I tapped the keg of education!

Mike was awarded a PhD studentship! Success, after all the distress. What a relief!

The most enjoyable pastime

Alright, admittedly the second most enjoyable pastime, but cooking definitely is unimpeachably on place two.

As I'm currently in the situation most people may call «unemployed», however which I prefer to dub «extended application period» [1], I have plenty of time for (a) applications [2] and (b) the creation and refinement of dishes. By the time I eventually get my studentship I could probably hire as a chef.

So yesterday's dinner was *ahem* «Pork chops in a mustard-white wine sauce severed with fresh parsley potatoes and seasonal vegetables [3]». As far as one can refer to anything shopped in Sainsbury's as «fresh» - well, the temperatures are for sure «fresh» [4].

To the recipe. We need: Pork loin steaks (preferably with bones, as it keeps the meat juicy), salt, pepper, flour, thyme, marjoram, white wine, Dijon mustard, cream, waxy potatoes, butter, parsley, carrots and leak (our «seasonal» vegetables).

Pork chops and white wine sauce:

• Season the pork chops from both sides with salt and pepper, then flour one side. Start frying at high heat in some oil with the floury side down until nicely golden. Depending on the thickness of your steaks this takes 2 to 3 minutes per side. You should have a close eye on it, as heated flour tends to stick even to non-stick pans.
• Put the steaks on an ovenproof plate, cover with tin-foil and transfer to a preheated oven (80-100 centigrade will do).
• Now pour a glass of white wine into your frying pan (do not clean in between!), add a tea-spoon of mustard, some thyme and marjoram. Let it simmer until the alcohol is evaporated, then pour in a small cup of cream and leave with an occasional stir at low heat until the sauce thickens.

And our side-dishes:

• Peel the potatoes (unless you want to make mash you should use a waxy brand), cut into reasonable chunks, place in a pressure cooker with a tiny amount of water (5-10mm high) and heat until the pressure-meter reaches the second ring. Turn down the heat and leave at high pressure for seven minutes. Since I've never boiled potatoes normally, I'm afraid I can't advise you on this. I suppose if the boiled potato slides off a fork easily it's done.
• In a pan/pot melt some butter, add chopped parsley and sway the potatoes gently in the mixture until they are covered in a tasty butter-parsley coat (they shouldn't be green though!). Season with salt.
• The rest is even easier: Chop carrots and leak into little wafers and rings respectively and fry gently in some butter until soft-ish.
• If you are eager, also boil some green-beans in salted water. Alternatively, peas, sugar-snap or any imaginable vegetable will do as well (okay, I wouldn't recommend aubergines as they tend to sponge up all the grease).

Unfortunately, my camera was out of battery. You'll have to use your imagination for the looks of the dish.

[1] My BHF application failed on the project, so I'm on the market once again.
[2] Cover letter or CV anyone? I am a pro by now!
[3] Hooray for globalisation! Wonder where they are in season right now.
[4] For anyone who's now confused due to a lack of delightful British shopping experience: the refrigerating units don't have doors and thus supermarkets turn into a cold-distribution centres.

Time to be back

It's been quite a while since I've written my last entry. I'm sitting in Andrea's lab and the only thing I can do right now is translating some e-learning tutorials from English into German. It pays part of my rent, but is not particularly thrilling when all you do is think about how you may restructure a sentence in German so that the variable included by the server-sided code is still at the end of the sentence. Sometimes an impossible quest and often boring.

But I better start at the very beginning (make sure you sit comfortably, here comes the probably longest entry ever): In the middle of last summer I started revising for the graduate record examination general test (GRE), one bullshit compilation of exercises that should evaluate a graduate's academic capability [1], which I was due to take at the latest by end of October. As idiotic as this test may appear to assess academic virtues, it still is employed by virtually every American postgraduate institution and suddenly some British colleges show the tendency to trust the «,test» results as well [2]. Considering that I'm no native speaker, nor did I grow up in an English-speaking nation, I believe I did an excellent job in the verbal part scoring more points than most American graduates [3]. The mathematics part was a breeze, but I screwed up badly in the essay section and therefore laid the foundations for the failure of most of my US applications.

I'm now the proud owner of six rejection letters from six Ivy League universities. I'm a first class student, I've collected three awards throughout my undergraduate degree, was twice on the dean's list and have a bunch of other useful qualifications that make me stand out, but I wasn't even invited to the interviews. Yet strangely, I was on the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory [4] interview list and I also attended the European Molecular Biology Laboratory interviews, with unfortunately unsuccessful outcome. In case of CSHL this was especially sad since many of my interviewers hinted that I would be accepted. In the end there were probably some hidden quotas as one of my friends here at UCL was offered a place.

Personally I don't believe that Ivy League and other elitist universities per se carry out better research than the «normal» institutions do, but getting into the high class journals is definitely easier with a big name including a big publication record behind you. Even though that means you follow the stupid «everyone comes five minutes before the professor and leaves the lab five minutes after the professor» rule for four to six years.

After receiving the last rejection letter extremely late (I'll never forget the fourth of April), I was clinging to the last straws such as going to the EMBL labs in Grenoble [5], or the DKfZ labs in Heidelberg [6], but none was to become true. While I was away for interviews the Medical Research Council deadlines passed and the professors I approached directly didn't have any interest in replying. Put yourself into my position, having all the ambitions to stay in higher education but no funds to do so.

Luckily, a professor (Jim) who lectured on my cardiovascular disease course sent out a circular email about a British Heart Foundation funded PhD on gene therapy of ApoE knock-out mice. As Jim made a little reading mistake the application is still pending and I'll have to wait until mid-October to be informed about the outcome [7].

Narf, thus I spent the summer searching for short-term research appointments so I could afford living in London from September onwards. There're plenty of RA positions with a duration of one year and longer, but there's nothing with less [8]. So my knight in the shiny armour turned out to be Andrea who offered me some money for finishing my BSc project and some other lab work. Additional funding would be coming from the translation of e-learning tutorials now destined for medicine students, which I should translate into German, or rather which I'm translating right now (I keep swapping between the blog window and the word window).

I'm sometimes wondering whether I should start collecting information on how rubbish some application systems are and publish a book about it.

Cheerio, there's a blood pH tutorial waiting to be fully translated. But I think I'll have a cup of coffee first. Coffee? Ehm.. I mean the brown stuff the common room's machine extrudes in exchange to 30 pence.

[1] There are plenty of post by me nagging about the GRE and a bazillion more sprinkled over the web, treat yourself.
[2] Namely, Cambridge. Some finance master courses if I remember correctly.
[3] Can you believe that?!?
[4] CSHL is led by James Watson and offers probably the best PhD programme for biological sciences.
[5] The trip to Grenoble is an entertaining story on its own, with myself not capable of speaking French and the French not willing to speak English.
[6] That kinase lady never came back to me after I set up a whole presentation and wanted to book my flights. Andrea always told me that kinase people are different; I should have listened to her.
[7] Should you hear about an Austrian going berserk in London around mid-October, you know my application was rejected.
[8] To be precise, there was one, but instead of hiring me as a well qualified person they chose to rehire someone they've already worked with. That's the simple outline, it was actually a little more complicated with wrong application deadlines being posted and Mike being utterly pissed off for many hours.

PS. isn’t it malicious irony that exactly now, after writing this entry, I receive an email from the GRE service?

EMBL and my interests

I like signal transduction and doing fancy light microscopy [1]. Hence, I looked forward talking to Philippe Bastiaens, who did a great deal of sophisticated fluorescent life imaging (FLIM) to elucidate pathways and make useful assertion about physiological levels of proteins, substrates and in one recent paper even about a gradient in vivo [2]. To my displeasedness, Bastiaens was too good to stay in Heidelberg and was offered a leading position at the Max-Plank Institute Dortmund, staying at EMBL only as a visiting group leader. «yeah!»

Fortunately, there are a couple of other quite interesting groups. One of which, led by Carsten Schultz, collaborated with Philippe on several occasions and provided the nifty underlying protective chemistry of the substrates he used [2]. A proposed PhD project leads deeper into signal transduction and by neat approaches allows to more or less dynamically switch parts of a pathway on or off [3]. This would enable analyses of the pathway branch without screwing up the physiological levels.

Other research units are concerned about chromosomal organisation and Matthias Hentze explores the mechanisms of translational repression by RNAi, having a paper submitted for review recently that elaborates on pseudopolysomes being observed on repressed mRNAs (hot stuff).

[1] As I currently do in my final year research project, by exploiting Tom Kerppola's wonderful bimolecular fluorescent complementation assay.
[2] Yudushkin IA, Schleifenbaum A, Kinkhabwala A, Neel BG, Schultz C, Bastiaens PI. Live-cell imaging of enzyme-substrate interaction reveals spatial regulation of PTP1B. Science. 2007 Jan 5;315(5808):115-9.
[3] Sorry guys and gals, detailed information not to be disclosed. However, some research is aiming to produce switches that may be genomically encoded.

I'm in Germany!

First of all, (the interviews in) Cold Spring Harbor has been absolutely awesome. I had eleven one-on-one conversations with bright minds ala Jim Watson, Gregory Hannon, Nicholas Tonks, Leemor Joshua-Tor and many more. I think the best part was this morning (well NY morning) when Dr Watson took me and Ralph (college from UCL) on a tour across the campus and even into his house, showing us his art collection and talking about the near future of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He is certainly a very interesting character and surprisingly fit for his 79 years. Did you know he played tennis since he was four?

This morning (NY night?), I reached Frankfurt and merely and hour ago I arrived at a hotel near EMBL Heidelberg. I'm slowly but steadily turning into a globe trotter.

Long Island here I come

I'm leaving good old Britain to participate in the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory interviews. These people are amazing, they even set up a complete itinerary for my stay and organised a limo to pick me up from JFK.

Just in case you read a post with a big «YIPEEEEIO» in the headline, this means I got an offer.

Forgetfulness' consequences

Remember? I forgot to upload my CV. Just received the following email in response to my kind request of attaching my CV afterwards. Darn, now I'll have to print and post the bloody CV. (Sob)

We are not able to open email attachments at this Webmail address. We suggest that you mail your CV to The Graduate School:
For express mail service (DHL, FEDEX, UPS), please use this address:
Harvard University
The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Holyoke Center, 3rd Floor
1350 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
USA

Shopping frenzy

I'm broke now. I spent more than 450 Euros throughout a whole day in a designer outlet. Now I'm a proud owner of a anthracite Boss suit (three parts), two pairs of blue jeans, Adidas shorts, a white Tommy Hilfiger double cuff shirt and orange v-collar pullover.

Please Santa [1], bring me money.

[1] For my British and American readers, as the Christ-child brings the presents in Austria (and hopefully in Germany as well).

PS. I need to remember to finish my CalTech application and start with the British universities. Funnily, I requested an Oxford graduate prospectus roughly 4 months ago and it hasn't arrived yet. Same applies to the GRE test training software.

Notable molecules

Many of my friends who visited my first year «shelter» will immediately recognise these drawings by nearing zero, as they embellished the walls of my humble residence for a long time.

Finally, two short movie-clips I think are quite entertaining.

How to draw a car in paint
The key ingredient for a christmassy soup is?

Update: Forgot to mention, Stanford is done. Only two more to go before end of term.

Graduate application costs

I thought it might be interesting for all prospective grad-students to know how much they are going to spend, or in fact how much I will spend. Let’s see:

• 160$ GRE general test [1]
• 45$ GRE transcripts [2]
• 60$ Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
• 90$ Upenn
• 90$ Harvard
• 105$ Stanford
• 70$ MIT
• 80$ Berkeley
• 80$ CalTech
• 60$ Mark transcripts
• 20$ Posting

This adds up to 860$. It’s probably a bit early to think about interviews, however I hope the flight costs will be refunded (though I would happily cover the costs if I receive an offer from any of the above listed institutions).

[1] I have no clue why I had to pay 40 bugs more than the American test takers. Moreover, only 4 transcripts are included in the test costs.
[2] Makes another 15 bugs per transcript. They must have been sent in golden envelopes or similar. From my angle this whole ETS business looks like an education-mafia.

Forgetfulness in action

I am a big moron, stupid, stupid, stupid. Yesterday, I submitted my Ph.D. application for Harvard. Having spent a considerable amount of time on fine-tuning and proofreading my statement, curriculum vitae and additional information, I was glad I finally saw some reward for the effort - the confirmation email. Then at 5am I bolted out of a lovely dream and it came to me that I didn't attach my CV to the application, ahhh! No need to mention, I emailed the admissions this morning (day of the deadline), begging that they'll still accept and attach my resume.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. So stupid! Arrghh!

European Molecular Biology Laboratory Heidelberg and UPenn

What a day. I've submitted my UPenn application less than a minute ago and addiontally I received an invitation for the EMBL interview week in Heidelberg. Ooohh yeah! I lived in Austria all my live, but I've never been to Germany longer than a weekend - weird, isn't it?

Update: Apparently, this was my 100th entry. Time flies by...

Yeeeeha, I did it.

My first real paper-based application is finished and already on its way to Cold Spring Harbor, NY. I only wonder why royal mail employs persons in post offices that seemed to have come to this country on a floating door. I've never heard a worse accent in a public place where people ought to understand what the dude behind the glass window is actually saying since it might be crucial for the correct delivery.

I just realised that if I get interview invitation for all my desired programmes, I will be quite busy touring through the States. Groupies wanted!

Even though I was severely interrupted in my internet duties by regular fluctuations of connectivity and a damn slow blogger portal, I eventually managed to change my page design to something impressive (self-shoulder-pet). Amazing what a layman can make out of a DNA x-ray diffraction electron density map with The GIMP.

Update: Now that I'm using the library computer, I notice that MSIE6 screws up the design. Can't be bothered to search for the «faults». So everyone who uses the microcrap browser either change to version 7 or get Firefox/Opera (It's for your own good). If anyone uses Safari, could you please leave me a comment about how the page looks like. I haven't had a chance to test the layout with a Mac yet.

So I'm registered

I can proudly announce that I have registered at the UCL health center and therefore I am another happy customer of the NHS? Unlike expected everthing went pretty smooth and quick, besides that the come-in clinic hours were already over when I entered. So I'll have to go back to the health center at 2pm and wait for a nurse to check my «cold». Wondering what the result will be.

Update: After one and a half hours of waiting (it's now 3:45pm and I just got home), I was attested perfectly healthy besides the bazillion of viruses that enjoy populating my lung. «Come back if it doesn't get better within the next ten days.» What did I predict, hun?

One plus for NHS (or rather the UCL health centre): They've been very friendly.

So I finished my GRE general test

Here comes the real fun: the statements of purpose for 7 American and 4 British universities. Let's get skilled in the art of catchy, literate, entertaining and informative but not amusing, emotional or bombastic writing. Sounds for me like a paper about n HIV cure.

Something else: There's a hairl-dresser in Euston station with a very time efficient system. First you buy a voucher at a ticket machine (9£ for men), then you queue up, get your hair cut and finally they treat you with a «head-vaccum cleaner» to get rid of all those tiny pieces of hair that would drive you mad. Very innovative, quick and cheap.

GRE, authentic signature?

I went to the Thompson-Prometric test centre this afternoon to ensure everything works just fine tomorrow morning (need to be there at but-crack dawn). After having a rather meaningless chat with the receptionist, I shifted the conversation towards identification requirements. My passport is dating back to the middle 90ies, an almost ancient document without any artificial intelligence. Thus, I’m allegedly 1.56m, having blue eyes, specs are an innate part of my face and the signature has absolutely nothing in common with today’s. In fact, I’m now 1.85m (6’1”), my eye colour is green and I haven’t used my glasses for almost five months. Nevertheless, according to the GRE test committee I need to sign in with exactly the same signature as on my bloody 10year old passport, how smart… «go practise it».

I feel like a real nerdy scientist

... when I consider my scope regarding general GRE issue task topics. It's within my capabilities to summarise G-protein coupled receptors within 900 words, but I cannot write more than a mere 200 words about art critics. Judge yourself (this is absolutely genuine):

"Although, critics who write about the arts tend to deny the existence of any objective standards for evaluating works of art, they have a responsibility to establish standards by which works of art can be judged."

Art is subjective. What one person considers to be directly produced by devine intervention, another evaluates only good enough to be put on a toilet wall. I therefore agree with critics. The only estabilished standards applicable to classify arts, don't classify in good or bad art, but in genres; e.g. Money and van Gogh as expressionist or Salvador Dali as surrealist.

What can be judged objectively are techniques used, though even this can...AHHHHH, I FUCKING HATE ARTS!!!!

Let me extend my last statement: I fucking hate the GRE exam as well. Since the issue task is all about reasoning, let me underscore my argument with sufficient material: aberrant, abscond, aggrandize, ambiguous, ambrosial, anachronism, antediluvian, arbitrate, attenuate, audacious, aver, barefaced, blandishment, bombast, buttress, cadge, caprice, castigate, chicanery, complaisant, conflagration, corporeal, corroborate, craven, culpable, dearth, deference, depict, deprecation, depredation, descry, diatribe, diffident, disabuse, disparaging, dispassionate, dissemble, dogged, eclectic, emollient, encomium, enervate, engender, ephemera, equivocal, erudite, eulogy, exacerbate, exculpate, extant, fathom, fawn, feign, fervid, fervent, fledgling, florid, floundering, garrulous, gossamer, guile, guileless, hapless, headlong, iconoclast, impecunious, imperious, implication, improvidence, inchoate, incorrigible, indelible, ineffable, ingenuous, innocuous, insensible, insipid, insular, intransigent, irascible, leviathan, loquacious, lugubrious, magnanimity, malevolent, misnomer, misogynist, mitigate, nefarious, noisome, obdurate, obviate, occlude, ossified, panegyric, peccadillo, perfidious, petulant, placate, plethora, ponderous, pragmatic, precipice, prevaricate, prodigal, propitiate, Pulchritudinous, pusillanimous, quiescence, rarefy, reproof, rescind, sagacious, sanguine, sate, saturnine, savant, sedulous, specious, tacit, taciturn, temperate, tirade (diatribe), tortuous, tractable, turpitude, tyro, vacuous, venerate, verbose, vex, viscous, voracious, waver, wretched.

Memo to myself: be less vulgar.

It's Wednesday night

Contemplating the day: I'm fed up with GRE revision. So far I listed roughly 350 vocabularies used at the time of King Arthur, just to achieve a better mark on this damn verbal section. When I consider the ridiculous time of 0.789 minutes available per question for a total of 38, including two reading comprehensions, I just feel the sudden urge to move to the US, start the bank account with the rifle and shoot the inventors of this condemned idiocy. It very much describes the American way of evaluating performances: rather than assessing the person's real skill, it favours those who invested hours and hours revising and learning by heart. In addition, it gives a rat's ass about non-natives!

Research projects are still not allocated, I read couple of 1989 science HIV Zidovudine resistance papers, the EMBL Heidelberg application made me miss a dear friend's birthday party and finally my girlfriend almost chopped off her finger at the attempt to cook dinner (The irony: she didn't cut herself in the whole anatomy course during the past 6 weeks). I call that a day; back to GRE...

Graduate Record Examinations - I'm so screwed

Besides my business course (with the fantastic name of "evaluation and planning of business opportunities in bio-processing and life sciences") all the finals exam were quite straightforward and "easy" (God if you protect me of Vicky's and Aurora's wrath I'll believe, I promise...).

From the day on I wrote my "metabolic processes" exam I decided to hate essay type questions. Writing more than 20 pages within 2 1/2 hours was simply too much for my "tender" hands.

Since my second year is finished now, I try to enjoy my regained freedom: punish the liver. On the other hand, some less useful things are on my agenda: GRE for PhD applications. Funnily enough, I won't encounter problems with the allegedly harder subject related GREs, but with the general test.

Example - Analogies:
HEADLONG : FORETHOUGHT
(A) barefaced : shame
(B) mealymouthed : talent
(C) heartbroken : emotion
(D) levelheaded : resolve
(E) singlehanded : ambition

The difficulty of this question probably derives primarily from the complexity of the relationship between headlong and forethought rather than from any inherent difficulty in the words. Analysis of the relationship between headlong and forethought reveals the following: an action or behavior that is headlong is one that lacks forethought. Only answer choice (A) displays the same relationship between its two terms.

Can someone please shoot me? I didn't even know the meaning of those two words! It's getting worse:

Example - Antonyms:
MULTIFARIOUS
(A) deprived of freedom
(B) deprived of comfort
(C) lacking space
(D) lacking stability
(E) lacking diversity

Multifarious means having or occurring in great variety, so the best answer is (E). Even if you are not entirely familiar with the meaning of multifarious, it is possible to use the clue provided by “multi-” to help find the right answer to this question.

Why can't there be an easy way?