Tuesday 28 September 2010

what's new?

I haven't posted in ages... it's been a busy year with lots of changes.

I've decided to put my scientific career on ice for a while and start med school. How come?
It's not that I did not like being a post-doc... I loved it: the research, the teaching, learning new things every day (or most days), the flexible working hours and lack of dress code. I love wearing sports clothes to work! What I did not love was being in a constant state of desperation. Desperation for publications, for producing results to put into publications, for experiments to work in order to get results, for a decent project that will let you do experiments that are interesting enough to get them published. See, it's a long chain of desperation, and after a while it is bound to get you down. Additionally, there is a lot of competition out there, and the success is not always distributed fairly. So I decided to take a detour away from science. Maybe (hopefully) I will come back to it one day, but if not, then I will be able to say that my job involves helping people on a really tangible level. If worst comes to worst, it's better to be a failed doctor than a failed scientist!