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?

On postdoc funding

Bashir has a post up about postdoc funding where he says that it’s weird that it takes a long time (~year) to apply for funding (i.e. the time between applying and hearing whether you’ve got the money) and that it’s hard that funding is rarely for longer than 2-3 years whereas the average postdoc length is more like >5 years. So you either have to stitch several grants together or (like me) be lucky enough that your PI supports you. I am currently applying for grant #5, the previous 4 I didn’t get. 

In the comments Drugmonkey suggests a system in which you can only apply once within the first year after getting your PhD. This is actually exactly the system that the home country funding agency has for handing out postdoc grants, and I don’t really like it for the following reasons:

First, the fact that you have to apply within the first year after your PhD, and the fact that this funding agency looks at CV (meaning: number of papers published) a lot, means that you should preferably wait as long as you can to apply to get as many papers from your PhD out. However, the funding agency also prefers it if you’re not yet at your host lab when you submit your grant, meaning that the only way around this is to stick around in your PhD lab for another year (or take a looooong time getting your PhD so that most of your papers are already published). I’m not so sure if that’s something you want to encourage.

Second, I think the transition between PhD and postdoc is the best time to switch fields or learn a new technique. When you choose the lab to do your PhD in, you may not be aware of your interests, or all the techniques that you can learn. Or you may switch interests during the course of you PhD. And during your postdoc you should form ideas about what you want to do when you have your own lab, so that doesn’t seem like a point in your career to make any dramatic changes to what you’re doing (or am I wrong? Please discuss!). However, if you need to learn a new technique (like I did, I only started doing slice electrophysiology during my postdoc), it’s very difficult to write a grant about experiments when you don’t have a clear idea what exactly those experiments are and how much time they will take. So a grant like this will either favor people who stay in their field and keep doing what they know or people who’s PI writes their grants for them. I’m not sure that is something you want to encourage either.

Also, being able to apply only once takes away the opportunity to learn from the review comments and improve your proposal in a next round.

Anyway, this comes from someone who thought that she had very strategically waited to apply for this grant until the last possibly option for her (a year after defending my PhD), because by then she had most of her papers from grad school published. However, then the government of the home country decided that this round of said grant was going to be the last, so all of a sudden many more people applied but they only handed out the same number of grants, meaning that the funding rate dropped to about half of what it normally is. Next round they said:”Haha we were just kidding, here is another round of this same grant”. So I may be a bit disgruntled about this.