farmer_beans

There is a saying in science… collaborate or perish. I get it.

But I also get that PhD students are cheap labour (aka ‘lab monkeys’), and we’re expected to be enthusiastic about it.

What I don’t know is if I really have to balance doing my PhD with being a good little lab monkey, or where the line is.

I know I did some extractions and ran some PCRs to support my co-supervisor’s work, and that blew out to data analysis, multiple draft editing and the responsibility to write my own article. First author publication… I’m supposed to be grateful, but hey, it’s not part of my project. I don’t even know how or if it’s going to go in my thesis.

Getting hijacked is not going to get my work done. Would be nice to be able to have it all, but who has that luxury?

So besides designing good experiments so as not to waste resources… from now on, I’m only doing experiments towards my work. Happy to look at something that fits in, but I until I have my thesis done, I don’t have time to be someone else’s lab monkey.

Let you know how that goes. Doing my own work well should be good enough!

as long as I’m not cutting on sleep. It’s embarrassing when you nod off in a seminar.

It also might help if the epidemiology folk mixed it up a bit to make it interesting!

I think scientists should embrace interpretive dance to communicate their work :)

30 min a day for a week is a start for the unfittest of unfit. I wish I could get it in the morning, but I’m already up before the sparrows for work.

So it’s going to be at night-time I guess. Go me.

I might add that it’s going to be FUN. I’m buggered when I get home. Catch 22. Go tell someone who cares, right? If I could DO tough self-love I wouldn’t BE in this position… excuses excuses…