Did anyone else refer to graduate school as “work” or was it just me? When people asked me “How is school going?” I would correct them and say, “I’m not really in school learning. I’m working a job in a lab doing research.” Did it feel that way to anyone else?
Today, I decided to email the first author of a great pre-print, a graduate student, to let them know I like their pre-print. Got a response in ~1 hour. I feel like praise and questions should go to the first author rather than the traditional corresponding author. Thoughts?
I am happy to share that I will not be joining any department, university, or institute. Nor have I been accepted to any graduate program or been awarded a grant. I don’t have a manuscript accepted or a paper published. So to academia I guess I don’t exist.
As a PhD student, I was a disappointment. One month later I was a Senior Research Scientist (w/ a MS, no PhD) and a valued member of a team offered full-time employment only 6 weeks into a 3-month temporary position. Just saying sometimes you just need a change of scenery.
@girlwithhorn
@TheInSneider
I recently learned they had two rules for the show:
1. An episode cannot end with the characters hugging each other.
2. The characters cannot learn anything. They must be doomed to make the same mistakes again and again. They cannot grow as people.
You ever get so sucked into work in a good way you forget to take a break or eat? 9.5 hours! And worth it. Peptide at 0.8 Å (my personal record) collected in-house on our
@rigaku
HyPix, 1 and 3 sigma in Coot. 🥰
#crystallography
You don’t need a PhD to have a successful career in the biotech or pharma industry. I’ve worked for a small CRO and medium pharma and you can do just fine with a Masters degree. In fact, I have colleagues who only have a Bachelor’s degree and they are bosses.
I love the contributions
#RoseTTAFold
and
#AlphaFold
have made to structural biology. However, when someone claims that the "protein structure problem" has been solved forever because of them, I'll always remember gems like this:
@bielleogy
Meanwhile, a kind professor was not only kind to me, really having a deep convo about protein evolution (not the focus of my poster but I wished it was) came back when I wasn’t there and left a printed sequence alignment with even more thoughts on protein evolution ❤️
First stop: Mukilteo Ferry Terminal, where we’re modernizing one of Washington State’s busiest routes.
Ferries are the primary way many residents and workers travel across Puget Sound. Our $4.9M grant will make the commute more reliable and efficient for 4 million annual riders.
BREAKING: SCOTUS has ruled 6-3 that x-ray crystallography, cryoEM, and NMR are all illegal and now we can only use AlphaFold to determine protein structures.
@jameslsutter
Meanwhile, people ask me why I bother lifting weight when strength does nothing to help my ultimate frisbee skills and I say, “Because I always want to be ready to help a friend move.” That one of my favorite things to do for friends.
I still can’t believe they took an awesome, flawed, but good, honorable, intelligent, caring, magnificent character like Helen Sharpe and made her someone who would sign off on a racist, unethical clinical trial. Then have white doctors stand up for minorities 😡
#NewAmsterdam
@khaoticreveries
How could you forget when all these guys with super speed decided to not use super speed but instead spontaneously generate lightning swords and have a mock lightsaber battle?
I’m watching
#TheOrville
and I have to give it major credit. Not only does it have the soul of
#StarTrek
but in s2e3 we get cameos from not one but TWO Star Trek doctors. Bravo,
@SethMacFarlane
, bravo, Sir!
This email shows all that is wrong with science. The fact that it came from someone students looked up to (based on "one paper in a strong journal"), is all the more depressing. How will students from resource-deprived labs find postdocs if this becomes a norm?
@VoicesofIndAcad
I live up on this hill. I've walked up and down so many times over the 10+ years. If that thing was still there, I would take it ALL the time. ALL THE TIME. I agree with the comments, we don't need to lanes of cars going up and down. Bring it back,
#Seattle
I noticed in crystal structures the N-terminal 10 residues are never visualized. So for the first time, I didn't just follow the literature, and trimmed those residues. Full length on the left, truncated on the right. I'm so psyched this expresses better now.
#Biochemistry
How often do PIs take courses in leadership training? Mentorship? Anti-harassment? Empathy? Is it a one time thing? Or are you annually taking training to ensure you are not harming your trainees?
@danistans
I’m sorry. I left my PhD program without a PhD too. Maybe you’ve done enough to earn a Master’s out of your time there? I was able to do that. Regardless, I remember how much it hurt. But it lessened over time, working with more supportive, kinder people.
I’ll never forgive the postdoc that stole my first-author paper and testified against me to our PI, explaining why he deserved to be the first author. Nor forgive my PI who relegated me to“second co-first author” then lied to me and said the order didn’t matter.
It’s Friday. I’m tired. I finally have time to spend the day with my data. It’s all bad. I can’t solve a single structure. Last dataset. Only 3.45 Å, looks meh… but I recognize the unit cell! Structure solves, ligand bound, finally got this after 1 year of the first attempt!!!
I’ve been promoted to Principle Scientist as of today! I’m the structural biology lead for five different projects, as well as president of my company’s US-based Toastmasters club, and I still get in the lab and do the work!
@academic_exit
My job titles since starting in industry after grad school:
Senior Research Associate
Research Scientist I
Research Scientist II
Research Scientist
Senior Research Scientist
Senior Research Scientist I
Senior Research Scientist II
My title was independent of my role too.
Today I was observing my trays for the first time setup before Christmas and I'm finding a lot of crystals. But when I got to this well, my mouth started to water. Have you ever had a physical reaction to finding crystals?
#crystallography
No no no
#NewAmsterdam
, please, it’s too soon. Don’t make Wilder the rebound woman for Max. How can he fall in love with one oncology head then lose her and then fall in love with the new oncology head? It’s absurd!
10+ years of refining x-ray crystal structures has not prepared me for my first
#CryoEM
structure refinement! I have no idea what I'm doing, kinda just checking different boxes until I find one set of options that gives the lowest clashscore. Help!
@pmddomingos
@BlumLenore
With all due respect, Pedro, if someone tells you that your point is insulting, then it is insulting. It’s not about your intention, it’s about others perception. If someone tells you that you are being insulting, that is a reflection of their feeling and perspective, not yours.
Hey, my dear friend is leaving academia after 6 years PhD, 4 years postdoc, 3 years staff scientist. He will be a technical scientist supporting customers with their experiments. Say something nice about those roles, he’s kinda nervous to leave academic research.
X-ray crystallography makes you a crystallographer.
CryoEM makes you an microscopist.
MassSpec makes you a spectroscopist.
What does small angle x-ray scattering (SAXS) make you?
Hi, I’m David. I left academia 12 years ago. I work for a mid-size pharma as a structural biologist. I’m living a dream industry job because I have developed into a leader within this company so I get to shape my own role. AMA. I do not work for META. I am not recruiting.
Omg, I’ve never been more excited to get an email from a journal before… manuscript submitted! Only took 7 years… I celebrated by getting not one but TWO glasses of wine tonight… yes… it’s THAT manuscript… 🥂
@felixtaschbach
Omg, I can relate: just before I gave my first talk at a major conference in my field, my Garmin rated my stress level at 100 out of 100. After my talk somehow my stress level dropped to zero (I’ve never achieved that before). Thus, I concluded I must have died during my talk.
@AcademicChatter
No. And I rarely did in grad school. That’s one reason I was a “bad grad student” and “not motivated” and “not taking this seriously” but now I’m in industry never working weekends and I’m a “model scientist.”
@AltAcChats
I don’t have long term career goals. It does not bother me. I just do a good job, grow, and support others. I’m not concerned with position and title. I spend more time thinking about non-work goals. Be healthy, be happy, be helpful.
Apparently, if you can see two people hugging, you're left-brained, and if you can see a dinosaur, you're right-brained. What do you see in the mountain?
@LifeAfterMyPhD
What I didn’t realize is that I said exactly what my company wanted in a lab scientist: a team player, someone willing to help someone else, someone who thrived on interacting with others. The things that made a me a “bad grad student” made me a superstar industrial scientist.
Patience pays off. Needles grown in 6 days gave 2.8 Å of Fab/antigen, 3 per ASU. Go to
#ACA2024
, then spend a week on vacation, find arrowheads that gave 2.25 Å but only two copies per ASU (18 days to appear, 30 days to grow)
#crystallography
#structuralbiology
#drugdiscovery
Today I introduced a bill to ban all messenger ribonucleic acid technology (mRNA) in the State of Idaho, and we passed the Freedom in Education Savings Account out of the Senate Education Committee to fund students and not systems, putting families in control over their ed $.
@PhDVoice
@PostdocVoice
Doing a PhD is a matter of luck or perserverance. You are either lucky and it all works or it doesn't all work and you have to perservere.
@RepJayapal
The
@NewsHour
and
@JudyWoodruff
honor those who have lost their lives to COVID regularly. I never turn away during that segment. Every news program should have been doing this the entire time.
Alright, we've got some mystery density for this cysteine at the bottom that makes it almost look like arginine at 1.5 Å and maybe it Hbonds the hydroxyl of this tyrosine. But what could it be modifying this cysteine? The condition contains PEGs, buffers, ethylene glycols. Help!
During a short break during the cryoEM workshop, I processed some newly collected x-ray data, got super psyched to see a new space group for this protein, and...
!~boom~!
I determined my first protein/macrocyclic peptide co-structure!
Here are the crystals, 2 Å, P 6522 🤩
Is there another biomolecule more frustrating to build into density than glycans? I'm seriously so sick of glycosylation. I get that it's important. But I'm so tired of them. I miss bacterial proteins. Damn you mammalian proteins.
#structuralbiology
#sugardaddy
@YashaExplores
Gross. I REALLY don’t understand his behavior or the behavior of men who do this. When I was a lab TA I only thought about students as students. And when the class was over I never thought about them again unless they reached out for advice.
@Sharronapearl
I can’t believe that with Yom Kippur listed on normal wall calendars now people still try to schedule things one the single holiest day of the Jewish calendar.
Crystal growth Monday! Good things come to those who wait. Do not be discouraged when your drops start precipitated. This is the crystal that diffracted to 0.8 Å in-house.
#crystallography
@_gixxelle0
I love the reversal here. Season 1 normal humans had the wide-eyed-fear when faced with a Titan. Now a Titan has the wide-eyed-fear when faced with normal humans.
First day back at work in 2024, found some nice crystals in trays setup just before Christmas, harvested the nicest (left) and got some ~2.4 Å in-house diffraction (right). I am hoping it'll lead to a new fab-antigen complex structure!
#TeamUCB
#crystallography
#drugdiscovery
@MegStEsprit
When I was a teenager I used to babysit a lot, usually boys. When word spread of me, a 16 year old with a car, who could handle high energy boys, presumably because I was a high energy boy myself, business BOOMED.
We are looking for a protein biochemist to join us! If you've got experience purifying membrane proteins, can work collaboratively, and want to create value for patients, apply! You'd be working with some really fun, supportive, kind folks who are excellent scientists. 1/2
If you are offended by what
@TheNeedling
writes here, the truth will infuriate you more. I wish this was a joke. SPD killed someone, minimized a human life, and joked about it.