Free time during PhD years?
Started by premd
There is potentially more free time during your PhD years than during any other time of your life after college. You can choose to take advantage of this and do things like pursue outside interests, start a family, etc. Or you can decide that you want to work your butt off 7 days a week, 12 hours a day. There are some people who do this because they want to finish your PhD in 4 years instead of 5 or 6. There are others who do this because they really love their work so much that they don't see it as work or have relatively few outside interests. There are a few people who are watching you who want you to work hard, for different reasons. Your PI will want you to work hard so that he or she can bask in the glory of your achievements. Your MSTP will waht you to work hard so that it seems to applicants and to the NIH that the students finish their program quickly. However, you have to decide whether it's more important to please these people, or to have a life outside of work. Also, your time in the lab is determined to a large extent by how efficient you are, i.e. how much time you spend on SDN vs. pipetting, or whatever you do to make progress in your work.
QofQuimica
Seriously, dude, I think you're overreacting....
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It's all relative, I suppose. You potentially have a lot more free time during grad school than you do during med school, mainly because you have so much more control over your time. When I was in grad school, there was no obstacle to deciding that I felt like taking an afternoon off or that I was going to work from noon to 4 AM today instead of coming in at nine. I could usually schedule my vacations whenever I wanted. Med school schedules are much more rigid. I can't exactly decide that I'll be coming in to clinic an hour late today just because I feel like it, you know? 😉
you'd be surprised at how many hotshots are studying olfaction. linda buck and richard axel are two recent nobel laureates that come to mind.
I study olfaction 🙂. I have a funny story about Linda Buck, but to tell it would peg my identity immediately to anyone who attended the same conference. My point was that, given the narrowness of what I do, I would be amazed if I ever got scooped (knock on wood), so there is less pressure on me. However, if I were trying to solve the structure of the ribosome, back when that was hot, I would know that dozens of other people were trying to do exactly the same thing at that very moment, and that only one of us actually would.
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