of that was that I found a condo and purchased in less than a month. But everything is really coming together, and I am really glad that I did it.

I started my rotation about 2 weeks ago and it has been going very well. I've really enjoyed the people in the lab and my PI, which I think can really make or break a lab. My project is starting to get going, which is also exciting. Hopefully, I'll be able to get some results before the end of my rotation.

I've also been hanging out with a lot of other new MSTPs and some other MS1s, who have been really nice and really fun to hang out with. We've been exploring the CWE and we've found some pretty fun places. We also spent an afternoon in Forest Park, which is just amazing. I keep hearing about other fun stuff that goes on in St. Louis during the summer, like Jazz in the Botanical Gardens and concerts by the arch, and the best part is that most of it is FREE!

I'm really excited for the rest of the summer as well as the beginning of the school year!