Everyday Scientist

stipends changing

Charles has been posting his calculations about graduate student pay partially because he is moving and partially because our department has recently had a clandestine change in the pay policy for teaching assistants (TAs).

From the plots below, you can see that, over the last few years, while a TA position pays more or the same one year to the next, the pay increase above the base research assistant (RA) stipend has been decreasing. (HTA and ATA are two different types of non-first-year grad student TAs.)

The real reason for this is that, in 2007-2008, graduate student TAs will now be paid less by their PIs during the quarter they are teaching. And, because our Department Chair went to bat for the students to the University, TAs will be paid above the minimum rate.

It actually makes sense that a PI shouldn’t have to pay his teaching students as much, and that the department should pick up the tab. But that’s not the way Stanford Department of Chemistry has done it in the past. I suspect we’re now in line with how most other schools pay TAs.

Motivated by unhappy granting agencies and an auditing University administration, the faculty decided to fix the students-being-paid-more-than-100% issue by, effectively, paying TAs less.

Frustrated grad students have been reacting to rumors of this happening for the last few months, and then it sorta happened while our back was turned.

Personally, I think it makes sense that a PI not pay a student full-time while he or she is TAing (on top of paying the student’s full tuition and overhead on the stipend)—I don’t want my PI spending more time working on grants. And students should TA for the sake of TAing, not for the extra pay itself. But it’s alway too bad when the University, the Department, and the Faculty make decisions that negatively affect student without even warning them of the impending change, or without explaining the reasons for what feels like a pay cut.

Graduate School Money, Part 3

Graphs:

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Graduate School Money, Part II

Income:

Expenses:

Federal/State Income Taxes at ca. 12.5% : $3,325

Rent at Palo Alto Average* of $904/month (US Census Bureau): $10848

National Average Food Expenditure for Single Male with Moderate Budget of $238/month: $2856

Subsidized Stanford Cardinal Health Care at $342/quarter: $1368

Averge Car Insurance for California at $847/6 mo.: $1694

1/2 Annual Automotive Travel (6250 miles) at average 21 mi/gal at Palo Alto gas price of $3.21/gal: $955

Cell Phone Cost (Cheapest Cingular Plan) at $40/mo: $480

*Note: Stanford Graduate Single Occupancy (i.e. 1 person/room) Housing rent ranges from $640 for Crothers to $994 for the EV studios. The Rate for Rains, Lyman, and EV 2Br is $790. There is an additonal a $27/month mandatory fee for telecommunication and laundry.

Total Income: $26,600

Total Expenditures: $21,526

Estimated Disposable Income: $5074/year or $423/month ($211/paycheck).

Graduate School Money, Part I

Stanford Graduate Minimum Stipend (what we’re paid in Chemistry): $26,600

Average Work Hours for a U.S. science postdoc (probably similar to / less than graduate student): 49.8 U.S. citizen (Brumfiel, Geoff; “Taking a Stand,” Nature, 2005, 438, 278-279.)

Average pay/hour (50 weeks): $10.68

Average pay/hour (52 weeks): $10.27

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Federal Minimum Hourly Wage: 2008 – $6.55, 2009 – $7.25

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Living Wages: Encouraged in Cities/Counties by Ordinance (tax/property incentives)

San Jose Living Wage: $11.35

Santa Clara County (our county) Living Wage: $10.00

Berkely Living Wage: $12.55

Oakland Living Wage: $10.50

Source

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2004 Estimates of Retailers Bay Area (Annual Estimates for 40 hr work week, 50 weeks a year)

2004 Average Hourly Wage for Walmart Associate in Bay Area: $10.93

Walmart Annual: $21,860 (Stanford Salaray -$4740)

2004 Average Hourly Wage for All Large Retailers in Bay Area: $17.01,

Large Retailers Annual: $34,020 (Stanford Salary +$7420)

2004 Average Hourly Wage for Unionized Grocers in Bay Area: $15.31,

Unionized Grocers Annual: $30,620 (Stanford Salary +$4020)

Source

Rube Goldberg Science

Most people have probably heard of or seen pictures of so called Rube Goldberg Machines. These are extremely complicated apparatuses which do extremely simple tasks. Here is an example from the Rube Goldberg website.

This one could actually be useful for those grad students who have bosses that keep track of time in lab.

There are even Rube Goldberg Machine contests, in which teams try to design a machine that can use the greatest number of steps to complete a simple task.

Now, science is often complicated and it doesn’t need any extra help from us grad students to make it more complicated but I fell into the trap myself and let this be a warning to all those who think they have a really good idea… think again.

The required task is: Do a pump-probe anisotropy measurement using infrared light. Simple enough at face value, but all you visible spectroscopists out there must keep in mind that IR polarizers are ~1000 times worse than visible polarizers and there is no such thing as a broadband IR half wave plate. Tack onto that the fact that IR detectors are much less efficient that visible detectors and you’ve got a passel of stumbling blocks in front of you when you’re trying to do this experiment. I’ve tried a number of different techniques and because the IR polarizers and half wave plates are a little sketchy, transmission always seems to screw things up. So I thought to myself, what if we did everything using reflections! Then it would be achromatic and everything would be hunky dory. Here’s a schematic diagram of what the pump beam is subjected to in this scheme. The actual layout is much more complicated but I didn’t have a digital camera with me.

The periscope serves to change the polarization of the pump beam so that it will be parallel or perpendicular to the probe. The bottom mirror in this periscope is on a computer controlled rotation stage so that it can rotate to spit the beam out in two different directions depending on the polarization you want. In addition to that, since there are now two beam paths we added a computer controlled mirror that could flip in and out of the beam depending on which beam path you were using (which polarization). It was a thing of wonder to watch these things rotate and flip on the click of a mouse button, almost mesmerizing and utterly satisfying as well. Needless to say, it didn’t actually work for the purpose it was designed for. I wasn’t able to align the two beam paths well enough and/or the mechanical devices weren’t repeatable enough to consistently steer the beams in the same direction. Bummer. Like so many things that seem perfect on paper, real life imperfections rear their ugly head when you try to make it work in practice.

Now, this experiment isn’t a simple task by any stretch of the imagination, but making it more complicated is certainly not going to make it work better. It was only after I was humbled by the lack of repeatability of my fancy new system that I remembered Rube Goldberg and kicked myself for falling into his trap.

what independence day means to grad students

This is a little email conversation I had with William:

I asked Kevin. He told me.

sam wrote:
> seriously?

> william wrote:
>> sure, but what’s this week?

>> sam wrote:
>>> [no journal club this wednesday,] obviously. can you go next week?

I’m glad that TJ wasn’t a chemist.

Top Ten Lies Told by Graduate Students

The Top Ten Lies Told by Graduate Students
(taken from the Harvard Crimson)

10. It doesn’t bother me at all that my college roommate is making
$80,000 a year on Wall Street.
9. I’d be delighted to proofread your book/chapter/article.
8. My work has a lot of practical importance.
7. I would never date an undergraduate.
6. Your latest article was so inspiring.
5. I turned down a lot of great job offers to come here.
4. I just have one more book to read and then I’ll start writing.
3. The department is giving me so much support.
2. My job prospects look really good.
1. No really, I’ll be out of here in only two more years.

Source

watching over the lab

There has been a wave of thefts in the physics buildings on campus—losers stealing lab equipment—so we decided to have someone watch over our labs all night and day:

He startles us often. But he’s the hardest working grad student!

Motivators

The folks over at despair.com have a new motivator generator – here are a few chemistry motivation posters that I came up with. Have fun. Click on any of them for the full-size image.

blog-roundup for Aprilish

I know this is late, but here’s some blog-roundup stuff for April/Mayishtime. [As a side-note, I went to my brother’s graduation at UNC (my alma mater, too). Madeleine Albright was the commencement speaker and she was good. My favorite part was when she mentioned chaising tail.]

• Katie’s exhausting story about defending her thesis to jerks at Minor Revisions.
• Propter Doc’s post about learning research. Also, she tells us how she became a chemist.
  
• Paul at ChemBark thinks that his bowtie namer is a chemist.
• PhilipJ at BioCurious finished his master’s thesis.
• The Skeptical Chemyst has suggestions for writing a cover letter.
• And Kyle at The Chem Blog gives us some history.

Enjoy!

shitting your pants for science

This is not my story. This is my friend’s story. Let’s call her X. X is dedicated to science. So dedicated that she shit her pants for science. Here’s the story (as best I can remember it)…

At some point in X’s grad-school career, she required some specific protein—some tubulin, I think. Now this tubulin was very expensive: for the amount she needed, her lab would have to pay upwards of $500k. Needless to say, they didn’t have the spare cash to buy a vial of this stuff. The other option for obtaining this tubulin was to purify it themselves … from calf brains.*

So X and two of her colleagues traveled the two hours to the nearest slaughterhouse … for calf brains. Once they got there, the workers discovered that they didn’t have any cow heads small enough to fit into their head-splitter (yes, apparently slaughterhouses have head-splitters on hand, but small ones). So the three scientists had to drive the two hours back to lab empty-handed.

After the third such trip, X and her labmates were successful (if you can call it that) in getting—still warm, mind you—calf brains. They threw the brains on ice and drove quickly back to lab. Unfortunately, all three had some digestion issues, and they had to stop several times on the trip back to use the restroom.</foreshadowing>

Now they had to do each step of the ~20-hour purification without stopping or the protein would be unusable. So X and her labmates were many many hours into this purification. She was doing one repetative pipetting step in the coldroom while her labmates were elsewhere in the lab. Suddenly, she felt a rumbling in her gut and a dreadful loosening of her sphincter. Continuing to pipet, she called out to her labmates. Her yelling was to no avail, because the insulated door to the coldroom blocked her cries for assistance.

A dilemma: to stop the purification and destroy many hours of collective effort and delay an essential experiment, or to shit one’s pants. For X, the decision was clear: she shat her pants between plunges of the pipetter.

When her labmates eventually returned, X excused herself and said she’d be back in an hour or so, went home and cleaned up, then returned to lab to help finish the purification.

You know, I never asked her whether the experiment with the tubulin actually worked…

[Update: X read this post and had this to say: “the only factual correction i would like to contribute is that i didn’t even go home after i shit my pants – we still had protein to harvest, sam, and i couldn’t abandon my colleagues. i just went to the bathroom, threw out the soiled underpants, cleaned up, and went back to the prep.” Now that is dedication! I would have just stolen the $500k at gunpoint from a local bank….

X also said: “i should also come clean and say that the tubulin was only worth $150k. the prep worked great—nice clean bands on a protein gel. finally, i should let you know that a former postdoc in [my old] lab told me that he once participated in a tubulin prep at an institution that didn’t have any cooperative slaughterhouses nearby. this meant that he had to SPLIT THE HEADS HIMSELF WITH A CHAINSAW. seriously. “]

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* Just a side note that X is vegetarian. So am I, so I can’t officially condone using animal parts. But, for science, some exceptions to ethical guidelines must be made. Like running stoplights. And using byproducts of the meat industry. Just the other day, I had to buy some gelatin in the name of science. ;)

breaking the 200k mark

My 1995 Toyota Tercel broke the 200,000-mile mark this (Sunday) morning while driving in to lab:

before: after:

My little friend has taken me from Portland, ME to Chapel Hill, NC and back many many times. It also made if from Chapel Hill to Palo Alto, CA and back 1.5 times. And it’s still going strong!

depressed grad students

Hmmm. A few depressed grad students out there. Kyle feels in a funk. Excimer is bummed about an NSF rejection, and most of us know that pain. Excimer also thinks April is the most depressing month. Maybe. Propter Doc gives some advice to us all.

I’ve been feeling in a funk for the last week at least. Nothing in particular is wrong, just a lot to do and I don’t end up feeling productive at the end of the day. But it feels nice to hear that others are in the same mood. So y’all keep your chins up!

caterpillars invade stanford

Caterpillars have infiltrated the Stanford campus. Hairy little guys are everywhere. They were around last year, but there are many many more this spring. I’m a big fan of nature, but this is some perversion of nature; an itchy, crawly, icky perversion.

They come repelling down from the trees and buildings and then crawl to the places that we want to walk. The doors to my building, for instance:

Or all over the picnic tables. They were completely covered like this corner before the sun moved (I think they like the shade):

For a little while, I thought that it was a ploy of the professors to get students to spend more time in lab, because being outside is not very pleasant. But the school/department has decided to hire someone to spray them off the buildings with water. Here’s an except of an email from our indespensable (seriously) Facilities Manager:

All,

After prolonged negotiation with Stanford authorities, the oak moth infestation loses to chemistry. Tomorrow morning, the infestation of oak moths will be attacked. The buildings will be power washed to remove the bugs and the bugs will be sprayed once on the ground with chemicals rendering them inert. The oak trees and grounds will be treated on Saturday.

Better living through chemistry–

The Managment

Hopefully we’ll be able to go back outside soon.

ilya’s defense

Notes from Ilya‘s defense entitled “Ultrafast Protein Dynamics in Aqueous and Confined Environments”:

Now we have a PhD who posts on this blog!