Homework over the Holidays

Update first: I have the new header for Mylifeinalabcoat.com. Me with a snake (which I for some reason decided was science-y) and moved the old header on over to MylifeOUTOFalabcoat.com. If you are a follower here you should click on over there to become a follower. As my previous post mentioned, I am splitting the content of my old single blog into two more awesome/streamlined blogs.

Now that we're done with that, I want to talk about something, that in my 21 year of education I still struggle with.

Homework over the Holidays.

Every time I pack a bag to head home to visit my family, I seesaw over whether or not to bring homework. For short/busy visits during the year, I have become pretty good at saying:

"no, you will not touch that text book, save you luggage and you back the 10 pounds and don't pack it"

The Christmas Holidays, due to their longer duration (nearly two full weeks this year), however, present a greater challenge. To study or not to study? As an undergrad student, the years when I had no full year courses were a particular delight, to complete my last exam (usually after Dec 20th) and spend the entire holiday, blissfully with no academic demands on my time. I believe this only occurred once in first year.

On the other hand, graduate school, knows no true breaks. As such, I have a USB key full of graphs to organize into some semblance of figures for a paper, along with a draft of my research proposal to begin reducing, reorganizing, rewriting, and replacing the reductions. Dutifully as ever I have taken it home with me.

Amid the typically holiday flurry of family, friends and food, however, I haven't spent nearly as much productive time with them as I had hoped to by this point.

And so I give you my holidays, 2012/2013 solution to that erroneous sin. 1 day spent in transit at my uncle's in Hamilton, with no worldly distractions from my writing; coupled with arriving back in Calgary on a Friday while not returning to the lab until Monday. Giving me a whole weekend of progress ahead.

Ah yes in typical, student fashion, I have solved a problem of chronic procrastination with scheduled procrastination.

Do you bring homework home for the holidays? What are your mechanisms for dealing with it?

Also this is an approximation of the kind of posts to expect on this blog: Life In. Once again click on over to Life Out Of for my lifestyle blog of day to day awesome. But if you liked this post, let me know in the comments!

Blog Switch

You may have noticed a few things changing (slowly) around here. Or if you're on 20something bloggers, you may know I had been contemplating splitting up my blog.

Guess what, I am, and it's already in the process of happening (hopefully it will be done in full by the new year).

This address, mylifeinalabcoat.com will be focused on just that, my life as a graduate student in the health sciences. While my new address mylifeoutofalabcoat.com will become the home of my personal/lifestyle/everything else blog. By keeping the two distinct but still connected, I hope to adress potentially two different audiences, as well as develop the academic-y nature of my writing.

Anyways, if you are a follower here, and would like to continue following me, click on over to mylifeoutofalabcoat.com and follow there. If you are interested in reading about grad school, the health sciences, and my opinions on academic success then stay right where you are.

Sorry if things get confusing for a while, but really I thought this was the best direction for me to be headed in.

Hope you are enjoying your holidays! I sure am!

Work Life Balance Part 3

Here's part three, hopefully you've already read Part 1 featuring wisdom from author of Rich Before 30, Lesley Scorgie. And Part 2 featuring Husky Energy VP Nancy Foster.

If you did not, I'll catch you up, I recently attended Young Women of Influence's Evening Series on Work/Life Balance; featuring a panel of three highly successful, exquisitely balanced women. Today I bring you the conclusion of this posting series, featuring the advice of Melissa Gunning.

Melissa Gunning, the founder of Wean Green (Twitter).

Melissa is the shining example of going after what you want. This mother of 2 used to be a teacher, before her determination to provide safe and environmental baby products for her own children, and yours as well, lead her to start her own company. The courage it must take to go after your dream like that is respectable to say the least.

On being asked "What does balance look like to you?"

"I make up balance. I redefine it everyday....and my house is a mess right now, by the way." Reassuring, because mine often is as well!

Melissa certainly has the most unique work style of the three invited speakers, with two young children she works mainly from home, except when travelling for business.

On working at home:

 When on the phone with potential buyers, her littler one often provides background noise from the potty.

 On dealing with 'mommy guilt':

"Mommy guilt should be outlawed...this is empowering....noone else can tech my girls to be as empowered as me."

The most important lesson for success? Surround yourself with people who not only support you but who understand your goals. A strong team personally and professionally with get you farthest.

With such a busy lifestyle, where does she find down time? Airplanes, where else can you just sit back, order wine, and watch a movie? Well I don't know if flights are quite that relaxing for me, but I can see what she's getting at.

And what was her final piece of advice?

"Try and plan ahead as much as possible...Sundays are planning days...I cook on Sundays." Having a plan for the week certainly does make things go more smoothly.

 Thanks again to Melissa and Women of Influence for this event. I hope you enjoyed reading about it as much as I did attending. No matter what your career goals or life goals are, I think between these three influential women there is something everyone can relate to and something everyone can take away.

Work Life Balance Part 2

If you stopped by on Friday, you may have read part one of this post, featuring wisdom from author of Rich Before 30, Lesley Scorgie. If not, I'd recommend you go ahead and read it now! (with an exclamation point for emphasis)

If you did not, I'll catch you up, I recently attended Young Women of Influence's Evening Series on Work/Life Balance; featuring a panel of three highly successful, exquisitely balanced women. Today I bring you part 2 of this posting series, featuring the advice of Nancy Foster.

Nancy Foster, the senior VP of Human & Corporate Resources for Husky Energy

Although on the rise, women VPs are few and far between, and in the oil and gas industry they are fewer and farther. Despite this, Nancy has worked her way up in one of Canada's biggest energy corporations, all the while raising four kids into particularly high functioning adults (as one of her daughter's friends was eager to point out). If anyone knows a thing or two about succeeding in a male dominated field, Nancy is the lady I'd like to talk to!

When asked "Can you really have it all?"

"you have to make choices...there will always be times when it feels like you don't have it all...know what you want, and don't worry about what people tel you you should be doing."

What's the key to balance for her?

 She worked had to get to a place where she has flexibility at work, where results are higher valued then the number of hours worked. This is something I particularly like, and that I think is true in some aspects of academia.

Importantly, it's not about the quantity of time, rather the quality, and she applies this to both time spent at work and time spent at home with her family.

What did her children think of her being a working mother? Well they once gave her a performance appraisal. Negative feedback?

1. Please stop wearing suits to our soccer games, the other moms don't.
2. They don't like that she doesn't bake.

Nancy's response "So if that's all, then it's pretty good."

On the support of her husband: "vent on your husband, it keeps you from sending emails to people you shouldn't".

What's most important to her now that her kids are grown? Giving back, she is passionate about mentoring young people within her company. "We need a workforce that is inspired...that includes an untapped resource that is women."

And Nancy's final piece of advice?

You need to be happy with the choices that you make. Women are often still the primary caregiver, and can have the biggest influence on their children. If your kids see you as passionate and happy with your choices, then that in of itself is balance.

 So thanks to Nancy, and the people at Women of Influence for organizing this event. Once again you can read about Lesley Scorgie in Part 1 and you can expect to here about Melissa Gunning in Part 3 (still to come).

Work Life Balance Part 1

Last week, I once again had the pleasure of attending a Young Women of Influence Evening Series. The previous one I attending was both a great social evening as well as a very motivational night. You can read my post on "7 tips for negotiating your graduate career" to find out more of what I took away from it.

This time around, the topic of the event was "Work Life Balance" and rather than have one woman talk about it they had a panel of 3 successful Calgary Women. Once again, like any good graduate student, I diligently took notes. Here's some highlights of what these women had to say.

Lesley Scorgie (Website/Twitter)

She's a best selling author of the books "Rich by 30: A young adult's guide to financial success" and "Rich by 40: A young couple's guide to building net worth." And considering the state of my own personal finances... I'm thinking these books might be in my near future. Lesley is passionate about educating young people about financial literacy, a topic her own mother introduced to her at a young age. In fact, Lesley was so well on her way to being rich by 30 that she was featured on Oprah when she was only 17 to talk about it. There is no doubt that Lesley has the work side of things down pat, so what does she have to say about life, and balance?

When asked what does balance look like to you?

"You could spend years and decades trying to find perfect balance... but really it doesn't exist....don't beat yourself up over it."

Her best advice:

Be present in your work when you're working, and your life/relationships when you're living.

Early on she made the mistake of saying yes to everything, and her time evaporated. You need filters for what's worth your time and what's not.

The lessons she learned:

1. How to prioritize her time.
2. To do this properly... How to value your time.

How to do this? Make a time wheel! Then pick the aspects of your life you need to prioritize/mean the most to you, and protect that time.

This sounded like a great idea to me and is definitely an exercise I plan on doing in the near future....only problem... I need to find the time to do it! 

Leslie is newly 29, and when asked the question "How important is it to you to have a family of your own?" she laughed because someone is always asking when will you get married and have babies it seems. But right now she says she definitely wants a family some day, and hopefully not too far away. She's spent the last 10 years all on her career, but in the past year has made a vow to herself to shift towards greater balance. She advised that you have to follow your heart and do what's right for you. Everyone else and their dog will have an opinion on what you should be doing; but those opinions don't matter.

And finally her biggest piece of advice, was you can work on your career all you want, but at the end of the day your personal relationships are all you have left, so don't forget to nurture them too!

Lesley, being closest to my stage of the game (despite being wildly more successful than I am) was who I related to the most of this panel. But you can expect to see a Part 2 of this post featuring wisdom from Nancy Foster and Part 3 featuring Mellisa Gunning in the next couple days.

Once again thank you to the people at Women of Influence for inviting me out to your events!

What is Success to Me?

This post comes to you by way of a 20 something blogger prompt. They posed the questions:

• What is success?
• What does it mean to be successful?
• How do you want to be successful?

and I kind of love those questions. Here's why.

When I think of success, in a big picture sort of way, I often think of it as being something many many years down the road for me... I mean I'm looking at a couple more years to finish this PhD and likely up to 5 years post doc work, before hopefully getting an academic position somewhere. The end of my career path is something so far off, it's hard to see, or more importantly see the steps that will get me there.

This may just be my personal outlook, or a result of taking the grad school route; but I think its something that many people of my generation can relate to. I mean more and more of us are staying in schooling until our late 20s, and even with that will change career paths a couple times...Success just seems far off to the average 20-something (or once again, maybe that's just me).

So I think that we need to instead look at smaller successes, the little milestones rather than the big picture.

Do I consider myself a successful person?

• Well I have a B.Sc. Hons in Biology and Pharmacology from a great school (McMaster).
• I am pursuing a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at a great school (U Calgary).
• My studies are fully funded by the provincial government through a grant I was awarded (highly competitive)
• I have 3 publications to show for work I did during undergrad.
• I've travelled to national and international conferences to discuss my science with some of the leaders in my field.
• I have a work life I love (despite the stress sometimes) a home life I love, a family I love.
• I am perfectly happy with where I am and who I am right now.

So yeah overall I consider myself a successful person. But there a lot's of milestones ahead of me... things I still want/need to accomplish. People and peers whom I look up to and wish to emulate (professionally and personally). I think the big picture on success is that it's often not tangible to look forwards too, but rather something that you should reflect back on.

(Although today I am looking forward to success with the western blots I'm finishing on a weekend... and hopefully I'll be able to reflect back on it when I show them proudly to my supervisor next week...here's hoping!)

7 Tips for Negotiating Your Graduate Career

Two weeks ago, I had the privileged to be invited by Women Of Influence (Website/Twitter) to attend one of their Young Women Of Influence Evening Series, if I would blog and tweet about it. And a privilege is exactly what it was, their invited speaker, Evelyn Ackah, one of Canada's top 40 under 40, gave an inspiring speech on negotiating career success, relating it to her own path to success as a lawyer with her own firm here in Calgary.

She presented the many young women in attendance (a heterogeneous mix featuring ladies from banking, real estate, advertising, students, photographers....) with 7 Career Tips for Negotiating Success...outlined by Emily Rack over at Avenue Magazine. And myself, ever the student, took copious notes. Afterwards I had the opportunity to thank Evelyn, commenting that although she spoke from her perspective as a lawyer, her advice was widely applicable to any field, and particularily to myself, striving for success in academia (a male dominated feild where you often have to create your own learning/mentoring opportunities).

So I've decided to outline her advice as it might apply to the young female graduate student. Hopefully you may find this helpful, I certainly did.

7 Tips for Negotiating Your Graduate Career.

1. Dream big, and share those dreams with other people.
Only 10-20% of PhDs will eventually get a tenure track position in academia. Is this what you want to pursue anyways? Do it! Don't let unfortunate statistics hold you back this early in your career. If that's not for you, have eaqually big goals no matter the path you plan to take, as Evelyn said "you need to dream big, even if you don't get 100% of the way there, 80 or 90% will still be remarkable." And the most important thing to do if you want to achieve your goals, tell people. Tell your supervisor, I want the kind of position you have, or as Evelyn told one of here first bosses "Hello Liz, I want your job." Tell your supervisor, committee and mentors... this will "help them to see you differently, and lets them know what's driving you and how they can help you towards that."

2. Be open to unexpected opportunities or circumstances.
Sometimes success is about being in the right place at the right time, but when opportunities present themselves you have to be willing to take the risk. As a young scientist, this may mean moving you project down a totally unexpected tangent when a curious result keeps happening. (Penicillin for instance was discovered when bread mould from a sandwich got on some plates, and killed all the bacteria). If your too focused on one path, or too unwilling to risk working on something because you're not familiar with it, then you might miss out on something big. Evelyn says "the biggest strength she has is being flexible when it comes to change."

3. Know who you are and what you really want from your career.
This can be really hard early on in our careers, in fact I asked Evelyn, what advice would she give to someone at the beginning of their path, who really isn't certain where they want it to take them.  Her answer reflected back to number 2, but also suggested that if you don't know what you want at the end of the day, you probably know what you want right now. Building an academic career is really a series of choices, and less a arrow straight to a target. But it is still important to "discover your values and let them direct and drive you." Is teaching important to you, pursue effective TAships. What is the work/life balance that you are comfortable with, success in science is often related to hours in the lab, however, personal time can keep you grounded (read sane). "Doing your personal work now will help you to develop professionally."

4. Be prepared to work hard.
This goes without saying, however there is a caveat here. "if the quality and results are not there you can't expect to advance." Its not the number of hours, blood, sweat and tears that will make you succeed at the end of the day, its what you can produce with them. And the world's not fair, sometimes people will get high impact publications with minimal effort, while you will sacrifice weekends all semester to publish in a journal no one's heard of.

5. Recognize that sometimes you have to move out to move up.
This is a tough one for the young PhD, you can't just up and leave your lab very easily. However this does apply to your project, for instance you might know I had been having a whole world of failures this summer with my project, there's a wall, and I cannot for the life of me find my way over/around/through it. So, I sat down with my supervisor, and came up with something totally different to work on for a while, so I can keep moving forward. "Sometimes that's the only way to move forward if you feel stuck." On the other hand, Evelyn, quoting the Kenny Rogers song, the Gambler, says you have to know when to hold em too. So that project I put on a shelf, I didn't throw it out, the results will be worth it once I trouble shoot it, so I'm still working it on the side.

6. Don't underestimate the importance of relationships and community involvement.
The ones applying to med school all know this...as they frantically pursue every connection and volunteer opportunity to get ahead... yet many grad students don't bother. Networking is always important, sometime this means sacrificing drinking with the other students at TGIF or a conference to hang out with the profs and hear hours of their stories of back in the day. You will make an impression, develop relationships that could lead to collaborations or post-docs, and you will have lots of fun (and probably get your drinks free). Additionally get involved, with your grad student government (have input in decisions related to your education) with organizing symposia, or student run publications. I do all these things, and have benefited directly from all of them. All this will help you "build up a professional network.... success does not happen without support."

7. You must be resilient.
Academia is a world of rejection. No your paper didn't get accepted without revisions, no you didn't get that grant the first time you applied, no your abstract didn't get you a speaking presentation and now you just have a poster in the corner. You will forever be frustrated by reviewer number 3. Evelyn's advice, which I wholeheartedly agree with "have a glass of wine then bounce back and move forward."

Hope you found this helpful, what other pieces of advice would you offer to a new grad student (besides run the other way)?

I'm back from my travels and grant apps so expect more regular posting round here!

The thing about groupwork...

I do apparently play well with rocks.....I was making an inukshuk, ok, it's not like rocks are my only friends.


The thing about group work is that it inherently takes a task that you could have accomplished in a short amount of time on your own and triples it, along with bombarding your inbox with millions of emails when/where/how should we meet.

I almost always prefer to work on my own. Having reached grad school I thought I had finally left the world of partners and group projects behind (I mean of my 3 classes, the largest one had 15 people... so they really don't need to pair you up to reduce marking ok). But alas, I still have to suffer through it, every other week.

Once in undergrad, my partner, who were were supposed to be paired with for the whole year got bit by a rabid dog and later dropped the course (unrelated reasons) and so I got to be a group of one! It was bliss! (she was fine, don't worry)

I know that working well in groups is an important skill to develop, and that some groups can be very effective... but for the most part its a huge pain!

Is it really so bad that I don't play well with others?

Do you have any group project train wreck stories... or times when everything went perfectly smoothly?

3 websites every PhD student should have bookmarked

Sometimes you have 15 minutes to kill during an incubation, time point, or exposure.

Here's 3 pages I recommend you click on while you wait.

1: PhD comics: Piled higher and deeper.

This comic strip follows the life of a nameless, bespectacled, engineering grad student as he and his friends struggle with procrastination, the endless quest to find free food, ridiculous supervisors and trying to have a life outside of the lab. Always good for a laugh, and so easy to relate to.

2: What should we call grad school.

"When someone brags about how late he stays to work."

One of those great giffy tumblrs, constantly being updated, always accurate, often at summer student's expense. If only there was a way to print these out and post them on the lab bulletin board.



3: Stuff by Matt Might, particularly the Illustrated Guide to a PhD

I came across Matthew Might (@mattmight ) 's stuff just the other day. Someone had share a FB link to his illustrated guide to a PhD, and well for me it was inspiring rather than just sad and funny. Then I spent another hour or so reading other articles like his 'How to get into grad school' his recomended books and papers every PhD student  should read and his team fortress related guide to the 9 types of students. Anyways, this is a great place to procrastinate and still feel like you a developing yourself into a better scientist.

Ponderings of a PhD: Women in Science

Tomorrow, the publication Science, is hosting a live chat on the topic "Do female scientists get a raw deal?" check it out starting at 3PM EDT here.

The chat, focused on often hot topic of inequality of the genders in academia, features the author of a recent study carried out at Yale University. "Science Faculty's Subtle Gender Bias Favours Male Student" which was published in last month's PNAS. (PubMed ID 22988126) If you don't have access to the publication (like I do as a UofC student) let me give you a brief run down.

~120 faculty members from departments of Biology, Chemistry and Physics were given an application from an 'undergrad student' who was interested in a lab tech type position and hopefully eventual graduate studies. The trick was, the student did not exist, it was a complied CV Resume made for the purpose of the study, and it was submitted to half the faculty under the name John, and to half under the name Jane.

So here's were things get interesting, despite receiving applications identical in everything but a male vs female name, on average, the faculty members were more likely to hire the 'male student', thought them to be overall more competent and deserving of mentorship. Additionally, they were offered higher starting salaries.

 (Moss-Racusin CA, Dovidio JF, Brescoll VL, Graham MJ and Handelsman J (2012) PNAS)

The paper is a solid, and interesting read, I highly recommend, if you have access, and male or female you give it a read. But I have to say, this has me alarmed. As a female student, I really don't like the idea that there's a bias such that male students are more likely to receive mentorship than me. That means that I'm set back long before the choice to have kids, and take mat leave gets a shot at my career. (See what I've had to say about women in science in the past).

So check out the live chat tomorrow.... already there are some interesting comments happening in anticipation. Particularly one which suggests that part of the reason women have less success is because we aren't as good negotiators as men. This might be the case....in fact in a somewhat related side note, I've been invited to the Young Women of Influence Evening Series next month, featuring:

EVELYN ACKAH
FOUNDER & MANAGING LAWYER, ACKAH BUSINESS IMMIGRATION LAW

Who will be talking on the topic of negotiating your career. I am thrilled to have been invited on a media pass to attend and blog about the event afterwards, and would recommend any other young ladies in the Calgary area who are interested to check out the event and consider attending.

So that's what I've been pondering today...have you ever felt held back by your gender? In science or otherwise? What do you think needs to change to avoid this in the future?

Today I: am back to class, and learning NMR

OK, so I just had to share this real quick, because it`s got me feeling a little like this kitty:

 source

SO I`m doing a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, so it stands to reason that I might have to take a couple graduate level biochem courses, tonight I have the first lecture of possibly my last class ever. The topic for the evening, metabonomics and pharmacology. The papers assigned to read in advance feature a lot of techniques, and a lot on NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance)  of which I previously know very little about... having coming from a physiology based undergrad (not biochemistry). The moral of this story is, in reading one of these papers I came across this sentence....and subsequently feel like the above cat.

``An NMR spectrum of biofluids can be thought of as an object with a multidimentional set of metabolic coordinates, the values of which are the spectral intensities at each data point, and the spectrum is therefor a point in a multidimensional metabolic hyperspace.``

 (Lindon JC, Holmes E and Nicholson JK, 2006)

So there you have it.....hopefully tonight`s class goes better than the reading of the papers did... looks like I`ll be working double time this semester.

Motivation

Sometimes science isn't all it's cracked up to be. Experiments can go exceedingly well for months at a time, then suddenly stop working all together with seemingly no explanation. My project is challenging me right now, and not in a good, makes you thrilled to be doing science kind of way; but in a makes it hard to even want to come in to the lab in the morning kind of way. So what I need is some motivation.

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Source: lookwhatkatiefound.wordpress.com via Kat on Pinterest

Ponderings of a PhD Student - Advancing in a Male Dominated Field

Two things on my mind right now.

1. I should have a bit more content related to aspects of my life as a graduate student.
2. This article over at the everygirl 'How to advance in a male-dominated field'

So here we go, what I have to ponder on the topic of advancing in a male dominated field.

Science is an old boys club, you absolutely cannot deny this.

My supervisor is male, 2 out of 3 of my committee members are male, our research group of 16 PIs...13 are male, our department is at about 23 out of 30.

They try to make things eaqual, but from my experiance equal means this:

• When picking your committee members be sure to pick at least one woman.
• When inviting speakers to a symposium, be sure to invite at least one woman.
• When you attend a full day of talks, there will always be at least one woman.

Now what does this often result in, a woman being selected not for the quality of her research, but just to be the token female. In many cases her contribution won't be at the level of the males (chosen first for being exemplary in the field) and her presence there does less for promoting women in science than her absence would be. Don't get me wrong, there are many women who will get up there and sweep the floor with their male colleagues....I'm just pointing out that there are sometimes hazards to picking a woman, just for women's sake.

What does science try to do about this?

Well just about every conference, retreat, symposium I've attended thus far, has had a section or seminar promoting women in science. Usually of the format of getting all the female PIs in attendance to talk about their own experiences and give advice to the female trainees. Additionally, basically every University will be constantly running women in science type events (we have fireside meetings once a month with invited speakers). Some of these are great. Others are train wrecks that set our gender back about 60 years.

You see successful women in science often fall on either ends of the spectrum.

The bitter: These ladies sacrificed hard to get where they are. Back in their day mat leave was as long as it took you to drive back to the lab from the hospital. You simply didn't take any breaks from experiments and publishing for any reasons. And if that meant giving up family, romance, personal hygiene and appearance, well you did it. And they expect this out of our generation as well and often see women who leave the academic realm to take industry or government jobs (often providing stable income, benefits, less overtime, and mat leave) as having failed.

The forever chipper and optimistic: These ladies may not have had it all for themselves (many often aren't married or have kids) but they are determined to make it clear that our generation of scientist can have it all, without any sacrifices at all....why it's the universities that should have to make changes. So you wanted to take 3 years off to start your family and don't have any publications since your post doc, clearly you deserve to be just as hire-able as your male counterpart who worked 60 hour weeks for the past 3 years and has a half dozen nature papers to show for it. This is the future people, you can have it all!

Of course these two groups of ladies immediately begin bickering, and instead of reassuring, and providing positive examples for the trainees...they just leave us more confused than ever, and embarrassed to be a woman.

So what's my plan to advance in a male dominated field?

Forget about everyone else. I try to come to the lab every day and be the best that I can be on that day, which is hopefully better than I have on previous days. When I first talked to my surpervisor about starting grad school, and whether it would be a smart choice (especially in light of how difficult it has become to get tenure track positions... or even constant funding) He said:

The cream always rises to the top.

Which means it doesn't matter if men typically have more success than women. It doesn't matter if most of your peers are male. And it doesn't matter if you need to take a year off to have some babies. As long as you always focus on making yourself into cream, you'll rise to the top, regardless of what else might be going on around you.

So go forth and make yourself into cream!

Advice from my supervisor

My supervisor sent me these today, I  pass them on to you.

He pointed out that number 7 was of particular importance.

Good advice I'd say.

Enjoy your weekend peoples!