"So far so good!" said the jumper as he fell past the 15th floor." As a scientist and scientific writer, I feel like this whole introduction should be full of references supporting and illustrating the things I'm about to tell you, but this post is hard enough to write as it is, so I'm going to leave verifying the things I'm about to tell you as an exercise to the reader. It should be relatively easy. You just have to search "grad student" and "mental health" to find page after page of results, including articles published in Nature, Neuron, and the Chronicles of Higher Ed just to name a few recennt ones. Graduate students as a population have much worse mental health than the population as a whole. This was true even before the pandemic, and while it's difficult to tell if the pandemic has had a greater effect on us than it has on other vulnerable populations, it has had a detrimental effect. To be honest with you, grad school h...
A first hand account of my experience as a PhD student in the biomedical sciences, related in real time as I'm going through my program. The focus of this blog is going to be more on the human experience than the specifics of the science, but there will be plenty of science in that experience. You can follow on Twitter @TheMacAran