The day we’ve been dreading here in the lab has finally come. We’re broke.

Actually, in the interests of full disclosure, we’ve been officially broke for about three weeks. It’s taken me that long to get around to finishing this entry.

This day has been clearly on the horizon for the past year or so, as grant after grant went unfunded. We had good scores and good comments, but at the end of the day it wasn’t enough. I’m not too surprised that our grants aren’t getting funded, either, as we haven’t had a publication since 2005. Over two years without a publication! I know if I were on a study section and had two equal-quality grants in front of me, one from a lab who publishes regularly and one from a lab who doesn’t, the choice of which grant to fund first would be easy.

So what does this mean for your favorite monkey’s graduation? Stress, mostly. Stress and uncertainty. I had a meeting last Wednesday with our chair, the associate chair (who is also on my committee and a family friend), and Tom. It was part venture capitalist, part swift-kick-in-the-ass meeting. For the VC part, there is some emergency funding available from the department but not an infinite amount and the chair wanted to make sure that it wasn’t going to be wasted, that there was a reasonable chance of a return on their investment, if you will. It was hypothetically an open and honest conversation, but I felt too much stress and threat at the time to be very effective at presenting my side, I fear.

The chair said that he saw three paths that I could take to resolve this problem. 1) Continue with my current project and finish soon, ideally by August but by December at the latest. 2) Leave now with a Masters. 3) Find a new lab who will support me and start a new, safe project that I can finish within two years. Option 2 is completely unacceptable to me. I’ve spent too long and worked too hard on this degree to leave now with a Masters. If I wanted a Masters, I would have gone into that program and been done three years ago. Option 3 is acceptable, but suboptimal. While I would probably enjoy being in a lab other than this one, I don’t really want to start a new project at this point. Also, I don’t know where I would look for funding. I have a half dozen professors that I would ask, but I don’t know what any of their funding situations are like, if they would be able to take me on. So that leaves us with option 1, which I think is the best choice for me and my career (and sanity).

The hurdle between me and finishing right now is largely technical. Since Tom fired our postdoc because we couldn’t afford him last May, we haven’t been able to do Southern blots. Not just me, the lab. We can’t figure out what’s wrong, either. We’ve had an undergrad working on the problem for much of this past year, while I focused on another technique, but it has gotten to the point where I need to put that down and figure out what’s going wrong. At the meeting with the chair, in fact, we agreed that I needed to solve this problem, and I effectively have a month to get it working. Despite Tom repeatedly claiming that he could come down to the lab and make it work, he hasn’t, so I’ve talked with our former postdoc and he is willing to take time away from his current work (he works down the hall) to help, so we’re going to go through the whole procedure as soon as we get fresh radioactivity. But that brings up problem #2 (or 200, whatever): we can’t get radioactivity right now. Because we’re broke, Tom’s purchasing accounts were temporarily frozen. The department has been using a credit card to order most of our supplies since then, but apparently 32P can’t be ordered on a credit card. We need a purchase order, which requires getting a new account number from Purchasing, which will take an unknown amount of time. The order left the department on Monday, but it’s unclear how long it will take to actually be placed. Meanwhile the clock is ticking. I’m down to less than three weeks now until my next meeting and am trying to figure out what to do. I discussed this with Tom yesterday and he didn’t have any suggestions or advice.

This brings me to a minor rant about this whole situation. At our meeting last week, the chair expressed concern about my working relationship with Tom and Tom said that I don’t communicate with him enough. One of Tom’s biggest complaints last week was that I don’t bring him negative data. I probably don’t, honestly, but feel that it’s a waste of my time. He impassively takes it in and doesn’t provide any advice. I don’t need him to say, “Oh,” or “Do it again.” I can figure out that myself. If he were to say, “Oh, do it again but try crammulating the freezelberg,” I’d bring him all of my negative data. Especially when I don’t have an idea of what’s going wrong. That might be useful. But when I get, “Go read the Red Book,” what’s the point?

I’m not even going to start complaining about the schedule he works and how little he’s available during the day.

Okay, I’ve spent far too long on this and need to get back to work. My plan for the moment is to work as hard as I can until the next meeting with the chair. I’ve put in 10 hour days every day since the meeting, which I think will help demonstrate how serious I am about wanting to get this degree. I also think that I’ll go try and beg some radioactivity from other labs, at least until we can order our own. And cross my fingers that I can make this work.