Hello PhD

Scientific training has its roots in the ancient world.  From Aristotle’s natural philosophy to the modern biomedical research lab, science training has relied heavily on an apprenticeship model. Senior scientists take promising young students into their labs and train them, hands-on, in the practical activities of research. The assumption has always been that the aspiring scientist will ‘grow up’ to be like her mentor – running a lab of her own someday.  And for a long time, that made sense. But in the modern world, PhDs go on to a much wider variety of careers.  Sure, some seek faculty positions, but others teach, consult, work in industry, and influence policy. Is it time to rethink the PhD process?  Can we modernize scientific training to support the diverse interest of today’s scientists? #modernPhD That was the question posed by The National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) in their push to modernize scientific training. We rise to the challenge with a Trilogy of Solutions.  This week, we unpack the first idea: revising the graduate school curriculum so that training is more standardized, and time to completion is fixed. Imagine a world in which your PhD program was limited to 5 years.  What type of training would build your research skills and make you ready for the workplace? The fact is, our current system is extremely variable – each student has a unique project with individual successes and failures.  One student might sail through in 3 years, while another is forced to change labs and stays through year 9. Is the first student smarter? Better equipped to succeed?  Or is the second student better trained by the additional time? The reality is that ‘time to PhD’ is not synonymous with skill or training.  And if time isn’t correlated with success, then there’s an opportunity to tighten up the training schedule without sacrificing pedagogical quality. We share a handful of ideas an concerns about a fixed-five year PhD, but we’d love to hear what you think!  Is it worth standardizing scientific training, and where should we start? Big fruit, small bottle Josh took a trip out west (but not too far!) to pick up this week’s brew: Wicked Weed Watermelon Saison from Asheville, NC.  It’s big on watermelon flavor, and makes us long for one last weekend trip to the beach.  Grab some before summer melts away!

It’s a compelling promise: take a few drops of blood, and tell the patient what hidden diseases are lurking in his body.  If only we could have an early warning system for cancer, Alzheimer’s, or myriad other diseases, then we could treat them before they took hold. This is the narrative of Theranos, a company that wants to make medical testing affordable and fast for everyone.  They’ve taken the notion so far that they actually publish a price list for hundreds of tests right on their website. Recently, the company made less favorable headlines when the Wall Street Journal revealed that many of the tests were performed on industry standard equipment, rather than the space-age technology Theranos markets. The company’s troubles deepened when federal regulators announced plans to revoke the license of one of its lab facilities and to ban CEO and founder Elizabeth Holmes from the industry for two years. But technology and regulations aside, there’s a more fundamental question we should all be asking: is wider access to routine screening a good thing? The math says no. Damn Lies and Statistics This week on the show, we discuss a recent article from fivethirtyeight.com that makes a bold claim: “We don’t need more blood tests.”  The reason comes down to some counterintuitive probabilities. Fundamentally, the value of routine screening for rare diseases comes down to just a few numbers: the sensitivity of our test, the specificity of our test, and the prevalence, or rareness, of the disease we’re trying to detect. Even if sensitivity and specificity are high, they can lead to unintended consequences when we screen truly large numbers of people.  We walk through an example on this week’s episode with a made-up test and a made-up disease. But the impact of broad scale screening is very real.  In fact, the recommendations for routine mammography and breast cancer screening have been changed recently due to the outsized side-effects of false positives in the screen. There’s value to testing, but we have to make every effort to test the right people at the right time, and to help them interpret their results.  Our intuition is not always a helpful guide. This Beer is Hot Hot Hot This week, we turn up the heat with a Habanero IPA from Dingo Dog Brewing in Carrboro, NC.  Dingo Dog grows some of its own ingredients onsite in a “zero waste” production facility, and they use the profits to fund grants to local, “no-kill,” animal rescue organizations. Their mission is cool, but this beer is hot!  It’s got all the bitterness you love in an IPA with a little kick of spice on the back of the throat.  Keep another brew on hand as a chaser!  

It’s official: the Hello PhD podcast is one year old! <insert confetti and noisemakers here> In honor of our birthday, we’re taking a look back at our favorite episodes and moments from the first year of the show. Stay with us… Cheers, Mate! We start the celebration with the Alpine Beer Company Hoppy Birthday Session India Pale Ale.  Brewed on Alpine Blvd. in Alpine, California (near San Diego), this beer packs a hoppy wallop. And listen – I like hops as much as the next guy – but a birthday cake made entirely of hops is probably going a bit too far.  Save ’em for the beer. The Way We Were We took a few moments to remember why we started this podcast in the first place.  Basically, it’s for all of you: the graduate students, postdocs, and career scientists who are navigating the PhD process and beyond. It’s a difficult road, but one that can be so richly rewarding that it’s worth the pain.  The goal of this podcast is to share the strategies and stories of other scientists to make the way just a little bit easier for everyone. We’ve had our favorite moments and episodes over the past year.  We’re still gnawing on the insights shared by Dara Wilson Grant in an interview about stepping off the tenure track. We also recall the #gradInsurance debacle at Mizzou and how quickly the story unfolded after administrators cancelled graduate student health insurance coverage without notice. We met lots of cool people this year, including a tenure-track professor, a management consultant, and a member of the teaching faculty.  They’re doing vastly different jobs, but they all love their work. Never ones to shy from controversy, we also covered a lot of the endemic biases and blind spots that plague the scientific community.  There’s a measurable gender bias in science, and we’re still using the GRE for admissions even when it’s not a good predictor of success. We’re also not doing a good job of supporting the real powerhouses of most labs: the postdocs. All in all, it’s been a great year for the Hello PhD podcast and we’ve loved connecting with you and hearing your stories.  We hope you’ll continue to share your successes and struggles over the next year to keep the conversation going.  You can reach us any time at podcast@hellophd.com or on Twitter or Facebook. One last note – we’ll be releasing new episodes biweekly rather than every week in the coming year.  That should give you plenty of time to catch up on past episodes while you work in the tissue culture hood. Thanks for listening!      

Jessica was finishing her third year of grad school when she finally decided she had had enough. Funding had gotten tighter, and her PI had basically checked out.  Many of her lab-mates saw the writing on the wall, and left their projects behind to find other work. With no support from her advisor or peers, she had little hope of turning things around. And then her thesis project – the one she just proposed and defended – was scooped by a competing lab and published in a major journal.  It was the last straw. Jessica had three options: * She could quit immediately, and have no degree to show for her three years of work. * She could find some portion of the project to salvage as a Master’s thesis. * She could start all over and try to find a new lab. Amazingly, she chose Option 3. A Spork in the Road This week on the show, we invited Jessica into the studio to share her story. It’s an impossible position, but one that graduate students face every day – the day you can see the conclusion of your dissertation topic and it’s a dead end. The decision to forge ahead or cut your losses is so challenging because of the costly investment we make in graduate education.  Graduate school means taking a subsistence salary for an unpredictable number of years, living frugally or taking on debt.  It’s a time when friends and peers are gaining valuable experience for their resumes while you try and try again to get your Western blot bands to appear with “publication quality.” It’s painful, too, because of the binary outcome.  You either get the degree, or you don’t.  There’s no “92%” when it comes to a PhD, even if you’ve completed all that work. Jessica shares the play-by-play mental and emotional process she went through during that fateful third year: realizing her current situation was untenable, remembering the optimism that had brought her to grad school in the first place, and facing her uncertainty about the future. She describes how she decided to start over in a new lab with a totally new project, and how she found a PI who would take her on after what looked like failure to the outside world. In the end, she earned her PhD.  Now she’s doing work she loves in the way she always imagined. If you’re considering a similar step out of grad school or into another lab, we hope hearing from Jessica will give you the inspiration and information you need to make an impossible choice.  Whatever you choose, we’d love to hear your story.  Email it to podcast@hellophd.com. You say Pecan, I say Pi’kahhhn As a special thanks to Jessica for sharing her story, we sample one of her favorite beers!  It’s the Lazy Magnolia Southern Pecan Nut Brown Ale brewed in Kiln, Mississippi.  It claims to be the first beer made with whole roasted pecans, but it’s only a matter of time before other breweries try it too. It’s apparently a little bit difficult to find, so let us know if you spot some in a store near you!

We’ve all had bad days in the lab: you throw out the supernatant you were supposed to save, or contaminate all the cells in tissue culture. It hurts, but the next day, you can start over and try again. Today on the show, we hear the true story of a woman who dropped a tube and splashed radioactive tritium all over her self, her bench, and the floor. And then things took a turn for the worse. Stop.  Just Stop. This week, our guests Nicole and Craig regale us with a tale of simple mistakes compounding with bad decisions.  We won’t spoil it for you – you have to hear it for yourself! We’re also excited to announce the launch of a website called Labmosphere by friend-of-the-show Juan Villalobos.  You’ll remember him from Episode 41 and his work on Peer Support at Oxford. Labmosphere has links and resources to improve and maintain your mental health while you complete your degree.  There’s even a place to share your stories and experiences with others. A few other resources we mentioned in this episode: The BenchWarmer’s Podcast – More tales from the world of science like the one you heard today. The National Postdoc Survey – Hurry up and take the survey if you haven’t yet! Prickly Paybacks This week, we’re drinking the Shiner Prickly Pear Summer Seasonal brewed in Shiner, Texas.  This was meant to punish Josh for making Daniel drink the ShockTop Lemon Shandy a few weeks ago. This beer combines all the fun of eating cactus with the flavor of blue Kool-aid. Just watch out for the spines!  

As a second-year grad student, Craig was making progress on an exciting project in a new lab. Then, one morning, the PI called Craig into his office. “I got a really generous offer to move the lab to Sweden.  Do you want to come with me?” Should I stay or should I go? You might think of your lab as a physical location in a building at your current University, but in fact, research is mobile.  If your mentor gets a better offer, she may choose to move across the country or around the world, taking her grant money with her. As a graduate student you’ll be forced to decide between the University and your research advisor. This week, we talk with two scientists who decided to stay with the University. Craig was a second-year grad student who had only been in the lab a few months when his advisor got an offer in Sweden.  At that point in his career, he was able to find another advisor who would take him, and he hadn’t lost much time. Chris was in a different situation.  His PI left during his fourth year, and rather than uproot his project and his life, he decided to stay behind. Now, he’s the last man standing in an empty lab.  That choice has expanded his responsibilities as he tries to complete a dissertation while migrating research and reagents to his PI’s new lab at a different University. The decision to follow a PI is difficult, but Craig and Chris were both at points in their graduate careers where it made sense to stay.  Let us know what YOU decided to do when your advisor moved on by emailing us. Two hearts are better than none By inviting some new friends into the studio this week, we also landed a case of excellent beer!  Bell’s Two Hearted Ale is a refreshing American-style IPA and is one of Josh’s favorites. Hey!  Save some for the rest of us!  

Shhhh!  There he is.  Behind that rack of Eppendorf tubes…. The elusive ‘Postdoctoral Fellow’ in his native habitat! If we’re quiet, we may be able to observe him as he completes an experiment, writes a few paragraphs in a grant proposal, and nurtures his young (i.e. graduate students.) Postdocs are difficult to study in the wild, and no one knows exactly how many of them exist outside of captivity. But thanks to a recent study from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), we are starting to understand their migration patterns as they leave the safety of the training lab and venture into the wider world. If only they’d wear tracking collars Last week on the show, we explored the embarrassing lack of data surrounding the number of postdoctoral fellows in American Universities.  We called for better tracking to improve training and prepare students for a broad variety of careers. This week, we get our wish, as Elizabeth Silva et al. help to shed a little bit of light on what happens to scientists after the postdoc period is over. In their study “Tracking Career Outcomes for Postdoctoral Scholars: A Call to Action” published in PLOS Biology last month, Silva and colleagues followed 1,431 postdocs from 28 training programs at UCSF.  The study ran from from 2000 to 2013, and represented labs from 277 different faculty members. So where did the postdocs go? Over 80% went on to careers we traditionally think of as ‘research’ in academia, industry and government.  Another 12% were in science-related careers like K-12 education, communication, policy, regulation, and business development. Another 4% sought more training, and 1% were classified as ‘other.’  While the bulk of postdocs stayed in research, not all went on to traditional tenure-track faculty positions.  In fact, the article implies that some labs produce more faculty-track trainees than others.  What’s their secret? In the end, we believe additional research like the UCSF study can help Universities to prepare their trainees for the full breadth of careers possible with a PhD. And while the UCSF data is important, it’s just a tiny snapshot of the overall ecosystem.  The authors call on other institutions to track their own students and trainees, so that we might begin to understand the lifecycle of a modern scientist. Beer and weed? To wash out the taste of last week’s Lemon Shandy, Josh picks up a top-shelf bottle of Clouds of Pale Gold Brett Farmhouse Ale from the Urban Family Brewing Co in Seattle.  It’s brewed with lemon and dandelion greens for a citrusy bitter one-two punch. And because it’s bottle conditioned, make sure you take the first pour.  Save the dregs for your friends and co-hosts!

It sounds like a simple question: how many postdocs are there in the United States? Maybe you want to know because you ARE a postdoc and you’re thinking about what kind of competition you’ll face for a faculty position. Maybe you’re a program manager at the NIH, and you’d like to direct extra funding toward STEM training and postdoctoral positions. Or maybe you’re a university administrator, and you’re wondering how the new labor laws will affect salaries this year. Well, too bad. No one actually knows how many postdocs there are. We Love to Count Things! Ah ah ah! And that’s the surprising answer.  In an era where we collect data on everything from the number of steps you took today to the composition of soil on Mars, no one seems to know how many postdocs we’re training at any given moment. Of course, there are ‘estimates’, but they range from under 40,000 to over 90,000!  How is it possible that we don’t have a better understanding of our scientific workforce and training outcomes? Participants in the Future of Research Symposium think we can do better.  They’ve called for better accounting and transparency for postdoctoral positions in universities across the country.  Only by tracking postdoc training and career outcomes can we improve the process for all scientists. When Life Gives You Lemons Also this week, we clear out the back of the fridge with a Shock Top Lemon Shandy.  The label proudly proclaims that it contains ‘natural lemonade flavor.’  Not lemon.  Not even lemon flavor.  But ‘lemonade flavor.’ Uhhhhhm…. No thanks.  

You’ve worked hard in your biopharma job, and you really love the position.  The team is passionate and dynamic, the product is starting to make an impact in the market, and you begin to imagine your long-term relationship with the company. But there’s one problem: it seems like no one with a Bachelor’s Degree can move up in the organization.  PhDs from outside the company are hired into management positions, while you and your colleagues get passed over for promotions. What’s going on? And do you really need a PhD to get ahead in your industry job? Go Back to Get Ahead? This week on the show, we field a question from a listener working at a biotech company who wonders whether she needs to go back to school to move forward at work. Dear Dan and Josh, I’m someone who is considering applying to grad school, and I am a big fan of your podcast. Your honesty and advice about the grad school experience have helped me greatly in considering this next big step. I have been out of undergrad for two years working as a research associate at a biotech startup. I am surrounded by optimism for the future of our product and the growth of the company, and it is exciting to imagine a future without ever going back to school. I am not alone here – more and more college grads are joining companies out of college and taking time off before getting degrees. What is new is that many people I encounter who have made this decision have a negative view of academia and do not want to go back to school. They are learning and solving scientific problems at a rapid pace on the job; why re-enter the “slog” of academia? On the other hand, though, managers at my company tell me there is opportunity for those without PhDs to grow and have a significant role in the company (the managers often have PhDs), I have observed these companies continuing to preference PhDs in the hiring process. My question is, is there opportunity for growth and achievement for the many of us who have chosen not to return to school? Or does the PhD still represent a unique skill set that cannot be achieved outside of academia? The simple answer is: no, there’s not some magical transformation that occurs in graduate school.  You can have similar formative experiences in industry and elsewhere. But the simple answer doesn’t explain the listener’s experience at work.  Despite the fact that employees can learn on the job, there is a cognitive bias in the working world that equates a doctorate with almost mythic abilities. Like all biases, PhD-reverence is a mental shortcut that can have some unintended consequences. For example, a hiring manager might overlook an extremely talented candidate with a Bachelor’s and years of experience and award the job to someone with a PhD fresh out of school.  The first candidate may have more training and sharper abilities, but that takes precious time to assess.  A PhD looks impressive with one glance at a CV. At the end of the day, PhD-bias is a palpable force in the workplace, even if your research field is irrelevant to the current position! You can certainly advance without the degree, but it will take persistence, strong networking skills, and a willingness to advocate for yourself with your managers.  If you can impress enough of your supervisors and are willing to ask to move up, you can make progress. But if you decide to go back to school, make sure you choose a program and a lab that will support your career goals.  Look for universities with a strong Technology Transfer Office, and find a PI that understands your desire to work in industry.  Not all of them do, and you’ll need their support to finish the degree and get back to work. It’s the trail mix of beer

Postdocs are some of the most productive scientists on the planet, but you wouldn’t know it if you looked at a pay stub.  For years now, postdoc salaries have remained stagnant in the low $40,000s, causing many young scientists to find other careers in other industries. But a recently announced bill from the Department of Labor could boost postdoc salary with the stroke of a pen.  Dubbed “FLSA” (Fair Labor Standards Act), employees earning less than the $47,476 per year would have to be paid overtime or have their hours cut back to 40 per week. Last we checked, most postdocs fit that description! Postdocs Put the ‘Labor’ in ‘Laboratory’ Before you get excited about earning time and a half on your 80 hour work week, please note that the most likely outcome is a salary increase.   Universities will not want to begin tracking time sheets for their postdoctoral trainees and your Western blot will not wait until morning, so overtime pay or work-hour-reductions are off the table.  That leaves one option: boost pay to $47,476 annually. Some have speculated that postdocs won’t qualify for the new thresholds, as they are ‘trainees,’ and not full employees.  The Director of the NIH, Francis Collins, has come out publicly in support of pay raises and has already decided to make the FLSA pay scale standard for postdocs paid out of National Research Service Awards (NRSA). It’s a small step, but one that we hope will signal change for postdocs around the country. Better Than a Tyrannostallion We’re celebrating more good news related to labor – a new baby for Daniel and his wife! On tap is the Rye Pale Ale from Ponysaurus Brewing in Durham, NC.  Aside from a tasty beer and a nightmarish mascot, Ponysaurus boasts the most non-sensical tagline ever written: “Ponysaurus: The Beer Beer Would Drink If Beer Could Drink Beer.” I’m sorry, what?

We know that stepping from academia to industry is met with scorn for the person ‘selling out’ and leaving the university, but there’s a subtler form of bias against those scientists who actually like to teach. The moment you consider applying for a university teaching position, your advisors and peers will come out of the woodwork to tell you what a bad idea that is. It’s unstable, a waste of your abilities, and you’ll be bored in just four days! And God forbid you mention a job that doesn’t offer tenure. This week on the show, we talk with a professor who took that fateful teaching job, and lived to tell about it.  In fact, she’s happier than she’s ever been.  Ignoring the Voices This week, we follow up on last week’s interview with Dr. Shannon Jones, the Director of Biological Instruction at the University of Richmond in Virginia. Though Dr. Jones was offered several positions on the tenure track at research universities, she knew her motivational profile and passions.  That included nurturing students on their own scientific paths through teaching and mentorship. But turning down offers for a job with tenure was no easy decision.  In fact, her colleagues advised her to stick with academia, citing many reasons why a teaching position was a bad idea: * Without tenure, there’s no job security. * The pay is terrible.  You can’t make a living teaching! * They’ll give all the good classes to tenured full professors – you’re going to be stuck teaching remedial biology to undergrads for the rest of your career. * There’s no chance for advancement – you’ll do the same work the rest of your career. * Applying for grants and doing bench research is what you’re trained for.  Teaching is a step down and a waste of your skills! And on it goes. But these are myths, biases, and simplifications that don’t hold up to scrutiny. As you read this list of myths, check your own intuition and experience.  If you find yourself nodding along with the naysayers, tune in to this week’s episode to find out how Dr. Jones addressed these concerns and many more. All Day is Not a “Session” This week, we enjoy the All Day IPA Session Ale from Founders Brewing Company in Grand Rapids, MI.   Curious about the notion of drinking all day, we look up the meaning of ‘session’ as it pertains to beer.  The etymology harkens back to a simpler time when employees were allowed to drink beer on their breaks. And for the record, citing precedent does not make it okay for you to bring a six-pack to work tomorrow!

Every day in a research lab is spent forming hypotheses, designing experiments, and examining data.  So it might surprise you to know that the scientific method is only rarely applied in the classroom. Wouldn’t it be transformative if the methods that professors use to teach science were tested and proven to be effective? Well, you’re in luck – we’ve found one such scientist who has focused her career on improving science education at the university level. The Leg Bone’s Connected to the Fumarate This week on the show, we interview Dr. Shannon Jones, the Director of Biological Instruction at the University of Richmond in Virginia. Dr. Jones’ sole focus is teaching and improving student outcomes as they train for careers in the biomedical sciences.  And as a scientist herself, she’s committed to improving the curriculum with evidence-based practices. How is a day in her class different from other bio classrooms? You may remember learning the Krebs Cycle “the old fashioned way.”  You memorized the names and structures of each chemical in the pathway and which enzymes and energy sources catalyzed the transitions. (The words pyruvate and Acetyl-CoA probably still give you nightmares.) At the end of the section, you took a test and immediately forget everything you had learned in order to cram the photosynthetic pathway into the same spot in your brain. Dr. Jones takes a different approach. She knows that the web provides a breadth of literature and learning available at your fingertips, so she’s more interested in how her students understand and synthesize what they’ve learned.  She presents data: a particular substrate has built up to unusually high levels in the cell.  Can the students figure out what part of the pathway is broken down, and how it might have happened? It’s a vastly different approach – asking students to solve a problem by learning the Krebs Cycle, rather than memorization for its own sake. And at the end of the term, her students do measurably better at recalling what they’ve learned. Tune into this episode for more insights into evidence-based learning practices, and how Dr. Jones can measure the success of her students. Hot Cuppa We take a break from ethanol this week (You’re welcome, livers!) to sample some tasty coffee.  Fact is, we had to record pretty early in the morning this week and we just weren’t up for the hard stuff. Instead, we turn up our noses at what’s dripping out of the percolator and dive into our own quirky notions of the perfect cup of joe.  It’s science meets snobbery with a splash of half ‘n half.

The good news is that your research project has gone well over the last few years, and you got your paper published. The bad news is that you published everything in that one paper, and you’re out of ideas. And you’re five years into the program. And your PI doesn’t want to help you anymore. How, exactly, are you supposed to get your research project out of the rut and back on track so you can graduate? Fasten Your Seatbelts That was the question posed by a listener this week.  And he’s probably not alone. Dear Josh and Dan, I am about to finish my fifth year in graduate school. We published my work several months ago in a good journal but I currently feel like I am in a rut. I started writing my manuscript early last year and it took over eight months and multiple rounds of peer review before the manuscript was finally published. The reviewers asked for more and more until, eventually, almost everything I’d worked on since joining the lab became included in the paper. It makes the paper great but it didn’t leave me much of a jumping off point for my next experiments. In fact, all of my proposed leads became dead ends. I’ve been working on more experiments but nothing has gone anywhere in over six months, which is really disheartening. Teaching responsibilities and other assignments have kept me from being able to focus on research like I used to be able to. Further, it feels like my adviser is no longer interested in my project. The only thing they want to talk about is another lab mate’s work and how something minor in my work tangentially relates to that work they are more excited about. I guess I’m writing because I am not totally sure what to do. I saw the light at the end but now I don’t. Do you have any suggestions for students in a rut like me? Sound familiar? First, we can commiserate about the glacial pace some journals take to get a paper published.  The constant back and forth with reviewers can ruin the excitement you once had for your results. But more importantly, we think the listener needs to change his focus: instead of finding ways to restart his research project, he should start taking steps toward graduation. Tune into this episode for more ideas on getting a project unstuck, or share your story with us by email.  We’re here to help! Here Be Dragons To celebrate the latest season of Game of Thrones, we’re drinking Seven Kingdoms Hoppy Wheat Ale from Ommegang Brewery in Cooperstown, NY.  It’s not clear what this beer has in common with the George R. R. Martin novels or the TV show, but it’s got a cork, and it’s pretty tasty! Winter is coming!  Er… actually summer is coming, but you catch my drift. And as promised, here is the ‘heartless’ cashew nut in fruit!  

What makes two PhDs who escaped from grad school years ago want to revisit all the highs and lows of their training?  Short answer: Beer! But the long answer: Grad school is no cakewalk – classes are challenging, experiments fail, and sometimes, PIs seem like they’re from another planet. We made it through one day at a time, relying on regular conversations and scheming over a beer at the end of a long week. Hello PhD is your chance to join those conversations and benefit from the experience of other scientists who have made their living in, and out of, the lab.  We want to help you take advantage of all of the great benefits of your science training experience, and avoid some of the mistakes and pitfalls. In this episode, we’ll share the origins of the Hello PhD podcast and how Dan and Josh (your fearless hosts) first met.  We’ll also lay out some of our goals for the show and how you can get involved. To celebrate our origins, we sample one of the beers that started us on the path to Hello PhD – the Top of the Hill Blueridge Blueberry Wheat.  It’s 64 ounces of blue-flavored goodness, with a couple of fresh berries dropped in for a surprise finish. The last layer of our origin story is the word-origin of “chromosome.” Now that you understand the DNA of the podcast, you may as well know the DNA of the word used to describe DNA… It’s like an etymological Inception!

Spoiler Alert: Working in a lab is tough. Yes, there’s the academic challenge, but it can also be an emotional roller-coaster when experiments fail, colleagues conflict, and you push yourself past the normal limits. When someone in your lab has a bad day, does it sound like this? Grad Student: (despondent sigh) “I can’t believe that PCR failed again.  I’m never going to graduate.” Lab Mate: (in a rush) “Yeah, that sucks.  Check your primers again.” Instead of finding support among peers and co-workers – the very people who understand how difficult lab can be – we often find indifference, dismissal, or half-hearted pity. But it doesn’t have to be that way. You Can Learn the Skills of Peer Support With a little bit of training in concrete skills like active listening, we can transform our everyday interactions into ones that actually build people’s confidence and help them to find their own solutions. Grad Student: (despondent sigh) “I can’t believe that PCR failed again.  I’m never going to graduate.” Lab Mate: (stopping) “Yeah, sometimes it feels like your whole degree is riding on getting one experiment to work. It’s depressing.” Grad Student: “Exactly! And with our funding so tight, I’m afraid to go into the PI’s office with another failure.” Lab Mate: “I know.  He’s really been crazy about the money.  He gets mad when experiments don’t work, but everyone knows that’s part of science.” Grad Student: “Yeah, well I have to find a way to make this work.  Maybe it’s my primers.” Lab Mate: “I can take a look at them with you if you want. Let me just run this stuff to the autoclave.” Grad Student: “That’d be awesome, thanks.  Maybe if it works this time, I’ll just forget to tell him about the last one that failed…” (smiles) It’s a made up situation, but things like this happen every day.  Our peers and lab mates reach out for support by expressing doubt, frustration, fear, and anxiety.  We have the choice to engage and support them, or to ignore the signs and dismiss their concerns. Walking the Talk This week on the show, we talk with Juan, a graduate student at Oxford who learned the skills of Peer Support through his college.  With over thirty hours of intensive training, he and a group of other students learned about active listening, nonviolent communication, and adaptive resilience. What’s more – they practiced those skills with each other, and then in their daily lives.  According to Juan, it transformed his experience in the lab. We ask Juan what Peer Support really means and what the training was like.  We also find out some concrete ways it’s made a difference in his lab and life. If you want to learn more, talk with the counseling service at your university to see if there’s an existing program nearby.  Together, we can make the scientific community a more supportive, creative, and affirming environment. That’s a Fine Ale! And since Juan is in England at the moment, he shares one of his favorite brews from Suffolk: “Old Speckled Hen.”  We’re just thankful it was ice cold and not served warm and flat!