My New Job

Wow the last 3 weeks have gone by so fast, I just haven't had time to blog at all. The new job has been way more work than I ever imagined. I worked full time last summer (well, sort of- I would leave early often if there wasn't any work to do) so I figured this would be just the same. But it's not. I am incredibly busy from the moment I step into work until the moment I leave. And I never leave on time. This isn't the kind of job where you have certain hours and once your hours are up you get to leave. Not even close. I've been working 9-10 hours 3 or 4 days a week for the past 2 weeks. Luckily I get to come in fairly late at about 9am. I guess researchers generally aren't morning people. But I usually don't leave until 6pm and once or twice it was 7 before I could leave. We have been doing massive mouse harvests of 16-20 animals in one day. That is a lot of work and it all has to be completed immediately. If you leave samples overnight to process the next day, the RNA can degrade so the samples become useless. Which means you have to just stay and get it done no matter how long it takes. Somehow I am the one who has been designated to do all the processing of the samples. So we (me and 2 other people) spend 9-10am preparing for the harvest, all 3 of us spend 10am-3pm harvesting, and then I get to spend 3pm-6pm processing while the other 2 sit in their office or go home. I'm not really sure how that happened, but I really shouldn't complain. I prefer a really busy day over staring into space for 8 hours. It just means that I have a million things to do and I can get overwhelmed sometimes when I have 5 thousand emails to answer and hours of benchwork to do.

All this mouse harvesting has given me lots of practice. In the past 2 weeks I've learned to bleed the mouse perfectly. This was extremely frustrating for me at first. You have to stick a needle directly into the heart without opening up the chest cavity. So you have to learn where to stick it exactly right. If you don't get it right, then the blood clots and you can't get any out. You can also end up puncturing so many holes in the heart that the blood just pools inside the chest cavity and makes a big mess when you try to take out the lungs later. After practicing on 5 mice, I finally got it. I'm still really slow compared to the other 2 researchers who help me. It takes me about 15 minutes to do one animal, while it takes them 8-10 minutes. I also learned how to tie a suture while working on the mice. Maybe that'll come in handy some day when I'm working with humans!

The only disappointing part about my job has been the pay. I got my first paycheck yesterday and it was surprisingly little. It's really scary for me. This is the first month that Daniel and I are paying our own bills out of our own income. If our income together isn't enough then we won't be able to pay our bills. We both believe in living within our means- which means no credit card debt. Neither of us have ever gone into debt (except for student loans). I would hate it if we couldn't pay off our credit cards this first month. But I realize there may be a small learning curve. And I'm still on my ridiculously low $8/hr student pay until July 1 so my income will go up at that point. Though working 9 and 10 hour days is much more attractive when you're on an hourly income.

Another benefit of working full time is that for the first time I get to see all the bureaucracy that goes on. Until we are able to hire a mouse colony manager, I am sharing the mouse duties with a graduate student in the lab. This means that I get tons of emails about food, housing, sick and dead animals, ordering, etc. etc. I'm slowly learning how to handle all these decisions and extra responsibility. With the whole lab moving to the University we have a lot of paperwork to take care of as well. I've had to submit a letter of resignation to National Jewish, I just got my offer letter at the University, and I've had to sign up for a new employee orientation. To work with animals in the new facility there is a whole other set of paperwork and doctors visit and meetings and training to go through. It's all very confusing and it seems like so much work. But when you're dealing with the welfare of animals, I guess I would hope that there were significant regulations involved. You don't want any old person walking in and experimenting on animals. Our move date is currently July 18th. At that point I will be driving to the University of Colorado every day instead of National Jewish. The commute is about 25 minutes with traffic and everything. That's 10 minutes longer than I'm driving now, but it's still not that bad. I'll also have to pay $57/mo for parking! I think it's ridiculous that we have to pay for parking at our own job. (by the way, a bus pass is something like $75/mo so I wouldn't be saving anything by taking the bus to work).

So, to summarize: I love my job. It's really hard work, but very rewarding. I come home completely exhausted every day. I make very little money. I love my life right now!