Cancer, cell culture and time management

When I was a graduate student at Penn State I studied chemical engineering, but really I did cell biology.

My project was to understand better how tumor cells, such as melanoma, interact with normal cells in our blood vessels.  In specific I looked at the way A2058 melanoma used soluble and mechanical signals to induce changes in HPM-EC and HUV-EC endothelial cell behavior (the paper is linked on my About Me page if you're interested).

Studying this interaction poses an interesting logistics problem: tumor and endothelial cells grow at very different rates and to different densities, and we want to study them together--a lot.

For this to happen:

1. Both types of cells must be ready on the same day at the same time.  Not only that, but the testing scaffold that has endothelial cells growing on it takes a different amount of time to grow together than the cells do growing in a normal dish.
   
2. The experiments need to be completed at roughly the same cell age each time.  Both types of cells needed to be taken care of at least every three days, and usually more often, depending on if they had grown fast enough, and what they were for.
   
3. Sometimes the cells need to be grown for a special period of time, before the media they were grown in could be harvested.  This was a different growth density.
   
4. Experiments must be continuously started, worked up, stopped and analyzed--and many experiments require results from the previously completed one to inform the conditions of the next one.
   Essentially, I had to have 3-12 plates of up to 6 cell types growing to be able to balance the experiment schedule my adviser and I had set up.

I am convinced that one of the most important lessons I learned in graduate school is time management.

This is not an abnormal case.  Students do this all the time.  It is simply a skill and life to be learned.  We did it day in, and day out, 7 days a week for 12-16 hours a day.

All that to say, when my time management skills are criticized at my current job, I'm somewhat skeptical.  Today it meant that there was an unexpected shortage at a client and frustration was directed my way.  Sometimes people have a lesson they just really think you need.  And I'm ok with that.  I learned exactly how I'm expected to prioritize a particular account.  There is utility there.

So, if you ever want to develop some kicka$$ time management skillz, complete a graduate program doing cell culture.  As an aside, I'm certain that I will never purposely step into a cell culture lab with the intention of working there for protracted periods of time.