I think everyone should work at a research laboratory. Research laboratories give you money and a place to bring your latte when your morning conversation with the disgruntled Starbucks employee comes to a screeching halt while he bodily escorts the self-dubbed --and aptly named-- "Top-Tooth Timmers the Homeless Wonder" from the premises for rearranging the rolls of toilet paper in ladies' room according to his preferred sleeping position.
DISCUSSION
Fact: Research is fun. So, now that you're all excited to go out and apply for a job at a research laboratory, I'll take this time to crush your thinly woven dreams of Ivy league grandeur with the following four (4) poorly researched but correctly numbered steps to landing your dream job in a research laboratory:
1). When applying for various career-like opportunities available to you at a research laboratory, it is imperative to take the time to look up the use of smart sounding words like imperative before you use it in a sentence on your cover letter. Then: apply for it, nail the interview, and get hired in a research laboratory.
2). If you want to become a sleep deprived, self-absorbed twit, then you should be a scientist. Back in 1629 when the first scientist was discovered loitering near an old-timey microscope by a pack of dateless Mathletes, no one had even heard of science. But they did what anyone of us would have done and published a 1,732,684,351,867,530,932 page Nobel Prize-winning paper discussing the bejeezus out of the probability of securing a federal grant for the Society for the Continuation and Preservation and Encouragement of the Research for Left-handed Gnat Populations of New Guinea (SFTCAPAEOTRFLGPNG) --donations accepted--.
3). As a researcher, your job will be to run participants through studies and answer any questions they may have such as:
-What is this research study about?
-Are we done yet?
-Where's the bathroom?
In between running participants through a study, your primary responsibility will be to fabricate scores and averages and type them into nauseating virtual towers of numbers called spreadsheets or typing TBD (To Be Determined) when you are unsure or are bored being in the lab and leave for a Starbucks run.4). Please don't think that just because your superiors are "scientists" and not "bosses" that working at a research laboratory is easy. It's not! Unless, of course, your idea of easy includes making at least 17 (seventeen) trips to Starbucks within a 25.9 hour work week or learning to seamlessly toggle out of the eBay screen a millisecond before your crazy-eyed boss walks by and gives you what we here in Academia scientifically refer to as a "grumpy-face." Seriously, that takes, like, a freaking hour to get the hand movement down.
RESULTSTBD
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, if you are still reading this, then --CONGRATULATIONS!!!-- you are interested in working at a research laboratory! But maybe you're uneasy about where to start looking. No one
blames you for being worried! And, if it makes you feel any better, it's much easier now to find a job in a research laboratory than it was back in the Good Old Days (October 3rd & 4th, 1987) and here's why: Back then, I was approximately 64% creative and 37%mathematically inclined and had a very short attention span. But now I can watch three (3) back-to-back episodes of Law & Order without moving. And so can you! Just work at a research lab and have more time for doing the important things in life like reading poorly researched/caffeine-induced blog entries.
