The MANDA Lab Odyssey

Laugh and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone.   -Ella Wheeler in the poem "Solitude" (1883) While this is a famous line that makes sense at a superficial level, my experience in life has taught me that this isn't true. When you want to complain about how things aren't going well and are generally negative, you'll find many people who will commiserate with you and allow you to vent. They might themselves vent to give you company. I find that people generally tend to be tolerant and sympathetic of the misery around them. This is somehow especially true in academia. People love to complain, and people love being in the company of those who complain. I myself got into such loops but have worked actively on myself to get out of such negativity cycles and focus on the positives. I have more work to do on this front still, but I am happy with the steps I've taken to achieve this.  Your "friends" are not your friends if they will not be genu...

I have 2 important postdoc papers to finish and publish, not to mention another paper I started as a PhD student. One of them has already gone through reviews at some good journals but needs some more revisions and work to get more insights into the mechanisms underlying the novel phenomena we had described fairly comprehensively. During my postdoc, I also generated data for several other projects that have now been taken up by other postdocs in my former postdoc lab. So I anticipate some papers to come out of those efforts as well, but what is within my control are these two papers that I am responsible for. For my faculty colleagues reading this, you probably already know how this has gone during my first three years as a faculty member, given the extreme amounts of multitasking one has to do (the postdoc to PI transition is hard for this reason). I was unable to get the needle moving on these papers for 3 years... until now.  As I was grappling with this issue, one of the first ...