So this has been my life for the past couple of days weeks. It has been fun and rewarding exhausting, but I have learned a lot:
- I can function on an average of 3 hours of sleep a night.
- As long as I have chocolate I do not need any other food.
- Crystallography is a pain in the ass.
Well, to be honest, I’m not sure about the first two, but trust me on the last one. Don’t go there. Just… don’t.
Hello to you too and hold on to your seats – I am back.
A World of Lies 
Chocolate is my major vice……but I don’t know if even chocolate would be enough for me to survive on only 3 hours of sleep a night…. ouch!…. :)
It would if you had your PI breathing down your neck and a competing Japanese group threatening to publish your work ;).
I’ve discovered the whole chocolate thing too. Chocolate is a food group all its own and the only one necessary for survival. Glad to read you are back!
Well, let’s hope I can stick to my word this time, I haven’t exactly got a clean track-record with back-promises… but I’m pretty determined this time!
Crystallography reveals a very anxious world of atomic behavior (and a schizophrenic word of weird diffraction). What brings you to that discipline? Are you planning on being a materials scientist?
Not material science: what I’m crystallizing is protein. What brought me to it was pure chance, to be honest – I was offered a position in after graduation and took it, if not because it interested me then simply because I had no alternative offer at that time. I finally got my PhD in protein crystallography last year and am currently doing a post-doc which has more emphasis on kinetics and functional work, but I got some crystallography side projects to keep me happy (because yes, it’s a pain in the ass, but it is beautiful when it works).