Toxic Academia | Part 6: Semester 3 — the pandemic project.
It’s Fall 2020, we are still working from home.
Given the nature of the work my Co-PI Eileen does, we have plans for a third project involving the pandemic. This project involves collecting three kinds of data, and the data to pilot this project is collected over the summer. For anyone not familiar, “pilot” can be thought of as “practice”. Getting data is very expensive, and experiments usually involve trial and error. So a lot of the time, only a small number of samples are obtained for experiments, and once we know the experiments worked, we can go back and get more samples. This was the plan for this project, which will have three data types that will be evaluated by three of us:
Data type 1: Will be evaluated by Mike, a scientist in Eileen’s lab I had met previously.
Data type 2: Will be evaluated by me, and is a type of data that is brand new to the field so I will be pioneering the pipelines to evaluate it. Cool but scary.
Data type 3: Will be evaluated by our newest PhD student, Elizabeth. This is a type of analysis I had started learning for my first two projects, so it is communicated to me to work on this with Elizabeth and mentor her since I had experience with this.
Wow, we are going to be working on something relevant to society in real time! Unfortunately, Alan will be doing the experiments for this project and will be involved in the downstream process. Remember him? He sent me an cringy selfie. So, I start meeting regularly with Alan and Elizabeth. Now I have three projects:
Project “Alpha” with Rob, a scientist in Eileen’s lab.
Project “Beta” with Alan, a post-doc in Eileen’s lab.
and now, Project “Omega” with Elizabeth and Alan.
I’m even busier than ever, but I’m happy because I have these really great opportunities. I need to figure out to analyze this new type of data, off to it.
XX Rosie Frank
