Part 1: Pre-Med Post-Bac Programs vs. Special Master’s Degree Programs for Aspiring Biomedical Research Scientists Atoning for Their Academic Pasts

What a week. I wrote the bulk of this entry on March 26th. I’ve been fighting to complete it since then. I have been trying so hard to get my head together and take action. I have been trying so, so hard. It terrifies me, how slooooooowly I’ve moved and how ridiculously idiotic I’ve been OVER THE LAST YEAR AND A HALF. I'm beginning to panic. I can’t remain stuck. I just can’t remain stuck anymore.

Deep breath. I recently interviewed for a laboratory internship at a Major Research University. After I blogged about it, two of my favorite bloggers, Comrade PhysioProf and Candid Engineer, admonished me for my ostensible insensibility to my repulsive academic history.

Of course they did. That’s because I haven’t made it crystal clear to all my readers that I do NOT think I’m entitled to be taken seriously. Not at present. Yeah, right! If I didn’t know myself, and I had nothing but my current academic record to go on, I wouldn’t take myself seriously. I may be arrogant, but I am neither lazy nor delusional.
Read more. . .

I went on an interview for a laboratory internship because a very kind scientist and supporter of mine offered to introduce me to my interviewer. Beforehand, I firmly reminded myself that the internship would probably not fall into my lap. It was an enormous opportunity, and I gave it my best shot. I failed. La la la . . .

Then I contacted Dr. Isis for advice, whined a little on my blog, and included valuable suggestions from blog readers and the scientist who made the introduction in the first place in my consideration of what to do next. Certainly, I did not think that I’d been wronged: “Well, I never! Isn’t it obvious that despite my awesomely shittastical (h/t Hermitage) 3.4 undergraduate GPA as an English major and the overwhelmingly shittastical 2.4 GPA with which I quit my master’s degree program in archaeology and that I would rather stick pins through my eyelids than admit to on my blog, I exude the unmistakable vibe of a spectacular neurobiologist in the making?” Uh, no. That thought did not earnestly cross my mind; that paragraph did not escape my lips. I don’t do stand-up comedy.

I am twistedly grateful that the interview went the way that it did. Sure, the shame I felt afterwards hurt. It bothered me to the bone, feeling so pangingly ashamed of myself as self-assured medical students and professors bustled around tiny me and my quaint wool Godet-flare suiting skirt. However, I’ve been avidly reading the blogs of professors, postdocs and grad students in the medical sciences for several months. Accordingly, I would bet the prototypically staggering amount of my student loan debt that my interviewer’s mercilessly helpful dismissal was mere child’s play in the tea-room. Therefore, she did me a favor. As I’ve already told several of you, I will take an ass-kicking over a coddling any day of the week. Why would I do otherwise? I’m not in this for fake. I tried that already.

It’s not a pain in the ass to start at Square One. It is what it is. I am enthusiastically willing to start at Square One. I always was. Here is what happened:

In August of 2007, I terminated the loveless marriage that was my master’s work in archaeology and came out of the biomedical sciences closet. I moved back into my worriedly astonished parents’ house. Surely, I decided, I would need to start with community college classes. No one would take me seriously otherwise. The advanced courses had basic science prerequisites; the prerequisites had long waitlists. This was okay. I’d make it work. I’d take as many as I could.

I fell to plotting. Due to my extant bachelor’s degree, I did not and still don’t qualify for federal assistance with undergraduate classes. I would have to pay upfront for each class I took. I was broke, though. So I took a part-time and minimum-wage job that barely covered my car, auto insurance and medical expenses. A few months later, I found modestly-paid full-time work. Now I would earn enough money to take science classes at a community college—of which there are hundreds in Southern California.

However, community colleges surprised me by exclusively scheduling the biology, chemistry and physics classes that I wanted during the day. Due to the hellish commute undertaken by every working Los Angeleno, I could not enroll in even the earliest or latest of these classes—if I actually wanted to be present for them, let alone on time. I had always disliked the grimily infinite suburban sprawl of impersonal chain stores that is Los Angeles as heartily as the "Millionaire Matchmaker" attitude towards women that rules this town. This discovery transmuted my dislike into furious despair.

I responded to this by trying to convince supervisors to let me work at home as much as possible. My last real job was as an underpaid copywriter, marketing research assistant and web designer for a shady tattoo business. I don’t want to talk much about it. Literally dozens of frustrated employees had held this position before me. I’m only talking about the seven months before my arrival. The sales executives with whom I had to work were so sick of pestering their best clients with new marketing researchers forced by my boss to throw out the data of their predecessors and call people with the same questions that they refused to cooperate with me for weeks. They didn’t tell me why, either. My boss yelled at everyone. He looked at me, and my skin crawled. He asked very personal and irrelevant questions about my life at every meeting. Importantly, he also asked me to work on a project that I thought and still do think constituted a significant public health risk. Regular Unleaded cost $4.95 a gallon at the time, and there was nothing I did that I couldn’t do from this MacBook at home.

I planned to stick it out. I needed the money. I quit only when something exhaustingly bad happened the day after I was offered a permanent position. I was to officially accept at the end of that week. No way was I committing myself after this incident, though.

If I’d planned on making marketing or business my career? Maybe. Probably, in fact. I’m no slacker. I’m not lacking a capacity for innovation, either. But that was just the thing, wasn’t it? This nonsense had too little to do with my career of choice. It had nothing to do with my career of choice. So. No fucking way.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! I haven’t been regularly employed since. In the interim, among attempts at other kinds of work, I’ve applied for glasswasher positions. I figured there was nothing obstructively arrogant about me asking to be paid to conscientiously help take the most basic care of someone’s laboratory. I would jump at an unpaid internship, of course. I’d go back to night shifts in a coffee shop and take an unpaid lab internship in a heartbeat. Meanwhile, though. The job advertisements were there, and I tried for them.

At this juncture, the idea of enrolling in a full-time program specifically intended to prepare people like me for graduate school in research science rose uppermost in my mind. They had to exist. I could not be the only one in my position.