passion vs publishing

As my third year as an undergraduate comes to a close, I think more and more about the grad school process and how to best increase my chances of getting in somewhere top-notch in a good location with an awesome faculty member and lab. For the most part this is pretty straightforward: gotta have good grades, experience in a lab, etc. But I still have a few things I’m not sure about.

For example, I am making the transition out of one lab and into another for a variety of reasons. But I don’t know if it’s the right decision…and the bad part is that everyone seems to have different ideas about what is best for me. Ordinarily I would go with what I thought was best, but in this case, I just don’t know. I guess it comes down to which goals are more important to me: the goal of getting published, or the goal of doing something i am passionate about and interests me. At this point in my education/career, which takes priority?

Maybe at another point in time, it would be easier to decide. Or would it? I wouldn’t want to have a career, or a project in grad school, that I wasn’t passionate about. But it’s also important to further my career by publishing and producing actual work. Hopefully I won’t be in that position where I have to decide as I am now.

I think I’ll end up sticking with my original decision to transfer. Even though this project has finally become interesting and I have obtained results, and a paper could be prospective, I’m still not passionate about neurobio. The potential to work on something related to human health is far more exciting. But maybe I can do both. Depends on how my PIs feel. We’ll see….

The world’s newest natural phenomena: boobs everywhere

This is a little outdated. But in case you’re out of the loop, some holy man declared that the reason for all the recent earthquakes was due to women’s immodesty. Blogger Jen McCreight posted a response declaring Boobquake shortly thereafter, a day upon which women everywhere should wear their most immodest clothing in an effort to scientifically test the man’s claims. In the aftermath of this internet catastrophe there has been discussion on whether Boobquake was a feminist event.

I personally believe that it had a feminist aspect to it, but others disagree (and for valid reasoning). To me, the holy man’s claims were just one more way of shaming women who dress as they please (no mention of how many natural disasters shirtless men cause). Boobquake, although more of a joke than anything else, was a way of reclaiming our right to dress just the way we want, regardless of the patriarchy’s claim on our sexuality and appearance.

Those who disagreed with the “reclaiming sexuality” viewpoint said that Boobquake was just co-opting to the desires of dudes everywhere, who must have been thrilled that women were exposing their breasts (not even, their chests) for the sake of defiance. “You’re just playing into the men’s hands!” they said. But this reminds me of victim-blaming in the case of rape, where the classic “she deserved it because she was wearing that short skirt” argument is often used. How can we ever expect to fully claim our sexuality if we do not do what we want with it publicly? The more we hide for fear of inciting the menz, the more we are co-opting into shaming our bodies.

Now, this argument doesn’t neccessarily apply to everything. For example, the recent Facebook-announced  Touch A Boob Week is quite the opposite of reclaiming sexuality. I guess you could argue that it’s still women doing what they want with their bodies (if women granted permission for someone to touch their boobs) but in this case, the organizers are encouraging people to reduce women to their boobs, and then to touch them as if they were some kind of squishy stress ball. And this is all in the name of “raising breast cancer awareness”.

Please.

Objectifying women and reducing them down to body parts is hardly raising awareness for any kind of illness, except maybe sexual perversion and assault. It bothers me that anyone thinks a woman’s breasts are there for someone else’s pleasure. Sorry, you are not allowed to touch my breasts. They are mine, firstly, and besides, I am more than a boob. My breasts are not there to raise awareness for breast cancer. They are not the only part of breast cancer. Breast cancer affects people, not just boobs. How about we try raising awareness for the very sick men and women that have this disease, and not for physically invading another person’s boobspace?