The Ph.D. treadmill is a long and intense ordeal of taking classes, helping teach classes, taking qualifying exams, doing research, proposing a thesis and then defending that thesis. All fairly well established and with clear requirements for continuing on to the next step. However, the need to produce and “’pass” was ever present. Michigan State University was a state school and it had a philosophy of accepting lots of students and then failing out the people who do not produce. So the attrition rate for the whole university was well over 20%. My Ph.D. class had an attrition rate of 25%. People would start but not finish the program. In the Ph.D. programs some people would get very far in the program but not be able to finish the thesis or defend it successfully. This is sometimes called an ABD (all but degree or all but dissertation). On occasion the failed Ph.D. candidate would petition to get a masters, but that was not an option for me. A second master’s would do nothing for me, as it would be like bringing two baseball bats to the plate. You can only really use one.

One of the requirements for a Ph.D. was to take a class that had the students giving lectures and presentations to each other. It was a practical exercise because it taught us public speaking and lecturing. Generally this class was team taught, meaning that the senior faculty would take turns teaching sections. So there would be different and changing theories on how to teach as well as what to teach. On one occasion we were told to pick a single research paper and present it to the group, and to make the talk as memorable as possible. We could use visual aids or limited multi media (acetate overhead projections, but no audio or video).

I chose a paper and went to work on my presentation. On the day of the presentation, I had all my acetate projections made with black text and figures on a bright red background. I also wore an outfit that was all red, including red shirt and tie, and even red shoes and socks. I started my talk by saying that there was no particular reason for the background of my projections being red, and the audience laughed at the obvious irony of red slides presented by a speaker dressed in red. Professor Sparks agreed that the talk was memorable, which was my goal. I had indeed met the requirements for that task. I don’t think anyone remembered what I talked about, but rather that I had done it all dressed in red. I did get one question at the end of my presentation: someone asking if my underwear was also red.

“Why do you ask?” I enquired sarcastically.

I worked hard in graduate school, but I was able to have fun too. After working for years on an ambulance and then more as an athletic trainer, I enjoyed having no one depending upon me for their health or well-being. On the ambulance if I had a bad day, someone died. As a trainer if I had a bad day, an athlete might have been injured and ended their career or season. Those were hard things. It may seem harsh to say so, but sometimes the injuries to the athletes were harder to take because these were often people I knew and even friends. So their injury became a personal failure for me. It would often bring male and female athletes to tears to be told their season was likely over. But in graduate school if I had a bad day at the lab, the experiment did not work, so I went home early and studied for a class. No one died and no one cried.

As a graduate assistant I also had an income, so I did not need to work multiple jobs. For my undergraduate and Master’s I worked a bunch of jobs to pay for my education. I worked on an ambulance, in an emergency room, in labs, and selling shoes. Now I just focused on the Ph.D. treadmill. If I could just jump through their hoops, I should end up with a Ph.D. degree in a couple years. These hoops required classes, teaching experience, comprehensive exams and research. My research was going to use nuclear magnetic resonance to analyze reactions in living arteries.

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is an analytic method that can study atoms and molecules. It can work on pure chemicals and living people. The way it works is that a magnetic field makes the atoms more able to sense radio waves. When a radio wave is sent into the magnetic field, those atoms absorb the waves. When the radio is turned off, the absorbed radio waves are sent back and can be used to analyze the atoms and molecules present. So if a person is put in an NMR that can detect the radio waves given off and assemble them into a picture, you have a magnetic resonance image (MRI). Because MRI and NMR use magnets and radios they can be used on humans without hurting the person or changing the physiology of what is being analyzed.

In my research on NMR I was measuring the molecules in the arteries and how they were changing to affect the function of the arteries. The NMR facility was in the clinical center because it was associated with radiology and the clinical imaging people were using it too. I would need to schedule time on the NMR to do my research. Because I was the new kid on the team and not a professor or radiologist, I would often be scheduled for nights and weekends on the NMR. This was largely fine with me because it allowed me to work somewhat unsupervised and to try things I might not try with lots of supervision. I rationalized that this was all part of doing research—trying new things and observing the results. I would write programs on the NMR’s computer and run them to see what the system would let me do. I actually got kind of a rush pushing the computer system to do things it was not really designed to do.

I also wrote programs for my experiments that would allow me to automate many of my research protocols. A research protocol is kind of like a recipe for a cook. It is a series of steps designed to produce a certain end result. This gave me time to concentrate on other things. I worked really hard at not having to work too hard. My programming got to the point where I could set up experiments to run for days at a time. I could set up an experiment on the machine in a couple of hours and let it run for a day or more, while checking on it occasionally to avoid glitches. Sometimes, I would be in another building doing other experiments and other times I would go home to bed (if I had an overnighter scheduled).