Who pays for your laptop in the lab?

My graduate advisor did not like desktop computers. Ze was under the impression that people don’t really care for their desktop computers and they quickly get filled up with crap and then become slow. The lab only had desktop computers that were designated for things like the qPCR machine. So we all needed to have laptops. I think this is nice, because then you automatically have a computer if you need to work from home. However, my graduate advisor only paid for 150 euros a year (~$180) towards the purchase of a laptop (and mind you, this came from someone who hirself used laptops like lab notebooks: when one was full, ze would just buy a new one). Considering a graduate project in my homecountry takes 4 years that meant that you got $720 for a laptop (unless you worked on your own laptop for a year, and only then needed a new one, then you only got 3 years worth of money…). Given that I worked in a lab where we did a lot of “big data” type stuff, it basically meant that if you wanted to be able to still process data in your fourth year, you needed a laptop that was more expensive then what our graduate advisor would pay for.

Currently, I am in a lab where most people have desktop computers but some (including me) prefer get a laptop instead. I like to have all my stuff in one place and be able to work from more than one spot without having to remember to put my files on a hard drive or in a dropbox. My current PI paid for my laptop, and for some (but not all) people’s laptops in the lab. The rule was that if you got your own fellowship, you could get a laptop (however, as you might know I did not get a fellowship, but did get a laptop). But after nearly 3.5 years of daily use (to work in the lab and at home but also to watch TV at home) my laptop broke. I don’t have a fellowship yet to pay my own new laptop, and since I will only be in the lab for 5 more months, I decided that I didn’t want to ask my PI for another new laptop. So now I am working on a laptop that I paid for myself. And I know of more labs where people are required to bring a laptop to do work, but have to pay for those themselves. And I understand money is tight and all that, but if lab equipment and consumables are so much more costly than computers, why don’t some PIs equip the people in their lab with decent computers?

A post-doc by any other name...

Sometimes I see people on LinkedIn change their profession from Post-doc to Research Associate. That always makes me laugh a little and until recently led me to think that those people had been a post-doc for too long, and therefore just gave it a different name. But that is not true, as I have recently discovered that Research Associate is actually a thing. Because yours truly is becoming one, which not only allows me to change my profession on LinkedIn, but also allows me to receive a substantial increase in pay (which then causes me to lose the daycare fellowship that we have, so not much of a net increase, but still).

The reason I am becoming a Research Associate is because only then can I be a co-investigator (is that the correct term?) on my PIs next R01 renewal, for which I have a lot of ideas and preliminary data. I have also been involved in setting up a successful collaboration that has led to these preliminary data. The deal will be that if we get the grant and I leave, I will be able to take my chunk of this money (which is nice, because since I’m not a citizen I am not allowed to apply for a lot of US funding). 

So this is all really nice, but of course in the end I’m still a post-doc; doing experiments, panicking about writing papers and trying to find free cookies (that’s a pretty accurate job description, right?).

Who gets to worry most?

For some reason the past week has been full of pessimistic (or realistic) remarks about how bleak the funding situation is. First, my PI was announcing at lab meeting that the two big R01s that the lab has will end next year (that was not new to me, but it was to some of the lab) and that it’s unsure whether they will be successfully renewed. Then, he told us about how if the US government has not determined a new budget in Januari, NIH may cut, even in existing grants. I didn’t know how that worked, so I asked DrugMonkey on twitter, who explained that indeed the NIH can do that, but that Obama promised it wouldn’t happen (if I have time I will embed those tweets later).

Same day, I got an email from the Society for Neuroscience asking their members to oppose sequestration (and they have a webinar about what it is too). And then today we had a seminar speaker who at lunch started to talk about how the current environment is not very good for young scientists in terms of money. Oh and a home country paper talked about how some of the grants from the home country’s scientific organization only have a 5% funding rate….

So at lab meeting we were talking about who gets to worry most. One of my post-doc colleagues has a husband with a good job, so she is last in the line of worrying about her job. I come next, because Dr. BrownEyes and I both have jobs, but they’re both in science. And the one who gets to worry most is my post-doc colleague who is single. For now, this is how I approach this: