Genomic Repairman
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Posts posted by Genomic Repairman
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So (in your opinion) is middle author in Science/Nature or even second-tier (PNAS/JBC/Cell/etc) greater than first author in Obscure Specific Jounal?
Incidentally, I am applying this cycle with zero papers but posters at 4 national meetings.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Some schools take a really hard stance on paper authorship. For instance, in my group there are generally only 2 names on the papers: the PhD student as first author and the PI as the 2nd author. Sometimes a post-doc might show up as a third author depending on how much they contributed. But it seems like alot of the people with publications on here, if you pull their paper from PubMed there are literally like 12 authors on them.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I may be days late to this party but honestly in the biomedical science field, grades don't really matter too much. The only things grades can do is hurt you not help you. Your reputation and what you are judged on is primarily your productivity in the lab, that should be your focal concern. A 4.0 really doesn't help you if you spend a ton of time away from the lab studying and don't get a lot of stuff done. So take the gentleman's B and don't waste too much time studying for an exam. The only exam to buckle down and take the time to study for is your quals or candidacy exam because that matters, everything else is noise. Boring ass noise. So buck the hell up kid and get right back in there.
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We blogged about this last week over on our blog page. Recently a case against a postdoc at Michigan who was sabotaging a grad student in his lab was settled. They had to pay over eight grand in damages and are on six months probation. Retards like this are wasting time (yours, theirs, PI's) and resources (read government money), if you really want to get this solve. Report this to your health and safety folks, they won't play when it comes to stuff like swapping reagents. This will also usually get the DGS involved and then you can bring up any harassment issues as well. This will at least force your boss's hand one way or another. Grad school is already hard enough, you don't need this crap.
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What kind of shit-hole program do you attend that takes a year-long break from teaching you guys? So we have already established that the dean is about as useful as a burlap sack rubbing on a hemorrhoid. Do you have a VP of student affairs or an ombudsman that you can talk to. The former are the ones that usually will stick up for you and the latter can act as a mediator or navigate you where to go next. And despite what someone said above, an MS degree should not take 3-4 years, more like 2-2.5 tops. At some point you have to give yourself a hard deadline of when you have suffered enough bullshit and you decide to cut bait and run. If there is no clear end to this, then you need to get out of there ASAP, you are wasting too much precious time and resources on these fools.
Email me if you need more advice.
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I run a hybrid of Endnote and Papers. All references are dumped into endnote but I keep my pdfs in Papers. This software also allows me to enter notes that I make the aritcles into the software and be stored in the program which also allows me to access my papers and notes from my iPod Touch.
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You put both because you did the work at the former institution but you are currently at the present one as well. Authors can have multiple affiliations.
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I will take my pre-med classes part-time after work, and if I get a job at a university, a lot of the coursework will be paid for with tuition remission. Then, if I'm sure I want to apply to med school, I'll take the MCAT and apply. I've already begun reviewing biology and chemistry textbooks to prepare for the classes/MCAT, and even though I don't have much formal science coursework, I worked in a neuro lab for a year and a molecular bio lab for another year, and then this genetics-based PhD experience will help me too. This whole process should take me about three years, so I'd be able to apply to med school to start at age 27 or 28.
And you don't think MD admission committees won't hold quitting a PhD program against you? Think long and hard, you better have a plan C to your plan B in case med schools say no. At some point in time, everyone has ideas of quitting in their mind. EVERYONE. If they don't admit to it, they are either fools or liars. You have to dig deep and pull yourself through. But if you can't forsee working in research, get out now. Best of luck.
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Not currently but we always keep our eyes out for new talent.
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Hey guys, I am a blogger at the LabSpaces, a science blog site that features mostly life science bloggers but a few physicists as well too. We feature people of all walks of life: grad students, postdocs, administrators, PIs, people in the biotech industries. Last month we put a series of theme post on work life balance which may be of interest to you guys and today we put out another set of posts along the theme of "I wish I knew" to give advice. So stop by and take a look.
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Now I'm left thinking something that most grad students never have to worry about: How do I get my name OFF a paper that will eventually be written based on research we conceptualized together? And when I say eventually, I mean within the next year or so.
Simple, you contact the journal editor, its actually quite easy to remove your name from a paper. The usual response is "Oh, we'll go ahead and take you off right now." In fact some journals have the authors either sign an authorship form and attest to the research through an e-form.
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Informally bring up your concerns to another professor who you are on good terms with and who is not too close to your advisor or maybe talk to the department chairman. Be wary of the second option because they have to take it seriously and it will unleash quite a shit storm. The question of do it now or do it later. Lets see, you get your PhD in their lab and then they get busted for misconduct people will not only take a harsh view to them but you also, "I mean you were a trainee of theirs and you did your work underneath them, you might be a scumbag too." Better sooner than later as this will rot your conscience and always be in the back of your mind. Besides what if you bite your lip and the dude gets caught and fired while you are in the middle of your program. Take the hit early rather than later when more is on the line and restarting is much harder.
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I swiped my institutional logo, put my title (grad research asst), the lab and department I belong to and my official contact information. I have one set with a blank back and another that specifies my field of work and what gene I work on.
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I have a friend in a similar position and what she did was take his name, but when publishing she hyphenated her last names so she can link her old publications to her new name anytime anyone searches for them.
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Man I shill out a shit-ton of business cards at conference. People (vendors, PI's, grad students, etc.) just write down what I'm working on the back of it and they have all my contact info. And I do the same with their cards, so at the end of the day I have a stack of cards with why information pertaining to why they may be applicable to me written on the back. Get some business cards. You can get them cheap from places like vistaprint.
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Most programs care more about your research experience versus your GRE score. They just want to make sure you aren't some illiterate hillbilly. How long have you been employed at the company and what have you done? Also a strong letter of rec from your boss will go a long way towards bolstering your case for admission.
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You can send four LORs, but they are not obligated to read all four but they probably will. Most AdComms are looking for lab experience from PI's, so those are way more important than someone that taught you for a semester.
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I agree with fuzzy, if its not glowing with personal references, then it comes off just like another stock LOR that says this individual does exist, they showed up to my class, but I have no heart-warming stories of adoration about them. Also another thing to look at is this politician of the same political persuasion and mindset as those who might be reviewing your application. It might sound petty but politicians and academics sometimes are.
microbiology vs virology
in Life Sciences
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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.