Esmerelda Weatherwax wrote:
Schlenk, pretty much exclusively, except for a couple flash chromatographies that I ended up running in the cold room with just the manifold. And please don't ask me about low-T NMR, I had nightmares for years afterwards.
My projects were challenging, very, and I went from the lab directly into a technical writing job. I'd wanted to go on and study further, but the two PhDs I was interested in doing postdoc work for - were both moving to different unis, can you believe it. So I took the writing job as a stopgap, but liked it so much that I never went back.
My first boss on that job initially thought I was a little strange - not Aspie-type strange. I'd come in to work in the morning and sit at my desk and laugh in sheer delight, and finally he asked why, and I told him: it was just. So. Nice. to leave my work out on the desktop in the atmosphere, at room temperature, overnight, and come in and find that nothing had decomposed. Sometimes I'd pick up a page and shake it and laugh because the letters stayed on the paper.
I really did have hellacious PhD work. It took about four months for that morning laughter to run its course. For about a year, the guys in the plant would come and get me when they ran into snags, which was a lot of fun, I was kind of a combination mascot and little sister; but then we had a change of management and the new regime frowned on that kind of flexibility. By the end of my career I'd gone so far from my original training that I can't even remember the title of my thesis anymore. That runs in my family; my dad was a ChemE, but worked all his life as an EE. Go figure.
IIRC you've been able to stay close to your original area of study?
I get this so well. I was working on a PhD and while I liked the subject the methods were outdated. I was forced to dissect out parts of a drosophila which was a nightmare as my hands are not shaky but I’d say restless. And then had to get all the work done on them before the protein disintegrated in their muscles.
I left it and found an IT job and was so relieved to be able to have everything there for ever on screen. And people thought I was going mad at first coz I’d talk to myself about how much I was loving the new job. I figured the IT job was real time results and so was very excited and often worked a lot of extra hours.
_________________
RDOS quiz —
Your neurodiverse score: 107/200
Your neurotypical score: 135/200
You seem to have both ND and NT traits.