Hello PhD

You’re busy.  Experiments, lab meeting, journal club, classes – you barely have time to sleep, let alone make it to the gym to exercise.  We’ll tell you about 10 creative ways other grad students and postdocs stay physically fit, and how it’s boosting their productivity and self-confidence. You don’t have time NOT to exercise The research is clear: exercising is good for your mood, your productivity, and your health.  So why do so many of us believe we “don’t have time for it?”  To reap the benefits of exercise for people on a busy lab schedule, we asked the LabRats group on Reddit and other grad students and postdocs for advice on staying in shape. Here are some of their tips: * Bike to lab! * Take a class at the university gym * Take the stairs * Learn a martial art * Schedule workout time with your lab-mates to make it social * Sign up for intramural sports on campus * Check out cross-fit at a local gym or online * Try the New York Times 7-minute workout or other apps * Read papers while riding a stationary bike or elliptical machine * Do squats while waiting for the centrifuge Bottom line – find something you enjoy, and make it a priority.  You’ll feel more confident, and tie your sense of accomplishment to something more than today’s experiment.   Salted Caramel Everything After all that exercise, it’s time to indulge as we sample a New Belgium Brewing/Ben & Jerry’s colla-BEER-ation (see what I did there?)  It’s the Salted Caramel Brownie Brown Ale, and it’s not as bad as you’d think.  The brewer’s sense of restraint is appreciated, as this still tastes like a beer and not a chocolate milk-shake. We also celebrate the season this week with a reading of The Night Before CRISPRmas, and an etymological tale about the origin of Santa’s name.  Happy Holidays!   References Exercise and workplace performance Exercise and cognition

Stephanie dreamed of becoming a scientist when she was a girl. She managed to maintain excellent grades while working in research labs throughout her college career. With her flawless CV, it came as no surprise when she was accepted into a top-tier pharmacology PhD program. Four years later, Stephanie walked into her PI’s office to tell him she wanted to leave.   Dreams in the Daylight This week on the show, Stephanie tells her story. Four years into her graduate training, she realized she was miserable and couldn’t see how her situation would get better if she stayed. So she had some hard conversations: with herself, with her family, and ultimately, with her graduate mentor and labmates. Reactions were mixed, but she was able to finish her Master’s thesis and leave on good terms. Then it was time to find a job and a way to pursue all of her other passions and goals.  She says it was the best decision she ever made. Biomedical PhD programs have a completion rate near 50%, which means for every newly minted PhD, there’s a scientist with similar training but a different degree. Some leave with a master’s, and some much earlier, but it’s high time we talked about the many paths of graduate students, and how to support each individual’s choice.   Mmm, Coppery! This week we sampled Bad Penny Brown Ale from Big Boss Brewing Company. We’re still trying to decide whether the little people on the label are Penny’s murder victims. And just in time for holiday giving, Stephanie makes some soap that WON’T give your loved ones cancer!  And isn’t that what the holidays are all about?  Check out RedMoutainGoodness.com and give the gift of goat!

A driving test shows that you’re ready for your license.  A pregnancy test shows that you’ve got a baby on the way.  So what does the GRE show? More often than not, it shows whether you’re a man or a woman, and the color of your skin. You can’t spell “regret” without GRE Identifying which students are ready for graduate school is a difficult task.  Admissions committees receive thousands of applications, and they need to consider each student’s academic performance, extracurricular activities, work history, and personality.  Naturally, they look for short-cuts to make the process simpler. And with that, the GRE was born.  The questions have changed over the years, but the basis remains the same: measure incoming graduate students on their abilities to understand and communicate in the English language, and see how much math they remember from high school.  Out pops a simple numerical score that schools can use to filter the good students from the bad. But recently, some administrators have questioned the efficacy of the tests.  How well does the GRE predict success in graduate school?  Do people with high scores make better scientists?  Do those with low scores perform poorly in lab settings?  The answers: no, no, and not even close. While digging through the demographic records of GRE test takers, Casey Miller and Keivan Stassun discovered that women score 80 points lower on average in the physical sciences than do men, and African Americans score 200 points below white people. In simple terms, the GRE is a better indicator of sex and skin colour than of ability and ultimate success. Their paper titled “A Test that Fails” was published in Nature. This week on the show, we discuss the unintended consequence of requiring grad-school prospects to take the GRE, and explore some better ways to predict which students will succeed. Bourbon on a Budget Josh searched high and low (mostly low) to find this week’s ethanol.  It’s Evan Williams Single Barrel, a highly-ranked bourbon for under $30.  We felt so bad about drinking the pricey Basil Hayden’s a few weeks ago, that we wanted to find something affordable on a graduate student budget.  Cheers!   Resources Impact of emotional intelligence on dental student performance

Think about your first few months of graduate school. You moved into a new apartment in a new town, you met hundreds of other students and scientists, and you had to pick a rotation lab and classes for your first semester.  It’s an unbelievably stressful time for most students. Now imagine doing all of that in German.   First-Class Research Most of us learn enough vocabulary in a foreign language to take the train or buy a coffee, but students who travel internationally for graduate school are expected to do much more. “Where is the library?” is an easy phrase to learn. “The Drosophila histone demethylase dKDM5/LID regulates hematopoietic development” is not. (Morán T, et al.) This week on the show, Josh interviews Haifa, an international student who grew up in Saudi Arabia and is now studying Drosophila at the University of Kansas. She shares her experience with coming to the US and talks about learning the nuanced English required to communicate with other scientists.  She also reveals the subtle differences between lab culture at home and abroad.   Stinking Stuffer Now that it’s officially the season for shopping, we tell you about a very unusual toy that should be on every microbiologist’s list. It’s Poo Dough, and it is perhaps the worst toy devised in a decade. Seriously, who thought this was a good idea? (Warning: it contains wheat for some reason.) Josh is startled this week by the recent spate of Cats vs. Cucumber videos appearing online.  Be sure to watch what happens when the cucumber menace sneaks up on unsuspecting scientists: And in honor of the University of Kansas, we’re drinking another beer sent in by a Lawrence listener. It’s the Copperhead Pale Ale from Freestate Brewing. Thanks to all our friends in the Sunflower State!   References Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell – He describes the influence of High- and Low-Power Distance cultures on the rates of airline crashes.

Even if you’re not working on a paper or grant proposal today, you’ll probably communicate about science.  You’ll send an email to a colleague, chat with your PI, or present a paper at lab meeting.  In every case, you’re trying to convey an idea or change someone’s mind, and that’s why it’s so important to communicate clearly. Write Right This week, we invited David Shifrin of Filament Life Science Communication and the Science Writing Radio podcast to share his top four tips for what he calls “non-technical writing.”  That includes those emails, conversations, and presentations you’re doing every day of the week. Here are the tips he shared on the show: Define your audience: Create each piece of content for an “audience of one” and don’t try to be all things to all people. Define the problem: Focus, try to convey one main idea, and support it with every sentence. Less is more: Use white space, don’t feel compelled to tell everything you know, and edit yourself ruthlessly. Tell a story: Data is critical, but data only makes sense in the context of a story. Use emotion, story arc, the hero’s journey, etc. to engage your audience. David has a 15-point checklist to improve your scientific communications on his website.  Check it out at http://www.sciencewritingradio.com/hellophd/ Freaks of Nature The ethanol took on mythic proportions this week.  David sampled the Rompo Red Rye Ale from Jackelope Brewing Company in Nashville, TN.  They describe a “rompo” as “a mythical beast with the head  of a rabbit, the ears of a human, the front arms of a badger, and the rear legs of a bear.”  Magically frightening! Josh and Dan couldn’t find that locally, so they drank a beer with a head of hops, the ears of hops, the front arms made of even more hops, and the rear legs of a bear who died from an overdose of hops.  It was the Freak of Nature Double IPA from Wicked Weed Brewing in… wait for it… Asheville, NC!  It’s like Nashville, but headless.  See what I did there?      

As you near the end of your graduate school training, you will feel defeated, worn out, and ready to take a nice, peaceful job at that bookstore down the street.  But if your career goals include leaving the bookstore and returning to lab, you’re probably considering postdoctoral training.  Question is: do you really need to do a postdoc? To Do, or Not To Do Fifty years ago, you could finish your PhD and be offered a faculty position, no questions asked.  Twenty years ago, you’d get that same faculty position after doing a lengthy postdoc.  But the times have changed, and not everyone wants to jump on the tenure track.  That means there are some of us who don’t need a postdoc and shouldn’t do one. There are a few clear cases where a postdoc is an unstated requirement, but there are also times where grad students take a postdoc because they haven’t figured out what they want to do with their degrees.  That means  you can actually avoid the entire process. We’ll talk about the different types of jobs you can achieve as a scientist in academics and industry, and whether the postdoc will help you get there.  The key is deciding early what you want to do and getting a job BEFORE you graduate. Pumpkin Spice Latte Lager We finally break down and sample a Pumpkin Ale from Schlafly Beer in St. Louis, MO.  It’s tastily-spiced, but not over the top like some of these brews that made the bottom of the Paste Magazine pumpkin beer taste-test.  You’ll see flavor phrases like “road tar,” “licorice,” and “Ipecac.”  Yuk!  

The research is cutting-edge. The publications are top-tier. Funding is abundant. But this lab has a toxic secret that will make your life a living hell.   Hidden in Plain Sight This week, we answered a question from a first-year grad student who found himself in a lab that felt more like the gladiator’s arena than an ivory tower.  The PI created an adversarial environment where it was every scientists for himself. This summer (my first lab rotation) was in an HHMI lab and the PI was both non-existent and absolutely poisonous. Furthermore, their caustic attitude bled into the rest of the lab. It seemed like the rest of the staff withheld information so as to throw you under the bus during lab meeting. This experience has led me to reconsider my position as a grad student as well as a scientist. How do you handle a bad lab/mentor? Thankfully, this was just a rotation, but it raises an important question about how to detect the subtle signs of disfunction.  We share one simple tip that helps you discover the hidden drama before you commit to joining. And it’s not just advice for grad students on rotation – you’ll want to take the same advice if you’re choosing a postdoctoral lab because the stakes can be even higher!   Cutting on the Bias We also took some time to answer listener mail about our recent gender bias episode.  Josh and Dan take the implicit bias test semi-live and on the air, and share their results.  If you haven’t taken it yet, go find out how biased you really are.  Jerk. And we get the giggles about the fuggles with Ad Astra Ale from Free State Brewing in Lawrence, KS.  It was sent in by some listeners at the University of Kansas, so thank you to all of our Jayhawks friends!

If you wake up every morning excited to go to work, you’re ‘in-the-zone’ all day, and you come home refreshed and excited to start a new day, please stop reading now.  Everyone else, join me in paragraph two. A story for the rest of us Oh good, they’re gone.  It’s hard enough to work at a job you dislike, but it’s much worse when the people around you seem to love what they’re doing.  As they succeed, you feel like a failure.  They seem engaged with the work, while you watch the clock until closing. But fear not: there are steps you can take today to find a career you’ll love.  Step one is to learn from other people’s mistakes and avoid their stupid choices! This week on the show, Daniel shares his story of landing in graduate school and realizing too late that it wasn’t a good fit with his work style or abilities.  Experiments weren’t working, and he began to lose hope of ever finding a career he’d love. Quitting was an option, but there’s such a stigma in the academic world for those who “leave with a Masters.”  In the end, he finished the degree, and took the time to understand which aspects of his work life made him happy. Along with the harrowing tale of poor life choices, we discuss the red flags that indicate you might be on the wrong path.  We also identify a few of the components of a satisfying career and why it’s important to start seeking them today. Reaching for the top shelf To extract Daniel’s story, Josh bribed him with a special ethanol this week.  It’s Basil Hayden’s Bourbon with one ice cube.  If you’re in grad school, you may have to take out a loan in order to buy some! Josh also shares some fun research linking bee foraging behavior to caffeine content in the nectar.  It makes the bees head out to the dance floor, and they seem to get addicted to the sweet tasting stimulants.  It’s like Red Bull for bees!

Shocking Fact No. 1: If you put a woman’s name and a man’s name on the exact same job application for lab manager, the woman is described as less competent and will be offered less money. Shocking fact No. 2: If you show  the results of that experiment to faculty members in scientific fields, the men are less likely to believe the results.  They say the research is flawed and the findings are suspect. Question: What happens if you change the results of the resume experiment?  Will those male faculty members still think the research was shoddy?  Or will they believe the new results because it fits with their pre-conceived notions about hiring? On this week’s show, we discuss some new research that gives hints as to why gender bias in the scientific community is so pernicious.  How can you solve a problem when not everyone will admit that the problem exists in the first place? And before you leap to judgement about those unenlightened pigs, be sure to check your OWN implicit biases with these simple tests. Everyday Sadism We’re also celebrating Halloween with a murderous IPA from Shipyard Brewing in Portland, Maine.  It’s the “Little Horror of Hops,” and the mascot is this handsome devil: We enjoy the bitter brew, and Daniel reveals the darker side of our taste preferences.  Recent research implies that people who enjoy flavors like coffee and beer are actually more likely to express psychopathic tendencies!  That explains a lot about the Hello PhD hosts… We hope you have a Hoppy Halloween (see what I did there?) and please tweet your #ScaryScience costumes to @hellophd.  

During his first week as a postdoc, James was excited.  He stayed late to set up cultures and read a stack of papers.  The second week, he was surprised to notice he was the last one in the lab at 6PM – in his undergrad lab, you could expect to see people working past 10. Over the next few weeks, James left earlier each evening, pushing off the next experiment until tomorrow.  By the end of six months, he wasn’t making progress and had lost some of his energy and passion for the project. Embracing the buzz Is your lab buzzing with activity at all hours of the day and night, or does everyone clear out before dinner?   It should come as no surprise that the work ethic of people around you can affect YOUR productivity.  Ignoring the subtle nuances of lab culture is an all-too-common mistake. This week, we respond to a listener question about culture and productivity: Hi Josh + Dan, I would love to hear a discussion about the work culture and differing work ethic at different tiers of institutes. I visited Boston over the weekend and was struck by the urgency all around, which I miss at my institute…wonder how much more productive I would be surrounded by a “hive” mentality. What do you think? We start by exploring those powerful phrases about urgency and a hive mentality and how they can motivate you to work harder.  But in the end, we have some doubts about whether you’ll only find that work ethic at certain universities.  In reality, it can vary by department or lab, so it’s extra important for you to know what you’re looking for and choose based on your own personality profile. Ninja Cowboy Cat Rides Again! Also in this episode, we celebrate fall with the new Pumpkin Spice Agarose from Fisher Scientific.  Don’t be surprised when you find your e. Coli wearing Uggs and a Northface jacket! On the beer front, we continue to enjoy some beers sent to us from a listener in Wisconsin.  We do double-duty with Spotted Cow Ale from New Glarus Brewing Co. (New Glarus, WI) and Fantasy Factory India Pale Ale from Karben4 Brewing (Madison, WI). The label on the Fantasy Factory is nearly indescribable:

Scientists aren’t like other workers.  There’s no 9 to 5 time clock with lunch and two fifteen minute breaks.  When you’re running an experiment, you have to make a plan days in advance, juggle each step and incubation period, and stay nights and weekends to hit your time points. That’s hard enough without the constant ping, beep, and ring of your computer and cell phone as internet distractions swirl around you.  How are you supposed to get anything done? Josh and the Giant Peach Tomato Timer This week on the show, Josh shares a few simple tricks for maximizing your productivity and minimizing distractions. It’s tempting to keep up with your friends on Facebook and take that call from your SO, but the research shows that as a species, we’re pretty bad at multi-tasking.  What can you do to bring focus back to your experiments so you can publish that next paper in record time? First, you need to know where your time is going.  Josh explains how to keep a time-log to document your starting point.  Do you spend 40 minutes each morning flipping between email, Twitter, and CNN.com?  Have you been taking leisurely ninety-minute lunches in the pizza place in town?  And how much time did you spend debating with the guy two labs down about which Game of Thrones character is the most devious? Once you know where your time is going, you’ll have a better plan to manage it.  Josh uses the Pomodoro Technique to stay focused for 25 minute sprints.  That’s less than half an hour, but by eliminating distractions, you’ll be surprised how much you can accomplish.  Tune in to this week’s episode for a full description of how to get started, and why it’s so important to use your time well. If you want to try it out, you can get a “real-world” tomato timer, or just use an app. I don’t know anyone in Stockholm.  You must have the wrong number. Also in this episode, we give some love to the recent Nobel Laureates in Chemistry.  Aziz Sancar, Tomas Lindahl, and Paul Modrich won for their work on DNA repair mechanisms, and each one got an early morning call with the good news.   We celebrate with TWO delicious beers from a listener in Madison Wisconsin.  She shipped us the threateningly labeled Ambergeddon from Ale Asylum (Madison, WI) and a fall-tastic Oktoberfest from Summit Brewing (St. Paul, MN).  The beers were excellent, and Josh realized his dream of receiving free beer from a listener.   See kids, dreams DO come true.  

The moment you finish grad school, a weight is lifted from your shoulders.  You’re free to follow your scientific passion and publish your discoveries in top-tier journals.  But don’t get TOO comfortable, because we’ve already started the countdown on your temporary position… Last week, we asked postdocs what they loved and hated about their jobs.  This week, we try to discover the common themes.  Postdocs love the autonomy and freedom they feel as they push the boundaries of scientific knowledge, but why is the “system” forcing them to move on after just five years?  And why is the pay-scale derived from a dark-ages fiefdom with serfs and vassals? Postdocs in 2015 are happy to use their skills to pursue new branches of scientific inquiry, but they’re frustrated by postdoc limbo status.  They long for the salary and benefits of their “muggle” (non-magical/scientific) peers, and wish they had spent more time building their CVs with the bullet-point experience that could help them land a job in teaching or industry. In the end, they offered valuable advice for other scientists advancing through graduate school.  Whether you’re an incoming PhD student or a postdoc completing year five, you’ll benefit from the wisdom, experience, and “do-as-I-say-not-as-I-did” insights of the postdocs we interviewed. Also in this episode, we sample something old, something new, something black, and something tan.  Okay, so it’s basically a fairly new Black and Tan from Berkshire Brewing.  They call it “Shabadoo,” and it’s a porter/ale mix blended with precision in Massachusetts.  Shabba-dabba-doo!      

If you met him on the street, you’d never suspect that mild-mannered Clark Kent was actually the indomitable Superman. And there’s a chance that you’re ignoring the real superheroes walking around your lab every day. They’ve escaped from graduate school Krypton and are flourishing under the yellow sun of independent research. They’re postdocs, and churning out high-quality papers is their super power. This week on the show, we unmask unassuming postdocs in labs across the country and find out what really makes them tick. What do they love about their new-found freedoms? What do they hate about their “science trainee” status? And what one thing would they change about this phase of their scientific careers? Besides the salary, of course… After earning a PhD, your perspective shifts and you begin to see all the mistakes you made in grad school. So we asked each postdoc what they wish they had known as a graduate student. This advice could change your life and alter your career path, but only if you choose to heed their advice!

If you believe the newspaper headlines, you’ll be ready to dismiss Jake as another statistic. After all, the odds of a soldier returning from war and getting an undergrad degree are not good, which makes his dream of earning a PhD sound like a pipe-dream. But don’t believe everything you read in the papers. The Cost of Coming Home While the men and women fighting overseas will periodically make the evening news, few of us pause to consider what happens to the veterans who return home. After World War II, the GI Bill helped pay for many of those vets to go back to college, training them for civilian jobs and leveraging their unique skills to bolster economic growth. But our societal appetite for war has waxed and waned with each conflict, and with it, our support for the troops returning home. Instead of handshakes and expressions of gratitude, many vets return to uncomfortable questions and awkward stares. So what happens when a soldier like Jake leaves the danger, camaraderie, and daily structure of an active war zone and sits down in English 101 with a group of teenagers scrolling Facebook on their laptops? Short answer: he doesn’t fit. Science for Soldiers Enter John Schupp, a chemistry professor who wanted to change the patterns that lead to high veteran drop-out rates. By applying a scientific approach, Schupp experimented his way to a system that could help veterans not only fit, but excel. In this week’s episode, we unpack Jake’s questions about how he will get back to school and achieve his goals in biomedical science, and Dr. Schupp will be our guide. He tells us how to make science training accessible to all veterans, but also, why it should matter to every one of us. Jake wrote: I am a disabled military vet who was going to school under the GI bill.  However over the course of my time in college I suffered a mental breakdown that lead to my GPA plummeting and my leaving the small liberal arts college I was studying at. This has left me uncertain as to what my future will be but the one thing I know for certain is that I want to finish my undergrad and get my PhD.  Now I’m probably getting ahead of myself.  I have several things that I am concerned preclude that for even being an option for me. 1) I am concerned that I am too old I’m currently 27 years old 2) I am concerned that I may have burned my bridges having dropped out 3) Though I’ve received help from the VA for the issues I was dealing with at the time, I’m concerned that I’ll have a recurrence of those problems. Any advice for getting back on track would be greatly appreciated. You say vee-EN-na, I say vie-AY-na Also in this episode, we sample Devil’s Backbone Vienna Lager. This tasty brew from the Blueridge Mountains of Virginia really takes Josh back to his roots. References Dr. Schupp shared a treasure-trove of information that you may find valuable. You can reach him at  schuppjd@tiffin.edu Full interview with Dr. Schupp A business plan universities can use to develop their own program to support student veterans A presentation on veteran suicide and income inequality throughout US history For vets pursuing a PhD, there are a number of exclusive funding sources available: * The Small Bu...

Biomedical science is broken.  Funding is unpredictable, training programs drag on indefinitely, and some of our best scientists are drawn to careers outside of the university or drowned in paperwork if they stay.  Can anything be done to support research staff and boost lab productivity? Saving Science These topics are regularly debated in the literature, but a recent meta-analysis by Pickett et al. in PNAS works to find the consensus among a dizzying number of suggestions.  Their paper, Toward a sustainable biomedical research enterprise: Finding consensus and implementing recommendations, could be re-titled “8 Ways to Save Science.”  And while these 8 ideas may appear across the literature, they’re not without controversy. This week on the show, we unpack the 8 recommendations and debate their merits.  Should all graduate school programs be limited to 5 years?  Should the federal government increase overall funding?  Should post-docs receive higher pay? To summarize, the 8 recommendations are: * Make funding predictable from year-to-year * Increase the total amount of money the federal government hands out * Reduce regulations * Pay post-docs more * Shorten graduate school to 5 years * Train students and post-docs for “alternative” careers other than faculty PI * Change how trainees are funded * Increase opportunities for staff scientists Josh throws in a bonus recommendation that didn’t quite make the top 8: increase diversity in the biomedical enterprise. Did you applaud every item on this list, or did the authors miss the mark?  Leave your comments below and let us know what you’d add or remove to make biomedical science a more sustainable enterprise. Also in this episode, we pay tribute to all the Oregonians who don’t listen to our podcast by drinking Dead Guy Ale from Rogue.  It’s an Oregon beer and we’re pandering for listeners in that great state, so tell a friend! References: States in order by quality of their beer offerings. Newt Gingrich (NYT April 2015): “Double the NIH budget” PIs spend 42% of their time on administrivia Stanford recently bumped starting postdoc pay to $50K NIH recently started a funding mechanism called “Broadening Experiences in Scientific Training (BEST)”.