I want someone to do a study (or, actually, several studies) on grad students working in labs. Here are some ideas so far::
- Repetitive Stress: No, I'm not referring to the chronic stress from advisor expectations or the constant disappointments. The ergonomics peeps should study repetitive stress due to pipette use, or overuse as the case may be. It's a legitimate problem I worry about.
- Blindness: I'm pretty sure that sitting in a dark room for hours staring into a microscope, scanning for and taking pictures of fluorescent-glowing cells is likely going to cause long-term damage to my perfect vision. Prospective cohort?
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| Fig. 1. The scariest looking lab worker pipetting something colorful (generally not the case). |
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| Fig. 2. Approximate size of and light availble in the room containing the microscope. |
3. General measures of sanity. I think this might actually be ongoing in certain departments-- the attempt to monitor stress and its effects on certain health outcomes. I believe one was related to cancer, actually... Imagine that headline when the study reaches mainstream media-- "Scientists say, Grad school gives you cancer!"
1) Repeat Pipettors.
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3) Free Friday Happy Hour
While none of these are in the budge of most research labs (that operate under the "if i had to suffer than so will you" mentality), they make the real world a much more enjoyable place.
If you had these during grad school, what would be your incentive to graduate?
We sort of have the first one, but I don't use them correctly I think. And keep dreaming on the last two, definitely no room in the budget for those ;)
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