Losing Contact
Last Wednesday I took part in an event the Students Association of the Faculty of Pharmacy organize every year: on two separated days, people from the fourth year are presented the type study done in the groups they could apply for carrying out their graduation thesis project. Generally, on the first day, it is “chemical” area to be under the spotlight, while the second day is dedicated to the “biological” one.
Theoretically, every year, every group leader should send someone. Anyone. In fact, although the (good) idea behind this event is that students who are in the middle of their project describe all the (sordid) details to their one-year-younger counterpart, apparently, it is far from being an unusual circumstance to have full-time PhDs to represent a lab.
Still, some times, a professor simply doesn’t care and no one turns up. This, in a few words, is what happened last year with my group: not having any pharma chemist there, my current supervisor should have done it, but she was just too busy and, predictably, not that committed to the cause.
This year, though, it was my turn. As a fifth year student, reaching the end of his job here, it’s hard to come up with a better profile. Or isn’t it? You see, the moment my group leader asked me whether I could work out a short (10 minutes) presentation for the occasion, I instantly saw a huge problem: since I had decided to embark on a molecular biology project during my third year and quickly communicated my intentions to my present group leader, last year I didn’t think for a second to waste a couple of lectures-free mornings to hear things I had been told already and, plainly, opted for staying in bed longer and go to a lab-course in the afternoon. This meant I had no idea what kind of information I was supposed to provide.
Neither the Students Association’s member to whom I wrote an email with my questions nor my lab mates helped. The former told me of some slides concerning the them of my thesis, the latter wanted me to focus on the techniques I am utilizing.
The result was remarkable and impressive: a perfect presentation for the day I’ll defend my thesis in front of the board. I realised I’ve collected such a quantity of juicy data, it wouldn’t be mad to start writing (perhaps just the introduction and part of the results), even though I literally cannot graduate before July.
Unfortunately, this brilliant and comprehensive presentation seems not to have impressed the students that much. Although a rather interesting drug, Teniposide, had a lot of attention. This drug has been a fantastic tool to address the question of whether a detected phenomenon of Topoisomerase inhibitor on RNA polymerase II was selective for Topo IB or not: teniposide (or, as it’s better known among my lab mates, VM 26) is a remarkably selective Topo II inhibitor, which is perfect for highlighting Topo I specificities. Moreover, teniposide is a useful clinical tool in the treatment of acute myeloblastic leukaemia.
Going back to my performance, I sincerely doubt that any one would choose our group (and molecular biology as a subject): both my short but accurate description of how a ChIP or a Real Time PCR work gave my audience a good idea about what I do, but I sort of suddenly lost them when words such as “promoter”, “siRNA” or “transfection” (inevitably?) came out of my mouth.
I already speak a different language (not to mention that all the slides were in English...).
