The Ball Brothers' Lament

Here, here, here (photo credit)

The Ball Brothers’ Lament

Here, here, here (photo credit)

Congratulations Doctor Scicurious!!

Please join me in offering your congratulations to our good blog friend Scicurious of the Neurotopia blog. She has announced that the defense of her dissertation went brilliantly and she has been awarded her Ph.D.
This is a wonderful accomplishment and I do hope she is in the midst of enjoying the moment in the company of friends, colleagues and significant others. As many of my readers know, graduate school can be a hard and soul-crushing experience at times. Unfortunately, our business still delights in a “school of hard knocks” approach at certain stages of training. It is testament to grit, smarts, determination, desire and beyond all else a burning need to find stuff out when someone is finally admitted to the Tribe of doctoral scientists.
Welcome Sci!
For those of you who read both of our blogs, it should not be surprising that I operate in related and overlapping subfields of biomedical science with Scicurious. On this more personal note, I am overjoyed that such a highly promising young scientist has made it over this particular hurdle into the field. I am familiar with her doctoral work and it is impressive. Findings that will have sustained impact on her areas of investigation and ones that seem to me to have a great many implications for much broader areas of science.
Reading through the lines, as it were, I am also impressed that Sci has received what I consider to be some of the best, if not easiest, training if you want to eventually head your own laboratory. And that is the training of having to learn some pretty hard scientific approaches on your own hook, trouble shoot, refine and make them pump out data. It may be a bit of a bias of mine but I am far more impressed by a grad student or postdoc who had to build up a research capacity that was not the heart of the training PI’s lab than I am by an arm’s length list of papers coming from a “slot-into-the-machine-and-churn-it-out” trainee.
This is not just me talking, either. I hope I am not stepping too far out of line to observe that Sci has been on a great number of postdoctoral interviews with extremely well-respected laboratories and has received many offers. I am unsurprised by this- if there was a logical fit with my lab I would have been giving the hard sell myself. But it adds a little perspective to my comments- this is not just blogger homeslicery talking here. As it was, I had a lot of fun trying to pimp out a few of my peers to Sci, trying to get her to go work with them. I look forward to seeing where Sci lands in her next career step and I anticipate many more scientific accomplishments are on the horizon.
If you haven’t done so already I urge you to wander over to Neurotopia and leave her a congratulatory comment.

Congratulations Doctor Scicurious!!

Please join me in offering your congratulations to our good blog friend Scicurious of the Neurotopia blog. She has announced that the defense of her dissertation went brilliantly and she has been awarded her Ph.D.
This is a wonderful accomplishment and I do hope she is in the midst of enjoying the moment in the company of friends, colleagues and significant others. As many of my readers know, graduate school can be a hard and soul-crushing experience at times. Unfortunately, our business still delights in a “school of hard knocks” approach at certain stages of training. It is testament to grit, smarts, determination, desire and beyond all else a burning need to find stuff out when someone is finally admitted to the Tribe of doctoral scientists.
Welcome Sci!
For those of you who read both of our blogs, it should not be surprising that I operate in related and overlapping subfields of biomedical science with Scicurious. On this more personal note, I am overjoyed that such a highly promising young scientist has made it over this particular hurdle into the field. I am familiar with her doctoral work and it is impressive. Findings that will have sustained impact on her areas of investigation and ones that seem to me to have a great many implications for much broader areas of science.
Reading through the lines, as it were, I am also impressed that Sci has received what I consider to be some of the best, if not easiest, training if you want to eventually head your own laboratory. And that is the training of having to learn some pretty hard scientific approaches on your own hook, trouble shoot, refine and make them pump out data. It may be a bit of a bias of mine but I am far more impressed by a grad student or postdoc who had to build up a research capacity that was not the heart of the training PI’s lab than I am by an arm’s length list of papers coming from a “slot-into-the-machine-and-churn-it-out” trainee.
This is not just me talking, either. I hope I am not stepping too far out of line to observe that Sci has been on a great number of postdoctoral interviews with extremely well-respected laboratories and has received many offers. I am unsurprised by this- if there was a logical fit with my lab I would have been giving the hard sell myself. But it adds a little perspective to my comments- this is not just blogger homeslicery talking here. As it was, I had a lot of fun trying to pimp out a few of my peers to Sci, trying to get her to go work with them. I look forward to seeing where Sci lands in her next career step and I anticipate many more scientific accomplishments are on the horizon.
If you haven’t done so already I urge you to wander over to Neurotopia and leave her a congratulatory comment.