Jessica Polka

A Postdoc Is a Postdoc Is a Postdoc?

November 21, 2014

“Postdocs” may share a common colloquial (if not official) title, but their benefits and compensation actually vary widely from institution…

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Poster Advice, Timeless and Otherwise

November 7, 2014
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With the annual meeting fast approaching, it’s time once again to start putting together your poster. There are innumerable websites…

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How Competitive Should Science Be?

August 29, 2014
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Duncker, Karl (1945). On Problem Solving, Psychological Monographs, 58, American Psychological Association OCLC: 9687931Intense competition in the biomedical sciences has…

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Know What You’re Getting into Before Grad School

August 8, 2014
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There are many reasons for wanting to go to graduate school: You want to become a professor, you love pipetting…

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For Scientific Publishing, the Future is Now

July 25, 2014
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Will traditional publishing go the way of the printed journal? Photo by Robert Cudmore (CC BY-SA 2.0)A collaborator and I…

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Where Will A Biology PhD Take You?

April 11, 2014
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Based primarily on the 2012 NIH Workforce report this infographic represents current workforce sizes and annual fluxes before and after…

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Exotic Electronic Lab Notebooks

April 4, 2014
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By proteinbiochemist http://www.flickr.com/photos/proteinbiochemist/ A few weeks ago, we heard about two of the most popular tools for maintaining a lab notebook: Evernote…

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Are You Still Reading PDFs? Try Lens

February 28, 2014
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When reading a paper, I often find myself furiously flipping back and forth between the text and figures. This is…

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Seven Reasons to Take the MBL Physiology Course

January 21, 2014
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When I took the MBL Physiology course in Woods Hole, MA, in 2008, I couldn’t have anticipated how powerfully it…

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Six Uses for Old Posters

January 3, 2014
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With the Annual Meeting behind us, thousands of ASCB posters are now floating around the world. If my colleagues are…

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