Graduate students feel overwhelmed in high-performing labs
11 posts across 5 communities in the last 60 days; 46% from r/PhD.
“Does anyone have any advice for getting peace and quiet working in a lab? I am now nearing the end of my third year of my PhD with no first author paper published yet but having the plan going forward to turn what i did so far with some more experiments and mostly grunt work…”
“1st semester biology PhD US student here. We are rotation based and I'm in Rotation #1, a bioinformatics lab with a PI who is known as intimidating, intense, but also supportive. I'm on week 4/7 and wish I could end the rotation early. I met with the PI once before I started in…”
“hi everyone! i wanted to get advice on my situation. i currently do research in a wet lab and have been for the past 1.5 years, having around 900 hours in this lab alone. i’ve done a couple poster presentations, a research internship where i was “published” in our schools annual…”
Multiple graduate students express feeling overwhelmed and behind due to the fast pace of work and high expectations within their research labs. They worry about their performance compared to peers and question how to best navigate this challenging environment.
SOURCES (11)
“1st semester biology PhD US student here. We are rotation based and I'm in Rotation #1, a bioinformatics lab with a PI who is known as intimidating, intense, but also supportive. I'm on week 4/7 and wish I could end the rotation early. I met…”
“Does anyone have any advice for getting peace and quiet working in a lab? I am now nearing the end of my third year of my PhD with no first author paper published yet but having the plan going forward to turn what i did so far with some more experiments and mostly grunt work into three papers. My issue is that every time I actually think I can just push ahead and work late/early someone or something interupts. Be it suddenly new teaching duties that make staying late a bad idea as they start at”
“hi everyone! i wanted to get advice on my situation. i currently do research in a wet lab and have been for the past 1.5 years, having around 900 hours in this lab alone. i’ve done a couple poster presentations, a research internship where i was “published” in our schools annual pamphlet, but have no paper publications and honestly don’t see one coming extremely soon. i really enjoy my lab work and feel ive developed a good relationship with my mentor and my PI, so id love to stay in this lab. d”
“This is a question for professors and lab directors: What standard do you set for lab documentation? In grad school, we had a paper lab notebooks. Highly variable quality student to student. In my first industry role, we also had paper lab notebooks but more rigorous structures were enforced about content AND we had to sign each other’s notebook pages. In my most recent industry job, we switched to Google Docs with templates for experiments. Which standards and tools are you enforcing in your la”
“3rd year PhD in a wet lab / computational hybrid field and experiment design somehow eats more time than actually running experiments. I usually start with a hypothesis, then check the literature for controls, assays, or methods I might be missing. That's where it falls apart. One paper leads to another method paper, then three older papers, and suddenly I have 30 tabs open with no actual experiment plan. Lately I've been trying to keep the whole thing from turning into tab hell. Zotero”
“So i joined my current lab in the summer after my 1st year. Was given a project that my lab has past expertise in. However it is a super under studied protein and literally any previous data published on it (2 papers) had nothing substantial that I could go off of. We tried making a few different cell lines and experiments and for the past year I have been trying to nail down the function or anything about the protein. We were given some data by collaborators but none of their data was reproduci”
“3rd year PhD in a wet lab / computational hybrid field and experiment design somehow eats more time than actually running experiments. I usually start with a hypothesis, then check the literature for controls, assays, or methods I might be missing. That's where it falls apart. One paper leads to another method paper, then three older papers, and suddenly I have 30 tabs open with no actual experiment plan. Lately I've been trying to keep the whole thing from turning into tab hell. Zotero”
“i recently graduated undergrad with a good GPA, 2 years of molecular bio lab experience, and limited fieldwork experience (volunteering + taken 2-3 field courses). i intended to take 1-2 gap years and i have just begun looking for faculty mentors with the intent of applying for this cycle in the evolutionary bio/ecology/conservation field. i’m feeling kind of conflicted and overwhelmed looking at school faculty pages for PIs to cold email. some professors have a time window on their lab pages (t”
“I’m starting grad school a year from now and I’m mulling over my choices of labs. One lab I’m considering has really great funding and it’s very well equipped, but the work environment scares me a bit. The grad students there were reluctant to tell me much about it and were cryptic at best. The PI seems nice from my interaction with them, but I worry that I’m not seeing something. This PI told me they guarantee a research assistantship too. Another lab I’m considering is way more relaxed, and I”
“Im a 2nd year PhD in a pretty niche area of comp bio, and I keep noticing a gap between what I can find in the literature and what people in my lab already seem to know. My PI or senior lab members will casually say things like “people tried that years ago” or “nobody uses that approach anymore.” Then I look for the papers behind those claims and find almost nothing beyond a poster, supplement, or passing mention in a review. I assumed I was just bad at searching, so Ive been checking PubMed, Go”