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Tips That Can Save Your Kid’s Life.

THIS IS IMPORTANT

When I was a child, from the time I was about four and could understand things, my mom told me and my brother that we should have a secret word. That way, if we were ever in trouble or felt unsafe and we didn’t want the people around us to know we needed her to come get us, we could let her know. So she let us pick the word and my brother and I chose the phrase “peanut butter cups.” (I’m happy to share the phrase now since both my brother and I are adults now).

I used the phrase twice in my life. Once, I was at a friends house when I eight years old. Her dad got really drunk and was throwing things against the wall. I was really scared and I didn’t want to draw attention to myself on the phone when I called my mom to come get me because I didn’t know if he would get more violent if I asked her to come get me. So I called her and was calm and after a couple minutes I asked “Hey mommy, did you get me those peanut butter cups from the store?” And she said “I’ll be right there.” And she came and got me within minutes.

Second, I was a teenager spending the night at a friends house. Her brother and dad were drinking and they started talking about things that made me uncomfortable - ie: what they liked to do to women. My friend didn’t seem perturbed and said that was normal for them and that I shouldn’t worry. But I was worried because they were really drunk and I was 15 and the only ‘woman’ around that wasn’t related to them. I went in my friends room, told her I needed to call my mom and say goodnight. Before I hung up with her I asked “Next time we go to the store, can we get some peanut butters cups? I’ve been craving them.” And she came and got me, just like that.

Two incidents, one as a young child, one years later as a teen. Don’t discredit this stuff, it fucking works. My brother used it a few times too. Let your child pick the word and no never, ever, ever, ever get mad at them for using it no matter what it is.

titenoute

DO NOT SCROLL PAST THAT.

When you introduce yourself to your new students...

#graduate teaching assistant #gta #ta #grad school #humor

theneuroscienceside-blog

“I said add 1 microliter”

“We did. We added it 1 microliter at a time!”

- A grad student recounting one of her more memorable TA experiences. They used an entire vial of ethidium bromide.

quietbuddha108

thehedrickm-deactivated20160218

Lookout

Prints available at https://society6.com/mikehedrick

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takashiyasui

2016/01/20 Winter gift

coral

Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world, I mean everybody — no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds… Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.

Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 5: A Game of You (via feellng)

deliciousdistractions

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

Simone Weil (via deliciousdistractions)

chemysteriously-blog

“And this is the first time I’ve ever had class on Friday… it’s terrible.”

Lady on the bus who clearly has never taken a science class (via chemysteriously)

I finally got a semester where I didn’t have to take classes on Friday. Guess what day I ended up getting scheduled to teach?

archenland

why do people complain so much about grad school?

i know it’s hard, tiring, etc. but you should be happy of doing what you love

caffeinatedcraziness

At the end of the day you always come out loving what you do.

That doesn’t mean I love it every single second of the day. The road to my degree is not paved in gold. In fact, it’s not even a road. It’s more like I’m walking blindly into a dark forest trying not to get eaten while having an anxiety attack.

Still love what I do, though!

cancerbiophd

tbh sometimes we just complain for the attention

and venting is always nice. sometimes u just gotta fart it out ya know. feel better afterwards. a-ok.

caffeinebooks

We complain because we care, and grad students are far from being the only group to complain about their work. For an interesting discussion, see this thread.

We have got to stop with this toxic idea that doing what you love is like a walk in the park at sundown. It is not. Grad students have strict calendars, obligations, and reports. It’s a job, even more so when you’re at the doctoral level and you’re being paid - guess what, nobody will ever give me money if I’m slacking off, and there’s no amount of love that makes me feel 100% happy all the time when it’s 10pm and I’ve spent 12+ hours sitting in front of my computer reading texts, or a manuscript, or working on a paper.

/end of rant

chemysteriously-blog

yes we complain a lot about grad school, but we’re also (most of us) in huge transitionary periods of our lives… for instance

• many people are either in/getting in serious romantic relationships or are just coming off of them (many college relationships don’t last through grad school for some reason or another)

• most grad students are in their 20’s. Research has suggested that the mid-20’s are the prime time for developing symptoms of mental illnesses, especially in higher-stress situations. Grad school is not easy anyway and then your body’s biochemistry pulls that shit out on you.

• unless someone is incredibly good at time-management and has a good program/project, it’s really stinking hard to consistently fit in gym time or health-food (this could also be because we don’t have much money), meaning most people gain some weight or lose any physical fitness they had before grad school

• this is the first time that many of us are TRULY on our own without being near our parents or as much parental support as we had before. It’s a lot to figure out with budgets, cooking/food, laundry, bills, repairs for things… etc. (and most people are doing all of this on large loans or small stipends)

• imagined peer pressure is a bitch in grad school… you always feel like the people around you are working WAY harder than you are, and yet grad students are reliably terrible at knowing exactly how much others get done… so there’s always this pressure to do more and more work to stay ahead of the others.

• related to this is the idea that people who have been through an event (such as grad school) tend to remember it as worse than it actually was. The whole idea of “we walked uphill both ways in the snow even in July” type of thing is super prevalent with professors because they want us to do as much as possible in as little time as possible with as little hassle to them as possible.

• this is a time when a lot of the friends we had before grad school are getting married, having kids, and have far greater stability in their lives because they have stable jobs and stable/good salaries… while we’re… not.

• and probably the biggest thing that is hard about grad school, no matter the major, is the realization that we brought this on ourselves. So any of the above things, such as salary, lasting relationships and stability, are things that we are intentionally foregoing for the chance of getting a degree.

so yes, we’re unhappy about a lot of that.

adventuresinchemistry

It also often feels like the only possible way to do what you love (say science) so the stakes feel really high. Like if I fail, if I can’t hack it, there’s no other way to do what I want to do with my life. Which just adds to the stress.

That and there are very few protections available for grad students (which is true of a lot of jobs I know). We can’t negotiate salaries and don’t get raises/bonuses. There is no HR department to talk to if your boss is exploiting your work. And the attitude of many other people in academia is that you just suck it up and deal with it. So your experience really depends on your department/PI.

I know these things aren’t exclusive to grad school by any means, but it does take away from my experience actually doing what I love.

scientistsarepeopletoo

Great discussion! I’d like to add that in most places, grad school is very much broken. The amount of expectation/pressure put on many grad students is way too high. You should be able to maintain a healthy life outside of grad school, but many students can’t/feel pressured not to (I’ve known people whose advisor suggested they break up with significant others to be more productive in the lab. Not healthy.)

Therefore, a lot of grad students view grad school as something to get through rather than being able to fully enjoy the science.

That being said, there are a lot of things I enjoy about grad school, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t loads of things to complain about, a lot of which are things that genuinely need changing about the grad school process!

#grad school #truth