Wayne and Erika Pfeiler

We aren't taking any classes this summer, so we haven't had to study for tests and turn in assignments. However, since we're in graduate school, it doesn't mean we get time off either. Basically in research-oriented graduate programs around here, the students are expected to convert from the normal (20 hours of classes and studying + 20 hours of research) per week into 40 hours/week of research.

If you've never done anything like that, I'll explain it a bit. Research means lots of things. We have to find and read lots of technical journal articles to find out what other researchers have done and are doing around the world in our area of interest. Luckily, these are mostly available online, so we don't have to spend hours in a library. After we think we've learned enough about whatever we want to study, we come up with some new unanswered questions and design an experiment that should try to answer those questions. You know, all that scientific method stuff. So after we've got a plan about what we want to do, we order supplies and grow up cells/bacteria that we'll need for the experiements. When we've got everything together, we spend lots of time in the lab, and/or in front of a computer to run the tests. Often times the test don't go the way we expect, or they just don't work. This usually calls for changing the plans or repeating the experiements. Sometimes we'll stumble across something really interesting and the research will take a new turn, but that can't be predicted. So after we get losts of results from the experiments, we decide what all the data tell us. By the way, in science-talk, data is a plural word and datum is the singular. So we then we sit down to make lots of charts and figures and try to write a paper about what we learned and why it's important. This paper will then be sent off to a scientific journal editor.

You might think that's the end of it, but it's not over yet. The editor will send copies on to people called reviewers who will scrutinize our paper and decide what they think about it. They'll make suggestions for changes, or ask us to repeat or add more experiments to make the paper better. If we're particularly unlucky, the reviewer might just say the paper isn't worth publishing and reject it outright. So we typically have to wait 3 monts to a year to hear back about what the reviewers think, and then we'll make whatever changes they asked for. After a second round of review, the journal will hopefully accept the paper, and it will be published.

So that's basically what graduate students do over the summer. Not as much fun as trips to Mexico, or Caribbean cruises, but hopefully the stuff we work on will be helpful to people in the future.