Dorky Poll: Worst Job in Science

Of course I'm biased on this one, but hands-down the worst job in science is that of the postdoc. All the powerlessness and low pay of the graduate student; all the frantic desperation of the untenured professor. Plus you're the new guy and nobody knows who you are and if you've switched fields they're all speaking in some other language. And the health plan stinks.

Vacuum pump oil is pretty bad... but try stringing CAT5 through a moldery old building, up and down floors, above t-bar ceiling full of rat crap and probably asbestos fibers.

When I was a post-doc, one of the grad students was volunteered to network the labs, which involved crawling so far into the soffeting that only his feet were visible. It was one of the funniest looking things I've seen-- there was a big ladder going up to the ceiling, and two sneakers poking out of a duct opening...

Don't know about cleaning up MOSFETs but I can tell you that this one would be excruciating for me:

http://www.slate.com/id/2158877/

I'm sure it's not the worst job in science, but counting butterflies is the most unpleasant scientific task I've been involved with. I assist the biologist at a wildlife refuge with a weekly survey of endangered butterflies during the short period they are in the adult stage. It doesn't sound bad until you've spent a full day, in weather well over 100 degrees, working your way through dense, chest-high scrub trying to spot nearly invisible butterflies ;-)

Ever been in an oil refinery? They have chemists and chem engineers on site at most, and refineries are about the nastiest places on the planet. EVERYTHING is covered in black shit, including the people.

Metal plating comes in a close second. I loved having to monitor the chrome and manganese tanks. You haven't experienced joy until you've had to do QA on 500 gallons of shit that gives you cancer from nothing more than skin contact.

I've drooled in a cup to produce DNA. It's not the worst job in science, but it sure is boring.

"Metal plating comes in a close second."

I'm a Chem E, and I'll take a refinery over a plating shop any day of the week.

Given: two humongous direct drive vacuum pumps hooked in parallel to a liquid helium dewar to drop the temp hard by 1.2 K. The first run for the new ass't prof was set up by three first year grad students who topped off both newly installed pumps (not "filled to the line," "topped off") and went direct to pumping the dewar. An explosive tsunami of direct drive pump oil burst the vent lines. That basement room was still lubricated after a week of cleanup.

The worst industrial I've seen was a big nickel plating area. Nothing grew downslope of the building. The workers were bare-faced illegals in jeans. Managers didn't go in without bunny suits, gloves, and respirators. (I suggested a few inches thick layer of little hollow plastic balls to hold down the misting - nickel is expensive. The detergent foam they used had problems.)

I've worked in both. The cat-cracker and the H2F always made me feel like dying was one spark away.

It didn't help that the idiot operators would drain off unwanted naphtha right on the ground from the towers.

Hey, this is fun to read, we theorists live sheltered life.

Internationalizing software, by far. Spending 8 hours a day for months on end cutting, pasting, and writing comments for strings with the net result of making the code you have to work with going forward even less readable makes me long for when I worked in metal plating.

Tough call, but I'd probably have to say that the worst was extracting conodonts from dolomites. The typical extraction involved crushing about 6 kg of dolomite, putting it into plastic buckets, adding a couple of liters of hot water, then pumping in a couple of hundred mililiters of 90% formic acid from a 55-gallon barrel. After that, you wait a week, then sieve out the samples, which usually involved several hours leaning over a sink in the acid room, trying to get as much of the sample to wash through a #180 or #200 sieve as possible.

I'm always puzzled by the "low pay" complaints about postdocs. They don't pay as well as industry, but the ones I'm aware of tend to be in the $40k-$60k range, probably biased toward the lower end of that. What's so terrible about that? Or are they lower paying in some fields?

At least in biology, postdoc positions pay more in the $20k-$40k range, which is kind of ridiculous for a job requiring that much education and training. That's not a whole lot more than minimum wage, considering that postdocs work way more than 40 hours a week.

I believe biology has the lowest paid postdocs. I know chemistry is higher, and physics is slightly higher still. I think at least part of the problem in biology is a supply and demand issue.

I was working as a "human autosampler" back in graduate school at an environmental testing facility at the University. That wasn't so bad compared to the poor woman who was busy digesting human feces in a fume hood so it could be analyzed on the ICP. By the time it made it to me it was a colorless, acidic, odor-free liquid.

Cleaning out the Australian super vegemite collider?

Well, my experience so far as an experimental condensed matter physicist has been pretty decent. But I can't imagine what its like to be in the sort of biological labs where one experiments on animals. One of my fellow students in grad school posted that ad on our office door: "Only the Polytron turns an entire mouse into a soup-like homogenate in 30 seconds." It must be pretty dispiriting to be the one who actually has to use a Polytron.

It may not be dangerous or nauseating, but in grad school one of the students had the project of trying to definitively show that muscles increase in size only by hypertrophy and not by hyperplasia. Since muscles change in architecture when they increase in size, cross-sectioning won't work. All of the cell counting had to be done by dissecting acid-fixed muscles under a dissecting microscope and counting individual fibers. This was done with rat and cat muscles, some of which had >>10,000 fibers. Most of the grads were involved and some of us spent more than 8 hours a day hunched over a mic, teasing apart an individual muscle.

It is not particalrly disgusting but once during my thesis work in Prague I had to spin down about 6 galons of beef blood on a large centrifuge, twice. The asignment included the bus ride to the slaughterhause, and back. The slaughterhause was in industrial zone on periphery and it was a long ride back to the uni, on the public bus, with two big carboys sloshing next to me. Couple of people asked me: "Boy, what's in these tanks - is it red wine?"
Of course, if you do it like this you have to answer: "Nah, it's blood. Just blood. Almost pure blood, I had to add some little things to it - so it wouldn't curdle - you know. I got lot of it - do you need some too?"

1a. Macro:Removing highly radioactive internal organs from large animals for, well, it would take a lot of space to explain this, but it really got down to perfusion studies.

1b. Micro:Cleaning out the tissue culture hood aspirator trap following a longish holiday break.

2a. Faculty meetings (I'd rather do 1b).

2b. Committe meetings during graduate school (I'd rather do 2a).

Worst task I ever had to do was mucking around with the insane toxics in the NASA clean room. Ever see aqua regia at 300C? It turns the exact color of strawberry Kool-Aid. Only lots more likely to dissolve you.

The rumored worst job at NASA was being the poor shnook who has to open the door to the Shuttle, and get the faceful of two weeks' worth of B.O. The actual worst job I saw anyone have to do was the engineer who had to inspect the wire that went into the Hubble gyroscope sliprings. (You remember, the ones that kept failing? It was the sliprings.) There were meters of the stuff, and every millimeter had to be examined for nicks and scratches. With a scanning electron microscope. It took weeks.

Hi Chad,

nice post and imaginative trigger to a lot of interesting stories. Here's mine.

"The CMX kills". That is what Paolo Giromini told me when I was first hired as a post-doc for Harvard University, with as primary task the extension of the muon system (CMX) of the CDF experiment, in 1998.
Well, it did not kill me, but it went close a couple of times... The job did involve climbs 25 feet high with no harness, up arched arrays of muon chambers covered with a half-inch layer of radioactive dust. But the day I remember most warmly is when I had to punch 180 1/4" holes in a large sheet of 1/8" stainless steel, with a hand drill most suited to hang paintings on your living room wall, and breaking a dozen drill bits in the meantime. It took me a full day of work, and I did not go home happy that night.

Cheers,
T.

Feeding a medicinal leech colony: (1) Wash lubricant off of lambskin condoms. (2) Fill condoms with defibrinated cow blood. (3) Warm filled condoms in vat of hot water. (4) Dangle condoms into jars of leeches. (5) After leeches have drained condoms, pull leeches off of empty condoms. (6) Pull leeches off your own hands before they have time to bite you. (7) Smell like condoms, blood, and leeches for the whole day.