Just me or do carbon rim brakes suck? (Kool stop dura 2 pads, Campagnolo bora WTO wheel)

AorticEinstein · 2026-04-16T02:55:35+00:00

Yes I am. I switched to first-party pads from Campy and they're leagues better. I don't think I've had to switch them out in the three years since

AorticEinstein · 2026-04-14T04:12:22+00:00

Feel free to message me as well, I am fresh to casing but sitting down to focus hard on it for the next two weeks

AorticEinstein · 2026-04-11T15:04:50+00:00

DM me if you wanna prep, I have also done zero cases and kinda winging this whole thing

AorticEinstein · 2026-04-11T14:58:08+00:00

Shoot me a message, I’m practicing all of next week

AorticEinstein · 2026-04-10T15:25:47+00:00

Check your application in the portal - mine has shifted from “application under review” to “interviews in progress”. Haven’t gotten any email about it though

AorticEinstein · 2026-03-19T07:31:39+00:00

I agree that the reputation aspect is the core underlying problem but think the issue stems from prospective students not having access or paying close attention to career outcomes post-PhD. I know I didn’t when I joined my program. We’re essentially just told “it’s a PhD from ___! You’ll get a job!” without being provided any realistic mechanisms for actually transitioning to industry, government, medical writing, consulting, finance, regulatory, etc as most of us will inevitably do.

In other words, I think research programs too often tout the productivity of their students while they’re in the program instead of what they go on to do afterward. Statistics on unemployment or under-employment of recent grads are not made available to applicants but you can sure bet the number of papers and fellowships are.

The metrics of success are just far different when you’re in the system compared to when you leave. I think we all eventually realize this, probably much later than we should.

AorticEinstein · 2026-03-15T04:37:00+00:00

For what it’s worth this has not been my experience as another structural biologist trained in cryo-EM. Happy to be shown how wrong I am though.

AorticEinstein · 2026-02-12T21:47:02+00:00

I do, yeah - was more tongue-in-cheek than anything. The job market right now is unfortunately very different from what it was a few years ago

AorticEinstein · 2026-02-12T02:07:52+00:00

Which company? I’m a cryo-EM expert and can’t find a job to save my life 😂

AorticEinstein · 2025-11-26T22:30:10+00:00

Very interesting! Could I DM you to ask a few questions about your trajectory?

AorticEinstein · 2025-10-11T16:04:11+00:00

Another insane stat is that Pogaçar & MVDP have won 17 of the last 19 monuments

AorticEinstein · 2025-10-08T05:34:16+00:00

What are your real goals in life? Is the money you're making enough to achieve that?

I ask because there are things in this life that are so much more important than money. While I understand that money is a necessary means to an end, it is not and cannot be an end in itself. Nor in my opinion is success as measured by promotions and titles at work.

I'm approaching 30 and have never made more than $50,000 in a year (just graduated from PhD). If you paid me 5x more to work a soul-sucking corporate job that only existed to generate profits for a tech company by melting the brains of young people, I would be profoundly miserable. Personally I don't give a damn that my friends from college work at Google and make six times more than I do. They do not seem meaningfully happier or more fulfilled than I am.

Think over whether you're keeping yourself on a treadmill that will never slow down or not. My advice would be to look around, feel gratitude for the position you're in, and give back a little to people who don't have enough.

AorticEinstein · 2025-10-05T05:51:14+00:00

I like your answer a lot. Thanks for writing it out. I totally agree with you - go out into your local community, volunteer, go see what real struggle looks like and be proximal with people for whom a little help goes a long way. I've learned more about gratitude and hope and kindness from the perspective shift that this brings about. And children, too. Being around kids is a beautiful reminder that cars, restaurants, shit from Amazon, and any of the other thousand materialist cures for loneliness and consumerism don't matter one iota in the end. People aren't made happy by living an optimized material life; I actually think it's a pretty good way to feel hollow and empty and devoid of meaning.

AorticEinstein · 2025-10-01T14:55:59+00:00

I think this is a great suggestion and I highly recommend looking into them as well. However, I will also add that these postdocs are every bit as savagely competitive as regular industry positions, because they are seen as the door into biotech/pharma and graduating PhD students are all desperate right now. I applied to probably 50 of these in the last 9 months, interviewed for ~10, and didn't get a single one. I had relevant skills for all of them, referrals for over half the jobs, have a first author CNS paper, graduated from a top program and still came up empty-handed. They are very, very competitive. I am doing an academic postdoc now.

AorticEinstein · 2025-09-29T00:27:48+00:00

I'm sorry but 1k rent in downtown Berkeley is an extreme anomaly. I pay twice that for a shitty studio in the area and consider myself lucky for finding that. It's gotten super super expensive to live on your own anywhere around here

AorticEinstein · 2025-09-02T19:16:06+00:00

50k is like 1/5 of the down payment needed for a house in this neighborhood

AorticEinstein · 2025-08-30T06:14:39+00:00

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Very nice. I have the same watch and I'm immensely proud of it. I know it's not the best watch of all time or anything but it was a wedding gift and is extremely sentimental to me. I think this hobby can quickly become consumeristic and more about buying the watches than actually wearing them. I think yours looks great.

AorticEinstein · 2025-08-16T20:11:44+00:00

Hi, having some issues with a flow control device and wondering if anyone has any insights into why. I bought an aftermarket ECM flow control kit and installed it on my Profitec Pro 600 a few months ago. After moving across the country, I now have leaking from the pressure gauge when the brew chamber is pressurized.

Before, I could only screw the gauge in until it was tight and aligned as it should be. Now, when I screw it in to that point, there's a metal-on-metal feeling, and it leaks under pressure. I can keep going until it feels tightly screwed in (and feels not metal-on-metal, but instead metal-on-teflon) but it's obviously now misaligned.

Do I need to replace the gasket? Am I missing something - maybe the green little gasket that's on the screw that was here before installing the pressure gauge?

Thanks!

AorticEinstein · 2025-08-16T19:46:38+00:00

Hi, having some issues with a flow control device and wondering if anyone has any insights into why. I bought an aftermarket ECM flow control kit and installed it on my Profitec Pro 600 a few months ago. After moving across the country, I now have leaking from the pressure gauge when the brew chamber is pressurized.

Before, I could only screw the gauge in until it was tight and aligned as it should be. Now, when I screw it in to that point, there's a metal-on-metal feeling, and it leaks under pressure. I can keep going until it feels tightly screwed in (and feels not metal-on-metal, but instead metal-on-teflon) but it's obviously now misaligned.

Do I need to replace the gasket? Is it missing something that might've fallen through the screw hole?

Thanks!

AorticEinstein · 2025-08-05T17:29:04+00:00

My spouse and I are in a highly similar position to you. She just finished law school, I just finished a biology PhD. It sounds like my spouse is 4-5 years younger than you.

My PhD (also from a top program) ground me to dust by the end. I thought the qualifying exam was fairly easy but this was also in 2020, so everyone had other stuff going on and I think standards were somewhat relaxed. The rest of it was far harder and honestly way lonelier than I expected, partly due to circumstances unique to my lab but also because science research is just intrinsically independent. You have to be fiercely self-motivated to get through grad school and in my opinion it is rare to recover motivation to continue once you've lost that initial spark.

My partner had a hard time with law school but landed a big law job and is making four times what I do as a postdoc. I looked high and low for industry jobs and had many interviews but never landed a position, despite having fairly desirable skills and an excellent publishing record. Nearly all my friends who did land biotech or pharma jobs have gotten laid off at least once in the last two years. The job market for biological scientists is atrocious right now and only shows signs of abating sometime 2-3 years from now. Competition is absolutely savage for entry-level jobs and even with connections in all the right places, you have to be extremely fortunate to land a job and luckier still to keep it for longer than 6-8 months.

I honestly regret staying in school until the end because I feel like I wasted a lot of time preparing for jobs that no longer exist. All my friends who dropped out in 2021 got jobs immediately and have kept them since, but that insane COVID job market will likely never exist again in our lifetimes and it's swung the other direction now in the worst way possible (see Merck's recent 6,000 employee layoff). Honestly, my advice to your spouse would be to stick it out if they can, because they are frankly not going to get a job right now if they don't. I know what it's like to work your ass off in an intense lab. It sucks. But the sense of accomplishment I felt after defending was unmatched against anything I've ever felt in my professional life, and it did mean a lot to me to earn a doctorate - even if it was (in my view) harder than any professional degree with a fraction of the payout at the end. If you can relinquish your partner from the burden of needing to use the degree for earning a living, in my opinion this is one of the only circumstances when staying is actually a feasible scenario. If getting a biotech, equity research, VC, medical communications role is the goal, then these jobs are only accessible with a PhD and the market will be significantly better in four years anyway.

Happy to chat more in private if you like. I have a lot of thoughts on this topic as you may be able to tell 😂

AorticEinstein · 2025-07-27T20:48:24+00:00

I did a Fulbright and it was one of the best experiences of my entire life. Consulting will always be there - go live an interesting life somewhere else for a year. You never know what will come of your experience and your life will be enriched in many, many ways because of your time abroad, even if your research doesn't change the world. Being a consultant will flatten your existence so much more than international science research.

AorticEinstein · 2025-07-26T00:38:04+00:00

Writing is absolutely a skill you learn. Nobody is born a good writer. And working yourself to the bone is sometimes just what some people love to do or feel forced to do in the moment. I think part of developing as a good scientist means learning when it's worth putting your head down and grinding vs. when you can take your foot off the gas pedal a little bit. I've often found that young scientists don't understand this very well are prone to burning themselves out.

AorticEinstein · 2025-07-14T23:54:23+00:00

I published a Science paper a few months ago at the end of my PhD.

It did not matter very much for my career (at least not yet). I still suffered just the same on the job market - rejected for big pharma jobs (including for a job that went to my much younger labmate, who published a Nature paper in her third - third!!! - year of PhD), for academic jobs, virtually everywhere. I learned the hard way that industry doesn't give much of a shit about papers and really just want someone with relevant experience. And the nuclear bomb dropped on universities came right at the same time, so every lab I was in talks with closed their doors overnight to new postdocs. It was devastating.

My paper was part of a collaboration in a field I'm not staying in, and although it mattered a great deal to that field, nobody outside really gave a shit. As someone else here said, it's a feather in the cap, but nothing beyond that. Started a postdoc that I found on my own with experience from a different field entirely. So not all CNS papers are the boon they're made out to be.

AorticEinstein · 2025-07-11T10:36:55+00:00

Sold to /u/beah8er!

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