When you work in an academic lab and are fully engaged in your research, it’s easy to overlook all of the people that provide support for your experiments and keep…
Continue ReadingAs many young academics very well know, science can bum you out. Experiments fail, equipment breaks, and funding opportunities are few and far between. Even when experiments run smoothly, the…
Continue ReadingAuthor’s forward There are days in which a scientist finds herself needing to express her “mean genes.” When an experimental control fails, when Reviewer 3 sinks a paper, when someone…
Continue ReadingThe giant whiteboard outside our lab has a simple to do list: Plan the experiments to answer all the questions Be better This list is a joke, of course, but…
Continue ReadingIf you’re like most graduate students, you’ve probably thought to yourself at one time or another, “I really hope I’m doing this whole grad school thing right.” Let it be…
Continue ReadingGraduate school preliminary exams are dreaded, anticipated, and for me, thankfully over. In the days before taking my second preliminary exam, my oral qualifying exam, I self-evaluated and determined that…
Continue Reading