You’re in the midst (mist?) of your PhD. People tell you that there is life beyond this, but it is hazy at best. You’d like to somehow start preparing for the next stage of your career evolution but how, exactly? There are a few things you can start doing now…

TL;DR talk to current students & trust your instincts — Recruitment season is finally over, and you have a couple of weeks to decide where you’d like to spend the next chunk of your life. …

When I was born, my grandfather was 73 years old. Most of my memories about him are from when he was in his 80s, 90s, and even 100s. He lived 103 years — an absolutely unfathomable amount of time to spend inhaling and exhaling air on this planet. …

His autobiography will make you laugh, cry, and appreciate the underdogs of the brain — There are very few stories like Ben Barres’. There could be more out there, but as it goes, sometimes you need to hear someone else’s story before you can recognize your own. It wasn’t until Ben Barres read a local news release written by a trans man that he had…

We need to get past the essentialist mindset about coding — When our summer intern Daniel first joined the lab, he seemed terrified of MATLAB. And I can’t blame him — encountering a programming language in the wild is intimidating, especially when you sign up for a summer research program and they ask you to declare upfront whether you’re “computational” or…

You don’t need a neuroscience background, and it might even help if you don’t. You do, however, need research experience. — You’ve given it some thought, and a neuroscience PhD could be in your future. So, what do you need to get there? Undergraduate degrees before the PhD In theory, you could come from almost any academic background before coming into neuroscience, as long as you also have research experience (see below). According to a recent…

What to consider when you’re considering — Perhaps at some point during your childhood your partially-developed (and frankly, self-absorbed) brain thought to itself, “I wonder how brains work.” Or perhaps you’ve been doing neuroscience research and although you’d never admit this — you kinda like poking brains. …

Authorship can be a difficult topic for many researchers, especially when it is their first publication in a lab. Fortunately for you, dear friend*, I’ve devised four useful rules when it comes to deciding authorship on a paper: You should talk about authorship before you think you need to talk…

In the timescale of humanity learning about how things work, our somewhat organized investigation of the nervous system is relatively new. There was a ragtag group of guys at Walter Reed in the 1950s who did a mix of behavioral and anatomical research, but Harvard takes the prize for the…