My favorite moment from when I was in grad school was when…

No doubt there’s a lot of bitterness out there about graduate school these days. There’s a steady drumbeat of despair about getting jobs, dealing with the frustrations of failed projects, the pain of publishing, all amid the backdrop of decreased funding. Here are a couple of examples I just saw:

@kuchtam I feel like most people understand "Pick a fascinating project," but underestimate how crap it feels when the project goes sideways
— Mika McKinnon (@mikamckinnon) April 12, 2015

My advice selecting a grad school: Environment matters. Pick somewhere you want to be during a bad day/week/month; grad school has many.
— Mika McKinnon (@mikamckinnon) April 12, 2015

Reading that last one had me nodding in agreement–there are indeed many tough times in grad school. But wait, weren’t there a lot of good ones, too? In fact, looking back at it, grad school was one of the happiest times in my life. And there were many great moments I will never forget. Here are a few of mine:

• I remember the very first time I saw single molecule RNA FISH spots in the microscope, which came after months of optimization (i.e., messing around). There they were, super bright and unmistakable! I ran and got my advisor Sanjay, who was all smiles.
• Talking about conspiracies, both scientific and political, with Musa.
• The first time I saw an endogeneous RNA via RNA FISH (instead of the transgenic RNA spots from before). I felt like I was at the beginning of something very cool, like there were endless possibilities ahead of me. Also wish I had figured it out a couple years earlier... :)
• When I felt like I had finally figured out cloning with a long string of flawless ligations (winning streak since broken, by the way!).
• Writing a super complicated (for me) simulation directly in C (implicit method with Newton-Raphson for solving a non-linear PDE in 3D, I think) all in one go and having it work perfectly the first time I compiled it. Yes!
• When I was feeling like nothing was working and my project was hopeless, and I walked into Sanjay’s office and talked to him for a half an hour, and came out feeling like a million bucks.

I bet many of you have a few of these too, so please leave them in the comments. Would be nice in this particular day and age to have a list of reasons reminding us why grad school might not be so bad after all.