May Entry

Something I’ve found very interesting about my experience in grad school is the type of people you find in academia. There are a lot of consistencies across individuals as you might expect at this level of education. For example, I could create a very long list of the runners, yoga practitioners, weight lifters, martial artists, soccer players or cyclists among the NSP students. The list of people in the program who make regular healthy eating decisions (in spite of pizza Monday) is likely equally as long and highly overlapping. Perhaps I’m generalizing a bit too much but the NSP students seem to be a fairly fit and healthy bunch. The consistency of this behavior pattern makes me curious; what other patterns may be found?

NSP students:
When did you start “taking care of yourself”? Gradschool? Undergrad? Highschool? Were you always involved in athletics (really broadly speaking) even from a young age?
Are your parents’ regular exercisers?

Do you think health and fitness were/are as much a priority to your advisor as they are to you or is this change seen mostly in the current generation of graduate students? I think the argument could me made both ways.

I’m just interested in hearing about the motivation and history here since we all work in an industry which pressures (to varying degrees) one to spend every possible waking hour working. If we all skipped the workouts and just grabbed McDonalds on the way into the lab would we excel and flourish or would rot set in?

March Theme & Entry 1

We recently had a lively research forum discussion about funding in science. For me one of the most interesting ideas that came up was that of refining the grant application process to eliminate personal biases.

Dr. Kreulen prompted us to continue thinking about funding in science and I would like to continue the discussion here on the blog.

I will start by saying that if we were attempting to improve the grant review process; I think the first step is to decide, in very loose terms, by what criteria a grant should and shout not be reviewed. Can we form a list of factors that should be considered and a list of factors that we would prefer not be considered? Some items might require a bit of explanation and that’s fine. This is just brainstorming. I will start and I encourage everyone to continue the lists in their comments:

Grant should be review based on:

Quality of idea – Will the proposed experiments contribute significant, meaningful content to the scientific community regard (insert granting institutions particular agenda here).

January Theme

The topic for this monthw as certainly easy enough to come up with; what are your science resolutions for the new year?