How to apply for NSF funding... and how not to

What you should do:

1. Designate enough time in the month before the application is due to put together a well-thought out proposal, personal statement, and resume.
2. Submit drafts to your adviser and other trusted people for feedback.
3. Edit, rewrite, edit, rewrite.
4. Consider many examples of grant essays and apply what worked for them to your grant.
5. Feel proud of yourself for submitting a coherent and substantial application.

What Elyse does:

1. Think of an idea for a proposal exactly 12 days before the grant is due.
2. Spend the better part of three afternoons writing, rewriting, and rewriting again.
3. Submit to adviser just in time to get his feedback on a single draft, maybe two if I'm lucky.
4. Submit application and pray that you just get lucky.
5. Pray more. Then : epic fail.
   

Why do I even bother? Because I need an extra $5k a year? When did money become so important? When did I stop having a life? How can I even expect success when I haven't tried very hard? Don't I have any work ethic? and most importantly... how did I become the Goofus against life's Gallantry?

sorry, but I have to get political

... except really, I'm just defending science from "Palin" politics, AKA the Deliberately Uninformed Opinion Brigade.

Palin Opposes "Pet Project" Research on Autism

There are no words. Well, there are words, but I'm not going to say them here. You're smart enough to figure out what they are.

Owww

I am in the middle of one of those headaches/migraines/hells that starts friday afternoon and hasn't stopped since then. I go to bed with a headache, I wake up with a headache, I spend all day with a headache... sure, it's not crippling the entire time, but it sucks to spend the entire day at home waiting for this horrible pounding pain to build up from the top of my head to my soft palate. Last night, around 10pm, it got so bad that I found myself lying on the couch with a blanket pulled over my face, clutching the sides of my head.

Here's where everyone tells me I should see a doctor for my headaches... but I'm too busy to see a doctor, because 4-5 days a month of migraines means 25-26 days of insane catching up. So INSTEAD I am going to bake banana nut muffins and hope for the best.

I guess North Cackalackys think it's getting cold here because everywhere I look, there are windbreakers, hats, sweaters, and Ugg boots. Not just Ugg boots, but Ugg boots with 5 inch heels. Hate to tell y'all, but it's still hitting 70 degrees in the afternoon, and if you were ever in a place with snow, those boots would cause you death or injury.

It was pretty damn cold in Chicago this weekend, so naturally, I contracted some sort of virus. My parents harangued me non-stop with their crazy Fox News politics. You can go home again, everybody, and when you do, you'll be as miserable as when you left.

That's a bit of an exaggeration. I went out to the local bars nearly every night and had a lot of fun. I remembered that I can make myself look pretty if I put a little effort into it. I also remembered what my hair used to look like before the humidity took over my styling duties. Hooray!

Adventures in Misarthropody

tuesday night, i visited the bathroom at one point, as one does, especially when one imbibes coffee all day long to stay conscious. when i entered the bathroom, i saw, reflected in the mirror behind me, an ominous dark mark on the ceiling. i whirled around, hoping that it was a manifestation of my paranoia. it was not.

IT WAS A TWO INCH LONG INSECT.

under not-too-close inspection, i realized that it was a cockroach with antennae that were twice as long as its body. that detail is so you can imagine this intruder in its full, horrible glory. i reeled back, trapped in the bathroom, then a burst of adrenaline inspired me to run underneath it and into the living room. i grabbed my can of extra-strength, ovary pruning, internal-organ-crystallizing RAID, which has this amazing little nozzle on it that allows you to point and shoot at a single spot instead of a large area. i aimed. i fired.

this &$%#&$*&#@ bug FLEW ACROSS THE ROOM. it hit the mirror and flew to the other end of the room. that's when the Raid must have started to take effect, because it hit the ground, flew into the wall two more times, and then tried to run under my shower curtain. here's where i have to admit that the entire time this was happening, an utterly inhuman scream was coming out of my mouth. it was the sound a monkey might make if you lit it on fire. i pulled back the shower curtain to find this thing sitting on the floor, watching me, watching me. i sprayed it again and ran out of the room.

when i came back it was crumpled on its back, dead dead dead. i put a kleenex over it and exhumed its body with my hand-vac. i am dreading the day that i am forced to empty that hand-vac. after that, i took my raid and sprayed every externally facing baseboard in my apartment-- these flying cockroaches/palmetto bugs apparently live in the trees around my apartment (the anoles and squirrels that i love so much eat them!) and probably don't have breeding populations inside. PLEASE DO NOT CORRECT ME IF THAT IS NOT TRUE. anyway, my point is that it probably got in when i had my windows open this weekend or when i was doing laundry/recycling that caused me to go in and out and in all day.

but guess what, people? now i can do anything. i feel empowered and nauseous, like a pregnant ayn rand. i feel the exhilaration that sarah palin must feel when she hunts elk/polar bears/pandas/people who have sex using condoms-- only i feel even MORE QUALIFIED than palin because i did all this WITHOUT wearing an entire tube of lipstick artfully smeared on my over-lined lips. WITHOUT A POWER SUIT, Hillary Clinton! i did it in my new Puma ballet flats, half naked, with chocolate chip oatmeal cookies in the oven.

Unsurprising fact:

I do not find Kenny Chesney attractive, nor do I enjoy his music. Quite the opposite.

Counting down...

There's nothing like two weeks of nonstop work to make you look forward to flying to a place that's 20 degrees colder and occupied by your pathologically republican parents.

Briefly: they amped up the reading in NBIO, I had to make two presentations, my brain underwent a conformational change that caused me to realize that making presentations is way easier than lots of other things (for example, operating on 6 hours of sleep every day-- more on this later), moar readingz!?, two weeks of lab totalling to 60 hours of pouring solutions, putting tiny pieces of tissue on slides, and scorching all my viable eggs from exposure to xylenes while i coverslipped and cleaned 130 slides. And just when I thought i would have a break, my neuroetho journal club asked me to present an article, which isn't a huge deal but I haven't done it before, and I naturally picked an article that was SUPER DENSE and only interesting to me and the profs in the club, so there was so much pressure and [insert neurotika here]. THEN our NBIO exam came to kick my ass all weekend. And it's still kicking my ass.

Here's an unfortunate cycle:
1. I have a lot of work to do so I need to get up early every morning and do it.
2. I am very stressed all day so when I get home I have all these borderline obsessive-compulsive things to do that ultimately keep me up wayyyyy later than is necessary.
3. Repeat.
I understand that there are many many many people who can operate successfully on 5-7 hours of sleep every night, but I am not one of them. I tried to do that in college and I was in so much physical pain and depression and exhaustion that I thought I had Lyme disease-- turns out I probably have fibromyalgia. I need my sleep. Maybe if I need it that much I should have gotten a 9-5 and not gone to grad school, but let's not talk about that now-- it's too late! Besides, I'm way too nerdy to be with normal people.

So: Four days until i'll be gallavanting around Chicagoland just like old times (hopefully the good part of the old times) and every day I'm waiting seems LONGER AND LONGER. Put me on the plane! Give me some non-crappy pizza! Until then... I will be working on this crazy exam until my eyes shrivel up like my poor, xylene-ridden ovaries.

READ THIS

http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12342127

it's very important.

Grad life

I haven't been doing anything but school, lab, school, and more lab, so that's what I have to write about this weekend. I am making this post because I should be preparing a presentation about neuroethology for my First Year Group (a professional skills workshop everyone has to take).

My neurobiology class has been pretty great. It is like a review of all the neuro I took at UChicago plus an hour and a half of more detail, which is exactly what I expected it to be. We also read papers and discuss them, which sort of burns everyone out, so there is a lot of delicious comisery to enjoy every morning.

My first year group is pretty annoying. This is something I should have expected because I have never enjoyed anything involving learning real-life, non-theoretical skills... and this is one of the first times that I actually MUST learn the skills because I will need them for the rest of my life. I'll adjust.

The problem I have right now is that we are all giving these 5 minute talks, then Q&A, then the class critiques us so we can improve. Everyone in my group gave their talks on their molecular biology research, and they were especially focused on the therapeudic benefits of whatever anyone talked about. Even the few behavioral neuro people in my group talked about their research on alcoholism and drug abuse, which has obvious clinical implications. My research is a little more abstract than that. I have this firm belief that any research that advances our knowledge of how a brain is working can be used as a stepping stone for further understanding, especially in light of the fact that every organism's brain is obviously incredibly different from a human brain, and we cannot perform experiments on living people. So I need to give a speech to convey that defense of my research.

But anyway, I love my research. It is so awesome. I spent almost 30 hours this week staining tissue for my project, and next week Kendra (the post doc) and I are going to put the tissue on slides and take pictures of it under the microscope for me to analyze on my computer. Kendra is trying to correlate song output with vasotocin expression. I have been preparing to write an NSF grant proposal and getting extremely interested in individual behavior patterns within a species, or, as I have learned to call it, "behavioral polymorphism." The individual's life history in regards to environmental conditions pattern it for a specific type of behavior as an adult, and this maximizes the fitness of the species in a variety of environmental conditions-- i.e. an abundant vs. poor summer. I'm really interested in that right now, so I assigned myself a lot of reading for the weekend.

Ughhh. It's time to clean my apartment, exercise, write my speech, fix my powerpoint, and read read read read read. I'll work on being more entertaining next time.