Offices & Acts of Kindness

This morning I brought in posters, binders and some of my old text books. The office I'm supposed to be sharing with another grad student who, conveniently, never seems to come in, is really starting to feel like a second home to me. I have the tendency to surround myself with images that inspire me. In my case, that means plastering the place with Hubble Space Telescope images of the cosmos. The image below is a "before" photo. I'll post another one after I'm through redecorating. ;)

As you can see, I did not have to give up my precious office space (made all the more precious by the fact that it is, by far, the nicest workspace I've ever had in any of the labs I worked in. Not everyone in my program is as lucky as I am (to have so much privacy and natural light) but even those students who must share with more than one other person still have it better than their Penn State counterparts. When I was there, the fewest I ever had to share with was two (during a short 6-week rotation). I went through two labs there where six students shared the same office space (that is, where office spaces were not in buildings with noisy "open concept" labs, in which case, bring the number up to ten!)! Yes, it could always be worse.

The last lab I was in at Mass General was an open concept lab on a grand scale (all labs on the same floor of the Richard B. Simches building in the same room). If a few people decided to horse around, everyone paid for it! For someone who is easily distracted like myself, trying to concentrate there was a total nightmare (this was my desk behind us in the photo; right next to my bench)! As if that wasn't enough, I was stuck in the middle of the room, about as far away from a window as you could get and... right next to the hallway that housed an unshielded NMR... The one piece of equipment I could not approach with my implants. Requests to be allowed to move fell on deaf ears. I often sought refuge in other areas of the building so I could actually get some reading done. I was probably the only person with implants that were sensitive to magnetic fields but no one seemed to care at all. It simply didn't matter to anyone else.

Speaking of which, one thing I find so refreshing about UW is that they tend to do the exact opposite of what I expect (given my past experiences). The other day, I was so worried that my actions (namely, moving someone else's belongings from my assigned work space) was going to serve as a source of long-term friction between myself and my new colleagues. As it turned out, it was no big deal to this other student at all. He was polite and easygoing about the whole thing and this was a complete shock to me! If this had happened at either of my last two schools, I never would have heard the end of it! People genuinely seem to care about each other here.

The View from my 4th floor office window in Weeks Hall at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

People are just so darn friendly here that when the bus drivers see someone running to catch the bus-- even if they don't actually catch up to the bus when it's directly in front of a stop (i.e., stopped at an intersection)-- the drivers will stop, open the doors to let poor, would-be passengers on! Yes, to a former-Bostonian, this is quite a switch indeed! I have witnessed similar acts of kindness on a daily basis since coming to Madison and I still can't quite believe it. I guess it's going to take some getting used to...