Academics Andre's Research Biocuriosities Books Graduate School History of Science Hot off the Press Igor's Research Interdisciplinarity Molecule of the Month Open Access Philip's Research Philosophy of Science Physics Physicsworld.com
Backreaction Ceclia's Blog at PHD Comics Cocktail Party Physics Cosmic Variance The Daily Transcript Easternblot Everyday Scientist The Evilutionary Biologist Freelancing Science The Futile Cycle Good Math, Bad Math iMechanica in singulo Incoherently Scattered Ponderings Juniorprof Klara Stefflova Life of a Lab Rat The Loom Metadatta Mixed States Morning Coffee Physics Not Even Wrong Notes from the biomass Notional Slurry OpenScience Project Pharyngula PLoS Blog Ponderings of a fool Recombinants The Sandwalk SciAm Observations ScienceBlogs Scientific Clearing House Shtetl-Optimized Three-toed Sloth Uncertain Principles What's New by Bob Park
I was surprised the read, over at Incoherently Scattered Ponderings, about the difference The Ponderer sees in hiring a graduate student or a postdoc. Of particular interest were the anecdotes regarding a postdoc who didn’t care to do any of the ‘grunt’ work (soldering), or another postdoc who didn’t want to do any data analysis, favouring undergraduates to do both tasks:
A postdoc in my group wanted to “outsource” most data analysis to an undergrad – which we did (I was lucky to have several talented undergrads) – mostly because postdoc did not want to get heavy into MATLAB. In retrospect, this was a mistake, because now every time we/I had a new idea for data analysis, postdoc had to go looking for undergrad, who was busy with classes, etc. When I was a postdoc I did all of my data analysis – no matter how mind-numbing it was (even though I was often grumpy about it too).
We all like and dislike different aspects of our research. In my field, lots of people hate having to realign lasers, or construct flow cells, or from my old life, pull micropipettes. But I have yet to find someone (other than The Ponderer and his postdoc) who doesn’t love playing around with their data, data that is usually only collected after a significant struggle in the lab. Compound this with the importance of being able to trust and repeat the manipulations you do to tease our important parameters from your data, and I can’t understand why anyone would want to hand off the analysis to someone else. I would prefer to analyze data in lieu of basically any other lab task I can think of.
Molecule of the Month: Designed DNA crystals Science resolutions for 2010
Biocurious is written by Andre Brown and Philip Johnson, since 2005. Content of the weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
