Week 7 in the US — Balloon Festival!
It’s already been seven weeks since I came to the US.
Looking back, so much happened in the past six weeks.
From the day I landed in Dallas, I bought a car, got my driver’s license and SSN, and filled an empty apartment with furniture one piece at a time. I went through orientation, sat in my first classes, showed up at a US lab for the first time, took my first exam, and even ran an experiment on my own for the first time.
That’s why, for the past six weeks, I tried to record as much as I possibly could.
Because for me, freshly arrived, every single day was a new event.
But things are a little different now.
I have a car, and my place has more or less settled. Greeting the people I run into at school has become second nature, and I’m starting to get a sense of what a day in the lab looks like.
Above all, I’ve come to feel that instead of waiting for something new to happen each week, it’s time to write about what I’m learning inside the PhD that has already begun.
So from now on, I want to gradually move away from recording every little thing that happened each week, the way I have so far.
Of course, I’ll keep writing the Weekly Diary. It’ll just be a bit lighter — a record of what happened and what I was thinking that week.
In its place, about once a month, I’d like to look back on my experiences at more length and pull together “what I’ve learned living as a PhD student in the US.”
Things I learned by running into them head-on — how to adapt quickly to a new lab, how to read papers, how to communicate with people, how to choose a rotation — I want to gather each of them into a single topic.
So my posts from here on will probably focus a bit less on “what I did in the US” and a bit more on “what I learned in a US PhD.”
The first story is about how to adapt quickly to a new lab.
…
Still, the weekly record goes on.
Day 1 — Sep 14 (Mon) · Even the tiniest obstacle can ruin everything
It was the start of a tough week. And the trouble began with a small reagent that’s absolutely basic to any experiment.
Among all the materials used in experiments, antibodies in particular are very expensive, and only a tiny amount is used each time — so to keep the active component intact, we usually make aliquots. Put simply, that means splitting the reagent into very small portions, each just enough for a single experiment.
So today was the day I planned to sit down with my supervisor and divide the newly ordered reagents into lots of vials. That is, until the label printer for the aliquots started acting up.
As usual, I counted cells and moved them into a nice, comfortable environment for them to grow. Today was also WIPS day — the program where students in the immunology program give presentations every two weeks — so I attended that too.
Then, when I finally got ready to start the aliquots, the computer connected to the label printer was completely dead. I tried two things: swapping the monitor, and connecting the printer to a different computer.
Swapping the monitor changed nothing, so it was clear the computer itself was the problem, and I was struggling to hook the printer up to my own MacBook. I looked up the printer’s model name, downloaded the software, and even got it connected — but probably because it didn’t match the label stock we were using, nothing I wanted showed up on the label.
Back to square one, I tried to fix the computer. When we couldn’t manage it ourselves, we asked another senior, Bertrand, for help. He figured the problem was the video output card (?) attached to the machine, and pulled that part out of the computer so the signal would go through a different port.
And unbelievably, it started working!
Of course, all of this ended up dragging on until late in the evening, so I finished the day having done none of the aliquots I’d aimed for — only printing a pile of labels and getting things ready for the next day.
Day 2 — Sep 15 (Tue) · Experiments, and more experiments
Today was a fairly important experiment day. Together with my supervisor, we were running two experiments at the same time.
And in the middle of those experiments, the plan was to also get through the aliquots I hadn’t finished yesterday.
…
The gap between someone who has spent nearly ten years in one field and someone who hasn’t is beyond anything I imagined. He moves as if the whole protocol were stored in his head — as if he were simulating, in his mind, the movements of cells you can’t even see and how each reagent he adds will interact with them.
Of course, he explains as much as he can while he works, so I think I’m following about 80% of it. But when things get really complicated, even he stops explaining and just moves on quickly, so whenever that happens I jot it down and go through a very long review afterward.
Why did he do it this way at that moment? Would I have done it this way? Thinking through questions like these sometimes teaches me something really important for the first time, and at other times leaves me confused about how much I’m still missing right now. I comfort myself by thinking that every rotation student is probably going through something similar.
…
I’m also taking one-on-one English conversation tutoring — about 40 minutes at 7 PM every Tuesday and Thursday — and today, right on schedule, that time came around. The experiment ran long, though, so I was about an hour late, and I felt terrible about it. When I explained what happened, my tutor kindly said their schedule happened to be open and gladly moved the session, which was a huge relief.
I got home at 7:45 PM, reheated some fried rice at a crazy speed, and wolfed it down with a hot dog without even knowing what I was eating. Then 8 o’clock. Today’s lesson topics were:
- milestones in your life
- Your personality
- In terms of living, do you prefer big cities or small towns
When I talk in English, I feel like I discover sides of myself I didn’t know about. I recall reading somewhere that you should try making important decisions in as many different languages as you can, and this felt similar. I probably wouldn’t have put things this way in Korean, and I was quietly surprised to observe myself expressing who I am in a slightly different way, thanks to the brevity and directness of English.
I also felt grateful to my tutor, who draws all this out so naturally. Once I started thinking of this class not as a simple English lesson but as training to discover a self I hadn’t known and to widen my own range of thought, it felt even more meaningful.
Day 3 — Sep 16 (Wed) · Failing over and over
I stored the experiment I’d finished yesterday, and today was the day to analyze the results myself.
There’s always tension and excitement mixed together at this moment.
Did the results come out the way I expected? I look at them with everything I’ve got, and yet I always end up facing something different from what I imagined.
The deep disappointment lasts only a moment, and then I start thinking through all the different things that might have made the difference. I guess I’m slowly getting used to failing.
Anyway, both my supervisor and I were quite thrown by the unexpected result, and as we discussed the various possibilities, we started to wonder whether something might be wrong with the cells themselves.
So next week, we decided to take out the frozen parental cells and repeat the experiment. Before that, to be surer about whether this was really a cell problem, he asked me to run an experiment on my own, and for that I headed to school at 6 AM on Friday to do it… (continued in Friday’s entry)
Day 4 — Sep 17 (Thu) · Taking a breather
It was a bit of a draining week.
Maybe because the experiment didn’t turn out as expected, or maybe because the nonstop full-blast air conditioning in every indoor space brought my AC-induced cold back.
So today, to get my rhythm back, I boldly decided to take it a little easy.
The cafeteria always serves more or less the same food, and other than the Texas cheeseburger I haven’t found anything worth it there. But I can’t eat only burgers day after day, so I had pizza for the first time in a while.
It tasted good while I was eating, but before long I felt bloated. This is why, even when I’m hungry at lunch, I end up not eating much. My stomach was uncomfortable, so I wandered around the building and found a secret spot with a really healing view, where I stayed for about 30 minutes to rest.
Since this is Texas, everything is somewhat hard to get to. Even a simple grocery run, for example — the nearest Trader Joe’s is 15 minutes by car, and H Mart is 20. By Texas standards that’s definitely close, but the fact that anywhere I go, it’s “n minutes or more by car” isn’t exactly something I love.
School life is no exception. Of course, the campus has everything I need, like cafés and restaurants. But since there’s only one choice of each, on days when I crave something a little different I strangely have to get in the car. And as a grad student, driving off campus just for lunch or a café always leads to the conclusion that it isn’t time-efficient, so I still haven’t tried a different place for lunch.
…
And then today’s second English conversation session. We covered these topics today:
- definition of success
- is it important to be liked by others?
- pros and cons of social media
I’d never thought that deeply about social media, but I found out that I want other people’s attention more than I’d realized. Actually, it’s less about wanting attention and more that I seem to have a desire for my influence to reach a lot of people.
In the end, the drug development I want to pursue after grad school comes from the same place — the wish to step out of the role of a local pharmacist and help benefit many more patients.
Still, for society to function properly, someone has to be a local pharmacist and someone has to develop new drugs. Both are equally needed. Even so, I felt that work demanding a bit more scientific aptitude was the right fit for me, and that I’m now wearing a rather satisfying outfit.
Day 5 — Sep 18 (Fri) · Hanging out with my lab mates!
The big day had come. I had a busy day trying to finish, on time, the experiment my supervisor had talked about.
0900-1030 Lab meeting 1130-1300 Lab organization meeting 1400-1600 Lab Genetics analysis meeting
With three different meetings in this one day alone, there was no way I could finish the experiment on time using the gaps in between.
So on Thursday before leaving, I did the pre-processing for Friday’s experiment ahead of time, and today I woke up at the crack of dawn and rushed to school to start the experiment.
It had been quite a while since I moved so proactively, giving up sleep of my own free will. Sleep matters a lot to me, and most things — even pharmacy school exams — never made me give it up.
Was it that big of a shock, the failure of last Tuesday’s experiment? Or was I just really curious about my own hypothesis for why it failed? I don’t understand myself well enough yet, and neither answer felt wrong.
Anyway, I finished the experiment early in the morning as planned, had breakfast, and wrapped up the rest of the experiment. Then I ate the pizza provided at the Lab Organization meeting for lunch. (If I’d known, I wouldn’t have had pizza yesterday! Still, pizza from a real pizza place beats the pizza at the cafeteria here by a mile.)
I finished the analysis in the afternoon, and once again the results weren’t quite right. When I told my supervisor, he said there seemed to be a problem with the cells, so next week we’ll test the system again with new cells.
And then, hanging out with the lab! We went to a place called Bishop Arts Street — to borrow the local way of putting it, it’s full of cute shops and a cozy place overall.
It was a pretty hip neighborhood, with a decent number of souvenir shops and good bars. What stuck with me most was a bar run as a bookstore — buy a book and get a free drink! Of course, I have papers to read, so I didn’t buy a book.
Then I had drinks with seven people from the lab. Two postdocs (Ahmad, Jessica), four trainees (Maira, Maxime, Brooklyn, and me), and Ahmad’s younger brother, visiting from Paris (sorry, I forgot his name..) — seven in total.
My supervisor Ahmad is called a rising star for how good his research is, but he’s just as serious about having fun. I was pretty much dragged along, and after a brutal schedule since the morning I was very tired, but I was having so much fun with everyone that I tried to stay as long as I could.
It was almost my first time really spending time with American friends. Maybe it’s a cultural difference since they’re from New York, but they started drinking on an empty stomach, no food. We just kept drinking for a long while, and it was only around 8 PM that we went to get dinner. I was really tired and not very hungry, so I said my goodbyes on the way to dinner and headed home.
On my friends’ recommendation I ordered an Aperol spritz, which was very refreshing and delicious. I looked it up later — it’s an Italian wine-based cocktail, about 11% ABV. There are several kinds of spritz, so next time I’ll try a different one.
Day 6 — Sep 19 (Sat) · Balloon Festival
Today was such a, such a full day. It’s going to run a bit long, so I’m splitting it into three sections.
Lunch with Ryoske
My Japanese friend Ryoske said that since coming to Dallas, he’d never had In-N-Out or Chick-fil-A. I was so shocked to hear that, I offered to take him for lunch.
And that day was today!
A Double-Double meal, animal-style fries, and a Diet Coke — I still haven’t found a more perfect burger place. (It’s truly one of the two great pillars, right alongside Chick-fil-A.)
The fresh-tasting ingredients in the burger, and two thick patties. Then the caramelized, finely chopped onions, and on top of that, the animal-style fries piled with a bomb of cheese. Oh, and at the ketchup station there are these small yellow pickled jalapeños — you absolutely have to have them on the side.
They cut right through that greasy American richness and balance out the flavor with a bit of sourness and spice — it’s incredible.
While we ate a simple lunch and chatted about this and that, we got onto the topic of saunas. Maybe because both Japan and Korea have such a developed sauna culture. Ryoske loves saunas so much that he once took a sauna trip to Finland with a Japanese friend. And he said he tried one back when he was in New York too, though it was very expensive.
Talking about that, we decided we’d go to a sauna together someday. There has to be at least one in Dallas, right?
Then, since we were heading to H Mart anyway, we picked up one more Korean friend and the three of us went to do some light grocery shopping. They had Korean pears I hadn’t seen there before, and even a huge bottle of bokbunja-ju (Korean black raspberry wine) bigger than anything I’ve seen in Korea. Next time I invite American friends over, I’ll make them drink lots of this giant bokbunja and show them Korea’s spicy side.
And ahead of Chuseok, Korea’s big holiday coming up soon, I bought some songpyeon.
Alone time — shopping and a workout
Last week, I’d been debating whether to buy two items.
The Hamilton Khaki Field Mechanical 36mm, and RRL’s Vintage 5-Pocket Black-on-Black pants. The Hamilton hadn’t been shipped to the store yet and was said to arrive around next Thursday, and for the RRL pants, I’d arranged to have my size shipped to a Polo store that normally carries only Purple Label, so I could try them on in person.
And wow — maybe because it’s a store that carries only Purple Label, Polo’s top-tier line, even the fitting room was something else. A spacious room of about 140 square feet with all sorts of paintings hanging in it, and one whole wall made of mirror.
So I got to try the clothes on in a truly luxurious atmosphere, but the fit wasn’t what I’d imagined. The waist was also a bit loose. It felt too much of a shame to just send them back, so I asked if they could set out a size one inch smaller too so I could compare before deciding, and they gladly said that sounded good and set up another appointment. What happens if I end up not buying them, though? T_T
Feeling disappointed, I dropped by a select shop called STAR Provisions on Knox Street, where the Polo store is. They carry RRL too, but only the Gibbons wash and the Black-on-Black slim fit — not the Vintage 5-Pocket Black-on-Black regular fit I was looking for.
Looking around, I spotted a denim trucker jacket. Every button said RRL, and I liked all the details so much that I tried it on. Its distinguishing features are very long sleeves and a really cropped length, and apparently the design was inspired by the Levi’s Type II, which is practically the origin of the denim trucker in Americana history.
In an instant, my interest shifted from the pants to the trucker jacket. But with the brutal Texas heat still going, I wasn’t sure I’d get much use out of something this heavy. Still, Juan, the gentleman who explained the denim to me there, told me to come by and browse often, and I had a really good time asking him all sorts of questions.
For my last personal errand, I did a quick workout at the Student Center, took a sweet little nap before heading out to my evening plans, and then set off for the balloon festival.
Balloon Festival
We didn’t start heading to the festival grounds with my Korean friends until it was already almost evening.
The balloons were going up from 7:30 to 8:15, so the goal was to arrive just before that, but nothing went smoothly.
First of all, it was a huge event with far, far more people than I’d expected. I hadn’t realized it was this big — I’d assumed it was just a small local event.
But the line to get into the parking lot stretched out in an enormous procession, and we wandered looking for a place to park for a good two hours. Eventually the sun set, and the time when the balloons were scheduled to go up had passed too.
Still, we did make it into the venue in the end. Koreans with willpower, indeed. But the joy didn’t last long — with the huge crowds, the unmanaged festival grounds were a lot harder than I’d thought. We’d planned to lay out a picnic mat and buy food, but even the food lines were enormously long.
So we gave up on that too, and with the thought of at least catching the last event, the laser show, we were half-forced to enjoy the music we could hear from far away.
When the laser show started, we knew that something had gone seriously wrong. The scale and the whole approach were so, so shabby that we decided not to waste any more time and left.
Telling it like this, it might sound like a nightmare, but it was actually closer to the opposite.
For the two hours in the car, we enjoyed plenty of sunset under the cool air conditioning, and with fun music playing, it hardly mattered that we didn’t make it to the festival. We had lots of fun conversations in the car, and we were about the same age and got along really well. And nobody complained about the situation — everyone knew how to enjoy the moment.
I thought that might be the very essence of what a PhD requires. There’s a doctorate waiting at the end of it, but in the end, it comes down to how well you savor the process, how you take unexpected results, and how you propose a plan to prepare for failure.
To finish, a comforting bowl of gukbap healed all our worn-out bodies and minds.
Day 7 — Sep 20 (Sun) · Going into the lab
Today was the first time I went into the lab on a weekend. After the failed experiments, we figured something had gone wrong with the cells, and my supervisor messaged me that he’d go to school this Sunday to take out new cells. And the cells we’d been using would be frozen down and put back into stock.
I felt it was only right that I do this, so I happily said I’d come along and learn. I planned to hit the gym afterward, so I headed to the lab in my workout clothes.
I was wrong to think no one would be there. The postdocs were running experiments day and night, even on weekends, and a few of the trainees were at their desks too.
Seeing them work with such a sense of responsibility for their own projects — with nobody telling them to — made me reflect on myself. How much am I really giving my work?
The freeze-down we’d planned couldn’t go ahead because the cells weren’t in good shape, so we swapped in fresh media and left it for another day.
Week 7 in the US, and after all the failures, things have gone quiet. As I declared at the start of this post, I wasn’t able to cut it down. Maybe because each passing moment still feels so precious, I haven’t been able to trim things away easily.
Next week I’ll be more mindful and set a much stricter standard for what counts as unnecessary. And my exam is scheduled for the very next Monday after that!
Once I’ve gotten through the exam, I’ll be back — maybe with a sauna trip with Ryoske, or a review of the watch, the pants, or the trucker jacket, whichever I end up buying.