Thursday, September 5, 2013

Labsick :S

Everybody who wants to pursue a career in research has to find a laboratory as a graduate student and jump through the hoops and loops this new environment imposes on you. At beginning, your mentor will quiz your intellectual abilities during lab meetings, and since you have never done any research in the past you will feel overwhelmed with all the new methodologies, signaling pathways, cellular mechanisms, viral life cycle events, etcetera that you are not even remotely familiarized with. Well, this is only the beginning of a long path to become someone in whom your PI will rely on completely for writing his next grants. And don't worry! As matter of fact enjoy those frustrating moments when you don't know the answer to questions, because those moments will be over sooner than you expect. Time will fly and you will start sitting down at those terrifying lab meetings thinking that all of those questions your mentor uses to quiz people are not really that hard, and in fact they will start to sound just like simple "bioLOGIC." When you reach this stage in you PhD, you will start noticing that all of the sudden you are not the new guy at lab. As a matter of fact, this place filled with flasks, buffers, chemicals, cells, bacteria, and many other weird looking things has already grown on you and is now the place you call “second home." Unfortunately, just about the time when you start to feel this way, it means that your PhD is coming to an end and that soon it will be time to move on and continue pursuing other long term goals you had in mind when you first started this journey... So, what I am saying is that you will be at some point in the same position that I am today. Once again in a new lab, as the new guy who needs to prove himself to become someone reliable and an essential component of this place that you will eventually call your second home.    
       

1 comment:

  1. Thank you for sharing this, you are greatly miss in this lab

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