Brief rundown of Melissa’s life, which seriously I swear is a soap opera:

My appeal to the executive committee of my department so that I could try to remain a PhD student was denied. I am now transferring to be a masters student, and working on my masters thesis. I will defend my thesis sometime in March, and graduate in May. My boss says I can stay on in the lab as a lab tech until August (which is when the grants roll over for the fiscal year) if there is enough money in the lab budget.

My good friend and host of the podcast Girls Gone Geek I co-host Liana Lehua is ill and in the ICU in the hospital. I am trying to upkeep all of the Girls Gone Geek web presences and update our audience about what I can of her condition. She is a very private person, so please don’t be mad if I don’t directly answer some questions; I’m trying to protect her privacy. I’m collecting postcards/cards/letters/etc. to send to her, email me or DM me on Twitter for my address if you want to send stuff to Liana via me.

My sister’s baby shower is next weekend, and I’m frantically trying to put together a menu, favors, and decorations. Luckily I have tomorrow off, since I’m working an overnight study tonight, and Kevin and I have no plans for the weekend, so I can get some shopping and cleaning done. Still need a Halloween costume though….

I’ve decided to take next year off from school, and work at least for one year before going back to finish my PhD. There are very few places that do the sort of research I do, so I will have to relocate to stay in this field, so it needs to be well-researched, and Kevin’s job situation needs to be stabilized.

Thank you to everyone who has sent me emails, Twitter DMs, etc. and been so supportive through this rough patch! I’m working on it!

My wrist is still bothering me a bit from the mugging last week. Two Philly detectives came by my apartment last night and formally took my statement and my boyfriend’s. I think they may have caught one of the four guys, which is a step in the right direction. A nice lady found my keys in the weeds, and my Moo cards with my lab phone number were still on the keychain, so she called my lab and I was able to meet her and get my keys back. I walked along the block where she found my keys and found my hand lotion, one of my tubes of lip balm, and some trash I knew had been in my bag.

I’ve started replacing most of my things that were stolen, which is more frustrating than anything else. I’m back in lab, at work, for the first time in months. I’m in limbo though. I’m appealing to the executive committee of my department to let me stay in the PhD department, and not only get my masters (and then have to apply to another school if I want to continue my education). I’m writing an appeal letter that is due tomorrow, and hopefully they will meet sometime next week. No one has ever done this, so it’s new territory for me and the University. We’ll see what happens.

So I’m plugging away at labwork, more than happy to be back at work and not at home all day. Kinda in limbo at the moment though until we find out if I’m going to remain a PhD student or be downgraded to a masters student.

Wednesday I retook my oral PhD qualifying exam. I thought I had done much better than my first attempt, and was pretty confident. However, I could unfortunately hear my committee deliberating through the door after I was asked to leave the room; it didn’t sound good. When they finally called me back in, they told me while I did do better than my last exam, I was borderline pass/fail and they need to deliberate further.

Yesterday, my program director emailed me and told me she wanted to talk to me about the outcome of my exam. So I went into the city, to her office, to meet with her. I already had a pretty good feeling that I had failed. The regulations of the program say that means I’m kicked out of the program, so I was understandably stressed and a bit depressed. I had failed my exam, but I had 4 options: voluntary withdrawal from the program/school, take a leave of absence and take classes elsewhere, do a master thesis and take a terminal masters degree, or appeal to the executive committee of my department to stay a PhD student. I’m only willing to even consider the last two options. I’ve already taken 3 months off to study for this retake, and I’ve put too much into the past two years to just leave. So I’ve pretty much decided I want to appeal. I have the rest of the graduate students in my department behind me; my boyfriend, parents, and my sister are all supporting me on this decision as well. I have a meeting with my program director again on Monday afternoon - she wanted me to take a few days to make my decision.

After my meeting with my program director, my department had a social thing that my boyfriend came with me to, and we had a great time. We usually take the train home from Center City, but we got done with the social in between trains, and the bus takes us by our apartment just as well, so we took the bus home instead. We were walking home from the busstop when my boyfriend noticed some kinda creepy teenage guys in hooded sweatshirts following us. So we crossed the street and picked up the pace home. When we got to the parking lot of our building, the guys crossed the street as well, and approached us. The one guy tried to take my totebag, to which I resisted and kept yelling NO. The other guy claimed to have a gun and threatened to shoot my boyfriend. My boyfriend just kept telling them to calm down and leave me alone. The guy trying to take my bag threw me to the ground, which made it possible for him to yank my bag off my shoulder, and they ran. My boyfriend ran after them for a few blocks to see if he could catch up to them or see where they were going. I called 911; by the time he got back to me, my boyfriend was calling 911 as well. We rode around with the cops for a good hour, but didn’t find any leads. We made a report and I’m waiting for a detective to call so I can make a statement.

We’re getting the locks to our apartment changed, since my keys and ID were in my bag. I’ve also already called my bank and credit card company to cancel all my cards and get new ones. I’ve ordered new health insurance cards, and will be going to get a new state photo ID (I don’t have a driver’s license) and a new school ID today or Monday. Physically I’m alright, I’ve just got a sprained wrist from being thrown on the pavement. I’m more mad and frustrated at having to replace what was in my bag - my wallet was from Etsy, it was one-of-a-kind, my headphones and microphone adapter for my iPhone were in there (luckily my iPhone was in my pocket so I still have that), my school notebooks, including a notebook with all my notes from PodCamp Philly were in there. All because a stupid bunch of teenagers wanted some cash or something. I only had maybe $50 in there. And I was only a couple hundred feet from my front door.

My poor mom is worried sick about me, which is even more awful since today is her birthday I’m fine, but she’s worried about her little girl. For now, we’re waiting for maintenance to get here to change the locks, and then I’ll see what sort of time I have to get new IDs in the city. Not what I planned to do today, but life happens.

I was a founding member of my high school’s FIRST Robotics team, have mentored my high school’s team after I graduated, and have volunteered at countless FIRST Lego League tournaments and FIRST Robotics regionals. Dean Kamen is a brilliant inventor and visionary. My time in FIRST is what made me transform from wanting to just go into biology and instead I went into engineering in college. I now have two B.S. degrees, one in biomedical engineering and one in electrical engineering.

The following videos are Dean discussing his latest invention, a bionic arm, at the D6 conference in May. It’s one of his best demos I’ve ever seen (I’ve met Dean and heard him speak on several occasions), and he gives a great speech about FIRST at the end.

Next Wednesday I get my written questions for my retake of my prelim/qualifying exam. I retake the oral portion on September 24.

With school restarting for many, and my exam looming, what are your best tips and tricks for test taking and studying, my awesome readers? Thanks in advance!

This coming weekend is Labor Day. Kids are heading back to school, college students are starting semesters back up again, it’s starting to get a little cooler, leaves are slowly changing colors. It’s been a very different summer for me, so I feel like a bit of a review and some reflection are needed.

I’m used to not having summers off. I went to Drexel for 5 years, had Fall-Winter co-op, and classes Spring-Summer. So 6 months out of the year I was working full-time and taking a class or two; the other six months I was taking classes full-time and working a part-time job or two. The summer between undergraduate and graduate school I worked as a science teacher and substitute teacher at a day camp in a Philadelphia charter school. Last summer, I worked in my thesis lab; I wrote at least two end-of-year reports for NASA and helped write a year 2 grant proposal on top of working phase shift and overnight shifts for various experiments.

This summer’s been different. I failed my prelim (qualifying exam, whatever you want to call it) at the end of June/beginning of July. The head of my examining committee told me to take the summer off to study, since I had 3 months to retake the exam. I’ve been in lab a few days this summer, but most of my summer has been spent at home in my apartment with my kitties. For me, that’s been a big change. The first week or so was great, because I could sleep and get caught up on some things, but then it got tedious. So I’ve filled in the days with entering the world of Web 2.0, which I love, and reading books, something I haven’t had a chance to do in a long time.

I’m now loving blogging, podcasting, using the Twitter, and attending Tweetups. I’m attending Philly Podcamp September 5-6. Recording Girls Gone Geek is one of the highlights of my week. I’ve been a guest blogger on LiveCrunch.com. I’ve met some incredibly awesome people through Twitter and the Tweetups I’ve been to in NYC, and plan to meet some awesome Philly people at the Tweetup tomorrow night.

Going into this summer, and for the past few years, I thought I had my career plan all worked out. Get my PhD, do a post doc or two, become an associate professor, get tenure track somewhere, and just teach and run a lab. Now I’m not as sure I want to stay in academia. The politics involved (which I did know about previous to this summer) are just seeming to be more than I want to deal with. If Kevin and I ever want to have kids, a tenure track faculty position is not very conducive to that. If I need to take time off because of my health, tenure track faculty positions aren’t very conducive to that either (for those of you unaware of my litany of health problems, I’ll blog about them at some point, I’m getting a little better about not hiding them). Then there is the fact that I’m loving social media, and having a blast at it. Frankly, I enjoy it a lot more than the crap I deal with in grad school at the moment.

No worries, I will retake my prelim. I’m scheduled to get my written questions September 10 and take my oral exam on September 24. I’m much better prepared this time, so I hope/think I will pass. I’ll take a few years to get my PhD, especially since human research takes time (I study the effect of light on body clock rhythms in humans). I’m just not so sure I’m going to stay in academia once I’m done. The interview we did with Dr. Kirsten Sanford on GGG a few weeks ago definitely gave me food for thought.

For now, I’ve got a few more weeks of studying to do, and a bunch of meetings to attend to set up stuff for the new semester coming up. I’m going to keep podcasting and blogging and tweeting, no worries there. I just have to see where the balance strikes itself.

I think part of the problem of working from home is the inability to unplug from technology. The computer, phone, TV, and Internet are always there, unlike a project you could leave at an office or job. This week’s Girls Gone Geek, which will be on iTunes Thursday, discusses this topic. The more I think about it, the more I think this is part of what is burning me out this summer while working at home. So I’m trying the following to help me disconnect:

~close my laptop and read an actual book at least once per day
~screen my phone calls
~work out on Wii Fit and ignore the computer for at 30 minutes

Suggestions? Thoughts? Please let me know!

Until I retake my qualifying exam in September, I’m mostly studying from home with my lovely kitties above, Gracie and Pixel.

Problem is that I’m going nuts; I’m lonely and I’m too used to having way to much to do. Except now I don’t have a schedule really, nor a set of things that have to be done, nor that mile long to do list that other people rely on me getting stuff done.

So what do I do? I’m miserable, but I’ve got another 2 months of this, so I need to change something. Being miserable is not acceptable if I can do something about it.

I met with my advisor yesterday to discuss what happened with my epic fail of my prelim, and how I need to not be in lab and be off studying for the rest of the summer. The meeting went well; I’ll be in lab most of this week, on vacation in Phoenix next week, and then sporadically pop into lab when necessary for the rest of the summer.

So here’s what a typical day for the rest of my summer is going to look like:
get up and shower when Kevin gets up to leave for work so I can actually be productive
eat breakfast, take meds
check email, Twitter, etc.
read papers and study while listening to podcasts (e.g. TWiP, TWiT, MacBreak Weekly, TWiS, and of course, the show I co-host, Girls Gone Geek)
eat lunch and play with the kitties for breaks
do 30-60 minutes on Wii Fit
watch TV with Kevin when he gets home from work, eat dinner somewhere in there
go to bed

Such an exciting summer I’m in for! *sarcasm*

I failed my oral prelim this morning. My committee felt that I didn’t know enough about molecular experimental methods, and that I knew a lot about my research area, but not enough about other areas. And I agree with their thoughts. So I have three months to study, work with my committee to learn all the stuff I’m deficient in, and retake my exam and pass it this time. I only get one retake. I’m a little upset with myself, mostly disappointed. Nappage and Wii Fit workout, followed by GGG podcasting this evening (we interviewed Lisa Loeb!) has helped my mood some. Heading up to NYC on Thursday for a geeky Tweet-up, so at least I have something to look forward to.