Every now and then, usually in the summer or early fall, when the sun is shining and it’s just pleasant to be outdoors, I find myself almost regretting my career choices. After all, had I chosen a career in the biological sciences, rather than laser physics, I could do my research outside in the nice weather, rather than in a windowless room in the basement.<\/p>\n
Of course, every now and then, I hear stories like the one in the talk given by a colleague’s summer research students a few weeks ago. He’s a plant biologist specializing in moss, and his students went out looking for samples to test their new computer model of light transmission through a certain type of moss. On this expedition, they spent several hours tromping around a local swamp looking for this particular type of moss, during which time they stumbled across a large nest of wasps, and were attacked, getting stung several times each.<\/p>\n
And they didn’t find any moss.<\/p>\n
It’s good to be reminded that True Lab Stories<\/a> come from all different fields, and some of them even take place out in the nice weather. Suddenly, skinning my knuckles tightening ConFlat bolts in a cool, dark room on campus doesn’t sound all that bad… <\/p>\n <\/p>\n (Of course, one of my colleagues, working on an environmental physics project, took his research students out fishing one day this past summer. Maybe I just need to change sub<\/strong>fields…)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Every now and then, usually in the summer or early fall, when the sun is shining and it’s just pleasant to be outdoors, I find myself almost regretting my career choices. After all, had I chosen a career in the biological sciences, rather than laser physics, I could do my research outside in the nice… Continue reading True Lab Stories: Why I Am Not a Biologist<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1727","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lab_stories","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1727","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1727"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1727\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}