Sarah Addou stared hard at her computer screen, willing the code in front of her to compile properly. “When you don’t have any experience writing code, it’s a steep learning curve,” she recalls today, 8 years after that summer internship experience at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) in New York state.
Continue reading Internships Offer Undergrads Full-Time Research Immersion
Have you ever minimized your Facebook browser window when your supervisor walked past your desk, afraid you might appear unprofessional? Social-networking guilt may soon be a thing of the past as a new breed of social networking sites for scientists clamor to be the next great timesaver in the lab–for you and your supervisor. These science-specific, Web-based networks combine handy library and document-sharing tools with a social twist. Such sites permit scientists to “help out each other with protocols, discuss topics, prepare for scientific meetings, maybe even show off your research a little bit,” says social network user Erika Gyengesi, a neuroscience postdoc at Yale University.
Dermot Leonard’s first experience with technology transfer was as a mechanical and manufacturing engineering student in 2002. He and his teammates at Queen’s University in Belfast, U.K., won £10,000 in a Northern Ireland Science Park competitionfor their business plan to develop and market a self-powered medical pump. The invention never made it to market, Leonard says: The team took a half-hearted stab at marketing their idea–but then they graduated. They spent the rest of the money paying off student loans.
The sting of rejection was just as sharp the fourth time around for Marcus Bischoff, a postdoc at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the University of Cambridge , U.K. “There’s a lot of disappointment,” he says, when your manuscript gets rejected by a journal. After a year of trying, he was both relieved and pleased when the fifth journal–a “good journal,” he says–accepted his paper.
Continue reading If At First You Don’t Succeed, Cool Off, Revise, and Submit Again