Good Advice on Surviving Graduate School
Since I’m right at the start of my Ph.D. training, I’m looking for anything that’ll reduce my stumbling blocks ahead. This article on maxims to survive by is more oriented towards physicists, but is quite applicable to almost any field, including biology.
I particularly like this maxim:
Don’t make your equipment better than it needs to be. “The best piece of scientific apparatus is one that falls apart the day after you finish using it.”
I’m currently using a flow-cell that’s made of a glass slide, some scotch tape, nail polish, and a sheet of tissue paper. I could conceivably use epoxy and a syringe pump to construct a more robust, more controlled flow cell, but what’s the point? I only needed the flow cell for one experiment, and I’m doing cell biology with non-synchronized cells, which means that there’s too much noise to do anything more precise anyway. I feel like half of science is done with patched up equipment that falls apart right after that grad student or post-doc leaves.
I also used to think that people who used kits were sissies. “Just” do a phenol extraction! But really, kits are good enough. Who wants to troubleshoot a purification step if it doesn’t lead to a paper?
