Dr. PhD

Yesterday was my birthday and I passed my PhD defense.

Thank you everyone who attended my defense, that means a lot to me.

Thank you for those who used to sit with me and have lunch together with me for 5 years and didn’t bother to attend my final defense. That really opened my eyes how I should treat other people in return.

 

 

WTF, Man

I know you probably heard my outburst the other day. I couldn’t contain my anger any longer at the moment.

The sentiment has been building up for 5 years now. The triggering points become more accumulated in the past couple of months with two postdocs leaving the lab and all gone haywire in the lab.

  1. An Iranian postdoc, who became Swedish after immigration (I hid the name here), left the lab in September, 2016. He and my PI (let’s call Addy for my advisor) submitted the paper together before they left. The paper was first rejected from Molecular Cell Journal. So they submitted elsewhere. It came back with some revisions. But the postdoc already left. The problem is to do revision, Addy has been doing experiments in the lab for the past couple of months. The problem kicks in when they started digging some of his plasmids, and they don’t work as the postdoc claimed. Sequence missing, and some protein expressions do not work as he claimed. So this make the big problem. What’re they gonna do? Retract the paper or do cloning all over again from the very beginning?
  2. Another postdoc (let’s call her May), also left the lab at New Year. She left the project hanging in the lab. She’s become a housewife. So the project is going well, but it has to finish. Who’s gonna take the project? No one knows. Addy is not very sure. He’s worried about the lab since it’s becoming fewer people.

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