Jolted Principle Investigator
I genuinely enjoy being a scientist. Apart from the thrill of finding things out, witnessing people enter the lab as novices and leave with experience and growth is a massive perk of running a scientific team. Not everything is rosy. I've overseen 17 master's theses, i.e. I've seen my share of talent and the void. What I'm about to share is new and unpleasant. This is about a project assistant, who I will call Raju here. He spent a year going through the motions, not contributing to the lab's progress. Three months ago, I asked him to leave the lab, leaving enough time for him to find his next step. We had committed for a year, which ended last week. And this is what happened yesterday: Raju first sent an email with only one Word file attached to it and no subject. I looked at the contents. I took it to the lab to show them how not to write a statement of purpose. The contents of the doc suggested he has extensive experience addressing stemness in C2C12 cells. That ...