Happy Holidays!!!

Wishing everyone happy holidays and all the best for 2012!!!

Ticked off - and really happy!

As scientists our jobs involve a lot of project management: I myself at this moment am running three projects within one umbrella project, and this requires good organisation skills, good time management and note keeping.  Note keeping I would say is the most important, and although I am the first to admit I am not perfect: I have recorded notes in pencil instead of pen *gasp* - but only because I had lost my pen down the back of the bench - and I scribble and scrawl instead of, er, write; I do make an effort to get everything down of what I have done that day - what the outcome was and what I am going to do next.  I cannot describe how frustrating and sometimes how nerve-wracking it is, while you are setting up a complicated experiment - that may have to run its course overnight or over the weekend - for you to get distracted for one tiny second and forget what you have just done, or just added!!! At this point you have two choices: you can either throw it all away and start again - and waste materials (possibly some of which you have had to meticulously prepare yourself) and time and money, OR, you can continue, hoping that you have just done what you thought you had done right,

.......and spend the rest of the evening or your weekend biting your nails off.

SO ALL HAIL THE GREAT LAB BOOK! (Or laptop, note pad, ipad, whatever you prefer), the great keeper of reaction mixtures! - where every ticked off component is a swipe of  relief and assurance that it has been truly added and is contributing to your experiments success! (Or you'd hope so).

Yes, note keeping is important, and in this job it can be a very reassuring and pleasing to be ticked off all the time! 

Scientist gets hen pecked by wife for not taking a better paid job

With global recession apparently looming next year, I thought it would be a good idea to check out some TV programmes that could provide some good useful insight on how to deal, sensibly, with money.  On BBC2 (UK) there is a fairly new series dedicated to the subject, with the first episode based on taxes: who pays what, who doesn't want to pay what, and how much in terms of benefits do we get out of it all (incidentally, national insurance is the same thing as income tax! I never knew that!!!)  This weeks exciting episode was on couples, and tonight a group of them were invited to discuss their issues with their shared finances (oohhh, I said, elbowing my partner, this is interesting!)

All the couples came from very different backgrounds and had very different views on the subject, but my attention was caught by these two:

She works in a lawyers office and he works as a researcher at Manchester University; he is the breadwinner.  They have a very nice house, a nice family and seem pretty well off, but she is not happy.  She states that her partner is tight with money, is paranoid and that "all fun is banned from this house!" In front of the camera and with her red-faced partner beside her, she criticises his selfishness; that while he is doing a job that he loves, he is causing "suffering" to their children in that his pay check does not bring home enough to guarantee them a good future.  She wants the children to go to private school, she wants bright futures for them, and having seen the people in her work place earning triple the amount he does, she wishes for him to retrain for another profession, like accountancy : "Someone of your talent will have no problem doing that! Most of the general public do jobs they don't want to do for money!"

It is stated in the programme that the man earns £34,000, indicating that he is probably a senior post doc.  The salary is above the national average, but with children, a mortgage and other bills to pay, that really doesn't amount to much, so is his partner right?  The poor guy stresses that he loves his job and that he can't see himself doing anything else, but is that enough?

More and more scientists are realising that obtaining tenure and funding in academia is becoming increasingly difficult.  Even if we love our jobs there may come a day we have to find pastures new.  But is our passion all for nothing? Is our efforts all in vain? As mentioned in my previous blog Fat cats and dead rats it seems that academic science is the only profession where its professionals are treated so poorly in terms of job security, pay and benefits.  Should we become more selfish (or selfless, for our families as in this case)

....and all become accountants??       

Sources:  BBC2 Money: Couples