Career/Vet School Doubts

[cyrille104]

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Can I get a job in your lab?
A research techs life a nutshell: PCR, DNA/RNA/Protein Isolation, Cell Culture, Western Blot, Elisa, Immunohistochemistry and the same types of rat or mouse surgeries week after week. It seems like a variety but gets old after doing it 40hrs/week for 3 years. Yeah, sometimes we do other random, cool stuff but generally you repeat the same assays with different samples over and over.
If you're a post-doc/grad student it's more writing thrown in, and the Primary Investigators spend most of their time writing grant applications, and telling people like me what benchwork to do.
I also think people should do more than just undergrad research to really get a feel for it...I've found it very different.

So, IMHO I think you have to truly care about research to make a career of it.

Maybe that's true of research techs...I guess I've had a unique experience in that I actually got my own grant to do original research and I'm in charge of designing and performing all the experiments that I want. For me it has been very dynamic, and I'm doing something new every day.

On the other hand, I knew that it would be like this in the lab that I'm in...and I had to fight to get into the lab because the PI told me no twice before letting me in. So if you're interested in doing research, try to get into a lab that lets you work independently, even as an undergrad.