Category: Ph.D. candidate

As a researcher, especially as a Ph.D. student, you are most literally a jack of all trades, and – at least in the beginning – a master of none. You are a reader, detective, lab rat, data analyst, graphic designer, author, supervisee, and supervisor all at once. And, of course, you are expected to excel in all those areas. Whew, that’s a lot of pressure, right?!

The bright side of that system? While you will always be a jack of all trades, you can become the master of some. And, on your way to mastery, you will inevitably pick up one or two unique extra skills. Some of them might be useful, others not so much.

Here is one of my useless skills:

Have you ever done something that was – in hindsight – obviously stupid? That was, in fact, so obviously stupid it made you question how tf you got into a Ph.D. program?

Maybe you’ve unconsciously shut down all your brain cells for a second and found it to be a good idea to cool down the hot liquid in a sealed glass bottle by putting it on ice. You know, so it cools down faster. Or you simply forgot about the sealed glass bottles you’ve put into the 180°C hot cabinet to “just quickly heat up the liquid inside”. Whoopsie.

Well, it happens to the best of us. And I find, it happens more often than not on really busy lab days. Luckily, nobody got hurt so far by my stress-induced inattentiveness.

And while those moments are down-right embarrassing, they make for a good story 😆