Pursuing praxis

From Nature’s graduate journal column, March 16, 2006.

Have you got grad skills?

by Milan de Vries

It isn’t until the end of graduate school that you begin to wonder whether you’ve acquired any transferable skills. Despite having been at school since the age of five, it suddenly occurs to you that you’re not generally useful to the world.

I know what transferable skills I don’t have. I once sat next to a hypochondriac on a plane who berated me for four hours for being a biologist but not being able to cure his adult-onset diabetes. Thing is, unless you are a yeast cell I can’t really help you with your health problems. I can measure sporulation efficiency pretty well, but most humans don’t actually turn into spores, it turns out.

Then I started watching the Olympics. The commentators kept telling me how much pressure these athletes are under. That’s when it hit me. This month I taught a class, wrote an abstract for a thesis committee meeting, finished key experiments for two projects, caught up with the literature, met my adviser a few times, and in my spare time even made it to the supermarket once or twice. This would have seemed like a bit much to handle in my first year of graduate school. Now, it’s par for the course. I’m not sure it’s enough to get hired, but where were those commentators when I trudged to my lab during a blizzard because an experiment couldn’t wait? Good at multitasking under pressure — that’s one transferable skill. Now if only I could land a triple axle.

From Matt. Friggin genius, as always. I found the Smithsonian article in lab, late one night, drifting around aimlessly (me or the article, I don’t remember). It was so awesome, I immediately sat down and transcribed all three columns of this backpage riff. Worth every keystroke. And I thought it was Kevin’s. Pshaw. I should have known better.

We are the music makers
And we are the dreamers of dreams.
Wandering by lonely sea breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World losers and world forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world, forever, it seems.
With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up with world’s great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire’s glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song’s measure
Can trample an empire down.
We in the ages lying,
In the buried part of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth
And o’erthrew them with prophesying,
To the old of the new world’s worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.

Arthur O’Shaugnessy (1844-1881)

Thanks to Carlo for pointing this out to me.