Orientation

Yesterday was my orientation day for graduate school and it went pretty well overall considering I had to wake up at 6:30am (I honestly can't remember the last time I woke up that early) and then proceeded to sleep through happy hour. Orientation consisted of a general orientation for all the incoming grad students for the all the biomedical sciences programs and then afterwards I had my microbiology department orientation.

The general orientation was just a bunch of deans and professors giving us their pearls of wisdom (all the things they claim they wish someone had told them when they were in grad school), telling us we don't really need to do well in classes because no one cares about your grades anymore (just get a B was the takehome message), and reminding us that we're not in college anymore. I'm not gonna lie, it was a little scary. I mean I never thought getting a PhD would be easy but now I have fears of:(1) how do I decide what an important problem is?, (2) how do I keep myself from getting frustrated around my 3rd year when nothing is working and I can't see the light at the end of the tunnel?, (3) what if I can't think critically enough to be, not just a good scientist, but a great scientist?, and (4) what if I'm in grad school forever (and by forever I mean longer than 5.5 yrs)?

However, besides scaring me a little, orientation also made me realize what I'm doing is important. When I finish my PhD, I will have done original research and discovered something that currently is unknown and will be an "expert" on that topic--that's pretty awesome. The icing on the cake of course would be if my work can somehow be applied to alleviating human disease since I'll probably focus on bacterial or viral pathogenesis.

Also one of the deans speaking to us gave us an example about thinking about hypotheses I'd like to share just because I had never thought about science in that way before. So he basically told us that you must always remember that we can't ever really prove a hypothesis, only support it with data. However, while it's important to try to support your hypothesis, you should try to disprove it as well--that way you might save yourself some time chasing windmills if you can disprove it quickly and you also may get your critics to respect you (there's always going to be someone trying to prove you wrong so you might as well beat them to it). And to support his advice he told us a story about swans. If your hypothesis is that all the swans in the world are white, you can spend the rest of your life counting white swans but the easier and more practical approach would be to look for the one black swan. (Let it simmer for a while...)

Lastly, we had our department orientation. My program is only six people including myself--there are three other normal first years like me (one's a transfer) and two MD/PhD students. It's a pretty small but everyone seemed nice so I hope we bond pretty quickly but we'll see how that goes in the coming weeks, otherwise I'll have to settle on being the weird loner girl.