The Futile Cycle

The Journal of Visualized Experiments (i.e. JoVE) is yet another biological procedure video sharing site, except that JoVE videos are reviewed by an editorial board and seems to have much more high level content.

There’s a whole spout of online procedure and methodology sites on the web now, from the comparatively “venerable” OpenWetWare and Protocol Online to the above entrant and LabAction. There are also journals dedicated to this topic, including Cold Spring Harbor Protocols and Nature Methods and Plant Methods.

It’s taken a while, but finally it seems that biologists are using the internet for more than just the online BLAST searches!

Though I’ve worked in labs as an undergraduate, picking one for graduate school will be very different, if only because it won’t just be an extra-curricular anymore, but pretty much my life for the next 5 years or so.

Some of the post docs that hang around the internet have compiled some helpful lists of how to choose labs and deal with lab politics. These lists are more than just lab advice, however, as it seems like they would apply to any sort of job or life situation.

Jenny F. Scientist recently put up a series of three articles on choosing a lab, and what kind of questions and topics one should pay particular attention to. The advice all sounds very sensible, and I will definitely be using the list as a way to focus when I’m juggling lab choices:

• Part 1: Introduction
• Part 2: Professional Factors
• Part 3: Personal Factors

Post doc ergo propter doc has a “Lab Survival Guide” pair of articles up. She’s a chemist (probably organic), and the first part of the guide is more about the tools valuable for doing chemistry (e.g. different colored septa, a metal TLC spotter). Her second part is about dealing with people, and that’s something that translates quite well to biology:

• Lab Survival Guide Part I: Essential Lab Kit
• Lab Survival Guide Part II: Dealing with Difficult Lab Folk

Dr. Mom explains how to write the first paper, a great series that she eventually hopes to give her students as she starts her assistant professorship.

• Step 1: Am I Ready?
• Step 2: Where should I submit my paper?
• Step 3: Title, Affiliations, Abstract
• Step 4: Introduction
• Step 5: Materials and Methods
• Step 6: Results — Figures
• Step 7: Results — General Comments and Tables
• Step 8: Discussion