How to avoid the PhD meltdown

As I am now in the third (and supposedly final, yeah right) year of my PhD I thought I’d share the most important thing I've learnt so far in successfully surviving your own. You need to find a way to stay sane. 

Right at the start of my time at UEA I was told by another stable isotope lab research student a few years above me that it was a not a matter of if, but when I would have a meltdown. The early-third-year-meltdown does appear to be pretty much the norm, I've seen so many of my friends & colleagues go through them. Right from the start of your PhD it is drilled into you that by the beginning of your third year you should have practically finished your research andin a position to write up. However, if you are doing a lab based project this just does not happen and I've known people to be still in the lab well into their fourth year and still do perfectly fine.

The obvious way to avoid the apparently inevitable meltdown is just not to do a PhD, or at least go and do something in the social sciences or computer modelling (although I’ve seen a few impressive meltdowns from modellers when the supercomputers crash at the wrong moment, again). Unfortunately this is not always possible when you want to do ‘real’ science and so the rest of us are forced to spend hours, weeks and months fighting with highly sensitive and often broken analytical machinery which, of course, leads to delays, frustration and a hell of a lot of stress.

The bane of my life, the very temperamental LA-ICP-MS

I'm currently about 7 months behind on my lab work thanks to a flood in the lab back in January which broke the mass spectrometer I use for carbonate analysis and set off a series of problems which meant it wasn't working properly until mid-August. The other main mass spec I use (for trace element analysis) needed its laser servicing; the finance department helpfully sat on the request (after approving it) for about 3 months!

Luckily this is where I was when the flood happened so I came back to it in quite a good frame of mind to deal with shit 

However, even with all these setbacks, due to working my arse off during the short periods while things work, I'm still hoping to get out of the lab by Christmas and have still avoided/delayed my meltdown by realising one simple thing:

YOUR PhD DOESN'T REALLY MATTER SO DON’T WORRY ABOUT IT!!!

Yeah, no-one other than your supervisor, your viva examiners (and this isn't guaranteed) and yourself will probably ever read your thesis and, unless you are doing something ground-breaking it is unlikely you will make a huge contribution to the scientific knowledge. So why stress yourself out about things. Lab equipment breaks, experiments go wrong, lines of enquiry hit dead ends, technicians get sick, machinery gets booked up, your supervisor tells you everything you've done is worthless (not mine, they’re really nice), shit happens. If you can’t do anything about it then don’t worry about it. This takes everyone when they start a long time to realise, I've seen some never realise this and they’re the ones that don’t enjoy their PhD and may well be put off a career in academia all together. You worked hard to get this post and you've landed yourself another 3 or 4 years of being a student, only doing what you’re interested in and you get paid for it, so why not enjoy it!

When everything goes tits up and you find yourself with fuck all to do for a month or so while waiting on parts/repairs/money/etc that’s when you need to have something else to do. To get through your PhD you really need to have not let it have taken over your whole life because then, when it does get put on hold by something out of your control, then you’re in trouble. 

I find that the best things to do and take your mind off the crap you’re currently going through in the lab are things that take your utmost attention while doing them. You can’t think about the fact you've measured yet another batch of anomalous results while hanging off a rock face at the weekend, attempting a PB on your evening run, or lifting something heavier than yourself (while trying not to poo) while venting in the gym. I have less free time then I ever had at school, college or during my university and yet I have taken up or rediscovered so many hobbies: mountaineering, climbing, cycling, running and even this crappy blog to name a few, purely to take my mind off and to have outlets for the rage that builds throughout a stressful day in the lab.

Try thinking about work problems while concentrating on avoiding failing to your death...

So go, say ‘Fuck it’ to all your PhD problems and get outside, join a university sport’s club or whatever you fancy, just don’t let your work rule and ruin your life. And if all else fails, there’s always someone willing to go to the pub and listen to you rant about it all for a while.

UEA's 50th: Ask a Geologist, Volcanoes in Norwich and visits from Dwarves

After months of anticipation and planning this Saturday was the University of East Anglia’s 50^th Anniversary celebration. The whole campus was turned into some sort of educational fun fair with each department contributing in some way.

As part of the School of Environmental Sciences and a geologist (sort of) I was recruited for the Norfolk Volcano Team who’d organised the grand finale of the day’s entertainment in the form of an erupting scale replica of Mount Merapi, but more of that later.

As Friday was thesis deadline day for many of the department’s 4^th year PhD’s the morning started badly, with a hangover thanks to a few too many pints of ale at the departmental happy hour and then the pubs of Norwich, and so setting up the first (of many) liquid nitrogen volcano (see previous posts on ‘How to build a volcano’ and ‘Beware the liquid nitrogenpowered orange’ for the do’s and dont's of these) of the day before 10am was not the most enjoyable task.

After a morning of exploding bins to the delight of crowds of small children it was time for the (Great Norfolk?)’Volcano Cake Off’. In my opinion this was definitely the highlight of the day. There were cakes with accurately modelled magma chambers, beautifully layered stratovolcanoes, bubbling and degassing vents, mini firework eruptions and (with his usual flare of craziness) Honza managed to cover a couple of children in (edible but possibly not washable) lava with a foot-pump-and-bursting-balloon-powered stombolian eruption (and still got 3^rd place)!!!

The Volcano Cake Off (photo by Honza Chylik)

After the cakes had been judged, which generally resulted in some major Canary Islands style flank collapse (with just as much possibility of mega-tsunami generation as the real thing), it turned into some sort of horrific cake eating free-for-all as the bakers suddenly made a LOT of new friends.

My afternoon was spent in the Volcano tent doing ‘Ask a Geologist’ which was (surprisingly given my lingering hangover) great fun. Both children and adults came in with their rock collections, holiday photos and fracking/global warming worries, here are a few highlights:

A child came in with a rock collection he’d bought on his summer holiday at Mount Vesuvius, at some point the box had been dropped and all the rocks and minerals had got muddled up, unfortunately, as you can see in the photo, the labels were all in Italian so myself and one of the vulcanologists spent a fun 10 minutes sorting that as best as we could. If you speak Italian and can see any mistakes (we had no idea what the red, blue or sparkly minerals were supposed to be, they may have been artificially dyed, as may the ‘olivine’ which obviously wasn't found around Vesuvius even if it was real) please comment.

Child's rock collection from Vesuvius, please comment with any corrections/translations

Attempting to explain flint formation to a 6 year old – this hurt me

Miming an ammonite and a pectin (scallop) while identifying a fossil collection

Having a rather posh old couple come in and show me their holiday photos from the south of France (on their iPad). Their guidebook to the area had mentioned carved spheres of rock in the limestone but they were in very distinct bands in the limestone beds and seemed to be a slightly different rock type, so they’d realised these were a natural formation and had spent a year trying to find out what they actually were. As soon as I saw the pictures I know they were carbonate concretions, which at great coincidence were the topic of my Master’s thesis, and so I spent a good 15 minutes telling them EVERYTHING I could remember on the subject, finally a use for all that random specialist knowledge. Although going into redox boundaries and drawing diagrams of various types of concretion growth may have been going a bit far, they seemed pretty happy to have found the answer.

A piece of scoria (highly vesicular lava) found on a beach in Norfolk, this must have been brought by the sea all the way from Iceland or Italy, if not from even further!

After many hours of working my way through bags and boxes of rocks it was time, we thought, to relax and enjoy the firework volcano. But no, there were not enough (paid) stewards and security staff so we had to ‘volunteer’ to steward the event. I managed to get myself into a pretty good spot but some of the undergrads were not so lucky and after a full day’s volunteering barely got to see any of the show, which seems pretty unfair.

The volcano itself was a scale model of Mount Merapi in Indonesia, an active stratovolcano (which was chosen by the organisers for reasons which can be found on their blog here). Months of planning by the Norfolk Firework Volcano team had gone into researching, planning, organising and then building the volcano and they’d even got the same guy who did the some of the pyrotechnics for the London Olympics to create the eruption.

'Mount Merapi' photo by Honza Chylik

Once it got dark enough, the main eruption was preceded by traditional Indonesian music and a Taiko drumming display and then Gimli himself, John Rhys Davies, read an extract from ‘The Firework Maker’s Daughter’ by Phillip Pullman, which, in his Treebeard voice, sounded amazing (check out the video below) as the volcano started to de-gas and rumble next to him.

Then, finally it was time for the eruption, this was pretty spectacular, as from where we were in the dark, it didn't look like we were watching a small model of a volcano close up, it looked like we were watching a real eruption up off in the distance. As if somehow the tectonic plates beneath us had shifted and brought a subduction zone beneath Norfolk. I'm not going to bother attempting to describe the eruption itself, instead here’s my attempt at filming it and the following firework display. Unfortunately the fireworks are cut short as a stray flame set fire to the big finale, you can hear John Rhys Davies (yeah, we were sat next to Gimli) at the end joking about it, but it was still pretty impressive.

Let’s just hope that UEA’s 100^th anniversary is just as impressive…

Beware the Liquid-Nitrogen-Powered-Orange

As the saga of the broken mass spectrometer goes into its 7th month (fingers crossed for a nice long NERC extension when my 3 years of funding are up) I’ve yet again had to find things to do to fill the downtime in my PhD work. Thankfully there have been plenty of random bits of outreach and teaching on the go to keep things interesting.

For a University open day for gifted and talented high school kids the other week we once again brought out the liquid nitrogen volcano (see previous post here). As the usual volcanologists in charge are off on some fieldwork jolly, looking at real volcanos/lying about in the sun in some tropical paradise (not jealous at all), I was put in charge. 
As this was my first time operating the volcano we decided to have a run-through a few days beforehand which resulted in a few interesting observations. 

First we discovered that if you don’t screw on the lid quite right the pressure can’t build up and the liquid nitrogen gently boils off releasing a cloud of gas with minor bubbling. This rather nicely models a non-explosive eruption where the lava degasses easily (due to its low viscosity), for example the basaltic eruptions on Hawaii which produce some spectacular fire fountaining as the lava degasses but usually only erupt with quite gentle effusive lava flows.  We recreated this for the students on the open day by putting a small hole in the bottle top to allow for gas escape, the lack of drama of this ‘eruption’ was to the great amusement of the large crowd of builders who’d gathered expecting (from the way we still wore facemasks and ran away from the barrel) an impressive explosion.

Fire fountaining as lava degasses at the Fimmvorduhals volcano eruption in 2010, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bZ9IJjtuCo

Secondly, we also discovered the dangers of liquid-nitrogen-powered-oranges. My supervisor had come up with the bright idea of adding large oranges in with the plastic balls to represent pyroclastic bombs of varying sizes and densities. Of course it was expected that these denser projectiles would land close to the vent and 4 out of 5 of them did. However, (as shown in the detailed technical diagram below) one rogue orange managed to travel in a very high arc, taking a good 3 seconds to clear the 20m ‘exclusion zone’ between the volcano and where we were standing and flatten itself at high velocity into my mate’s (who’d come down to watch) forehead! Needless to say he didn’t find it as funny as we did and threw a proper little paddy – which just added to the amusement. A similar thing happened when we repeated the experiment for the kids but we’d learnt our lesson and added an extra 10m to the exclusion zone. 

Completely scientifically accurate diagram of flight path of orange volcanic bomb, unfortunately there is no idea on the launch velocity so cannot work out how high it went.

This really emphasised just how much uncertainty there is in predicting the hazards from a volcanic eruption as there are so many unknowns and shows that plans and hazard maps definitely must err on the side of caution! In real highly explosive eruptions the bombs can be over 6m in diameter and even these have been known to travel over 500m from the vent, with smaller ones in the region of 0.5-1m often being found more than a kilometre from the vent! (Here’s an amusing story I found about a different danger of volcanic bombs in an airport)

Explosive eruption emitting large volcanic bombs from Sakurajima volcano, Japan, video from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jav4-GLXecQ

Here's a close up of a volcanic bomb I found in Iceland on a fieldtrip a few years ago, my size 9 boot for scale

This post was brought to you by the relentless drone of the pressure washer directly outside the office window which made it impossible to focus on any actual work today. The horrific 1960's concrete monstrosity of  UEA's teaching wall and walkway is being cleaned for its 50th anniversary but cleaning it just makes it look worse.

Slapton Field Course - Important life lessons for aspiring rock-botherers

So the first year field course in Slapton has been and went for another year, and again I spent the week pointing at rocks in the rain and drinking too much cider. One of my first posts was about this trip last year and it was much the same this time. However, this year’s first years were rather more interesting/fun/drunk – so this post is focussed on what the students ACTUALLY learnt on their first field trip, rather than what they were supposed to…

1. All rocks look the same in the rain
2. Do not ask questions of hungover PhD students if you do not want a sarky answer 
3. Burrowing granite worms aid the process of kaolinisation (hope nobody writes that one in an exam)
4.  You can still injure yourself quite spectacularly after the coach arrives at the end of the field day
5.  Crutches do not float in the sea (same student as #4)
6.  Some students will do/lick ANYTHING for free beer
7.  If you pour water on a slug it will NOT get bigger and you will be laughed at
8.  If you do/say anything mildly stupid it may haunt you for the rest of your university career
9.  Don’t try to have sex in the smoking shelter
10.  Don’t try to have sex in the labs
11.  If you walk into the sea you will get wet
12. Skinny jeans and Ugg boots are not suitable field kit
13. Even a year into an Earth Science degree it is still possible to mistake slate for wood (second year in a row I've been asked, ‘Is this graveSTONE made out of wood?)
14. Bear in mind that PhD demonstrators and lecturers have got years more practice at holding their ale than you
15. Loose sheets of paper don’t fare well as a notebook in the wind and rain
16. Mud may be deeper and sinkier than expected
17. Cool packs containing months’ worth of insulin should be clearly labelled so they are not mistaken for, and handed out as, ice packs
18. Being tired is not an excuse for not climbing down to the exposure we’ve travelled over 300 miles to look at
19.  Don’t have a birthday on a field trip, it will not end well for you
20.  No matter how much you drink if we have to be ready to go at 9am and pretend to be enthusiastic so do you (even if #19)
21.  ‘Draw a sketch of the outcrop’ does not mean take a photo of it
22. Demonstrators can’t be bothered to learn all of your names, don’t complain about the nickname you’re given or you’ll get a worse one (just ask Sexpest)
23. If your compass points the opposite way to everyone else’s don’t keep trying to take orientation measurements with it
24. Don’t lick the demonstrators
25. ALL pebbles on the beach are flint if you're not sure

So all in all while they may not have learnt a huge amount of science from the trip, even with our best efforts, some valuable life lessons were (hopefully) taken away.

And here’s some nice photographs of rocks from the field course…

Lichen bothering in the graveyard, attempts at lichen chronology were very slightly more successful than last year

Angular unconformity between heavily folded Devonian limestones and overlying Quaternary beach gravels

Erosional transgressive lag deposit at the unconformity

Devonian Bryozoa and calcite veins in the limestone

Boudinaged limestone bed amongst less competent marls

Didn't feel like we'd seen enough rocks all week so took a detour to Stonehenge on the way home!

How to build a volcano

In spite of last month's post on the difficulties of communicating the real side of doing science to the public and how we should focus more on how difficult it actually is to do anything, this month's is on our latest outreach attempt and being a massive hypocrite. 

So yesterday the School of Environmental Sciences (ENV) at UEA were filming promotional videos to entice new undergraduates to come here next year; this was mostly interviews with current students and filming lectures but they needed something a bit more exciting. This was provided by one of Jon Stone's (@JonathanStone10) liquid nitrogen-powered volcanoes which are usually the highlight of ENV open days. On the promise of a free lunch, myself and Andrew Rushby (@andrewrushby), along with numerous others were roped into helping out.

How to build a liquid nitrogen volcano (probably best NOT to try this at home):

Ingredients:

• Liquid nitrogen, about 1l
• 2l plastic pop bottle
• Something to weigh the bottle down, we used a custom built metal cradle weighted down with bricks
• A large bin/barrel, this has to be strong enough to withstand the blast - we've lost a few lower quality bins this way; the eruption still works but ends up being more of a Mount Saint Helens style flank eruption rather than directing the blast upwards.
• Enough water to almost fill the the bin (leaving space to sink in the nitrogen bomb)
• Soft plastic balls, representing pyroclastic bombs
• We also added red food dye and strawberry jelly, to make the water/lava more visible on camera

Method:

1. Put the bin a long way, probably at least 10m away from anything or anybody that could be affected by the blast, seriously you don't want to be too near this when it goes off, and fill with the water, food dye and jelly (the food dye and jelly aren't necessary but will look good if you use plenty); now you've got a full magma chamber.
2. Set up an exclusion zone, 10m radius should be fine
3. Add the plastic balls, don't use hard/solid ones they must be soft and hollow 
4. Half fill the weighted plastic bottle with liquid nitrogen (use a funnel, insulated gloves and a blast-proof visor for safety) and put the lid on - now you've got to move quickly!
5. Drop the filled bottle upright into the bin
6. RUN TO OUTSIDE THE EXCLUSION ZONE
7. Wait for the liquid nitrogen to heat up and boil, the rapid expansion will cause the bottle to violently explode. This may take a couple of minutes DO NOT approach the bin in this time.
8. Watch the rather spectacular results.

To film ours (as well as having the professional film crew to make the official video) we used a tree climbing catapult to string up a line about 4m (which wasn't anywhere near high enough to escape the blast) directly above the bin, hanging a waterproof GoPro camera which Andrew controlled via Wi-Fi with his iPad while I filmed from just outside the exclusion zone. This is the resultant footage, edited by Jon:

As you can see, it's pretty impressive, supposedly you could feel the explosion through most of the SCI Teaching Wall, and surprisingly the GoPro did survive, it just got a bit wet.

Now if you read my last post you can probably see why I feel like a bit of a hypocrite helping to promote the department in this way. Unfortunately this kind of exciting stuff is purely reserved for outreach, it's not really what you're going to be doing on a daily basis as an ENV undergrad, but that's just one of those things, you're never going to get a decent intake of students if all you show is undergrads looking down microscopes, doing mineral identification or map work, and for us it was a fun way to spend a day at work - even if the free lunch never did materialise. 

The main highlight was actually just watching the crowd of undergraduates being filmed doing reaction shots after the eruption had already happened - it was painfully clear to see why we all do science rather than drama - hopefully that footage will surface at some point although I somehow doubt it'll be used in the promo video.

Communicating (the soul destroying reality of) Science

After a rather inspiring lecture by Professor Ian Stuart, of BBC’s ‘How to Build a Planet’ and ‘Volcano Live’ fame, on the difficulties of communicating science to the general public, I realised that my attempts had been somewhat lacking of late and thought I best get another blog post out for my regular reader. I’m going to apologise now if this all goes a bit woolly and social-sciencey, if you know me you’ll know that’s never my intention.

Titled ’50 Shades of Grey: Communicating Rocks’, a lot of this talk was on what the public want and need to know and how important it was to tailor what you wanted to say to your target audience. However, I think he missed something, while most scientific outreach and communication is about new discoveries and interesting things that have been found out, I think pop ‘consumer’ science is focusing on the wrong things, putting out the wrong messages about science and scientists themselves.

Watching any science-based TV show, or reading many science news articles, especially those on the earth sciences and physics which appear to be the most TV friendly subjects, it is too easy to get the impression that scientific research is easy. Exciting breakthroughs come after a relatively short period of work, you bang out a few experiments, check the results, and all goes pretty smoothly. It’s bad enough that all the fictional crime investigation shows do this, sticking a sample in a mass spectrometer which reliably spits out, already analysed, results giving a nice answer to whatever question posed in seconds – anybody who’s ever worked with one of these knows this NEVER happens, without factual documentaries adding to this.

Therefore, in my opinion (which may be slightly biased thanks to the spirit crushing difficulty of getting ANYTHING working in my labs) scientific outreach should be more strongly weighted towards the amount of time and effort doing any good science takes.

A life in experimental science is dominated by constant breakdowns of sensitive, expensive equipment and hitting soul destroying dead end after dead end in your research before (hopefully) something new and vaguely interesting is found out. Even after all of this, it may take much more work to confirm your results, followed by months or even years of reading and writing before a publishable paper can be put out into the literature, when it may just be rinsed by your peers just because they don’t like your research group (scientific rivalries can get pretty nasty).

To put this in context, I finally made an interesting discovery in some samples of modern corals this week (can’t say what yet). This was able to happen as I have finally managed to get some reliable data on the trace elemental composition of these samples using a laser ablation- inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometer (LA-ICP-MS). This has taken over a year and a quarter of attempts as this machine is one of the most temperamental things imaginable, every time I manage to scrounge some time on it, it breaks.

Since (after a year of attempts) finally working out a reliable method of analysis, I was booked to use this before Christmas, however, a workman in the department managed to cut through one of the pipes for the air conditioning. The lab that this machine is housed in needs to be kept cold due to the sensitivity of the mass spectrometers and so the whole lab was shut down for a couple of weeks. Next time I got booked on the machine the lab was struck by flu and so the technician, who’s baby this ICP is, was busy doing the job of about 6 other people. Of course the machine was then fully booked up for the next few weeks until I managed to get a block of 4 days booked on it the week before last. It takes a whole day to set up and carry out a run along a 40mm long transect of coral so I was planning on just being able to run 4 samples during this period. However, out of the 4 days, one day the computer system controlling the laser ablater crashed in the afternoon and lost the settings for the run that I’d spent all morning setting up, and another day there was a university-wide blackout just after my run had started as someone had exploded something and started a fire in one of the labs over in Biology.

This kind of bad luck is unfortunately the norm in research, the other main piece of equipment I use (another mass spectrometer) has been broken for a month now thanks to a major flood in the lab it sits in. I know of another PhD researcher who suffered a major setback when a (separate) flood washed away a load of irreplaceable microscopic fossils (foraminifera) she’d spent the last 3 months painstakingly sorting through ready for analysis. And of course there was also the disappointing loss of the BLEAT space balloon I wrote about in December.

If the general public knew about all the long hours, suffering and heart break that happened in the background behind each scientific discovery they might be more inclined to trust scientists more and lose the view of the researcher as a mad scientist, down in the lab, doing crazy experiments.

Clearly we still need to put most of the emphasis in the communication on the big, exciting discoveries to keep the interest, but a bit more of the human stories behind the science is definitely needed.

Speculating wildly this, I’d hope, would lead to less scepticism and a more positive view on science. Less people reading and believing the internet ramblings of sceptics and conspiracy theorists, instead listening more to the scientist’s voice of reason, scientific research getting more funding (maybe more out of sympathy than anything) and a greater role of (good) science in governmental policy making.