Lab Workers

Labrats of Veeky Forums, what do you do?

I've been doing food safety microbio for years, good times.

I'm a chemistry Master's student working for a physics work group on the side. One of their PhD students is working on graphene oxide which I have to prepare. Entry level shit (I don't even need a Schlenkline) but good money and a safe work group to do my Master's thesis in.

Mouse work in the field of GVHD. Lots of flow cytometry.

Nothing because no professors here want me and so no good letters of recommendation so no chance for REU..probably end up applying to MS with no research experience...

Qa analyst otc pharma, looking to break into micro/molec lab role

Yeah i did not like doing QA, would prefer QC but i like doing the lab tests the most, less paperwork.

first year phd student
using E. coli to study rice metabolic enzymes
analysis done with GC-MS mostly

synthetic biology research for a startup
it’s overwhelming and busy as hell but it’s also interesting and the pay is really fucking good (~$170k for a Bio PhD level position in San Diego) so I’m happy

that's rad, how many years and moneys did it take to get your PhD?

HPLC monkey at a factory

I want to die.

>HPLC
My company offers that but I've never seen it done in person.

Is that the only thing you do? Did it have a silver lining at first?

I think the main thing keeping me at my job even though the pay sucks, is variety. Getting to do sample prep, petridish and plate count reading, FDA paperwork and qPCR / Vidas / confirmation steps. [spoiler]Who am I kidding it's all the free food and cheese keeping me here.[/spoiler]

Im really trying to go do synbio in grad school, any tips? Where did you go?

Manufacturing tech. Synthesis and purification of custom mRNA. 43k salary plus overtime out of college. Astoundingly mediocre; I want something more interesting.

>microbio

my n e g u s

first year masters student
studying selenoproteins and c.diff metabolism
mostly just standard protein purification

Fourth year molbio phd candidate, studying plant hormone signaling

Brain slice electrophysiology. Testing how different substances alter electric responses in neonatal brain.

You're doing it wrong. Find a grad student who wants and undergrad and have them get the professor to let you into the lab.

I work at an industrial biotech company. I'm working on a few projects to scale up genetic engineering techniques to high throughput levels. It's chill.

Honestly being at a company with resources is so much better than being in an academic lab. Supplies are always in stock. I can order stuff like media, oligos, built plasmids, analytics of samples, sequencing, etc from other divisions in the company and they just make it happen.

>tfw work in a poor lab in academia

i just want 1-L centrifuge bottles so we don't have to bum the other lab's bottles everytime we need to do a fucking spin down

I work in a mat sci lab studying exchange bias of thin films. It's pretty fun desu

The only explosion I’ve ever caused in a lab was during the synthesis of graphine oxide. The protocol called for taking regular graphite, and then oxidizing the fuck out of it (go figure). A ton of KMnO4, and then 90% conc. H2SO4 and 10% concentrated H3PO4. Our first synthesis wasn’t giving us good results, so we decided to double the amount of KMnO4. Before we could finish adding the acid, there was a loud bang, and fire erupted from the beaker. Luckily nothing escaped the hood. I called it a day after that one.