Postdoc talk

Had Professor Morris address a small group of PhD students last night.  He focused on some big picture issues about careers in Science – the knife edge between success and failure. For him the career scientist is always asking questions and that is what distinguishes the person who is going to like the career. The students quizzed Roger on whether an industrial career  was inferior (No), how did you know whether you were ‘good’, what could you do if you did not manage to publish any papers, what if your project was ’scooped’ by a publication – this had happened to one student in the room.

Roger gave a very personal account of his career and spoke in favour of ‘diversifying’ in the choice of postdocs. But my question was why did so few students turn up to such a fascinating presentation?