If I could offer you only one tip for the future, gloves
would be it.
The long-term benefits of gloves have been proved by
scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable
than my own meandering lab experience.
I will dispense this advice now.
Enjoy the power and beauty of your
weekends.
Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power
and beauty of your weekends until it's Monday.
But trust me, in 20 years, you'll look back at photos of
your gels and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much
possibility lay before you and how fabulous your results really
looked.
You are not as slow as you imagine.
Don't worry about future experiments.
Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as
trying to dissolve an EDTA solution by chewing bubble
gum.
The real troubles in your assays are apt to be things
that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at
11pm on a busy Friday night.
Do one thing every day: drink tea at 4
o'clock.
Sing during work.
Don't be reckless with other people's sterile
media.
Don't put up with people who are reckless with
yours.
Clean your bench.
Don't waste your time on artifacts.
Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're
behind.
The review process is long and, in the end, you will not
recognize your manuscript.
Remember compliments you receive for your talks. Forget
the unanswerable questions.
If you succeed in doing this, tell me
how.
Keep your old lab journals. Throw away your old
contaminated plates.
Stretch.
Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do
with your life.
The most interesting people I know didn't know at
22 what they wanted to do after their Ph.D.
Some of the most interesting 40-year-old postdocs I
know still don't.
Get plenty of Tris solution. Be kind to your equipment.
You'll miss them when they're gone.
Maybe you'll publish, maybe you won't.
Maybe you'll have a job, maybe you
won't.
Maybe you'll leave science at 40, maybe you'll
dance the funky chicken when your 75th paper is
published.
Whatever you do, don't sleep during seminars too much, or
eat potato chips either.
You cook only with water. So does everybody
else.
Enjoy your pipet.
Use it every way you can. Don't be afraid of it or
of what other people think of your pipetting style.
It's the greatest instrument you'll ever
own.
Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your cold
room.
Read the protocols, even if you don't follow
them.
Do not read scientific magazines. They will only
make you feel stupid.
Get to know your strains. You never know when they'll be
gone for good.
Be nice to your co-workers. They're your best link to
your lab and the people most likely to help you in the
future.
Understand that rotation students come and go, but only a
precious few will do a Ph.D. in your lab.
Work hard to bridge the gap between theory and practice,
because the older you get, the more you need the people who know what
is possible and what not.
Live in Bern once, but leave before it makes you
slow.
Live in Davis once, but leave before it makes you
hate America.
Travel to meetings.
Accept certain inalienable truths:
Salaries will not rise. Professors will plan impossible
experiments. You, too, will become strange.
And when you do, you'll fantasize that when you
were young, salaries were reasonable, professors were realistic, and
students respected people with more lab experience.
Respect your postdocs.
Don't expect anyone else to supply your
buffers.
Maybe you have all the solutions you need. Maybe you'll
have nice gels. But you never know when either one might run
out.
Don't mess too much with radioactivity or by the time
you're 40 you will look 85.
Be careful whose reagents you buy, but be patient with
the companies who supply them.
Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of
fishing the reaction tubes from the disposal, wiping them off,
writing over the ugly labels and recycling them for more than they're
worth.
But trust me on the gloves.
(inspired by Baz Luhrmann: Sunscreen, who was in turn inspired
by...)