Forbes has just published an article about professor’s career as the No. 1 of the least stressful jobs of 2013, and that has caused a huge uproar by many colleagues in the comments. Apparently, the article was written with misconceptions of what a professor’s life is like, based on innuendos and information from CareerCast. While the author has made an addendum after hearing a lot of angry comments in two days, the tone is disappointingly impersonal. Basically she only said I hear you, I am only relaying the message from CareerCast, thank you for your comments and I understand your life MAY be more stressful than portrayed. You can actually see how people are critical about that too, and I am not repeating that here.
For students who are fascinated about “doing research” as a career/becoming a professor, I encourage you to read through these discussions, as well as a followup article “Top 10 Reasons Being a University Professor is a Stressful Job” in Forbes by another contributor who has a science background to see the actual dedication that one has to put in to be in this profession.
Prof Pang and Chen first met with Prof. Marietta Harrison, Associate Vice-President for Research and Dr. Geanie Umberger, Assistant Vice President for Corporate and Foundation Relations to discuss collaborative plans between the Leung Lab, Purdue and JSIEC. Our long-term goal is to explore the opportunities in clinical eye research and drug screening in China.
From left to right: Dr. Umberger, Prof. Harrison, Prof. Pang, Prof. Leung, and Prof. Chen.
Then, Profs. Pang and Chen visited the Bindley Bioscience Center. Dr. Tommy Sors, the Center Project Manager, showcased the Purdue’s infrastructure for preclinical investigations.
From left to right: Prof. Chen, Prof. Leung, Prof. Pang and Dr. Sors.
Finally, there was a dinner gathering with Prof. Marietta and other distinguished professors from the Department of Biological Sciences to celebrate friendship and new collaborative relationships.
Back row: Prof. Don Ready, Prof. Chen, Prof. Leung and Dr. Liyun Zhang, postdoctoral fellow in the Leung Lab. Front row: Prof. Bill Pak, Prof. Marietta, Prof. Pang, and Prof. Richard Kuhn.
I have been paying attention to the ongoing discussion on open access to scientific research in the news media and have collected a number of interesting articles. Here I will keep a record of a few interesting ones
I once wrote about the difficulty in getting access to the research papers here and I had to ask my friends from my home country to download that for me. The expensive journal subscription is obviously one reason that caused the problem. Obviously publishing in high-quality, open access journals with publisher like PLOS and BMC can be a good solution. However for many practical reasons, i.e. to survive and be recognized, scientists often do not act what they advocate is good. Let’s hope the field can wise up and treasure what is actually important to us.
“Why is it that we can’t find any money for more faculty, but there seems to be an almost unlimited budget for administrators?” asks J. Paul Robinson, a Purdue University professor of biomedical engineering and chairman of the school’s faculty senate. Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg
This is an interesting story that I came across last week. It started with a guy playing with his ex-girlfriend’s pregnancy test… and the result was positive! He told his friend about it and he made a rage comic and posted it on reddit.
Several users pointed out that he should check with his oncologist, and he did. As it turns out, he had a rare form of testicular cancer that would produce human chorionic gonadotropin, a hormone that is being detected in the pregnancy test. This (un)fortunate incident helped his early detection of the cancer and saved his life.
They announced the update through another rage comic again.
