Classes, Seminars, Lab Work - The Life of a Grad Student

So things are CRAZILY busy right now! I knew things would be intense but I didn't think it would pick up so quickly!

I'm going to give you an idea of what my schedule is like, which revolves around three major things: classes, seminars, and the lab.

Classes

This semester I only have two classes - Cell Biology and Physiology, and Topics in Molecular Medicine. Cell Bio meets MWF for an hour and a half, and Topics is a seminar/journal club class that meets every Wednesday for two hours.

Cell Bio uses the same text I used when I took Cell as an undergrad at Ithaca, and since it was the newest edition at the time, I didn't have to buy a new one (woot!). So far, I am pleased to say that my undergrad cell bio class has prepared me pretty well for the grad level...while we are definitely going into more detail on all the topics, I have enough background knowledge to follow everything pretty easily (thanks Professor Cluett). The readings in the text are review since I've already done them before last year. All in all I am pretty confident I am going to do well in the course, although we are definitely going at a somewhat accelerated pace.

The course is taught by a variety of professors, with one of them acting as class coordinator. Basically they bring in the resident expert on the topic and have them give a lecture about it. This is both a blessing and a curse; on the one hand, you are getting very expert explanations of the material, but on the other hand you sometimes run the risk of dissecting the topic to a level of detail that is not really useful for our purposes. Since there are so many professors giving lectures, you also see a the gamut of presentation/teaching skills; some professors are definitely better than others when it comes to giving presentations. Again, the advantage here is that we aren't stuck with one particular teaching style but that also means we are constantly adapting to new presentation patterns. So far it hasn't been terribly difficult but it can sometimes be a challenge (or just annoying). Another drawback is that professors often don't know what has already been taught in the course, and may explain a process that we've already gone over in a lot of detail, or breeze over something we haven't seen yet. This was highlighted in the lecture on the nucleus where, to my surprise, the lecturer spent about five minutes at the end of the lecture talking very rapidly about the RanGTP cycle and its contribution to nuclear import/export; up to this point, no one had gone over the Ras-like GTPases and their regulators like GEF's, GAP's and GPI's, so while I understood what he was saying, I know many of my peers had a hard time following him. Fortunately, this was covered in more detail in a later lecture but it was still pretty disconected.

The professors also often give us "assigned reading" from primary sources. Initially I would try do all of these readings, but it very quickly became way too much (especially when the mitochondria lecturer posted five articles, two of which were twenty page reviews). I decided that, while some of the primary articles were interesting, they were really only useful as references for a more detailed look at the system or as a review to complement the textbook. I decided I would look at them only if I found a topic to be interesting or confusing, and I wanted some more reading about it.

Since I've already taken a Cell bio class, I have an idea of what works for me in learning the material, so I feel like I'm good to go.

My other class is a journal club type class which looks at the molecular basis of certian diseases and their treatments. We read two papers a week, a "clinical" and "basic science" article relating to a specific disease or condition - say, Diffuse Large B-Cell Lymphoma. Two students present the papers and we have discussions. It's in pretty much the same style as my capstone Biochem course. This class isn't so bad, it's just a lot of reading. One plus side is that, after my senior year and into this year, I am finding that my proficiency at reading and interpreting scientific papers has really improved, and I can spend more time thinking about the experiments and interpretations rather than figuring out what the nomenclature means.

Seminars
So, in addition to classes, there are various seminars hosted by different departments on campus. They are usually once a week and for the most part invite faculty outside of Penn to come and give a one hour talk, though sometimes in-house faculty or even upper classmen grad students give talks...and sometimes its an actual thesis presentation.

Just within my concentration, there are four seminars that are directly applicable: Virology, Prokaryotes, Parasitology, and Microbiology (ostensibly a mix of the three, though it usually is light on parasites). In addition, there is the occasional immunology seminar that might be applicable/interesting. And since Penn is a Center for AIDS Research (CFAR), there is also a seminar series hosted by them. Put them all together, and that's a lot of seminars. In practice, I go to Virology and Microbiology seminars regularly, the former because it is directly related to my interests, and the latter because, even when it's not a virology talk, the speakers are excellent. Every now and then I'll pop into an Immnunology or CFAR talk, but it's hard to go to all of them. While this doesn't seem like a whole lot, if you add these seminars to the time I spend in class, you will find they very quickly eat up your day. And these are just the seminars that are directly related to my major.

I find that the seminars are very useful because you will always learn something new. They can be good sources of new ideas, techniques or approaches. The departments also host lunches with the speakers and invite grad students to join, so they can be excellent networking opportunities, especially for grad students starting to look at life after graduation. And if nothing else, they can often be a very cool story about an organism or system you didn't know about.

Lab
Basically any time not spent in class and seminar should be spent in lab. The specific schedule you develop in the lab really depends on your commitments and the inclinations of the PI and your lab mates. I generally work till sometime between 5pm and 6pm, and on the days I don't have a morning class I try to get in around 9:30. It has been somewhat of an adjustment for me because I am coming out of a summer rotation where the entire day was devoted to lab; now some days have more lab time than others, and I have to make sure to budget enough time to do my readings and study.

In addition, most labs have a weekly lab meeting, and ours is no exception. In addition, our lab does a somewhat informal journal club where once a week (usually Friday over lunch) we read and discuss an article that is related to someone's project or that is a hot new finding in the HIV field.

Fortunately, most labs are pretty flexible about when you do your work; people are more concerned that you are making progress than when you are doing it. Because I live relatively close, I could do lab work in the evenings or come in on the weekends to do an experiment or two; this flexibility makes trying to get everything done much easier, but it has so far still been rather challenging. Now that I'm a few weeks into things I am starting to develop a rhythm; my online calendar has been invaluable in keeping my commitments straight.

The take-home message is that time-management skills are a must!