Home for the holidays — What is it like for you?
January 17, 2013 | by
Nick Snead
I’m sure each of us has a different sentiment about this question and relies on a variety of different things to answer it. (E.g., is one’s Ph.D. still stimulating and progressing and does it seem to be leading in the direction we want to go in? Is one very close with one’s family? Are any deadlines looming?)
For me, I enjoy my lab very much, and I am entrenched in science for a majority of my waking hours. Therefore it is actually quite difficult when I head home for the holidays and talk to friends and family, having to make small talk about non-science things. I chuckled when I read this article, as this sort of thing happens to me too.
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I also thought that was a funny article. A particularly like him talking about choosing to take time for other activities outside of research.
I usually enjoy the time off, so long as I don’t have a deadline or presentation coming up soon. However, I get many of the same questions stated in the article from my mom every week when I talk to her on the phone: “When are you graduating again?”; “How’s your research going?” She still doesn’t seem to understand that one week is not enough time to have a different answer. I assume she’s asking the 1st question because she misses me (I’ve still yet to make it through to her that the chances of me finding a job or postdoc position in Nebraska after graduation are slim). As for the second question, she’s probably just trying to be polite. I highly doubt she wants to know about the cloning or western blots I’ve done this week, even if they happened to be slightly different than the last week (must get that n=3).
for some more insight from someone who was in industry and went back to Academia, and had to re-visit the ins-and-outs of being a PI, including noticing bad PIs:
http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v31/n1/pdf/nbt….