it's my last day being paid as a postdoc so I've got some academic bridges to burn. THREAD:

1. seminar snack lines (possibly extinct but just in case): one cookie max, no adding sugar and cream to your coffee at the table while holding up the line. GTFO with the raisin cookies. Snickerdoodles and chocolate ship are the only acceptable options.

2. departmental coffee: down with keurig. Every lab needs a Zojirushi electric kettle.

3. journal clubs: it works *way* better when groups are assigned papers to present instead of just one person. Also, it's too easy for the culture to turn toxic. If everyone is slamming >20% of the papers you read, you're doing it wrong.

4. unpaid jobs for undergrads that don't at least offer course credits: bullshit, bad for science and society, don't do this.

5. funding grads: departments should expect that zero new grads will receive PhD fellowships and plan accordingly. In a better world grad students wouldn't apply for any funding until they advanced to candidacy.

6. dissertation formatting requirements: just, ugh, are you kidding me? LOOSEN UP.

7. faculty interviews: no one likes the dinner. comp room service and throw in a bottle of champagne but let your exhausted candidates just watch SVU fully clothed on top of the bed until they fall asleep at 8:15pm.

8. publishing: it now costs as much to publish a paper (even non-OA!) as I spent on all the sequencing for my first two projects. If departments want grads to publish their dissertation chapters, there needs to be some way for people to pay for it that isn't "ask your advisor"

9. stats for biologists: not a useful class for PhD students. If people need stats make them take real stats. When you say "t-test" students should say wait is that just a particular kind of linear model and you should say yes, yes it is.

10. organismal fiefs: no one owns the science on a clade. It is actively bad for science when all pubs on some organism/site/clade come from one lab group. Stop training grad students to fear scooping or being scooped.

11. Fun: have it. Science is extremely cool and academia (ideally, at least in EEB) lets you explore it in wildly uneconomic ways. Find research you actually like doing or switch things up. Don't slog through for a hypothetically better future position.