My first conference!

Tags

conferences, masters, stats

Tomorrow I’m off to my very first conference. No microbiology for me this time, instead it’s going to be 3 very full-on days of Bayesian statistics. I’m looking forward to the sessions on experimental design, which will probably inform how I set up the larger bioassays I’m expecting to start in a few months.

I’m hoping I’ll get a bit of reading and writing done while I’m there, but I’m probably kidding myself.

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Murderer of beetles, slayer of small things

Tags

bugs, masters, science

So yesterday, for the first time, the title of this blog became literally true for me. I used fungus to kill a beetle. Just one, for now, but I’m sure things will pick up.

I’ve had a hectic month since I started my master’s. I’ve moved house, and still don’t have internet at home, which is affecting my ability to post very frequently. That should be hooked up this week though. I’ve missed the internet!

Most of what I’ve been doing has been writing. Research proposals, experimental plans, and literature reviews. Mostly a lot of planning for the large amount of writing I’ll have to keep doing for the next couple of years. I’ve also been spending time encouraging my beetle colonies to grow. You know, the usual tactics – singing songs, playing Mozart while they sleep, implying that they’ll never have self-worth if they don’t have larvae some day. All this with the eventual goal of killing them off.

I’ve had a few brief panics. There was a scary moment when I discovered a whole bunch of dead weevils in one of my beetle jars. I briefly thought that maybe I’d been the victim of some cuckoo weevil, and had been raising these impostors as my own for the previous 8 weeks, but thankfully discovered that the little bastards are getting in in the organic wheat we buy for my beetles to infest.

I’m getting used to putting on a lab coat and doing science. I still feel a bit like a fraud in the lab on my own, but I guess that’s something I’ll get used to over time.

Now I am actually running my first experiment. It’s only a trial run, to get me used to spore application and the procedures involved in this kind of thing. My samples aren’t large enough for the data to be very useful, but this sets me up for my official first experiment which will hopefully start in a couple of weeks, when I have enough beetles under my care to be able to kill a significant number off. As of yesterday, one of the dosed beetles was dead. My first victim. I am feeling some guilt over this, especially knowing that there will be thousands more before my time in this lab is up.

That’s pretty much where I’m at right now. I have many deadlines and only 24 hours in each day. I’m struggling to sort out the things I need to do from those I think I should do, and of course I’m terribly afraid of disappointing my supervisors or my peers. I am, however, very glad to be finally up and running with my master’s!

The beginning

Tags

feats, masters, shinies

This is just a quick update to say that I have finally officially started my Master’s degree. I got confirmation a couple of hours ago, with a start date of today. Very exciting news!

Tomorrow (if I can bring my notoriously scattered brain to remember) I will bring in my lab coat, whiteboard, and pot plant. It’s so exciting to finally be able to settle in and do some work!

Bench!

Tags

masters, science communication, shinies

I finally have my own bench space in the lab!

My new working space

I don’t know that everyone would be as excited as I am, but being from a definitely theoretical background I’ve never had my own lab space before. It was weird to write my name on things – mostly pipette boxes, Kimwipes and boxes of labels. Surely, surely they can’t actually be planning on letting a mathematician loose in there.

Status update

Tags

masters, stats, to-dos

It’s been a long time since I wrote any actual content. Mostly I’ve been waiting as patiently as I can for news of a start date and funding. In good news, both of those things might actually (touch wood) be approaching. I don’t have an official start date from the uni yet, but should have some money coming in soon, so at that stage I hope to start my bioassays.

Yes, it is very unusual to start your bioassays as soon as you start your research. The normal procedure is to spend some time getting background on the topic and writing a formal literature review. In my case, the timeline for my Master’s is very tight, so I need to charge on in there. Unlike most postgrads, though, I have more or less known my topic for nearly 8 months, so I’m more familiar with it than a lot of people would be just starting out.

My main task at the moment is to put together an experimental design. I’ll need to plan out what we will vary, and what we will measure, and how many times. I’m not sure if I should incorporate any Bayesian experimental design principles or not, because I’m worried that doing so correctly will take more time than I’m willing to give. I also keep forgetting that I’m supposed to be doing frequentist statistical analysis of these data at some stage too (to the point where when someone said that I should write down my null hypothesis I said “nulls? Where we’re going, we don’t need nulls!”). In any case, I’ve emailed one of my university’s resident Bayesian experts, and hopefully she can point me in the direction of some experimental design information that doesn’t require me to first spend two months learning extra maths to understand (the papers I’ve looked at so far go heavily into information theory, which I’ve never learnt).

My practical work will require many new skills. I’ve started helping the lab’s research assistant with some of the insect-rearing work, so that I don’t kill them before I mean to. I’m also reading At the Bench by Kathy Barker, which covers everything from lab etiquette to growth media for bacterial strains. It’s principally aimed at medical scientists, but there is a lot of information in it for any kind of lab. I’ve had my first introduction to my own personal spore applicator, and I’m confident that at some stage I will learn how not to spray myself in the eye.

So everything is ticking along. It feels like everything came together quite quickly in the end, and I’m not quite prepared. There are also a lot of personal things that will change when I start – the big one will be that I’m hoping to move closer to the uni, but house hunting and moving bring with them their own set of problems. I’m also going to have to cut down my hours at my beloved casual job, and that is really going to hurt.

Fingers crossed for the next few weeks!

Personalities in science

Tags

masters, people, troubles

A few weeks ago I had a meeting with some people who will probably be contributing to my project. Their organisation will be supplying some insects, and the scientists I met with will probably be a great information resource. We all went through my research proposal together, and the thing that struck me most was how literal-minded they were. One of them in particular (an entomologist) just could not grasp why my proposal was full of “and then I’ll work out what I’m doing next”, rather than “and then I’ll do x, y, z.” At this stage, I can’t imagine restricting myself to a certain type of statistical analysis or a particular transmission model. I also haven’t learnt the science yet that I’ll need to know to refine my bioassays, so I guess my entire methods section is a bit vague. I’m okay with that, but I really struggled to explain to this entomologist why that is. Communication with people who don’t have the same bent to their thoughts that I do is something I’ve always struggled with – I think I just want things to make sense without further explanation.

When I got back to uni I commented on the literal-mindedness of said entomologist to two different people (both biologists). One said “all entomologists are like that”. Another said “that’s normal, all mathematicians are just really hand-wavy. I’ve had to adjust to dealing with you all.” So apparently I’m a hand-wavy mathematician*! So I’ve been wondering today if perhaps different types of science attract different personalities. I think that the idea is probably a load of crap. Most of the maths/physics people I know are fairly happy with hand-waviness (I do know one very literal-minded physicist, but she tends to stay away from anything with the words “quantum” or “probability” in it), but it’s pretty essentialist to just class us as a bunch. If we’re hand-wavy it’s probably because after first year in applied maths there is usually more than one way to do anything, and the “best” method is subjective. The science with which someone is involved is probably as inaccurate a method of judging their personality as cryptanalysis.

*I don’t call myself a mathematician. Other non-maths scientists tend to.

On negotiation

Tags

feats, masters

One thing I sense I’m going to have to learn very quickly once I start my Masters is how to have uncomfortable conversations with people.

Today I talked to my supervisor about a) the money not really seeming enough to live off, and b) I really really need to be able to use LaTeX because i) I’m a mathematician and it’s one of the tools of my trade and ii) my mathematical associate supervisors will crucify me if I don’t.

We’re now looking at ways to get a bit more money, and we’ve agreed that for most purposes annotating a pdf will do as well as the track changes feature in MS Word.

I’m not a terribly confrontational person, but I need to know how to speak up about the things that bother me. Today I took an advocate (one of our brilliant lab people) in with me, and my supervisor (as it turns out) was not upset and not scary. Maybe next time I will be fine on my own.