Read, write, make a plan, do the experiments, teach, rinse and repeat.
*Written in October 2017... when my mind was wondering if I was happy. Re-reading this, it is obvious- I wasn't.
Yesterday I was flying back from France and met a father whose daughter was in love with Physics. SCORE!!
He and his wife were of different professions and did not have a clue what the day to day of a scientist or physicists might be. This might be true for most people outside of our world. My family seems to think I am still in school. Albeit, I am physically still in College, but I have a lot less time to go to the Pub and to be late for classes, especially if I am teaching them.
This is my day, it varies every day but this was Monday 30th October 2017. NB: During my PhD, it was 10 times more hectic and twice as long because of experiments.
I Wake up at 7, snooze to 8. Climb out of my tree house of an apartment, have brekkie and look at Stephen Colbert for the funny side of news in the States. Check emails. No messages from my Prof of imminent danger, phew. Look at the weather forecast, 4C. “Mental note, I need to plan another surf trip.” Finish breakfast (I have the same thing every day to save time), then walk to work listening to the science podcasts that are long overdue. Then back to Spotify Discovery. I look forward to Mondays for many reasons but having new music to listen to is one of the best parts.
I'm at work in 30 minutes. I sit and plug in my laptop to a larger screen. One is to my computer at my previous postdoc, another is my personal computer, and the third is my computer at my current post. Then I go through my lists for the day. First, EMAILS. I need new mammalian cells, I need new training for microscopes. At exactly 11am I get an email that one of the synchrotron facilities is down and my experiments I planned for this week won't happen. I cry a bit inside as I have been waiting 7 months to do this experiment. I look to see where I can do it and book flights for my trip to Berlin to do more work there. Then I email (on my personal computer) a surf camp to make sure I can surf with them in January. Because: Surfing.
I have lunch at my computer and I definitely check Facebook. But actually I go through the list of all the journals and email alerts to see what other people are doing and publishing making sure I am still the first to do X, Y and A. These include eLIFE, Nature, Science, Nature Immunology, Advanced Materials, Advanced Functional Materials, Advance Science News, Connexion (Extracellular Matrix, Human Immunology and Mesenchymal Stem Cells), Microsystems and Nanoengineering and a few others. Some days I would have lunch in interaction areas. Where our group will come together to laugh and talk about frustrations. Essentially it's the therapy area where one can get emotional and scientific support while feeding the body. The group I am in is particularly good at this. Actually so was the group in Sweden. It’s how your Professor operates that helps keep the stress levels down. Don’t be fooled, we are stressed but that’s because we want the best data and personally I am a time optimist (it’s a problem).
Then I finish lunch and write a few lines from what I have read into a word document of the two reviews I am trying to finish. A review is usually a summation of a field. It should be somewhat critical of the field and should imply a path the field should follow. It is taking me two years to write one for collagen as I still am trying to make sense of decades of work done. A lot of the misunderstanding has to do with semantics. Fun fact, Science was not always done in English.
“ Albeit, I am physically still in College, but I have a lot less time to go to the Pub and to be late for classes, especially if I am teaching them.”
Then I teach an undergraduate course on differential scanning calorimetry. Essentially trying to give second-year students an idea of how changes in temperature profiles are determined by a material's chemistry.
I am currently trying to finish a research paper from my previous group so, I spend few hours sitting at my desk treating data and preparing them for my meeting in Berlin in November.
Then I head to the gym because I refuse to be a T-REX having spent most of the day typing away and sitting poorly.
After the gym, I head to the lab and put materials into varying solutions for processing tomorrow. I check my list of experiments that I need to do. I make sure I have booked equipment and then check that I have everything ready for it. When I am developing new things I just stay in the lab and try over and over until I understand what is happening. But today, I already have a plan so I am just working towards the experiments and data treatment according to my first hypothesis.
When I have students in the lab, I would bring my computer there so I can help them along until they don’t want me around anymore.
Most times I start my lab work, early in the morning, before any emails or later at night. This is essential to avoid people. Most of us do this. I am in a big lab (60+ on this site). So even if I didn't want to, I would still see people and I can be chatty.
One time I came back to work 10pm. Then at 11:55pm, I decided to go to the bathroom, only to find I was locked out of everything. I had to call the security and they were not happy. "GO home!" they said. I responded, "Erm No. Why?" apparently I would cost the university several million a year to insure. Then I replied. "Got it, I’m going home." This varies from place to place. In Sweden, I would stay until I finished everything. I know some people who spent the night at work. There are beds. It's not a bad thing because sometimes experiments take that long and you live too far to go back and forth. When you love it, you love it. There are some days, I am in the lab the whole day, but these are usually not Mondays. Once a week there are group meetings where someone presents data and we all try to make sure it is up to par. Keeping us all on our toes.
Then I go home, make dinner (I only prepare things that take less than 10 minutes). Healthy Kale and rice salads with tofu or salmon. Easy, healthy and fast. Drink some coconut water and crawl up to my tree house and pass out to the sounds of random Spotify sleep playlists, 12am. I might have missed out a few things like, I do take a shower (I am not an animal), I watch Family Guy which makes me laugh (I am still an adult ), maybe I call my dad because things were really bad that day or really great. By the time I get to bed it is almost 12. Most nights I dream about my experiments and then I wake up super early and run to check that the dream did or did not occur.
So to sum up: Lots of reading, a bit of email, lots of data treatment, lots of writing (like sooooo much) lots of solution making. Lots of checking cells. Lots of begging for more money, lots more writing.
So there you have it, a day in the life of a scientist.