Taming the literature

The undergraduate years remind me of being an adolescent. It’s an awkward stage in which you try to wade through schoolwork while also trying to answer very philosophical questions such as, “What do I want to do with my life?” If your sights are set on doing science, the question Read more…

Life advice (part 2): Holi-daze

And now for something completely different. Let’s jump ahead to that (seemingly impossible) point in the future where you’ve spent enough time working on THE graph as well as many other graphs and words, which have themselves come from what feels like millions of experiments. You’ve not slept a full Read more…

Working the lab

The big decision has been made, you have picked the right supervisor. They’re going to help you flourish and develop into the perfect, employable graduate student. They’ll always be there to answer all your questions, but wait, what? What do you mean they’re in another country, before going to a Read more…

The art of supervisor wrangling

A colleague of mine was sitting beside a senior academic at a conference. A young researcher was giving a presentation on the preliminary results from their doctoral research, and the senior academic was really impressed. The topic coincided perfectly with his research interests. Meeting the young researcher over coffee, the Read more…