One of the reasons I haven’t posted regularly since my thesis began is that I’ve spent little time at the computer, having developed a taste for saunas and, generally, hot, isolated rooms, where I work all alone, luckily, with a radio that keeps me connected to the rest of the world. And when I finally get out of the oven, there are always data to be plotted. Today, though, I’ve broken my routine as I needed to do some research on the internet, surfing through scientific articles, in order to find as much as possible about next week’s experiment. Basically, what I’ve been doing throughout the day, is looking for other papers where both camptothecin and aphidicolin were employed (even better if fibroblasts were involved) to get a general idea about which doses I should include in the assay.
In the past, I’ve always needed to read just a few articles and all of them indicated by professors, lecturers or supervisors (when I created this very blog I was doing a stage at the VU Medisch Centrum, Department of Oncology, in Amsterdam, so, in a nutshell, this is not the first time I’m supervised by someone). Whenever I had to read an article I always printed it straight-forwardly. I oddly reckoned that holding pieces of paper in my hands was a fundamental requirement for fully understanding the article. That’s probably a direct consequence of the fact that, as an undergrad, you deal solely with books (at least in Italian university). There was also another, undisputable benefit from this: I could study the article wherever and whenever I wanted. That’s include pretty much any journey by train and public transport, afternoons in parks, etc. Perhaps you could say I was a paper-aholic.
Weirdly, pretty much all the graduate students I’m working with at the moment seem to suffer from the same disease. Their desks are covered with tons of paper, either properly folded, so you get the impression of a very efficient and methodical person, or following a messy (dis)organization. Either way, these people are blamed by environmentalists because of their eco-unfriendly habits. But environmentalists shouldn’t be mean and blame these people: they should feel sympathy and pity for them, instead. It took me approximately a month to realize what many of you already wrote in some comments: most graduate students are sociopathic individuals, who undermine their own mental health through a slow and subliminal torture which basically consists of an almost complete isolation from anything that’s not somehow linked to their research. Sadly, not only do they reject anything that comes from “outside”, but they also show an eerie tendency to give up having a social life and begin to live in their office, going home only because there’s no bed in the lab. Hopefully.
Although it’s not that difficult to understand why they joined this self-destructive pathway, it’s not that simple to work out to save them. Especially if you, like me, are about to enter their world and your own worry is to preserve your mental health, whereas actually enjoy being surrounded by these zombies.
One way to solve the problem is to stop printing articles. I’ll admit
that reading all your articles as displayed on a monitor damage your
eyes but, hey, don’t fool yourself: what you read of most of the
articles you download are
abstract,
introduction and
conclusion. Am I wrong?
So, while neatly organizing your own, ginormous portfolio on your hard disk, you won’t be wasting paper you’d otherwise have to recycle after a variable amount of time. Because there’s ALWAYS, in every group, the
bio-freak who’ll curse you loudly if sees you’ve thrown away that plastic bottle in a normal bin
But this isn’t the most important point. What really matters is something else: reading on-line won’t let you highlight paragraphs and bring the paper wherever you go. Nevertheless, you can by a copybook and write down (on both sides) impressions, notes, most relevant facts or whatever you want. Still, when the computer is off or, supposing you’re the type of person who never switches it off, not at hand, you could either choose to read your notes or, much better, finding time to look for other interesting activities which are totally unrelated to the subject of your studentship. Believe it or not, there’s something interesting outside the lab.
