Derek Lowe explores the terrible state of academic labs in Arcadia’s Furnishings:
I haven’t worked in a US academic chemistry lab since 1988, so you’ll have to take that into account as you read today’s post. But I don’t think that things have changed enough to invalidate this observation: many grad-school science labs are so depressing as to defy belief. This isn’t universal, but I’ve seen enough examples to convince me. The atmosphere doesn’t correlate well with the amount of money around, either, because I’ve seen some lower-level departments that weren’t so bad, and a couple of Ivy League lab corridors that would pull the serotonin right out of your brain just to walk down them.Many of the students and post-docs working at these places don’t realize this, though, which is surely to their benefit. It’s only after you’ve gone out into the Real World for a while and come back for a visit that it hits you. That’s certainly how it dawned on me.