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052: Hello PhD Year in Review

It’s official: the Hello PhD podcast is one year old! <insert confetti and noisemakers here>

In honor of our birthday, we’re taking a look back at our favorite episodes and moments from the first year of the show.

Stay with us…

Cheers, Mate!

We start the celebration with the Alpine Beer Company Hoppy Birthday Session India Pale Ale.  Brewed on Alpine Blvd. in Alpine, California (near San Diego), this beer packs a hoppy wallop.

And listen – I like hops as much as the next guy – but a birthday cake made entirely of hops is probably going a bit too far.  Save ’em for the beer.

The Way We Were

We took a few moments to remember why we started this podcast in the first place.  Basically, it’s for all of you: the graduate students, postdocs, and career scientists who are navigating the PhD process and beyond.

It’s a difficult road, but one that can be so richly rewarding that it’s worth the pain.  The goal of this podcast is to share the strategies and stories of other scientists to make the way just a little bit easier for everyone.

We’ve had our favorite moments and episodes over the past year.  We’re still gnawing on the insights shared by Dara Wilson Grant in an interview about stepping off the tenure track.

We also recall the #gradInsurance debacle at Mizzou and how quickly the story unfolded after administrators cancelled graduate student health insurance coverage without notice.

We met lots of cool people this year, including a tenure-track professor, a management consultant, and a member of the teaching faculty.  They’re doing vastly different jobs, but they all love their work.

Never ones to shy from controversy, we also covered a lot of the endemic biases and blind spots that plague the scientific community.  There’s a measurable gender bias in science, and we’re still using the GRE for admissions even when it’s not a good predictor of success. We’re also not doing a good job of supporting the real powerhouses of most labs: the postdocs.

All in all, it’s been a great year for the Hello PhD podcast and we’ve loved connecting with you and hearing your stories.  We hope you’ll continue to share your successes and struggles over the next year to keep the conversation going.  You can reach us any time at podcast@hellophd.com or on Twitter or Facebook.

One last note – we’ll be releasing new episodes biweekly rather than every week in the coming year.  That should give you plenty of time to catch up on past episodes while you work in the tissue culture hood.

Thanks for listening!

 

 

 

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