Flyceum: Your Science. Your Career.

An “Elevator Pitch” – the idea that you should be able to explain your idea, project or lab within a 20-30 second elevator ride – is like explaining your project in a Tweet.  You’ve got to trim the fat and get to the point, or else you just get cut off.  Never has the art of brevity been more important than in today’s society, where people face constant information and sensory overload.  In every interaction, people are constantly forced to make a quick judgment call on whether what they’re hearing is worth their time.

Despite understanding the concept of the elevator pitch, it can often be very difficult to craft, especially when you’re working on a very specific problem that needs a few minutes of background to be put in context.

Or so you think….

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You’ve decided to join a small company, so you sign the contract and celebrate with some friends.  The next day, amidst a pounding headache, the stress sets in.  A new world awaits… what’s going to happen?  What do they expect?  Was that the right decision?

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One of the classic choices facing grad students or postdocs looking to move into industry is whether to join a large or small company.  For most of us, who have only academic research experience when looking for that first job, there is little opportunity to understand what really goes on in companies.  In many cases, it’s not until you accept the position and begin working that the consequences of the decision are finally apparent…for better or worse.

To shed some light on small company life, we interviewed Patrick Hillas, Ph.D. about the transition from academics to biotech, the pros and cons of the decision and the expectations placed upon new hires.

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It was almost midnight at the end of a very long day and my friend Walter and I were sitting at our benches, half-delirious, joking about protocols to film.  As if sent from above, our labmate, whose language would make the father from “A Christmas Story” blush, walked into the room right on cue.[Continue Reading…]

We are incredibly fortunate to live in this era.  We’ve got a front-row seat to watch the collision of the internet and science.  Over the next decade, we can expect major changes in the scientific process – from teaching to learning to the way we think about publication.

Whatever happens, we, BenchFly, pledge that the following statement will always be true:

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Choosing a good scientific problem is essential for being a good scientist. But what is a good problem, and how to choose one? The subject is not usually discussed explicitly within our profession. Scientists are expected to be smart enough to figure it out on their own and through observation of their teachers. This lack of explicit discussion leaves a vacuum that can lead to approaches such as: choose problems that can give results that merit publication in valued journals, resulting in a job and tenure.

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Problem:

The moment when a new idea is conceived is incredibly energizing.  The moment when a boss shoots it down is not.  In my experience, having a strategy to manage this situation is key to getting the approval needed to move the project forward.

Solution:

In this post, we will present a universally effective “three-ory” as an approach to deal with this problem.

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The Problem:

The world of science can be surprisingly small and news travels fast.  When speaking your mind about potentially sensitive professional and ethical issues, privacy is essential.

The Solution:

Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.  We’ve designed BenchFly to give you added protection in the part of the site we think you’ll need it most.

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I did a lot of cloning as a graduate student, and even more as a postdoc.  In total I’ve now cloned somewhere around 300 constructs.  As we all know, one of the real bottlenecks in cloning can be the ligation reactions.  Using traditional ligase, it takes three nights (set up ligation, transform bacteria, pick colonies) to get to purified DNA.  And this is assuming we haven’t had to insert any black magic ceremonies to get the reaction to work in the first place.

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The Problem:

The lab notebook is probably the single most important document you maintain as a scientist.  It records protocols, stores data and serves as a legally-binding record of your work.  But let’s be honest, we all neglect our notebooks to some degree.  This is nothing to be proud of, but it’s reality.  Sometimes it’s our fault – “we’ll download that data from the computer later”… and sometimes it’s more naïve “we just didn’t know what to do.”  Unfortunately, neither is a good excuse.

The Solution:

What follows are 3 steps to keeping a proper lab notebook.

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