My dept needs a kick in the pants

Last week and this week there are several faculty candidate seminars/interviews. Part that includes an opportunity for grad students to eat lunch with the job candidates. The first candidate lunch last week, only two students signed up. I think partly due to short notice. To help in organization I set up an online doodle poll for students to sign up for lunch. Its worked out much better, but yesterday two students dropped out at the last minute. I was mildly annoyed at this because it looks bad when you make a reservation for lunch for N people and N - 2 show up. But in general I feel a lot of apathy for attending these lunches. The candidates are all in bioinformatics (which is really broad, so far the talks have ranged from cancer gene expression to metagenomics.) Most of the research in the dept is cell and molecular biology, so I get the sense perhaps students think they won't have much to talk about over lunch to computational scientists. Also in my department there are definitely some faculty who think bionformatics is some sort of passing fad and all there is to it is you punch in data into a computer, and boom! your answer comes out. Finally, another cause of embarrassment is that people are late in arrival for the actual seminar. Maybe I'm being anal about this, but when when a seminar starts at 3, that doesn't mean you arrive at 3:05.

Rant over, but sometimes I just feel my department needs a kick in the pants.

Activity log week of Feb 1

MOnday: 2,000 yards swimming
400 warmup
8x50s freestyle on 1:00 held :45-:46 splits
8x50s kick (back (with fins), breast no fins fly with fins, free no fins)
8x50s with paddles and buoy 1:00 held 40-41 splits for the first 4, 42-43 splits for last four
8x50s IM order on 1:15 about 20 seconds rest on the stroke reps, :44 for my last free split

Tuesday: 25 min bike trainer
Wed: off/birthday recovery
Thursday: 45 min bike trainer
Friday: 75 minutes swimming

3x100s free
4z50s kick evens free/back odds br/fly

pyramid reverse IM set building up to a 200 reverse IM. This set is long, but each rep is relatively short distance. I was feeling pretty good overall. I ate a slice of pizza about an hour before in journal club. Not a good idea since I was getting side cramps, but the subsided. I took about 5-15 sec rest on the 25-75s and about 20-40 on the longer ones. I'm getting in better swimming shape. Two weeks ago as set like this would have impossible.


25
25,50
25,50,75
25,50,75,100
25,50,75,100,125
25,50,75,100,125,150
25,50,75,100,125,150,175
25,50,75,100,125 - I bonked/lost concentration/really tired here. I scratched the last 150,175,and 200.

Saturday:
30 minutes treadmill 10min/mile, 3 miles
40 minutes weights - upper, lower, core

Really good week. Have upped my swimming yards to about 2000. Today my right hip flexor is hurtin'. I think it got pretty tight after the run yesterday along with my perennially tight hamstrings. Had a good 40 minute stretch/yoga this morning so hopefully I'll be better soon.

Week of Jan 25th activity log

Monday 25th:
Swimming 1700 yards
Tuesday 26th
Bike trainer 30minutes
Wed 27th:
Bike trainer 30 minutes
Thursday:
work got in the way/had a way too many meetings with my PI
Friday:
Swimming 1200 yards
Saturday:
Bike trainer 40minutes

Work was a bit busy later in the week, plus had to run errands in the middle of the day on Wed/Thursday.
Didn't make it to the yoga class, going to try again this week. Bike trainer sessions have been good. I don't have a cylcometer, but at minimum if I'm going 12 mph, I got in 20 miles on the trainer this week. Its a better workout than I expected! Like spinning, but the bike actually fits me. But no cute spinning instructor ;) just the music on my iTunes.

Exercise is a fountain of youth

I read this interesting story in the NYTimes Health section : Phys Ed: How Exercise keeps your cells young Some highlights:

Recently, scientists in Germany gathered several groups of men and women to look at their cells’ life spans. Some of them were young and sedentary, others middle-aged and sedentary. Two other groups were, to put it mildly, active. The first of these consisted of professional runners in their 20s, most of them on the national track-and-field team, training about 45 miles per week. The last were serious, middle-aged longtime runners, with an average age of 51 and a typical training regimen of 50 miles per week, putting those young 45-mile-per-week sluggards to shame.

...

The sedentary older subjects had telomeres that were on average 40 percent shorter than in the sedentary young subjects, suggesting that the older subjects’ cells were, like them, aging. The runners, on the other hand, had remarkably youthful telomeres, a bit shorter than those in the young runners, but only by about 10 percent. In general, telomere loss was reduced by approximately 75 percent in the aging runners. Or, to put it more succinctly, exercise, Dr. Werner says, ‘‘at the molecular level has an anti-aging effect.’’

The 2009 Nobel prize in medicine was awarded to studies of telomeres. Basically, the shorter the telomere, the faster the cells age. The study here shows exercise has a potenial anti-aging effect. But I really hope you don't have a to run 50 miles a week to benefit from it. But I joke around that exercise is a fountain of youth. Turns out, that could well be the case!

Final grades sometime this century.

This PhD Comic pretty much sums up this post.

Since I started in the spring semester of last year, I finished my 'core' classes for my PhD program in the fall, the last of which was biochemistry. Here it is, the last week in January, and the professor has still yet to post final grades/grade the final exams. The whole set up of this course left me with my head scratching. The first week we took an assessment test consisting of 60 or so short answer / multiple choice questions about various topics in biochemistry. ( I should add the class met once a week for two hours) The next four weeks or so the prof went over sections of the exam, asking students in class to elaborate on their answers. There was no such thing as formal lecture or lecture notes passed out. We were even not allowed to take our assessment exams home with us. So for 4 weeks, it was essentially very informal 'lectures' from the instructor, while each of the 11 students hurriedly wrote down notes about the concepts the questions addressed.

At the conclusion of four weeks we took a mid-term, which again were not allowed to keep after being handed back the graded papers. Then the remainder of the class each student had to prepare 45 min presentation on a seminal and more recent paper in biochemistry topic awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry or Medicine. The final was in mid December which covered the biochemical methods and results of the papers discussed in the presentations. Each student was responsible for reading all the papers, including the ones he/she was presenting on. I think I was one of the few who actually made an attempt to read each paper, after talking to some other students who freely admitted they didn't read each paper in depth as they should have.

I hadn't taken a biochemistry course in 11 years (since my junior in undergrad - yes I'm old ) I spent a lot of time reading my biochem textbook for background info. (There wasn't an assigned text for the class.) I also spent time agoogle-ing and reading the Wikipedia to brush up on my biochem. All in all, I can look myself in the mirror and say I put my best effort in the class. The least I can expect is the instructor to post exam grades in a reasonable time window, *not* more than one month after the final exam was taken! I know faculty have a lot demands on their time, but every other school I"ve attended and faculty I've worked with, each has posted grades within 2 weeks of the semester ending. While I'm just a hapless grad student and can't do much about this, I can use this blog as a soapbox to complain.

Rant over.

MP's new Subway ad

week of Jan 18th activity log

Monday: swimming 1600 yards total
Tuesday: rest
Wed: swimming 1600 yards total
Thursday: recline stationary bike 25min, lower body weights
Friday: 40min bike trainer
Saturday: 25min treadmill run (2.6 miles), weights

Goals for the upcoming week:
Try and make it to a morning yoga class on Tuesday (7:30am!)
Up my yardage on the swims to 1800