Five months ago, I pranced into the office of a renowned research institution wide-eyed and full of hope. I was about to begin my MSc project, and nothing could bring me down. I no longer considered myself a scientist in the making, but a fully formed academic. It was with great pride that I labelled [...]

I recently had my PhD viva (that’s a thesis defense, to those of you in the US, and it was successful – yay!), and one of the questions my examiners brought up was: “if you could go back and do things differently, what would they be?”. Obviously they were thinking more about what different reagents, [...]

Several years ago as a freshman in a research lab, the very first project I received was to pipette incremental micro-volumes of H2O onto a piece of parafilm. Boring! Weighing the liquid on parafilm and comparing the weight between 10 replicates for each micro-volume continued for a week before I touched anything else in that [...]