I finally ordered my linens…

By linens I’m referring to the table clothes for my wedding. If you’re not planning a wedding or have never planned one, you may not understand the significance of this, nor might you care. That’s ok. This post probably isn’t for everyone, but I want to use it to bring up a couple of aspects of my life that I’m currently trying to balance with my lab work. One of those aspects obviously being my wedding. I’m getting married next month, in less than 6 weeks now. Peter, my fiancé, is also in my graduate program. We’ve been dating a little over 8 years, and got engaged about 2 years ago. We went to high school together here in Athens, he attended Northeastern while I was at Yale. When it came time to look at graduate schools, we decided we wanted to try and apply to schools that would leave us hopefully in the same city. However, we didn’t anticipate ending up not only at the same school, but in the same department, working on separate floors of the same building. It’s been nice though, definitely better than living 200 miles from each other with neither of us having a car (a.k.a college).

Peter and I started saving for our wedding after he proposed in December of 2014, and we’ll get married in February of 2017. We’ve saved enough to pay for about 75% of our wedding that we’re determined to keep under 15K. To stick to our budget, while having the type of wedding we both envisioned, we had to plan and do a lot of it ourselves (with the help of wonderful friends and family too of course). Overall, the process has been a little bit stressful, but honestly, some days it’s a nice break from lab work! I will admit to being a bit of a “girly-girl”, so picking out dresses and shoes and whatnot has been kind of fun. Peter and I both LOVE food (eating it, cooking it, talking about it, etc), so even selecting caterers was a somewhat enjoyable process. The one thing I hate though are…linens. Linens (a.k.a tableclothe) drive me CRAZY. I am very aware of how ridiculous this sounds. The thing is, I have had to deal with “linen troubles” for more than just my own wedding planning. I’ve served on the Biochemistry Graduate Student Association in different roles for the past three years, and one of the regular jobs of this group is to help organize the departmental holiday party. Overall, I love being a part of BGSA. It’s a little time consuming because besides planning the holiday party, we also organize seminars with invited guest speakers, plan outreach/community service opportunities and host social activities for the department’s graduate students. Keep in mind, these are all things I thoroughly enjoy doing. Being a part of BGSA has meant I’ve met (and networked) with lots of guest speakers, been able to give back to the community I actually grew up in, and have gotten to know and have fun with my peers in the department. I think it’s been a huge plus for my overall graduate experience and a great way to maintain sanity while in graduate school. BUT, it’s also meant I’ve had to deal with the holiday party LINENS. Each year, we have to dig them out of storage, make sure they’re clean and wrinkle-free(post holiday party wine stains are a real pain to get out), and lay them out on what seems like a million tables at The State Botanical Gardens of Georgia (just so happens to be the same place we’re hosting our wedding reception. Go figure). Something about those damn linens just drive me crazy.

As much as I would have LOVED to just have the caterer order our linens and let them deal with it all, Peter and I are on a budget, and the $17 per table cloth price tag is not in our budget. Therefore, I decided to order my own at a third of the price. I put off this task for quite some time though, just because I dislike tablecloths so much. HOWEVER, they are now ordered. That’s one thing off my To-Do list for the wedding, which puts me one step closer to hitting my January goals from my last post!

So yes, I can admit this post may seem a little silly, but planning a wedding has been a great distraction from some of my graduate school stresses! I think finding an additional project to focus on has really helped me from feeling too immersed in graduate school and lab life. Obviously, a wedding isn’t the only project that would fulfill this role, any sort of project or hobby will do, and I definitely think I’ll need to think about something new to work on once the wedding has come and gone!

I promise that post on what I actually do  in lab is right around the corner! In fact, I’m presenting myself with the task of writing a synopsis of my work in 500 words or less to use for an application for an upcoming science communications (scicomm) conference I want to apply too soon, so now I have a hard deadline!

 

Best,

Michelle

 

Hello 2017!!!!! Time for some January Goals

Happy New Year! I’m genuinely hopeful that this upcoming year will be better than last year. I also genuinely want to try to be a better person than I was last year. I want to work harder towards my PhD and future career plans, workout more, eat better, wake up earlier…you know, all the usual New Year Resolution B.S. And while it does seem like total B.S. some of the time, I do actually believe that starting the year with at least the intention to try and do some self-improvement, leaves you in a better place than just being like “screw it!”. The aforementioned list of improvements encompass my overall New Years Resolutions, but as I mentioned in my earlier post on End of Year Resolutions, I’m going to set achievable  monthly goals for myself rather than try to make these grand, sweeping changes.

So here are this month’s goals:

1. Publicly promote my blog…
   • If you’re reading this, then I’ve accomplished this goal. I started the idea of this blog without really knowing if I actually intended to share it with the public. But I’ve decided to do so with the hopes that sharing my experiences in graduate school could maybe provide some insight and guidance for someone else who may have hit a rut in their own journey. I also figured it can help me get some feedback on my writing and also hold me accountable for continuing this process. I hope if you’re reading this, you’ll be willing to leave a comment letting me know what you think! I’m totally fine with constructive criticism and I think any feedback will be useful!
2. Write 1-2 Science Communication, or “Scicomm”, articles.
   • This was one of the items I didn’t accomplish last month that I’m going to put some serious energy into it this month. I am hoping to pursue some sort of career in science communications or policy after I finish my PhD. I’ll elaborate more on these career plans in a separate post, but I figured one way to gain some experience writing would be to go ahead a write some science articles. Essentially, I’ll take a scientific topic that I find interesting and explain it with a non-science audience in mind. I’d like to get a couple articles published in a local science blog called the Athens Science Observer (https://athensscienceobserver.com/), but we’ll see how it turns out once something is actually written!
3. Optimization of the pilot experiments I started last month.
   • This is a follow-up to one of my December goals from last month. I started some experiments in lab, but they still need some work. I know next month is going to be a less productive month for me because I’m getting married at the end of February (I know! So soon! I definitely owe you all a post on this). Therefore, I know I need to wrap up what experiments I can before I get too into “wedding mode”
4. Wedding To-do List
   • Peter and I are planning our wedding ourselves, obviously with tons of help from friends and family, but we’re not using a professional wedding planner. This has been challenging because we’re BOTH in graduate school (we’re actually in the same program) and neither of us have planned a wedding before! In fact, we’ve only attended a handful of weddings ourselves. A lot of our planning has started with googling “wedding planning”, and there have been several useful check-lists available on the internet. I may do a few posts on wedding planning if people think it will be interesting or useful (leave me a note in my comments!) There are these timeline-based ones, and I want to get caught up this month to where we actually should be in our timeline because according to the internet, we’re a little behind on some things.
5. Try hitting financial goals for groceries and eating out again
   • Another follow-up from last month’s goals. In order to restart our savings after paying for the aforementioned wedding, we’re going to try to stick to a grocery and eating out budget. This month, without the help of free leftovers from family holiday gatherings.
6. 30 min of exercise for at least 25 days this month
   • Of course I need a fitness goal for the month (what are New Year’s Resolutions without fitness goals?) I think working out every day will be a little ambitious, especially with wedding planning, and I actually do find a lot of value in rest days to make sure I don’t injure myself. I’m really hoping to just take 1 rest day a week, which would mean I’d exceed my goal, but it’s nice to leave a little wiggle room for some unplanned rest days.
7. Take at least 2 “I do what I want” days
   • This is actually part of a bigger New Year’s Resolution of having at least 1 Saturday and 1 Sunday (needn’t be consecutive) that are designated “I do what I want” days. What exactly does this mean? So I have a tendency of packing my weekends with stuff that I don’t get done during the week (think laundry, grocery shopping, visiting my parents and other various errands). Combine this with the fact that I have to go into lab every single day to take care of my cells, including weekends, and sometimes my weekends feel more stressful than my weekdays. Towards the end of this year, I was feeling a little overwhelmed with all of this, so I took a couple days where I did exactly what I felt like doing that day. If I didn’t feel like doing something, I didn’t do it. This didn’t apply to caring for my cells, that has to happen. However, besides caring for them, I did what I wanted. For example, if I wasn’t in the mood to do laundry, it could wait till the next day. Essentially there were no “To-do lists” for those days, and those days felt good. And sometimes, I still felt like doing things like running errands or doing laundry, so I did them, but ONLY if I felt like it. I’m giving myself at least 2 of those days a month from now on.

There we go! Another 7 things to do this month! Once again, you’ll see these span lab, personal life, fitness etc. I’m looking for balance, so setting a couple of tasks in each area will hopefully help me feel well-rounded in the end. And once again, I tried to make them pretty manageable, so I don’t get overwhelmed! I’ll let you know how it goes at the end of the month! Till then, posts on my project, wedding and scicomm are coming up!!!

 

Best,

Michelle