Dear Dora,

Is it appropriate to contact a school and ask them (delicately) how much one of their criteria really matters?  More specifically, I’m grappling with the GRE subject test.  I’m working as a lab tech right now for a very miserly boss and coming up with another $150 on top of the many hundreds of dollars in application fees I’m going to have to pay is not going to be easy.  I don’t want to lose out on one of my top choices because I couldn’t come up with the money for some silly test but at the same time it’s hard to justify the cost when I know I have other significant expenses coming.  What should I do?

– Grant, Lab Tech

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I picked today’s topic based on personal interest. As an overzealous undergraduate I came to Brown to work on a very similar problem, and so I was excited (yes, I still get excited despite staring down the barrel of my seventh year in graduate school) to see this article title in Current Biology:

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Whether induced by the magic of grabbing our first pipette or the vapors from the ether bottle that was left open, many of us daydream about how our career in research will unfold.  While the ending may vary, most fantasy scripts include completing graduate school in three years, curing a major disease, and winning a Nobel prize.  But in our rush to bask in the glory of our own scientific greatness, one person is often neglected in our visions – our boss.

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Not long ago, I was tasked with assaying for levels of glycogen in animal tissue. In most labs nowadays, glycogen is assayed by enzymatically hydrolyzing glycogen down to its component glucose monomers, and then enzymatically oxidizing that glucose in turn, producing hydrogen peroxide which can then react with a number of chromogens to produce a colored product.

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This month for “Sensational Science” I wanted to dig into some of the nuances of what makes a claim “sensational” and how you can start to tell right off the bat. On the internet, we often look at the source. For example, an article from ACS Nano (where scientists converted dog poop into graphene) carries more weight than a chain email. The sensationalism comes from intermediaries. For example, a blog linking to the ACS Nano paper that says: “Alchemy is real! Poop converted to valuable nano material!” That’s where some of the digging and investigation needs to start happening. To illustrate this point here are three posts from the same intermediary source- a technology blog Gizmodo.

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Dear Dora,

I go to a lot of seminars around campus that I have no interest in, many of which are outside of my department, simply to get food. Even though I sit through the talks, is there any ethical or karmic reason to stop doing this?

Mooch, grad student

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If you’ve been reading “Mind the Gap” for a while now, you are probably aware of the fact that I am a fair-skinned lass from England. You will therefore understand my excitement when I saw the headline “Wine consumption can help prevent sunburn”. Not only am I fond of a corked cocktail every now and then, but I burn in the sun like an over-achieving moth in a flame.

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In last week’s poll nearly 70% of readers felt that giving group meeting more than quarterly is a waste of time.  While this certainly doesn’t sound like an extreme position to us, it’s clear that respondents’ answers were influenced by their definition of group meeting.  If the goal of group meeting is to get help with the problems we’re facing in lab, then maybe monthly or even weekly informal meetings would make sense.  Alternatively, if the purpose of group meeting is to practice giving formal seminars, then maybe giving two or three meetings a year is enough.  So this got us thinking – What the heck is the point of group meeting anyway?

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Unlike traditional offices, our lab benches don’t come with a door to shut when we want privacy.  As a result, there’s no physical barrier to alert visitors to the fact that they’re now in our personal space.  Even in the event the approaching individual is courteous, without a door where are they to knock – on the bench, trash can, our head?  Although a couple of pieces of drywall and a door would dramatically cut down on the riff raff dropping by our bench, lab safety departments would likely stroke out at the first sight of our handiwork.  But there’s another way.

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In lab vernacular, few words can elicit a fiery range of emotions like “group meeting”.  Fear, panic, apathy, anger, frustration, embarrassment and nausea are not uncommon responses as a graduate student or postdoc reads the lab schedule and realizes they’re up next week.  While some will feel they haven’t had enough time to obtain new data, others will feel a tremendous amount of pressure since it’s their only talk of the year.  But who’s to say how many group meetings we should give in a year?… You.

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