WARNING: long post. Scroll down further for pics if your attention span is lacking.
There are 2 main ways people respond when I tell them I work in science:
There are 2 main ways people respond when I tell them I work in science:
1. Their eyes glaze over and they smile vaguely and quickly steer the conversation into a territory they're more familiar with.
2. They assume I'm some kind of genius and know everything about everything, and start asking me about how to fix their broken gadgets/bodies/sanity.
And no, contrary to what the title of today's post alludes to, I and 99.9% of other people working in science don't know how to make meth (and I'm not willing to try, based on my very average performance in undergrad chem).
Mainstream media is also prone to making science look way more exciting and/or insane than it actually it is, and I admit that sometimes I use this to my advantage and make my job sound way more gruesome and dramatic than it actually is (although admittedly I do get to play with highly toxic and flammable materials on a daily basis and routinely poke at bits of dead people). I thought I'd take the opportunity today to explain a little of what I actually do for a living and what my day at work kind of looks like to any curious friends and family (hi Mum). I'll try and use as much normal-person-speak as possible so that people who haven't lost their minds after years of science-ing can understand, so be warned that any science appearing here is a really really simplified version.
I work as a research assistant in a university research lab that works on motor neuron disease (that thing everyone was doing the ice bucket challenge for last year) and specifically, how people's genetics might help cause this disease. Because this really awful disease can run in families, our lab can "read" the DNA of people in these families and try to figure out if any of their genes has a mutation, or "spelling error", in them that's different from people who don't have the disease. Now how DNA works is that is "spells out" instructions for your cells to make proteins, which are like little cogs in the big super complicated machine that is a living being. Our lab also looks at the wrongly made proteins and what the effects of them being different from normal are in the cell, and ultimately in a person.
I mainly work on the cell/person side of things, and only occasionally help out in the "DNA reading" side, as the latter requires more knowledge of bioinformatics than I have. My days at work are extremely varied, as it all depends on what projects are currently being worked on. As a research assistant, I don't get to have my own projects like postdocs do. However, I do get to have intellectual input into other people's projects that I'm helping out on, plus I don't have to deal with shit like writing grants to keep myself funded, so my job is pretty sweet. Because my boss is awesome, I also get authorship on papers when I help with the experiments, unlike many other poor assistants in the world of science. By the way, I'll just mention now that when I say things like "help out", I don't mean in the way that a surgical assistant just stands to the side and hands the surgeon scalpels in surgeries on TV. I do pretty much all the hands-on stuff for an experiment, usually by myself, then hand on the results to whoever is working on the project, who will pull together a bunch of results from lots of different experiments and write them up coherently into a paper. Besides experimental work, I also do a tonne of housekeeping (labkeeping?) stuff, like making sure that everyone has all the equipment and reagents they need for their experiments, keeping everything in the lab clean and tidy and in good working order, making sure that students aren't burning down the lab, harassing salespeople of scientific goods for better prices, etc.
I work an extremely flexible 9-to-5 day, as demanded by how long different experiments take and the hours of whoever I'm working with that day. My boss is a really nice chilled out guy and very into maintaining a good work/life balance, so he doesn't mind people coming and going whenever, as long as they've put in the hours they need to. I work with a bunch of awesome ladies and we probably spend too much time talking about non-science things at work like Game of Thrones, shoes, and cute fluffy animals. Our group works pretty closely with a few other groups working on different aspects of motor neuron disease (some looking more closely at specific bits of cells or proteins, some looking at what biochemical reactions are happening in the disease, some making fish with the disease so we can test potential treatments on them), so there is a bunch of people at work to get drunk and complain about how hard it all is with.
Anyway, to better illustrate (quite literally) what I do all day, I took one photo every hour last Thursday at work. This isn't my everyday routine, because there's no such thing, but it does show a few of the things that I get up to when I reply "yeah it was alright, pretty normal" when I get asked about my day at work.
9 am: Oops running late today, so I'm still on the train. All hell breaks loose on Sydney public transport when it rains. I'm wearing sensible shoes because that's rule number 2 of working in a lab, after "don't put anything from the lab in your mouth". I've pretty much stopped buying footwear that I can't wear to work.
10 am: having done some other random stuff, I'm getting ready to do some cell culture work in the lab. We grow cells from both animals and people in this pretty pink liquid that had food for the cells in it, and changes to a gross yellow colour when your cells get unhappy. I keep a bunch of cells growing almost all the time in case we need them for experiments, and change their food and housing maybe twice a week or so. We wear gross gown thingies instead of proper lab coats because we're not cool enough.
11 am: working on some cells that I preserved yesterday and now I'm dyeing them funky fluorescent colours so we can look at where different proteins are inside them using a microscope. You can't see them, but these cells are taken from the skin of a person with motor neuron disease and another person without the disease, and we're comparing whether the two act differently when you put icky toxic chemicals on them, as the last experiment for a paper we're hoping to publish soon.
4pm: oops got distracted and took this pic 15 minutes late, because the boss came round and distracted me with cake. Cake and 2 pots of tea later, having a quick look at some pretty pictures I took with a microscope a few days ago. This is what I meant by dyeing things fluorescent colours. This is for a different project, where someone from my lab found what might be a new gene mutation, so we shoved the mutated gene into some cells and are now looking to see if the protein that gets made gets put into a different place in the cell compared to the not mutated one.
5pm: oh god how is this day not ever yet?! Sugar crashing from the cake and the fact that I did some reading which made me realise how little I know about what the hell I'm doing. Can has home time nao plz?
Anyway, that's a day in the life of a biomedical research assistant! As much as I may bitch and moan, my job is pretty damn sweet (and they pay's not too bad either!). How does one obtain such a job? Well I have a Master of Science in biomedical science, which only cost me my soul, sanity and $10000+. Increasingly, people are hiring PhD graduates for my job, which is fucking ridiculous and makes me really think twice (or thrice, or a hundred times) about doing a PhD. I just got super lucky (and may have made promises to bring baking in my interview) with this job! And now, I must plot ways to hang on to this job forever! *fade out with evil laughter*
This is essential what I did during my studentship at UoA! I miss the work and really want your job now :/ Need more degrees. Also it is insane that they would hire a post-doc for a lab assistant!
ReplyDeleteSuch is the sad state of unis these days - not enough funding so people recruit more students for free money, labour and resources than are likely to ever be able to find relevant jobs :( Have you considered postgrad? If you do well enough for the first year of your masters at Macquarie, they give you a bunch of $$ for your second year or something like that.
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