Fighting Down Panic

This morning I met my new lab for the first time.  They invited me to come to their Friday morning meeting so I could meet everyone and see the lab.  I was really excited yesterday.  Then this morning I started to get nervous.  While I was in the meeting, I was fighting down full-blown panic.  Well, that may be a bit dramatic.  I'm just not sure I'm prepared for this.

Okay, I was in the middle of writing that paragraph and white foam started shooting up out of the sink about a foot high. It filled up the entire sink in less than a minute and now is threatening to overflow onto the floor.  I put a bunch of blue pads down, so hopefully that'll take care of it.  Random.

Anyways, as I sat in the meeting and listened to everyone talk about things that I knew nothing about, I started to think about how much they know and I don't know.  I really hate being the new one.  I don't like having to ask people where things are and try to figure out the way they do things.  I'm afraid that I'm going to say something dumb or not know something they thought was really obvious.  Right now I'm thinking "why in the world did I leave my comfortable job that I love with all the people that I get along with to go to a new lab where I know nobody and know nothing about the work?!"  But I'm going to use Daniel's mom's favorite technique: cognitive behavioral therapy.  Instead of thinking that I'm crazy for changing jobs, I'm going to think about every good thing about starting my new job.

1) I will meet new people, and make new friends.  Making new friends is always a good thing, especially for someone like me who has a hard time with it.

2)  I will learn a lot.  I will learn new lab techniques, better cell culture practices, and all about breast cancer and cancer physiology.

3) I will make A LOT more money.

4) I will potentially get 2 or 3 more publications.

5) I won't have to work with the very few people in this lab that I don't enjoy working with.

6) I will have a higher position and will no longer feel like I was cheated out of what I fully deserve (a full professional research assistant position- NOT an obscure "technician" position that is just an excuse to pay me less).

7) I will practice going outside of my comfort zone, and pushing myself to be better.

I will repeat this list over and over in the next few days until I feel less panicked and more excited.  I will take a deep breath, and believe that everything is going to be fine.  Great.  Fantastic!

RIP Schnoodle Rosen

Yesterday, we said goodbye to Schnoodle Rosen.  He lived a very long life, almost 15 years.  He was a grumpy old dog, even when he wasn't that old, but we loved him anyways :-)  Daniel's family adopted him on one of their weekly "Sunday Fun Day" trips and he has been a member of the family ever since.  As he got older he lost his hearing and most of his teeth, his black hair turned to gray, and his eyesight was fading fast.  Anytime he barked at Jackson grumpily, we liked to tease that he might "gum Jackson to death" because he had no teeth.  When we went to Phoenix a few weeks ago he was leaning against walls and seemed disoriented most of the time.  It's very sad to say goodbye, but it was time for Schnoodle to go.  Last night Daniel's parents, Evan, and his girlfriend Kristy buried Schnoodle in the backyard under their orange tree.  They called us so that we could participate in the burial over the phone.  It was one of the saddest things I have ever experienced.  Kristy told us over the phone that it looked like Schnoodle was just sleeping in the box.  Daniel's dad dug a hole while we all shared our favorite memories of Schnoodle.  Everyone was crying by the end of it.  As they lowered Schnoodle into the ground, Daniel's mom said that it didn't really look like he was sleeping anymore.  It was so sad. I'm glad I wasn't there to see him put in the ground and buried.  I think that must have been very hard. Losing a pet is so difficult, but it's absolutely worth the many years of joy we had with him as part of the Rosen family.  New life always comes to take the place of those who have passed, and this was no exception.  In fact, Evan and Kristy had just adopted a new dachshund puppy last week and named him "Doodle."  So after Schnoodle was buried, the family spent the evening playing with the new puppy.  It was perfect.

On Tuesday, Daniel and I had our first pre-marital counseling appointment.  Chris set us up with one of his classmates at Iliff School of Theology.  This worked out really well because Daniel had class until 6pm and then we just walked one building over to Iliff and met with our counselor.  She is extraordinarily qualified, with 2 Master's degrees, 11 years as a licensed preacher, and an almost complete Ph.D.  She had a whole curriculum and schedule prepared for us which really impressed me.  I wasn't sure what to expect, but I certainly didn't think she would have spent so much time preparing.  We introduced ourselves and got to know her a little better, and talked about our expectations, goals, and what specific things we want to talk about.  Based on that information she is adjusting our schedule a little bit.  We're going to meet at least 5 times over the next 8 weeks.  I am hoping that this will give me absolute confidence that we have done everything we can to ensure a successful marriage.  Though I think our past 9 years together is a good indicator that we know how to resolve conflict and stay committed, I also think that our relative inexperience in difficult life situations means we haven't had a lot of things to test our relationship.  We've also never had any sort of formal counseling.  If nothing else, it will be some quality time we can spend together improving our relationship.  :-)  And lucky for us, Chris has taken care of the cost too!  Daniel and I knew that we couldn't really afford to pay for counseling ourselves, so Chris set it up for us.  Knowing that our counselor is a friend of Chris' and a student at Iliff gives me complete confidence that she can really help set us up for a long successful life together.

Tomorrow is my last day in the Schwartz/Yang lab.  I can't believe it's been almost 2 years.  The last few days I've been nervous about my new job.  What if I don't have the skills they expect me to?  What if I don't like anyone in the new lab?  What if I don't like the job itself?  I know I've been so lucky that I've never had a job I didn't like, and I feel like at some point my luck is going to run out.  Am I dumb to leave a job that I love with people that I enjoy working with to try something new?  I hope not.  I try to reassure myself that I have lots of experience, and they have hired me based on my resume and interview- and in both I was completely honest.  There is no reason I will not be completely prepared for this job.  And if I need to learn new skills, which I almost certainly will, then I know how to do that too.  I'm a quick learner, and I have the intelligence to figure things out if I have to.  And getting along with everyone shouldn't be a problem.  In general, I get along with pretty much everyone.  I'm trying to convince myself that this is a good decision- can you tell?  Tomorrow after work we're all going out for happy hour to wish me good luck in my future career.  It was so nice of everyone here to do that for me.  I'm going to miss everyone a lot.  This was the first job I had that I felt really successful.  Everyone here has taught me something.  But now I have to do what's best for me and our family- and a big raise is definitely going to help.  So I'm jumping in, hoping everything turns out for the best!

I'm going to be published!

I found out last week that I am finally going to be published!  As a scientist, publishing articles in a scientific journal is how most people measure their success.  The more they publish, and the better the journal they publish in, the more prestige (and therefore grant money/salary) they get.  I have been working in this lab for almost 2 years and I have worked extensively on 3 or 4 projects, and one of them is finally being sent off to the journal at the end of this week!  I had to sign a bunch of paperwork disclosing any conflict of interest and giving all copyright rights to the journal.  Ironically, this first paper is one that I have only been working on for the last few weeks.  I completed the last bit of work that needed to be done before we could submit the manuscript.  It's a fascinating paper.  Once it's published, I can write all about it.  Until then, I can only say that it involved human subjects with different forms of interstitial idiopathic pneumonia and aimed to find genetic markers in their lung tissue that could predict what subtype they have, their prognosis, and how they will respond to different treatments.  I am pretty sure that in the next year or so, I will continue to be published in this lab for the work I have already completed.  And my new lab has promised me at least 2 publications, hopefully more.  I just wish that one of them would have been finished in time for me to put it on my graduate school application.  That would give me a great advantage over many of my co-applicants.

Speaking of grad school, I still haven't heard anything :-(  I fully expected to hear something from them by now.  The early deadline was September 1, and I submitted mine in mid-July.  The final deadline is October 1, so maybe they're waiting until then to contact anyone.  I applied to 3 schools and I will be extremely surprised if I don't get an interview at one of them.  I'm starting to get discouraged.  It's hard to stay positive, but still brace myself for disappointment at the same time.  It helps that if I don't get into graduate school, I'm still very excited about our alternate plan.  Which involves me continuing to work in the job that I love, and start having babies.  Not a bad Plan B, right?

But first, I have a wedding to attend.  We got our first 2 RSVPs in the mail on Saturday.  About once a day I have a moment of extreme excitement and then I come back down to earth and remember that I have a lot of things to do between now and then.  As it gets closer, I am also getting more excited about those 10 days after the wedding that we will be spending in Hawaii!  Right now the ocean, beaches, volcano, and snorkeling sound very nice.  And I imagine that 6 weeks from now, when it's 30 degrees and snowing outside, it will sound even better.  (side note, it's 80 degrees outside right now, I can't believe in 6 weeks it will be full on winter!)  One of my co-workers, an MD in our lab, told me that her parents own a snorkeling charter company out of Kona, the capital of the Big Island and she offered to set me up a trip with them.  Last week she emailed me a confirmation for our trip and a link to the website.  It looks amazing!  The trip is 4.5 hours and includes breakfast and lunch.  We go out snorkeling to a site where they see dolphins almost every day, and once out of every week and a half the dolphins stay to swim with the snorkelers!  It's also whale season in Hawaii, so we could see humpback whales.  The boat also has a diving platform and water slide.  Oh, and did I mention a fully stocked cash bar?  I think I'll be bringing some cash along for some post-snorkeling drinks.  And it's completely free to us too!  We will be sending a nice thank you note to my co-worker for that.  I looked up the company in our guidebook and it got fantastic reviews.  Daniel also decided that he wants to take golf lessons.  So now the plan is for us to spend a day at a resort on the Kohala coast.  Daniel can learn to play golf, and I will be happy to spend the day at the spa.  Daniel isn't really into massages, and I'm certainly not into golf, so I think spending a few hours away from each other on our honeymoon is okay.

I should stop wasting time and get back to my science.  Last week in my old lab :-(

Saving Money

It's very frustrating that the new job hasn't moved forward much in the last week.  It got stuck in HR- where everything seems to get stuck around here.  But it seems that everything is still on track for me to start on October 1.  I'll put in my 2 weeks' notice next Monday.  Word has started to spread slowly around the lab.  I doubt I'll get any sort of recognition.  I think if I had stayed until graduate school, I probably would have gotten some kind of celebratory "good luck in grad school" party.  But since I'm leaving for another lab, it's a little different.  But I am very VERY excited for the raise!  This is going to increase our income by almost $600 a month.  That is huge for us.  We still need to save $2500 more to reach our goal for our wedding and honeymoon, so in 2 months just that increase will get us halfway there.  We have been consistently saving about $600 a month on my current salary, so if we continue with that trend it looks like we'll just make it.  What a relief!  I think it is very encouraging that we can live on my $25k salary and still have over $500 left to put in savings.  That means that when Daniel starts working full-time, we will be able to save a lot more.  And for a while, every extra penny will go towards student loans.  After our honeymoon, of course :-)

Last week I started auditing a course here on campus on basic immunology.  The only immunology I have learned has been picked up little by little as I do research in the lab.  After 2 classes, so many holes have been filled that help me understand the research so much better.  I hope I will be able to continue taking the class after I move to the new lab.  The professor is absolutely incredible.  It's obvious he's a very visual person because he explains everything through drawings or acting things out in class.  It's very amusing when he uses people in the class as props.  I love this because I'm a visual person too.  Giving human personalities, emotions, and motivations to things like antibodies and T-cells makes everything so much easier to understand and remember.  One of my favorite things in the world is learning something new, and having a fantastic professor to teach me makes it even better.  Every day I am reaffirmed in my fascination with the human body.  I am a born scientist.  Third generation, in fact!

Work has been inordinately frustrating lately.  I have been running a million qPCRs and every third time the instrument fails in some way and I have to repeat the experiment.  It takes about half a day to do each plate, so when one fails that's half a day completely wasted.  And the reagents and materials to run one plate cost a couple thousand dollars.  That's not much in science terms, but it's still waste.  The most frustrating part is that I always feel like it's my fault.  Even when the instrument fails I feel like it's my fault.

Yesterday was my first day of not going to school.  To me it still feels like summer break.  I wonder when it will hit me that everyone else is in school and I'm not.  Maybe when it starts to get cold.  I am loving what I'm doing right now.  Compared to school, working feels so completely productive.  I actually get paid for working 40 hours a week, instead of paying thousands of dollars to work 60 hours a week.  I have more free time than I ever did in school and less stress too.  Although, I can't imagine having kids and working full-time.  I think it would feel like I never see them.  But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Savoring the Here and Now

Well, it's official.  I told my PI today that I received another offer.  She was surprisingly cool and calm about it. She totally understood and reassured me repeatedly that it was fine.  Later today she is going to talk to her co-PI, David, and let him know.  She told me that likely he will not want to give me a raise because he is trying to save all his grant money to pay for post-docs and not research techs.  She emphasized that it has nothing to do with me personally, but just the organization of the lab and how they want to move forward.  That's fine with me, I want as easy a decision as possible.  And I emphasized to her that I love this lab and have enjoyed my work here, but I just can't turn down a better offer.  I'm so relieved it's out in the open and I don't have to keep my email closed or disappear for surreptitious meetings anymore.  What a relief!  Life is moving so fast I can't believe it.   Barely 4 months out of college and I've already gotten a raise and promotion.

Lately I've made a commitment to try to enjoy my life the way it is right now.  I have spent so much of my life looking forward to what's next, that I completely miss the excitement of the stage I'm in.  While in high school I couldn't wait until I moved away from my parents and went to college.  While in college, I couldn't wait for financial independence and forming my own family with Daniel.  And now I'm itching to get married and start having babies as soon as possible.  Now I look back with nostalgia at each of those periods in my life and realize how much fun they were.  I wish I could go back and relive the pure fun that is the life of a teenager.    I wish I had enjoyed having my sister and all my family so close.  And I wish I had savored the feeling of having every opportunity in the world open to me.  I also wish I could go back to those first few weeks of college when I was experiencing life without parents for the first time, meeting all new friends, and spending my entire life on school and socializing with no bills to worry about.  So I am going to try my hardest to enjoy this time.  The time of new financial independence, a new job, life without homework and tests, being young and energetic, and not having to pay a babysitter every time Daniel and I want to go out on a date.  I hope that I don't look back on this time in my life and wish that I had enjoyed it more instead of constantly looking forward.

Labor Day Weekend

Well, not much has happened to progress towards my new, higher paid job.  HR is not very motivated, and they're moving at the speed of a snail to get my paperwork through.  I still haven't said anything to my PI.  I think I might talk to her tomorrow.  I won't officially give her my 2 weeks' notice yet, but I will tell her what's going on.  I feel like I need to give her more time to talk to David before I actually put in my 2 weeks' notice.  That way, they can counter-offer or match if they want to.  I know what I'm going to say, and I'm not as nervous about it as I used to be.  I'm sure it won't be a fun conversation, but it needs to happen.  And soon.  I want my higher salary!

Work has been extremely busy lately.  I have finished all the projects that I was working on when this new job offer presented itself.  I have been doing everything in my power to be productive and efficient so that I leave this lab with good feelings all around.  Last Thursday and Friday I worked very hard.  We had a huge harvest over at National Jewish so I went back to the old lab for those days.  It was great to see everyone, but difficult because we had limited supplies and no desk or computer for me to work at.  I worked from 8:30am-6pm and then unfortunately I had to leave.  My handbells group was having a beginning of the year potluck that I really didn't want to miss.  I felt so guilty leaving early because my co-worker who has 3 children between the ages of 7 and 13 stayed until after 7pm.  And I, who has zero children, left at 6pm.  But she is also getting paid much more than me.  We worked so much together for those two days that we got to know each other so well.  And when I told her how much I was making, she was appalled.  She thinks it's pretty rude to pay me so little.  I'm glad I'm not the only one!  I told her about the new offer, and she said that I should take it.  I told her mostly because I knew that she would be taking over a lot of my projects so I wanted to give her a little more time to get what information she needs to do that.

Friday was another long harvest day, and when I got home Daniel had made a beautiful romantic dinner for us. He made Spanish tapas with our own homegrown tomatoes, and even baked brownies from scratch.  He went to the grocery store and bought mussels for dinner and fruit for homemade sangria!  It was delicious and beautiful and exactly what I needed after 2 very long days.

For our Labor Day weekend, we got a lot of chores done around the house, and had some fun too.  On Sunday we went to A Taste of Colorado which is a food festival downtown.  There were all kinds of food vendors and you could buy little tastes of everything, or a whole meal.  I ate so much junk food that night that I got a stomachache.  But it was still really fun.  On Monday we met Hope in Colorado Springs.  We drove to Garden of the Gods which is these giant sandstone red rocks that stick up from the mountains.  We hiked around a little bit and enjoyed the gorgeous almost-fall weather.  Then we went to a little art festival in Manitou.  Colorado Springs is super conservative, and Manitou is the hippie town right next to it.  The festival was small and cute- perfect for a small mountain town.  We got back to Denver in time for me to get some more chores done and have a nice little dinner together to finish off our weekend.  Every time I go somewhere new in Colorado I am overwhelmed by how beautiful it is.  I never want to leave.  I would be happy living here until I die.  I think it is just about the most beautiful place on the planet.