I wanted to do this as little as possible - complain about grad school. But at some point everyone needs to realize that grad school is, at times, exactly the horror story they have heard.  So, unfortunately, that is what my last week was.

From the blog - "What should I call grad school" - entitled "One Month into Graduate School"


Seriously - this is what my life has felt like the last few weeks?? What have I done?? Last week was such a Murphy's Law week, that describing it and re-experiencing it literally brings tears to my eyes.  I re-hashed it to my dad yesterday, and I literally struggled to maintain composure. It was bad.  

I'm a perfectionist. Admittedly. I enjoy succeeding, but really, who doesn't? I work my ass off though, and I really feel like I deserve the successes that I have. But, this week, it was like no matter how hard I worked, nothing ever seemed to go my way, and nothing ever seemed good enough.

In school - I had two exams last Thursday, in back to back classes. These weren't easy classes either. Epidemiology and Biostatistics.  Biostatistics should have been so easy, really. But, unfortunately for our class, it was the first time he has ever taught the class, and we all proceeded to take the most poorly written exam I have ever taken in my life. He had a line of people in front of the class waiting to ask him questions for 90/120 minutes during the exam. After that brutality was over, a large group of us waited out in the hall for our Epidemiology exam to start. It started 10 minutes late, because of Biostatistics, and, of course, they didn't give us extra time.  If they had, things may have been SO MUCH BETTER, because that exam was a BEAST!! 50 Questions in 80 minutes, and they were long questions!! It was all I could do to finish the exam.

I was so livid when I finished the exam. But, I pushed those thoughts out of my head and went to lab to complete a multitude of experiments that I had set up, and of course, everything was dead! Nothing worked - yada yada yada! Let's just say that you know it's a crappy day in lab when all 3 of your graduate students are at the bar at 2pm.

Within two days, it was no longer just an issue of crappy cells, slow-growing parasites, etc., but the bacterial contamination which had derailed me weeks before and had run rampant through the lab resurfaced again, and of course it did so in my cultures.  REALLY??

Hopefully I haven't scared you away - the beginning of this week has already been SO MUCH BETTER!

To happier times!!