What I Learned Dancing to Bomba Music: A Compare and Contrast of the Conference Experience
In October of 2022, I attended a conference put on by the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS) in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Having attended an academic conference in Plant Biology in North Carolina just two weeks prior, I was struck by the marked [...]
Have you ever run away from a funeral?
I have. The year I got married my grandmother passed away. Two weeks after my wedding, my family and I drove to Arlington National Cemetery to say our last goodbyes. The staff at Arlington were so kind and everything was going smoothly, but when we got to the graveside, and [...]
Choosing an Advisor
Transitioning from undergraduate school into graduate school brings along many new challenges and opportunities. Obviously, there are things like moving into a new city, finding where to live, and meeting new people. Then you also have new classes, new professors, and other new life decisions, like choosing a lab, designing [...]
Peer-Review: The Tragedy of the Scientific Commons
Earlier this semester, when I went to use my lab’s pH meter, it was in bad shape. The storage buffer was dried out, the internal solution had crystallized, and the standards expired over a decade ago. In a way, this pH meter fell victim to the tragedy of the commons. [...]
Inequities in COVID-19 vaccine distribution
What brought me to make this post were comments from a friend of mine concerning the distribution of vaccines in D.C., where he lives. He found it curious that vaccine distribution -- that is, the percentage of individuals that were vaccinated -- is strongly correlated with wealth. Digging a little [...]
At what point do you consider someone a scientist?!?
While scrolling through Twitter late one night, I came across a tweet from an academic advice account. The tweet read, “at what point do we consider someone a scientist? Is it when they graduate with a Ph.D.? Is it when someone achieves full tenure? Is it after publishing?” It had [...]