While I generally am a lurker on other people’s blogs (I admit it), I have a long list of blogs that I subscribe to in my Google Reader feed. And since it’s Friday, I thought it time again to share some of the postings from around the blogs that caught my eye.

On the Five Stages of Proposal Writing - Professors, for the most part, are writers. Grant proposal writers, especially. One prof describes the stages behind her writing.

Life Science Ph.D.s as Industrial Strength Technicians? - Sandra discusses some of the issues for PhDs trying to find jobs, and the biotech companies who find them overqualified.

Walking the Line Between Grades and Experience: My Life as an Undergraduate Researcher (Part 2) - Continued from Part 1, Tim discusses the struggles between getting laboratory experience and earning high marks in his coursework.

The Future of Cell Biology: Organellar Shape - Alex shares some insights regarding what we don’t (yet) fully comprehend, with commentary.

Bacteria on Rocks - A recent paper in Nature reveals that microbes have been found thriving on fresh volcanic basalt on the ocean seafloor, implying that our understanding of carbon cycling and deep-sea systems is missing an entire food source and web.

And from last month:

Serial Endosymbiosis and Intelligent Design - Allen makes an excellent case how science progresses and that while science may resist change, the only way to change science is to do hard work, research and show how your ideas form scientifically relevant contributions.

To accompany Dan’s article on choosing a grad school, I thought I’d relay my experiences and thoughts on this subject. As Dan said, these articles were prompted by a suggestion emailed to us by one of our readers (thanks Vida). We are always glad to hear you article suggestions so if you’d like us to cover something, feel free to drop us a line.

Being in the UK, my experiences of grad school and the grad school entry process will be a bit different from Dan’s US experience because the systems are quite different. Read more »

I’ve been in a small European country (Cyprus) now for about five months, and recently spent a whole lot of time preparing grant applications to the national Research Promotion Foundation (RPF) here. Some observations: Read more »

Time for our weekly look around the best of the blogs… Read more »