(Image: U. Müeller)

Journey to the Microcosmos-  The Complicated Legacy of Lynn Margulis 

Images originally captured by Jam’s Germs

New project!

I received a new research project in my lab today on concurrent ehrlichia infections in dogs! All the happy feels! 

underappreciated form of humor: using incorrect long forms of proper names i.e. Craigory, Bobert, Barold, etc.

Sanity check

Hi everyone, I overheard a very troubling conversation between a neighboring grad student and my PI. In this conversation, the neighboring grad student said the following:

She has no work-life balance. Most of the times, she comes in very early in the morning (before 7 or 8 AM) and leaves very late (after 10 PM).

She says she’s fine with this but also says she’s under constant state of stress because of her PI’s expectations, and my labmate and I have actually ran into her crying in the stairwell.

She’s actually concerned about her peers when they can relax in the evenings instead of being in lab or at least working from home, or when they get to do things on the weekends.

I just want to see how other PhD students are handling their work-life balance after hearing this conversation just to make sure I’m not slacking off.

For me, I come in 9 AM - 5 PM (sometimes staying later depending on experiments, but this is NOT the norm). Sometimes, I come in for a few hours on the weekends to speed things up or if need be (also not the norm). After dinner, I usually do homework, prepare powerpoints for journal clubs or seminar presentations and other non-lab related things, but sometimes I do some work (interneuron quantifying, schedule and plan experiments for the next day/week, etc). I do want to incorporate more literature reading in the evenings or mornings. Regardless, the majority of my work is done on the weekdays 9 AM - 5 PM.

My reasoning is that I’d rather go “normal” pace and steady since I’ll be here for 3+ years to avoid burning out. I want to enjoy my work, and that’s not happening if I feel like I NEED to be here and NEED to do all these things on this impossible schedule. I have been having thoughts of mastering out in the back of my mind, but at the end of the day, I do enjoy my work and my PI’s mentorship and I think I can learn a lot more being here for 3+ years of my PhD.

In addition, we get paid barely above minimum wage as a grad student if we work 40 hours a week. During crazy weeks (which everyone has), that increases by a lot, which means we get paid less than minimum wage, for very specialized and skilled works. Yes, we are in training as PhD students, but if the expectation is for us to work all day, all night, all week, then the PhD feels less like training and more like slave labor disguised as training.

How are your schedules like as PhD students? @cancerbiophd @queenofthebench @whitecoatjourney @adorable-amygdala and many others!

Nothing spices up your love life like the scientific method!

chappelle-“remember bitch you clicked on my face”

of course i did...that’s cuz you used to be funny

Monochrome image of a victorian butterfly tongue captured by Gregg Kleinberg with a Paxcam microscope camera under the microscope at 400x.