#postdocs

[strassmann]

Four exciting postdocs in Ecology and Evolution at Washington University in St. Louis!

Looking for a postdoc? We have plenty!

Sometimes it isn’t just the project that attracts a postdo to a lab but it is the community. It isn’t easy to tell what that community is like sometimes, so here we share. Four of us are looking for postdocs in EEB at Wash U! We already have quite a few postdocs that this new cohort will be joining. It should be fun. Find what you love from the labs of Michael Landis, Rachel Penczykowski, Liz…

[aqeons]

[thorsten-j-pattberg-books]

Shout-out to PhD Guru Andy Stapelton #DrAndyStapelton Don't know this man, but (as a fellow PhD) his PhD advise, Uni life hacks, and Academic Survival guides are accurate, relevant, and bullseye.🥸🇺🇸🇬🇧🇦🇺💡👇🏻 https://youtu.be/5sSeLa2DNEU #AcademicLife #PhDGuru #grants #Postdocs #PhDs https://www.instagram.com/p/Cm-phVJLSwS/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[dreamerinsilico]

You’ve heard of the browser wars....

I just recently made a long-overdue defection in the search engine wars, and I’m entirely pleased with it. 

You know how shitty Google results are when you need some fairly niche information that won’t be in a Wikipedia article, mainstream news, or some shitty celebrity gossip outlet, these days?

DuckDuckGo has cleared my skin, watered my crops, etc.  I was kind of ambiently glad it existed for a long time, but was like “well, privacy good, but my infosec practices are already sketchy at best, and google’s been doing this for a long-ass time; they’re probably better at it, so why bother.”  But no, my friends, google is better at something but these days that something is delivering clickbait to your fucking eyeballs.

I was frustrated with a very specific science question the other day and getting absolutely fucking nowhere with google, swapped over to duckduckgo on a curious whim, and it... didn’t get me exactly what I needed immediately, but it did give MUCH more relevant search results than google did.  And that’s, well, because enshittification.  Maybe someday, duckduckgo will also live to see itself become the villain, but for right now, it’s fucking useful, and it is now my default search engine on every device I use (and also every work computer i have reason to touch).

[miss-biophys]

Work on a scientific article

What it actuallly entails:

Come up with an idea, define an interesting problem

Do thorough literature research. Maybe similar stuff was already done. Define the knowledge gap well.

Plan in detail, how we can solve the problem, design experiments

Reach out to potential collaborators, agree with them on a plan

Buy necessary equipment, chemicals

Do pilot experiment, optimize the conditions to get reliable data

Perform experiments, calculations, make everything multiple times so it's reliable

Analyze the data

Urge collaborators to deliver their parts

Coordinate your progress with the collaborators

Manage the collaborations, organize meetings

Be diplomatic, you don't want to make enemies in academia

Agree with direct colleagues, who worked on it, what will be the message of the article. Will it be a long story and we need to add some more data? Or will it be short and right to the point and we write a short "letter"?

Do literature research again. Maybe new stuff appeared, and for sure your data must be confronted and discussed with already known facts.

Write the first draft of the article

Send it around for feedback, first only to direct colleagues from your lab

Incorporate the feedback, maybe do more experiments and more analysis

Rewrite the manuscript

Send it around the second, third, fourth, fifth... time

Incorporate the feedback

Send the manuscript to all collaborators.

Wait for the feedback, urge everyone to give it, maybe you don't have all data from all the collaborators yet

Incorporate feedback

Prepare the manuscript for journal submission

Get approval from all co-authors

Submit the manuscript

Wait for editor response, hopefully they send it to reviewers. If not, you need to rewrite a bit the article to adhere to the new journal's format and send somewhere else.

Get reviewers' reports, deal with them, reply truthfully, make effort to explain everything even if you know that the reviewer's suggestion is just impossible or irrelevant. Be diplomatic.

Maybe you need to do an additional experiment, analysis, or rewrite a major part fo the manuscript. This can take months.

Submit revised manuscript with all the changes

Wait for editor's nad reviewers' comments in the second round. You can get many rounds of review and still get rejected.

Finally get a "Congratulations, your manuscript has been accepted for publication"

Pop a shampagne! You deserve it!

What part of this do you usually do in different career stages:

BSc. and MSc. students: Perform experiments and analyze data

PhD students: Do all the experimental and analysis parts, write the manuscript, discuss with their supervisor and direct colleagues, incorporate feedback. But does not have to come up with their own idea and manage collaborations and diplomacy.

Postdocs: Do literally everything on the list

Group leader/Professor: Do the thinking and managing parts, help with writing and feedback, provide discussions and insight. Do not perform actual experiments and analysis.

Being a postdoc is the transformation between the student and the group leader.

As such, we just have to do all these tasks. It's stressful. It's challenging. It's definitely not boring. I am taking every opportunity to get a student, who can help with the experimental repetitions so I have time for all the other stuff.

[sisyphusheureux]

Io procrastino le cose perché già lo so che saranno un inferno. Oggi ho finalmente fatto la schedule di tutti gli esperimenti che dovrò fare e mortacci mia dovevo procrastinare decisamente meno.

Per ripicca sono sul balcone a perdere altro tempo fino a pranzo eheh

[scryillo]

and also the concept page for my vash podcaster au :)

[the-everqueen]

academic tasks sorted by difficulty (least to most hard):

editing a chapter/article/paper

drafting an outline for a chapter/article/paper

giving a conference presentation

writing a chapter/article/paper

developing a theoretical framework

writing a conference presentation

making the powerpoint for a conference presentation

opening the doc with peer review comments

reading the peer review comments

doing anything about the peer review comments

[sleeplessant]

After much suffering, I can finally say I'm pretty fucking stupid for someone with a PhD.

[thatwizardofearthsea]

Also PhD and PD periods are super hard on one's mental and physical capacities. There is huge instability. You're constantly expected to fight for having a funding in order to do your job but also live. That is insane. That is an inhumane system to continue. Nobody can be a genius under that kind of pressure. There is a reason of brain drain from academia.

[catboybiologist]

Every single study I've seen on transfemme breast growth stops most sampling at 2-3 years of growth, sometimes with one or two examples of longer timeliness thrown in if that. So when you hear "most trans women never get more than an A cup" it's outright false. I really want better studies out there, but for the time being remember that you'll see growth 10 years from your start date.

Yes, I'm also affirming this to myself. It's easy to lose sight of this stuff. Doing some three month measurements rn.

[aqeons]

The University of Amsterdam, Netherlands is seeking online applications for various Postdoctoral Positions at their different Departments.

[blood-orange-juice]

I like how Erenville is *that* type of scientist even if he's not technically a scientist

We all know them. A pandemic? A war? A revolution? Just ✨keep doing your job✨

A course of a whole nation changing? Pfft. This guy planned to just continue to collect creatures

[ardenrosegarden]

setting myself up for massive disappointment on icarus levels i can just feel it ✌️

[miss-biophys]

Did we kill them?

Looking at what concentrations my antibiotics killed resistant Staphylococcus bacteria.

Higher antibiotic concentrations are on the right side, where there is clear liquid with no bacteria growth. It works!

[thoughtsafter3am]

I’m used to grading for grad seminars of 12-15 students but I have 80 total undergrads in my classes this year and my body and brain are not used to 80 journal entries. The stamina required to be a teacher/professor/educator cannot be taught, just acquired over time, because I am exhausted. 😳