For those of you who had a happy postdoc experience, was the postdoc experience good because you ended up in a good lab? For those of you not in a good lab, were there ways to help cope/ overcome the negative parts of the postdoc (i.e. stress, poor mentorship, etc) that resulted in an overall positive experience?
Hi everyone, I'm hoping for a sanity check and some advice about how to work with a PI who (in my opinion) may be a little unreasonable. I'll try to frame my experiences as neutrally as possible so as to not skew towards extreme negativity.
I'm obviously unhappy with the situation so I'm actively looking for ways to exit but in the meantime, I'd like some perspective on how to make my current life less exhausting. I also figured that people outside of academia may still be hard to work with.
My PI transitioned to more wet lab-based projects without a lot of experimental background so they don't understand how long experiments can take. This has resulted in a high demand (maybe unreasonable?) for data. For example, within one week of my first day, before I was even done with onboarding, my PI brought up in my one-on-one meeting that we should be already be talking about results.
I've brought up that certain things just take longer (i.e. I can't force cells to grow faster) but they haven't taken it seriously. During the weekly one-on-one meetings, I'm constantly being berated for not doing more things or not doing things faster. I can't stress enough to them that faster isn't better especially since I work with VERY expensive samples. It's also extremely demoralizing to have data and be told that I should have used my time better to have even more data.
A smaller problem is the expectation for the lab to work through federal holidays and random spot checks throughout the day and into the evening to see who's still working.
All of this combined has made the lab an exhausting place to be, and the general atmosphere is extremely tense (especially on meeting days). On a personal level, I feel like I have no room to make mistakes. I recently messed up a section of a protocol and I felt nauseous from the anxiety.
So all in all, how have people managed to not lose their sanity when working with intense PIs? Or am I just too sensitive and my PI's expectations are completely reasonable?
(edited for spelling)
edited again to add: I thought I screened this lab well enough during my interviews, but the issues and lack of wet lab experience of the PI was only told to me after I joined. The lab is pretty small so I assume no one wanted to say anything negative during the interviews in case it somehow got back to the PI.
I was trying to purchase event train tickets this morning and got payment error messages, but when I checked my card statement, tickets were charged to my account. But on the mticket app, there aren't any tickets. Is anyone else having this issue?
Hi everyone! I'm a new PhD grad currently working as a postdoc to gain some more skills. I'm at a crossroads between continuing in academia (as a staff scientist, not a PI) or transitioning to industry.
I would appreciate it if people could share their thoughts and experiences on either! Particularly if you considered both, but ultimately chose one or the other.
If it makes any difference, my background is primarily in oncology, protein engineering, and molecular biology (mostly wet lab, very little computational experience).
Hi! Has anyone seen water lotus tubers for sale at local garden centers?