Genomic Repairman

I think if anything you are going to have to do an MS before they would let you into the PhD program. Do you have a strong foundation in biochemistry/molecular biology? Have you taken all the required coursework?

You realize the history of gene therapy is not so good and that maybe gender identity could be controlled by multiple genes or by epigenetics? In my opinion it cannot hurt to bring up your situation. Also, I think you just stereotyped graduate students in science as cold introverts that can't even articulate their projects to the general public. This may not be a good preconceived notion to have.

If you are going to mention professors by name in your SOP, you may contact them in advance and see if they are taking on students in the future. If they aren't its just a waste of time.

And you didn't get into anything? Oh lady we need to chat, something must have gone wrong somewhere (interview faux pas, LOR writer might have tossed you under the bus or some other reason). MS and 2 papers in preparation that should put you over the damn hump.

Did you compare cost of living versus stipends? Quality of life between the two places (living in the boonies of Long Island vs maybe getting mugged in Houston)? Equipment/lab spaces of potential labs? Neighboring institutions that you can collaborate with easily? Why the hell are you asking us? This is your decision that will determine at least the next 5 years of your life, are you sure you want anyone swaying your decision?

Based upon the links in your signature me doth think you art a troll Kellyy?

Tired of searching PubMed every damn day to see what new stuff comes out, why not set up automatic searches so the pertinent literature comes to you... Check it out on my blog.

Does your boss already have any affiliations with grad schools/programs/etc? If not this is going to be difficult to swing. Most programs want you to study underneath advisors that work in their programs. Is this a DoD based or funded lab?

Yeah I moved from LabSpaces because of some issues I had with management and blog my science stuff at Scientopia and my personal crap on Wordpress. I still chat with my LabSpace peeps and troll their sites on a regular basis though.

I'm pretty sure it would be rare for a grad student to F#ck up your chances at grad school, provided you are responsible and maintain control over yourself. Yes, sometimes we might take you out drinking to our local speakeasy, but to the strip club? I'm a man of class and distinction and wouldn't be caught dead in a strip club, plus I'm a grad student, do you think I can afford the cover? As far as you being complicit in a 4 day ecstasy bender, that's on you. Watch how much you drink, what you say and what you try to poke and smoke and you should be okay.

Keep it going folks, I want to hear some good or horrible stories from the interviews.

Unless you do phage work (virology) and then you jump back and forth between the two. So just pick what you find to be the most interesting, but note that a lot has already been worked out in the viral replication field, but there is so much that is wide open in microbiology.

Too me its a toss up. A middle author might have just done one assay in a Science Paper, but that first author in the Field Specific Journal has typically handled those experiments from cradle to grave. I give a lot of credence to that. Its easy to pump out a single piece of data, but to come up with experiments, conduct them, analyze, and write them up. That's huge. I guess it would really depend on how much the middle author of the high impact publication did and how much and difficult was the work that the first author of lower impact journal article. Not having papers won't kill you getting into grad school, but they do help. So do presenting and attending national meetings, so that's a nice feather in your cap. Wear it proudly.

Science is becoming a team-based sport. To put out the best work in a fair amount of time you sometimes have to lean on collaborators that have more expertise with this technique or model system. Part of this also boils down to grant funding, the NIH/NSF aren't going to give you money to do the work if they don't think you are proficient in an area or technique. That's why if you are not, you get letters of support from collaborators to package into your grant proposal saying that they will either do the work or oversee your lab conducting it. So while interdisciplinary and integrative are buzzwords, and annoyingly so, they are the future of academic science. The days of the single author paper for particularly life sciences papers are long gone.

Hey are any of you folks blogging and if so, let me know. I'm building a list so that I can highlight new grad student bloggers on my blog, so either comment below or email me at genrepar at gmail dot com.

Hey are any of you folks blogging and if so, let me know. I'm building a list so that I can highlight new grad student bloggers on my blog, so either comment below or email me at genrepar at gmail dot com.

That's because we do integrative multi-disciplinary science and that is the way it seems to be going. A lot of high profile publications require a ton of work and its usually more than one lab can handle or has the expertise for, so you branch out and collaborate. You could do the work yourself but it costs you time and money to start up and assay, optimize and validate it, before using, so why not just send your samples off to a collaborator who already has it up and running and is pushing out publishable data with the technique already. I do a lot of cell biology and biochemistry but I'm not going to do Xray crystallography myself, I'm going to hand my protein over to someone else for that because I'm not trained in it and it would take too long to learn how to do it at the high level that I need. The pressures of science (funding cycles, and the push for data) are sometimes too much to invest time into doing certain experiments when they can be given over to others.

First and second author papers are what counts. Some folks have one or some have a few. This depends on the research (some projects are not time intensive and lend themselves to gobs of data that you can publish) and where they are publishing (The Journal of Really Specific Subfield That Needs Papers to Fill Out This Month's Issue vs a higher impact journal). Middle authorship papers do count, just not that much. Oh and review articles really don't mean much to us. You didn't do any substantial new work, just summarizing the existing literature and the gaps in the knowledge.

Open Access is starting to become the fad and fashion. You are getting your science out to a broader audience than publishing at a journal that will keep it behind a paywall. And remember the more people that can see your papers, the more likely your work is to get cited. Even Nature is creating their own PLoS-like journal. Its still reviewed for scientific content but impact or importance are not a pressing concern for these OA-journals. A big issue with them is that the fees needed for OA are solely encumbered by the authors so it can be a little bit expensive and some grants done cover publishing fees so in some cases OA can be prohibitive. As for me, I don't mind it, I see a lot of good stuff coming out and from an author's perspective, you aren't wasting time trying to shop an article. But for a postdoc who needs high impact glamour pubs, they will stay away from OA journals unless it has a good impact factor.

I have friends with PhD's in life sciences that do everything from patent law to medical writing to science advocacy to working as an analyst for venture capitalists trying to invest in biotech business. The jobs are much more diverse than just academia vs industry. Also don't forget national laboratories and agencies such as the EPA as well.