Where does the science pipeline go? My pipeline

I've done some thinking about the science pipeline this week: a thought-provoking blog post by Sergey Kryazhimskiy (@skryazhi) asked whether it is moral to hire postdocs with the assumption that they will get a faculty position, and meanwhile I've been organizing an event for the summer students to talk about STEM careers this Friday.

In just 8 years from my PhD I found that the pipeline leads to many places and that students and postdocs should be aware of where it can go. My graduate program now has a semester long class about what you can do with a PhD and I participated in the postdoc session for several years. It is not moral to train someone with the assumption that there will be job in academia and nothing else in their future, because that is not the case. On the other hand, there are tons of other things to do and in the vast majority of cases my friends decided in the middle of their postdocs that they wanted to do something else. I thought I'd list all the things my peeps from grad school (+/- 4 years from me) are doing and it would be cool if other people did it too. I am interested in seeing people's trajectories and I have listed job changes whenever they happened and whether they did a postdoc or not before their non-academic job. I also thought I'd write down when they had their kids.

Graduation (gender): trajectory
Academic jobs in blue, non-academic STEM in purple

n/a (M): MA dropped out > dancer > innovation consultant for healthcare
n/a (F): MA dropped out > science documentary producer

2002 (M): MD/PhD fellowship (1 kid) > assistant (2 kids) > associate professor @ Ivy institution
2002 (M): MD/PhD fancy postdoc (2 kids) > assistant professor @ R1 institution
By "fancy" I mean with a really famous PI at a very high profile institution
2002 (M): MD/PhD fancy postdoc K08 (2 kids) > assistant professor @ R1 institution
2002 (F): PhD fancy postdoc > assistant professor @ Ivy institution (1 kid)
2002 (M): PhD postdoc > startup software company (2 kids)
2002 (F): PhD fancy postdoc > big pharma

2003 (M): MD/PhD fancy postdoc K99 > assistant professor @ Ivy institution (1 kid)
2003 (F): PhD fancy postdoc > assistant professor @ Ivy institution (1 kid)

2004 (F): PhD fancy postdoc (1 kid) > group leader in the UK
2004 (F): PhD fancy postdoc (2 kids) > assistant professor @ liberal arts college
2004 (F): PhD fancy postdoc (1 kid) > biology teacher in fancy boarding school
2004 (F): PhD no postdoc (2 kids) > JD > intellectual property lawyer > university IP office
2004 (F): PhD no postdoc > healthcare consulting/writing (2 kids)

2005 (F): PhD fancy postdoc K99 > assistant professor @ R1 institution (1 kid)
2005 (M): PhD fancy postdoc (2 kids) > assistant professor @ R1 institution
2005 (F): PhD postdoc > big pharma (1 kid)
2005 (F): PhD postdoc > healthcare advertising > big pharma marketing in Switzerland
2005 (F): PhD no postdoc > healthcare advertising (2 kids) > freelance copywriter

2006 (M): PhD fancy postdoc > lab head @ fancy research institute
2006 (M): PhD postdoc > assistant professor @ liberal arts college
2006 (F): PhD fancy postdoc K99 > assistant professor @ R1 institution (YOURS TRULY!)
2006 (F): PhD postdoc (1 kid) > staff scientist in the UK
2006 (M): PhD industry postdoc > small pharma > big pharma
2006 (M): PhD no postdoc > technology ventures office MBA
2006 (F): PhD no postdoc > technology ventures office (1 kid) > startup company (2 kids) > sold company, consulting
2006 (M): PhD no postdoc > consulting

2007 (F): PhD fancy postdoc K99 (2 kids) > assistant professor @ Ivy institution
2007 (F): PhD no postdoc > consulting
2007 (F): PhD no postdoc > Journalism MA > science writer
2007 (F): PhD no postdoc > consulting > healthcare strategy (1 kid)
2007 (M): PhD postdoc > small pharma > healthcare advertising

2008 (F): PhD no postdoc > big pharma in Switzerland (2 kids)
2008 (F): PhD no postdoc > technology ventures office MBA
2008 (M): PhD fancy postdoc (1 kid) > biotech sales
2008 2M-1F still in postdoc

2009 (F): PhD postdoc > science writing
2009 (F): PhD no postdoc > science policy
2009 2M-2F still in postdoc

So, of 45 grad school people I have kept in touch with 33% (n=15) are in faculty positions, 16% (n=7) are still postdocs and the other 51% are doing something else. The 33% surprised me because I thought the number would be much smaller, but I have not included all the postdocs I have met during grad school who have gone to do something else. Also, there are loads of MD/PhDs who have probably gone back to being physicians, who will bring this number down. In any case this supports the old adage "If you get an Ivy league education and do a fancy postdoc, you are more likely to get a job". Which was an actual piece of advice given to me when I was looking for grad schools.

In this non scientific approach I am also skewed towards females because 1) our program was mostly female and 2) girls tend to keep in touch more than boys. The variety is staggering with fluxes across different careers and across scientific disciplines. I have peeps in most major pharma companies in the US and Europe, and there is a lot of writing and consulting and advertising, plus some finance sprinkled in for good measure. Yet, this is all still STEM related. I think it's important to consider all these outcomes and to know what we are training people for. 

Life on the tenure-track: learn to push through the wall

If you have never read “Stress in biomedical research: six impossible things”, you should read it right now. Not kidding. Go read it, because it’s much more useful than anything I will say below.

I have written recently on work ethics and while on vacation last week I have been thinking about dealing with stress. The first year of running a lab was stressful, but there had been many other stressful times before that helped me figure out how to handle it. The Fall of 2010, when this opinion piece by Doug Green at St. Jude came out, was a particularly bad one. I was a postdoc coming off directing the first year of a summer research program for undergrads I started, two big grants applications, including the resubmission of my K99, finishing a paper. I was at a breaking point. I had a deadline every two weeks for 3 months and as the cherry on top I had agreed to write a review with my postdoctoral advisor due in mid-November. It was a tricky one because it was a short Current Opinions piece and I had a very ambitious plan: it had to cover my advisor’s bread and butter, cover MY bread and butter so that I could use it in the future, and everything had to be elegantly explained and put together while giving illuminating ideas to my field. It wasn’t happening. I cannot write at home so I was in the lab at 1 AM the day of the deadline and I just put my head down on my desk: “I’m going to email him right now and tell him I cannot do this! I just can’t. He’ll have to write this himself.” I had just pulled a muscle in my back writing. Did you even know you could be so tense that you pull a muscle while sitting?

One of the grad students was there and she took me to the lunch-room for tea. “Just take a break from it for a few minutes” she said. We chatted, while I kept running combinations in my head, and then it clicked: the right way to make it flow. By 3 AM the review was done and emailed off to my boss. It gets cited all the time. I was awarded both grants, and the summer program is now in its fifth year and thriving even after I left. Though very hard, the Fall of 2010 was one of the most definitive times in my career. It is when I became a PI in my head, a year before I applied for faculty positions.

The moral of this fable is Impossible Thing #5 from Doug Green’s paper: Be an Athlete. You train, you focus and when you hit the wall, you learn to push through. As it happened I didn’t know I had powered through a wall, but when I read his article soon thereafter, it all made sense. The problem was: How was I going to do it again? The following spring possibly because of these events or the ubiquitousness of the CouchTo5K app, I started running for the first time since college and training for races. I’m still a 5 to 10K runner, but even the transition from running 0 to 6 miles was an eye opener. You have to know your body and you have to listen. There are times when the roadblocks are all in your head and there are times when you absolutely have to rest for a couple of days, so that you don’t get injured. And then there are times when you just fly! The feeling of getting stronger and faster on a monthly, sometimes weekly basis, is pretty awesome, as is the knowledge of your inner resources and limits. If this concept doesn’t help during the madness of your tenure-track years, I don’t know what would.

I am not saying that you have to start running, though it seems a pretty constant advice on the TT blogosphere that to keep sane you have to find time to exercise any way your like. I'm saying that building an academic career seems like a marathon, not a sprint, and developing a mental approach to cope is more important than anything else. I felt that I could handle Year 1 because I had somewhat "trained" for it and that the lessons learned in Year 1 will hopefully help me handle whatever will come along in the future. I truly believe that what I learned as a runner (and a yogi) has been critical and shaping my mental attitude at work. It becomes second nature to check with your body, to push it and to nurse it. Some days are bad, so you just acknowledge it and move on. You have to forgive yourself and work to build on your talents over the long term. You prepare, you perform, you rest, you repeat over and over again while setting always bigger goals. At any given time, there may always be someone who is better than you, but you focus on your personal best constantly getting better. You celebrate the improvements and learn from the failures. Will this really make a difference in the long run? What do I know? I'm just a year into this, but it's definitely making a difference for me. Yet, I have not mastered much of what I am preaching, I'm still training.

There has been some talk on Twitter of what your manifesto is. So in a way my manifesto is this: to never stop training to better myself as a person and as a scientist, and to learn how to balance challenging and nurturing to avoid reaching a breaking point. Now how do you work this into my IDP?

FENS symposium on women in science

My blog has had an empty post labeled “Women in science” for a very long time, but as I collected ideas and links, I was never sure how to fill it and what to say that would be new on the subject. I always teeter between “We need to do something about this!” and “Stop complaining, already!”, so it was actually great to be at the Women in Neuroscience networking social at the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS) meeting in Milan on July 6^th. Both reactions were validated.

Having attended half a dozen of these events at various American conferences throughout the years, I was shocked to hear that this was the first time FENS dedicated symposium to its female members, but after all it is the first time the federation has a female president. FENS president Marian Joels together with Society for Neuroscience (SfN) president Carol Mason just wrote a wonderful opinion piece about women in science in Neuron. At the symposium the two presidents presented statistics from Europe and the US showing how gender equality still lags behind in the STEM subjects: women represent 41% of PhD students in the US and 46% in the EU, but females are only a fraction of the full professor cohort (28% in the US, 20% in the EU). Joels remarked that in very liberal Netherlands, where she works, only 13% of academics are female. Female department chairs are even scarcer: 10% in the US and 15% in the EU. The only beacon of equality is Norway, where 31% of department chair are female because of a goal of a 40% quote imposed by the government. At the current rate it will take the rest of Europe until 2050 to get to similar numbers…

Talking about quotas always makes people uncomfortable, but Joels indicated that 30% seems to be the tipping point to change the culture in the workplace and that it would indeed make a difference to get things started. Both societies strive to achieve gender balance in presentations. SfN will have 50/50 plenary lecturers this year in Washington, DC, and FENS had 42% in Milan. FENS also forbade single gender symposia. Half of FENS participants are female, but in the past up to 90% of speakers have been male. Both Mason and Joels advocated the creation of a formal list of female speakers at all stages of their career, similar to Anne’s list (a resource created by Anne Churchland to increase gender balance in neuroscience meetings).

SfN has also created multiple resources for women and gender equality, from recognizing gender bias to training for department chairs that can be found here.

The need for mentoring at all levels and for the creating of peer groups was stressed by everyone and mentoring was discussed by Martha Davila-Garcia an associate professor at Howard University and a representative of Women in World Neuroscience at the International Brain Research Organization (IBRO). WWN is focused on mentoring especially in developing countries and has hosted "mentoring circles" at numerous neuroscience conferences. Dr. Davila-Garcia gave a great summary of what you must do to be a good mentor and a good mentee. I have already stressed how important mentoring is in general (here), but it is particularly crucial for women to have multiple supporters and role models (male and female).

Finally, Ilona Obara, a lecturer at Durham University, and Sarah Nickolls, an expert scientist at Neusentis Pfizer, described their career path in academia and industry respectively: balancing career and families, sometimes compromising with their husbands on what to do next. Dr. Obara concluded her talk with suggestions for starting academics: 1) negotiate your startup and salary as much as you can; 2) build allies in your department and outside; 3) learn to prioritize tasks and know that you will never get to the bottom of the pile. Dr. Nickolls did the same for industry: 1) take opportunities as they are offered to you since you may regret it later; 2) develop transferable skills that can be used in any drug development project so that you can change therapeutic area; 3) be change agile, i.e. be ready to lose your job or look for opportunities elsewhere.

The general idea of the meeting was: "Let's identify the problems to tackle and come up with solutions together!"

A compilation of K99 and R00 advice

Lovingly nicknamed the "kangaroo" grant by the NIH, the K99/R00 Transition to Independence award is designed to help postdoctoral fellows leap into a faculty position by supplying two years of mentored research time to obtain training to develop their independent project (K99) and supporting the newly independent investigator for 3 years (R00). There has been a lot of discussion of really who should be eligible for this and review strategies vary from institute to institute at the NIH, so you better do your research on what your desired institute prefers. However, in this cash strapped funding environment this "kangaroo grant" can really make a difference between getting a job and remaining on the market.  Since my K99 and R00 transition posts are by far the most popular in my blog, I thought I would put together an aggregator post to try and coordinate all the ideas that I have discussed on this subject. I feel a little like a band putting out a greatest hits album, but everyone is doing it and coordinating one year of posts in some coherent way may make them more useful. As you check out the posts that interest you, I also recommend reading the comments below, since there have been many wonderful questions and discussion and you may find additional answers there.

So here it goes.

1) BEFORE THE K99. Due to the recent changes in eligibility limiting the time of application to 4 years from the receipt of your PhD or other terminal degree, if you are interested in applying for a K99/R00 Transition to Independence award, you need to start thinking about it early during the 2nd year of your postdoc. How this may change the way you need to think about it is discussed here.

2) WRITING A K99. For some info on how to prepare yourself for the application and what to expect during and after the writing phase you can go here. Wonderful books you can read on how to write an NIH grant are here.

3) SALARY MANAGEMENT WITH A K99. The K99 will give you power to renegotiate your post-doc salary and to define your faculty salary. Things you need to know when you negotiate are here.

4) TRANSITION YOUR R00 TO YOUR NEW POSITION. A point by point description on how to put together your R00 application is here. Lots of followup questions and answers can be found in the comments.

5) DEALING WITH THE NEW RPPR. Going through your annual reporting using the new NIH RPPR online system is described here.

6) PAYING ATTENTION TO YOUR EFFORT. How to distribute effort on your grants when you have 75% tied in your R00 is discussed here. Plus some planning advice on how to use review timelines (here) to devise a multi-year grant plan is here.

7) OTHER GRANTS TO THINK ABOUT. Can be found here.

Finally, interesting thoughts from other bloggers about the K99/R00 process can be found below:
- Great how-to guides for putting together your K99 from ChemicalBiLOLogy and K99advice
- Dr Becca (@doc_becca) on the deadline changes and better definition of the review priorities
- ASBMB president Jeremy Berg on the decline of the funding rate and how more than half R00 awardees do not have an R01 one year after the end of the K99/R00

Image credit: Illustration of Macropus fuliginosus from Wikimedia commons

Musings about work ethics and unstructured schedules

After a very though year, I decided to take it easy this summer, which got me thinking about work
ethics and the kind of role model I want to be for the lab. One of my goals as a Principal Investigator (PI) and manager is to promote a work environment where people can be productive and happy. It is a very tall order and after 18 years doing research in different labs and institutions my thinking on what is an appropriate work load for a scientist continues to evolve.

I have been in places that were so stressful you would find people break down and cry in the women's bathroom every afternoon; and I have been in places where nobody cared about your progress but yourself. I have been thinking for a long time about what makes people productive. I remember one night in grad school (around the time the infamous Mu-Ming Poo letter on work ethics was leaked), when a new PI came up to our lab at 8pm and asked us: "Why are you here? Your boss left at 4. Why can't I get my people to stay longer on their own?" We were kind of clueless...all we could tell him was that we were there because we had work to do. Whether our boss was there or not, it did not matter.

At the same time, the 12-14 hour workdays in grad school were only productive to a certain extent. I had friends who took lots of vacations and still managed to publish great papers, and I sometimes felt that working too hard was more counterproductive than anything. The exhaustion and the emotional drain would actually cloud my thinking. A post-doc friend down the hall blew me away with his philosophy (imagine an Australian accent): "You know, I only stay late when everything is working well. If something is not working, I just leave, even if it's 3pm, and come back the next day with a fresh mind". Ha, such a hedonistic concept, mate. But could he be right in some way?

I think at the end it depends on what motivates you and on the structure you want in your life. The beauty of lab-life is that it's flexible. As the single mother of a self-sufficient feline, I have no constraints on my time, but friends and colleagues with kids have come up with a multitude of strategies. My postdoc lab was a great place to have a baby, since my boss was incredibly supportive of family time. Some people would work very hard from 8am to 4pm, others would work 10 to 5 and come back at midnight once the little ones had gone to bed. The only pressure you had most of the time was the one you put on yourself and they all managed to be productive. I like that approach.

Last year I discussed my desire for making the lab a Result Only Work Environment, a place where schedules are self-regulated and where all that counts is producing results to meet specific deadlines. I clearly tell my people that they can come and leave when they want, as long as they get their work done and they let me know if they are not going to be around during work hours. Some senior investigators have warned me that I could get into trouble by letting technical staff dictate their hours, but it's a risk I'm willing to take. So far, I am the only lab on the floor where people are still there at 8pm. Sometimes they are stressed when I really need data for something, but most of the time I think (I hope) they are just there because they want to be. I always try my best to find the self-directed people during the interview process. I laughed when my lab peeps told me that, when asked by interviewees what my biggest pet-peeve is, they always answer "She gets really annoyed if you are not self-motivated"...and it's true. I think it's awesome that they lay down the law for me.

Vernazza (Cinque Terre) is just a couple of weeks away

Culture is better implemented when upper management provides the example and your lab may mostly be a reflection of the culture you set, but people in the lab have to embrace it. I don't really believe in work/life balance in academia, since I don't know any scientist who doesn't email at midnight. The first year of being a PI cured me of any expectations of ever having a reduced workload. However, I realized that, to survive this crazy ride, science has to be in harmony with your life. Some days I dream to take the afternoon off to catch up on the journal table of contents in peace, or plan a foreign vacation including a visit to one of the local scientific institutes because it would be fun. Other days I watch six hours of Orange is the New Black instead of working on a grant, or take a three hour lunch break to watch the World Cup. Call me crazy, but in the end it's all about enjoying what you do.

Note: A great post on burnout from blogger Psycgirl!

What is this Twitter you all talk about?

After some crazy recent traffic due to a couple of tweets referencing my blog, I decided to give this Twitter thing a try. So if you wish you can now follow me @TheNewPI on Twitter.

I promise I will try and keep it active, as it may be easier to tweet websites and career development tips, than to construct a proper post. I have big plans for the FENS Forum in a couple of weeks where a great symposium on Women in Academia should provide some food for thought.

In the meantime, the BBC Radio has been broadcasting a Tweet of the Day that has nothing to do with Twitter.

Learning how to hire #4: figuring out who should be in your lab

I am back to hiring again, and though in no shape or form I feel like a know what I am doing, I figured out a few things from the past few rounds of hiring. So to follow up the past three installments of my "Learning how to hire" series (here, here and here), I am going to keep sharing what is going through my mind.

The one pieces of advice I have received from almost every senior investigator I asked for pills of wisdom about starting a lab was "Do not be afraid of the emptiness of the lab. Take you time in hiring the best people you can find." I had friends with lots of horror stories about wrong hires, so I tried to be very careful. I discovered that making the final decision about who should be in the lab can be incredibly difficult and that my thinking and my interview strategy have changed greatly compared to a year ago.

Sometimes take a calculated gamble. Last year around this time I was looking for a research assistant using Craigslist and wading through almost two hundred applications. I primarily needed someone who could help set-up the zebrafish facility, and I had to decide among professional fish techs, enthusiastic undergrads and professional lab techs with no fish experience. I was confronted with a wide range of salaries and qualifications. Would it be worthwhile to spend $70,000 on a professional aquatics tech who could get terribly bored, but save me the headache of starting an aquatic program from scratch without any experience? Should I go with a self-proclaimed fast-learner with a passion for neuroscience who had just finished college and just wing it? Then someone showed up out of left field, with extensive aquatic experience in the commercial sector, a background in neuroscience and a burning desire to come back into academia to pursue graduate studies. If your tech applicant already sounds like a graduate student, it is a really good sign. The gamble on someone who had an eclectic background paid off in spades, as we now have a wonderful fish facility which was showcased at a national facility management conference, plus I have someone who actually enjoys doing experiments.

Take your time to figure out what you need and be flexible. The first round of interviews I did took almost 6 months and $2-3,000 in travel expenses, but ended with two rejected offers. I focused on applicants with behavioral experience who ended up preferring to do more circuit-based approaches than the cellular/molecular work I do. There was a disconnect between the candidates I thought would be good for my lab and the career aspiration of students with the qualifications I wanted, so I had to regroup. I realized that I what I really wanted was someone whose passion was biochemistry and cell biology to do some kick-ass live imaging. So, that is the expertise I went after. Right now I need someone to staff the zebrafish project, but the candidates I have are very different from each other and I may need to be flexible in determining what I really want and what can be achieved with training.

Think in 3 to 5 year parcels. I am still trying to figure out what is sustainable. One piece of advice I received was to hire as many postdocs as I could to generate lots of preliminary data to get more grants.  While this does make sense to me, I also need to determine for how long I will be able to pay these people. There are lots of senior postdocs losing their jobs right now because the funding climate sucks. I am getting applications for very highly qualified people on their 3rd or 4th postdoc and while really tempting, unless it is an absolutely perfect match I have to turn them down immediately. They are way too expensive and my lab is too small at the moment to allow them to pursue their own independent projects. I do want my postdocs eventually to work on their own things and be successful, but the dynamics with someone right out of grad school vs. someone who has been leading projects for 10 years are very different. A postdoc on their 3rd experience cannot commit 3-5 years to developing a project and I cannot be sure that I will be able to pay them for that long. It's a lose-lose situation for both parties.

In the end, I think the choice of what your lab is going to be is a very personal one, based on the lab culture you want, your mentoring style and your publishing plan. I can assure you that having the right mix of people will make it fun to go to work every day.

Distributing effort on your grants (especially if you have an R00)

The original post was published on 6/7/2014, but updated with additional info following some great comments on 7/30/2013

When I was leaving my postdoc lab, my boss told me to be careful about my effort because when he started he did not pay much attention to it and soon he was stuck with no effort to give. In my head I was thinking "That's a nice problem to have, but that will definitely not happen to me".  Well, actually with 75% effort often tied to an R00 award, that is a real problem to consider. Especially if you go on a grant writing frenzy as I did. So I have learned a few things about distributing effort in the past year.

1) You may need to keep 5-15% for teaching and other academic activities. This will depend on where you are and how much the university contributes to your salary, but this was news to me. I guess it makes sense, since teaching and service must come from somewhere. If you commit yourself 100% to research then you have no effort to give for administrative and other work. Some universities will ask that you put 100% of your salary on grants, but others will not, so you need to discuss with your department chair or your grants administrator how to do this.

2) You must plan the distribution of your effort. If you have an R00, you must spend 75% of your effort on research and at the beginning this will be tied to your R00. If you are planning to apply for a bigger grant, like an R01 and want to devote 25-30% effort, you need to communicate with your Program Officer and let them know, so that when the grant gets funded you can adjust your R00 effort. The 75% research rule can be tricky, as different NIH institutes may have different policies and you should familiarize yourself with yours. You can also opt for foundation grants and you have to be careful about effort there. Most of these grants, while substantial, will not allow PI salary, but still require effort. I put 10 or 15% effort on every grant I applied for and quickly would have been out, since these grants were on a different project. Every grant had to be reduced to 5% and I heard of people putting 1 or 0.5% on foundation grants. Foundations tend to be more lenient with effort and will provide 1-2 full salaries for the people working on the actual research, so that you have someone with 100% effort on the project and you just need to provide direction.

3) Effort may be not tied to actual grant money (cost-sharing). You may put effort on a grant which does not allow PI salary and your department may cost-share your salary, i.e. agree to pay that portion of your salary necessary for you to perform/guide the research. Doing some internet searches I discovered cost-sharing is not favored by some schools where departments prefer not to pay, but it is something that you should keep in mind.

4) You must plan your grant strategy in advance. With my R00 ending early in 2016, I should apply for an R01 in February or June next year (see timelines for review here). Because some grants may take more than a year to be approved and funded, you need to consider where that big chunk of your salary is coming from each year, thinking a year and a half ahead.

5) Buy out of teaching or buy into teaching. If you have enough effort on grants and do not want to teach, you can buy out of teaching. Conversely, if you need the university to pay more of your salary, you can add a course to your load.

Your grants administrator or your department chair should be able to help you devise a strategy on how to best distribute your effort. Effort reporting is strictly regulated, especially on federal funds, so you have to consider all these issues carefully and make sure your effort is appropriately distributed. The NIH has some handy descriptions on how to calculate effort distribution here.

On mentoring: reflections on an empty nest

My first employee has left the lab. It was planned and expected. She pledged to work with me and
move from Boston to DC to help set up the lab. I pledged to do my best to get her into a wonderful graduate program, preferably in sunny California. We both held up our ends of the bargain.

She leaves for an exciting adventure and I stay to watch the lab change and move on. This is new for me. As a student and postdoc you see people leave and you imagine your own departure. As a professor you stay and worry a bit how the dynamics will change, especially if an important person in the culture you have created is gone. You worry about experiments getting done, about transitioning new people. At the same time you are happy and proud to send your mentee into the world.

I wonder whether this feeling is a fraction of what parents feel when their children leave. While I do not advocate treating lab people like your children and in fact tend to prefer formal and professional behavior instead of the TMI environment of millenials, having had multiple mentors throughout my career I realized something that they don't really tell you in grad school. A good mentor is forever! They will cheer you and support you, they will write letters for decades after you have left their labs, they will promote your work and they will be there to discuss your doubts. I always tell students you need at least one mentor like that in your life or you will have a much harder time.

So I have not lost my tech, since there will still be work to do until she has to find a postdoc or the next job. The reward of mentoring and I guess the reason why we wanted to be in academic science in the first place is to see these young people move on to bigger and better things. But still it may take a while to get used to this.

Freezers and fridges for your lab

The pricing of research items does not make sense to me. When I tried to buy a drafting stool for a high bench from Overstock.com for $110, I was told that insurance only covers chairs bought from VWR or Fisher and had to spend $244 for a VWR High Bench chair, luckily deeply discounted from a list price of $674.

Snowflakes at the electron microscope

As the lab is growing we started to fill the hand-me-down freezers and fridges I had collected from other investigators, and I had to figure out what to do. I wanted a nice and spacious 2 door deli case fridge. I didn't need a fancy chromatography fridge such as the one listed from VWR for $9,695.69 (Symphony Chromatography Refrigerators), but even the basic 49 cu. ft. 2-door fridge was not much cheaper at $6,899. With a good quote, I could have probably knocked 2-3K off the list price, but even if my institution has restrictions on chairs, it does not have restrictions on vendors for appliances. So after multiple searches on Webstaurantstore.com and KaTom Restaurant Supply, in comes a great 45 cu. ft. 2-door beverage merchandiser from True Refrigeration for around $2,300. I paid an extra $400 for white glove delivery so that it wouldn't get stuck in the loading dock and our fridge space is now tripled. A neighbor has had the same fridge happily for 10 years...and even if it breaks in 5 years, it's still 1/3 of the scientific distributor's price. This is $3-5,000 in your equipment budget that now you can use for something else.


Same goes for small undercounter freezers and fridges. In my old institution every bench came with one undercounter for free I believe, but here I just need a couple for specific applications that require separate freezer space. Again the VWR 5 cu. ft. general purpose freezer is listed at $1,639. From Best Buy you can get a 4.2 cu. ft. upright freezer for less than $300.

Hope this helps.