Quality control

Whenever I meet first years still doing rotations or undergrads considering grad school I explicitly tell them to avoid labs like y'alls.

I mean yes, you absolutely should be there late/on weekends as your experiments demand, but nobody in a lab environment should be treating weekends as regular work days that they're expected to be there for. It's in nobody's best interests, not even the PI's, to burn out their students and have them stop giving a single fuck about their work at year four. It's an unhealthy culture that needs to die as fast as possible.

at least in chemistry, a BSc and an MSc are pretty much seen as equal. The MSc has a few more opportunities, but simply not as much as the PhD. PhDs are proven research scientists that should know how to hold their own and provide themselves direction in research. until you are in the lab for 4+ years everyday fucking around with chemicals and machines, you just dont have the experience.

So i can see why chemists are underpaid at the BSc level, but at the same time its really unfair towards the person who has a wealth of technical knowledge to be paid minimum wage.

your friend with the MSc will most likely be promoted / get pay bumps relatively quickly though.

I just got to grad school and the only labs I hear driving actual slave labor are organic labs. Sure, some people come in of their own will because they want to get their shit done and move on with their life, but a guy I met the other day said he has been in lab from 8am to 8pm every day, including saturday and sunday.

We arent even grad students yet, this is a summer introductory program. some professors are slave drivers.

>all these grad school stories

Im scared guys

this, I'm seriously considering going for grad school in computer science after completing my mol. bio bachelor's just to avoid going through a grad school lab experience like the ones mentioned in this thread

Although not every lab will be like this, but I hear many stem cell labs require students to be literal slaves and working every day for ungodly hours. This madness has to stop imo.

>when I grow up I wanna be famous, I wanna be a star, I wanna be in movies
>when I grow up I wanna see the world, drive nice cars, I wanna have groupies
>when I grow up MTV, people love me, be on magazines
>but be careful what you wish for 'cause you just might get it, you just might get it

it entirely depends on the PI you end up with.

science, understandably, concentrates the kind of people with a work ethic of "if you're not in lab 24/7 you're garbage" and zero personality skills, but there ARE lots of people who are actually reasonable with their expectations

talk to grad students, ask for the horror stories, and avoid the fuck out of the PIs you hear shit about. talk to the current graduate students for each PI before you rotate, find out what kind of hours they pull and what the lab culture is like

my lab? people are in on the weekends, sure, if they need to be, but not more than a couple hours on one of the days (barring super crunch time on grants). it's more about, setting stuff up for monday that needs incubation or growth time or whatever, so you can get stuff done monday and not waste the day. or prepping media, bullshit like that. sometimes i bring a beer and watch a movie while i'm waiting on the autoclave.

i pull 8-10 hour days usually, more if i really have to or if i fuck up and start something in the late afternoon that needs lots of incubation steps. we also have postdocs with families and children who work strict 9-5 but get just as much work done as the grad students with more time (more, sometimes). and if you're there on on the weekend or late on a weeknight, you might see one or two people around, but it's not like anyone is living here after-hours.

now, i had a friend who WAS in one of those labs where you basically live there. he was pulling 12+ hour days 6-7 days a week. his PI wasn't a slavedriver, exactly, he just was a zero-social-skills workaholic and that set the tone for the lab culture for everyone else. he was slowly dying and i hated it, but then he wised up and transferred labs.

consider doing a PhD in bioinformatics. you keep your foot in the biology but get a useful degree in something compsci related.

This shit right here is why I'm doing computational quantum chem in grad school. The mathematics behind it is interesting, and I dont have to suit-up for ungodly hours and be away from home. The super computer is accessable via VPN, and I can program in my underwear in the comfort of my apartment.

>Why would anyone ever willingly pursue a career in this?

Why would anyone pursue a career in anything?
Some combination of money, personal interest and social status.

Are you retarded or something? Is QC some kind of meme job in the US and you just repeat it?

I guess my job would technically be qualified as quality control.

I determine the activity of brachytherapy "seeds" and make sure they're correct for each patient, make sure they are sealed, calibrate the detector equipment for NIST, etc.

I just took the job, and they said they have a career path set out for me to become a staff physicist, which would require me to get my masters in medical physics later, and my job title is physicist now, but i'm basically in a quality assurance type of role.

The pay's decent at 60K (equivalent to 90K in LA for same cost of living/quality of life)

I'm the guy that had the job offer from Lockheed to join their compact fusion program but got fucked due to "restructuring"

Sounds like a comfy gig.

Jesus fuck does it suck.
I currently work for a biotech company that tests pharmaceuticals for stability, things that are on the market and things that are not, tons of clinic shit. My day consist of seeing what is on my list to do and then reading a method word for word and following that method word for word. Then the QC department gets the more boring job of just reading my shot to see if I made errors.

I will summarize with this. When I worked my factory job I was making more money and getting a work lifting shit all day and I didn't need a degree for this job. Currently using my degree, I make less money and have a glorified desk job. I wouldn't recommend any quality based job to anyone currently because of how fucking mind numbing it is.

However, I have been trained in a fuck load of techniques that I didn't previously know, so it helped build my resume.

>for a living
you sound like my Grandpa

> but nobody in a lab environment should be treating weekends as regular work days

we have mice colonies in which we get the necessary mice we need for experiments wed/thur/friday. This means most of my experiments run fri/sat/sun. It has to be set up this way or else the lab tech has to come in every single saturday/sunday and get's paid an insane amount of overtime to the point of running the lab into ruin (plus, these lab techs are normally fresh out of undergrad). By the way, lab techs usually get paid 1.5-2x the amount grad students do and are on the clock.

It's my dream research, and it has to be this way unfortunately.

>tfw

we'll all be great scientists one day, anons. right?

that's fucked up user. If i was a physicist and I missed out on that lockheed opportunity I'd be red in the face and throwing punches...

At least you got a pretty sweet job now. I don't think many physics majors get jobs in their field like that. let alone paid for masters degrees.

First and foremost, some people (not myself) find the scientific methodology behind QC and QA absolutely breathtakingly interesting. For those of us who have friends, the topic is boring, but necessary work. The pay isn't as awful as some posters are claiming it is, however you have to be a little more firm as to what you want your salary to be. Most people who get into QC biology/chemistry tend to be the people who weren't too shit hot during their college careers, and so decided to take the industry job where 80% of individuals inevitably wind up. This also is because QC careers can let you go anywhere from food and drug industry to automotive to materials inspections. Face the facts Veeky Forums, most private institutions (see also, not universities) don't provide niche` research opportunities in some field that is perfectly tailored to your interests and skills. They actually require many of the same business, technical, and professional skills that any other job would require for advancement.

>tl;dr
It's where industries want people

I actually graduated with an engineering degree, but I did a lot of stuff with detectors and measurement of radiation in undergrad, which is why they were interested in me.

>some people (not myself) find the scientific methodology behind QC and QA absolutely breathtakingly interesting
I think reliability engineering is interesting, though it's not my field. That didn't prevent me from not having friends, though.

Same here except I'm a bioinformatician.

>usually do 10-12 hour days.
I guess you've never had a job in your sorry life

>TA got his PhD and he's off to work for a company that monitors shellfish toxins
>doing QA
>$13/hr
>mfw my shitty ass side-job during highschool paid $16/hr
>he got a PhD so he can get paid $13/hr

Suicide watch etc

No your autism and love of Veeky Forums did that.

I work in a quality control lab, mostly using different types of chromatography and particle sizers.

Its pretty comfy. 40k/year, get paid to learn new things on the job, and when production's slow, can sit around reading or shitposting on Veeky Forums. The only bad part is rotating 12 hour shifts.

I would, at some point, actually like to work in a research lab, though. But that's another reason to do QC; to get relevant work experience to throw in your resume.

literally what

I want to help people survive when they eat a can of ravioli.
The job.

Prolly cover up for drug R&D & smuggling. He develops new superdrugs and gets paid in untraceable untaxable ways.

>Meanwhile, after your 30th straight day in a row going into lab, writing massive amounts for the paper that was supposed to go out a month ago,

....your project gets scooped and someone else published on it first.

This.

just got into a PhD program in europe

>5-6 years of 25k salary grad school
31k for the first year, rising to 37k, 39k, 41k (salary in euros, usd equivelant= 35, 41, 43, 45k)

4 years contract, funding runs out whether you graduate or not, you could take extra time on unemployment to finish your thesis if necessary

>your boss tells you that you need or else he can't pay you

the whole thing is completely funded as soon as you are hired/selected (its a job here so its very competitive and difficult to get into a PhD)

>cushy, QC job

Ultimately thats a very fair point -in the United States- in no other countries in the world can an individual make 80,100, 120k for a normal job

Can confirm QC/QA sucks. Physics grad working for Dominos, I'm the one that does the quality check when the pizzas are finished.
Kill me.

What machine is she using in OP's pic? Looks like our FT-IR spec. Why would you ever need to use that in quality control?

>why would you take a comfy and relatively secure job instead of being a miserable poor overworked piece of shit in academia

>why would you give up on your dreams instead of deluding yourself you're pursuing them; it's just one more year of this provisional life and you'll finally begin

What's your face when your levey-jennings graph is out of range?

You best be trolling

> I used to laugh at theatre majors because I thought they were delusional children that didn't have realistic goals and will never reach their 'dreams'
>mfw now