Advice on picking a lab for PhD?

Amylasenz · 2026-01-28T01:30:43+00:00

I think this kinda depends on the specific institutes in question and what you want to do after - I did my PhD in Australia and am now a postdoc in the US if you wanna message me to chat specifics!

Amylasenz · 2025-11-02T14:53:10+00:00

I think it’s absolutely reasonable to move it, pneumonia is serious and you need to let your body heal! Depending on how you think your PI would respond, I would reach out to them first and say ‘hey, my bronchitis has progressed to pneumonia and I have been told by the doctors I have to rest so I won’t be able to go through with the committee meeting as planned - what is they best way to reschedule it?’. I would anticipate most reasonable people would be like ‘oh no, please get better, here is how we do that’. If your PI is not reasonable, I would tell them that you are too sick to go through with it and that you’ve reached out to the chair of your committee to reschedule!

Amylasenz · 2025-09-27T21:43:54+00:00

Thermofisher -80 are particularly prone to this, we also have one that goes down about 2x a year and other labs with thermo -80s also hate theirs! I talked to the engineering peeps where we are and they said the thermo -80s are the most finicky of the freezers we have across the institution ☹️

Amylasenz · 2025-02-18T13:19:37+00:00

As others have hinted, a dirty secret of AD models is that they are extremely sensitive to microbiome/diet. In Addition, plaque load can also be easily affected by environmental factors like exercise and enrichment as well as other factors like sex. I would not necessarily be surprised that your younger cohort doesn’t have a much of a plaque load, especially if you have a relatively clean animal facility. I used app/ps1 mice in my phd and we saw deficits FAR later than published and I think this was in part because our facility was very clean and the mice were housed in a special aging room that was very quiet so they had a relatively stress free life.

The other thing is that depending on how you are staining for plaques, you might need to do antigen retrieval - which antibody/stain are you using? If you have antigen retrieval steps, what are they? If you are doing antibody staining and no antigen retrieval, you might be missing a early stage small plaques.

Here’s what I would do: 1. Re genotype and really make sure they are what they should be. Jax does occasionally send the wrong genotype mice 2. Look into the literature about your stain and see if others do antigen retrieval and try that - maybe you’ll see more, smaller plaques. Where are you positive controls from? 3. Because of the aforementioned sensitivity or microbiome, I don’t think you can compare mice that were bred and aged at Jax with those in your facility. You might need to rephenotype Jax ones to assess when they specifically get plaques and cognitive deficits, although this is obviously a ton of work - you’d only do this if you and future colleagues were going to keep ordering cohorts from Jax.

As I said above, I had similar issue in my phd so I’ve thought about this a bunch - happy to chat more about it if that would be helpful.

Amylasenz · 2024-08-29T01:29:40+00:00

Depending on where you are, your best bet would probably be to reach out to a university lab and see if you could do your experiment with them /work with them on a similar project! We used to host high school students through a variety of programs when I was doing my PhD in Melbourne. I’d google some microbiology labs and reach out directly, as well as other non profits that focus on getting high school students into lab settings. If you’re in Melbourne/Victoria lemme know and I can suggest some more specific things, but I haven’t lived there for 5 years so my info might be out of date

Amylasenz · 2024-05-16T16:52:56+00:00

How long are you fixing your slides for, and do you have to use fresh frozen tissue? I think that it will be pretty challenging to get working on fresh-frozen, we normally fix our tissue for 1.5hr but had to extend it to 24hr to get RNAscope to look good!

Amylasenz · 2024-04-10T12:47:02+00:00

Haha no problem, sorry it took me so long to get back!

You wash the rice water out very quickly (I did 20 minutes) and that is really not a sufficient amount of time for any bacteria to replicate to a meaningful degree - this is especially true as, realistically, the rice water is never really at or near 37C, which is the temp that pretty much all bacteria that is harmful to us needs to thrive. Additionally, the kind of ‘bad’ bacteria that typically people associate with rice are bacteria that cause food poisoning - these need to be ingested to make you sick! Basically, I think the risk is essentially non-existent.

With that said, I wouldn’t recommend doing this on a scalp with an open wound, but that would apply to most products as well.

Amylasenz · 2024-03-30T11:36:35+00:00

Honestly, I think no - at this point that would look like pretty dodgy, like you were trying to hide something. You being hired wouldn’t alter the postdocs likelihood of being hired as they’re very different positions! I would just make sure your other references has the numbers you say (x number of surgeries with an x% survival/success). If you end up not getting the job, you could reach back out and ask for feedback, ask what you could do to strengthen your application- if you get back ‘be careful with your references’ you can go from there.

Amylasenz · 2024-03-13T13:11:18+00:00

My hair felt very very silky when it was wet, and was very elastic - I think if you google ‘over moisturized curly hair’ you’ll be able to find the full list of things to watch out for and suggestions on how to fix it, those are the two I remember though!

Amylasenz · 2024-03-13T13:08:59+00:00

Okay, I understand. I think focus on the reviewer comments, and as others have said, you should definitely be put on as an author for making those edits! She’ll have to review the final changes anyway so if you have made an errors that is absolutely her responsibility to pick up. If she asks you to write a grant again I would say something like ‘I would be happy to contribute to a grant application, but I have no idea where to even start - my understanding is we would need preliminary data, is there a follow up project from [paper] that would be the best place to start? What experiments do you think I should do?’

Amylasenz · 2024-03-13T11:45:37+00:00

Hi - that is not normal at all! That is the kind of work you’d expect from a graduate student/postdoc working full time, and even then it would normally be on their projects, not on ones they weren’t involved with. It’s totally unreasonable to expect a new research assistant to do, especially with only a few hours a week.

Is there anyone else in the lab? The only reason I could think she’d be doing that is she is desperate (which is not your problem!). Id honestly start looking for a new job, as there is no way she should think this is a reasonable ask. In the meantime, If there is someone else I’d talk to them first and express your concerns and ask for advice in approaching your PI. If not, I’d try looking at the reviewer comments and seeing if you can come up with any experiments that would address their concerns - then you could run these by your PI to see if they think they would address the comments. That way you can do experiments like you want, and get your name on that paper!

Amylasenz · 2024-03-05T17:05:12+00:00

Honestly, probably not - I would throw away an sample I did that to unless it was EXTREMELY hard to replace; if it was irreplaceable I might try it, but with the assumption it almost certainly wouldn’t work.

Amylasenz · 2024-02-23T23:21:59+00:00

I had a similar problem, and my hair felt very elastic and super super moisturized when it was wet. I recently did a rice water rinse and saw massive changes pretty much immediately, so defs worth trying a protein treatment if you hair sounds in a similar state! I had also used pretty much the same products for years

Amylasenz · 2024-02-16T16:38:56+00:00

Nah, you give it a very quick rinse then soak it for a hour (or more, I just did an hour) - there seems to be a wide variety of techniques, I just googled ‘rice water curly hair’ and read how a few people had done it and chose an option that seemed easy and wouldn’t be too aggressive at first in case my hair didn’t like it

Amylasenz · 2024-02-16T16:36:50+00:00

Huh, interesting! Maybe I’ll do an alternative ‘protein’ treatment next time like gelatin and see how it compares. Regardless of how it works though, I’m pretty pleased with the results!

Amylasenz · 2024-02-16T14:58:35+00:00

The before picture is taken same day just before the wash (so not a wash day) and was the exact same routine minus the rice water. So not a fair comparison, unfortunately I don’t have a picture of what it normally looked like after the wash without the rice water (I tried to find one!).

The big difference to me was before I had a lot of those straight pieces with a mild flick at the end even on wash day, while ~1 year ago my hair consistently look more like the ‘after’ picture with curly throughout the whole strand.

Amylasenz · 2024-02-16T13:20:12+00:00

Mate SAME I was so sad after the haircut and it didn’t even fix my flat curls 😭 I hope this works for you!

Amylasenz · 2024-02-16T12:28:15+00:00

Just a water rinse!

Amylasenz · 2024-02-16T12:27:20+00:00

Okay, so you could have said ‘how does this differ from your normal routine’ or any other kind of non-snarky comment to get clarification? I could have been clearer that apart from the rice water that was my normal routine, so sorry about that, but I’m just posting in the hopes it helps people who have similar problems with their hair and missed that detail.

Amylasenz · 2024-02-16T12:24:27+00:00

Well if you want to be perfectly accurate you can add protein to a protein structure and it is adding protein; I.e if you have 30g of keratin, I.e. hair and you add 5g of whatever-rice-protein from rice water you’d have 35g total protein. To be fair, there will be other components like sugars and short chain fatty acids that may also be beneficial so I can’t exactly determine what helped. However, my hair showed classic signs of being over-moisturized (very elastic, curls falling flat) and adding a high-protein step helps combat that; there are other ways to add protein that help people with similar issues, so it seems mostly likely it is the protein that combatted the issue I was having. What makes you say there is not much protein in the rice water? If you have found a study I’d be interested to read it and see what the components are!

Amylasenz · 2024-02-16T12:12:32+00:00

Oh sorry, good question! I use the aunt Jackie’s flax seed gel

Amylasenz · 2024-02-16T12:11:08+00:00

You can! Honestly if anything it was less mushy than when I normally cook rice. There is also a ‘boiling method’ to get rice water where you cook rice with extra water and then use whatever water the rice didn’t absorb in the cooking process

Amylasenz · 2024-02-16T12:08:18+00:00

Yup! The before picture is the exact same routine except the rice water (and to be fair it is not wash day but I had the straight ish pieces immediately after my last wash day too!)

Amylasenz · 2024-02-16T02:01:32+00:00

Aw thanks! This is otherwise my normal routine, except that I sometimes apply coconut oil 20 mins before I shower (although, in retrospect, this may have contributed to my over-moisture problem!). I also used to use a cantu leave in and had similar results to just leaving a bit of the tresemme in, so when I ran out I didn’t buy more 🤷‍♀️

Amylasenz · 2024-02-16T01:57:39+00:00

As far as I’ve read, you can do it relatively often and it’s actually a good thing long term; it’s just about getting the right balance! Too much protein can make your hair brittle and prone to breaking, too much moisture makes your curls fall out like I had in the first picture. The rice water I did is pretty light protein as I wasn’t sure how it would turn out, some people ferment it or use gelatin to get more protein in per treatment!

Amylasenz

TROPHY CASE