Soft Skills and Tools
Tips on Receiving and Applying Constructive Feedback for Scientists
Are you looking to improve your lab work, publication record, and grant success rate? Then read our guide to feedback—what it is, where it should come from, and how to give it to others.
Read MoreHow to Access Journal Articles Behind Paywalls
Researchers need to access journal articles, but paywalls can sometimes put up a fight. Discover the different legal ways you can access paywalled articles.
Read MoreTime Blocking for Productivity in a Busy Lab
How can you tackle work when it seems daunting or even impossible to know what will happen and when? Take things one bite at a time and try time blocking!
Read MoreFrom Dull to Catchy: How to Transfigure Your Manuscripts
When you are an avid reader, you can’t help but find similarities between your research and favorite novels. Here are some ways you can cite or quote your favorite fiction author(s) in your manuscript and make it more memorable.
Read MoreHow to Organize Your Lab Space for Better Productivity
The physical arrangement of a laboratory can have a strong effect on a bioscientist’s efficiency; those extra steps and seconds of time can really add up! Here is a compilation of tips to help you organize your lab space to minimize inefficiencies and maximize your productivity in the lab. Organize Your Lab Space with Stations…
Read MoreHow Scientific Researchers Can Write Effective Emails
Have you ever found yourself wondering why your emails don’t get quite the response you expect? Or no response at all? It is very easy to overlook the importance of constructing clear and concise emails that deliver the right message. In this article, we’ll cover key aspects of emails for your purposes as a scientist.…
Read MoreHow to Marie Kondo Your Laboratory
Does your laboratory resemble the nest of an overly enthusiastic laboratory rat that went on a scavenger hunt and squirrelled away all that it has found? Do you find yourself playing Jenga with stacks of Petri dishes and freezer boxes? Have you ever attempted to decipher the meaning of the mysterious string of numbers on…
Read More7 Tips to Keeping Your Undergraduate Student Volunteers Interested in the Lab
Although we do our best to keep undergraduate students involved in experiments, they are often just in it for a letter of recommendation. Here are some ways to help them enjoy their lab experience and keep them invested in the projects. 1. Maintain Mutual Respect: The relationship between primary investigators (PI) and undergrads differs slightly…
Read MoreWhy Early Career Scientists Should Care about Mentoring Undergraduate Students
Let’s be honest: the mentoring of undergraduate students is sometimes the lowest on the list of priorities for a busy postdoctoral research fellow. Amidst experiments, research progress meetings, reviewing of literature, manuscript writing, grant applications, and convincing your PI to let you attend that conference in Hawaii, your undergraduate charges may be just mere afterthoughts.…
Read MoreNil by Mouth: Evolution from the Glass Pipette to the Robot
If you compare a biologist with a cook and the lab with the kitchen, the pipette will be analogous to the most important cooking tool – the knife. But while the knife’s design has remained more or less the same since man moved from stone to metal some five to twelve thousand years ago, laboratory…
Read MoreGet Your Dream Job! How to Best Organize Your (Many) Applications
If you’ve ever been on the job market, you know how many job applications you can end up filling out and submitting. Sometimes the entire process takes months or even years to culminate in the right job offer! It can be overwhelming to keep track of what you applied for and when. This is especially…
Read MoreReducing Lab Waste One Experiment at a Time
As a scientist myself, I have always been focused on performing experiments to achieve my sole goal of producing data for a publication. Recently I started paying attention to the waste I solely generate on a regular basis in the lab. Starting from disposable Eppendorf tubes and pipette tips, to labels and Petri plates, it…
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