I know this meme is getting old, but I just had to post this one.
Funniest thing- the mouse with the ear on its back- that was my post-doctoral advisor’s post-doctoral work. So, in that regard, society gets it right.
I’m not sure how accurate it is otherwise. If I were making my own, I’d do it like this…
What my mom thinks I do: a picture of a scientist getting the Nobel Prize (I think she seriously considers this within the realm of possibility).
What my friends think I do: The running joke when I was in grad school was that I was working on a life-like Real Doll (don’t Google it at work because it’s definitely NSFW)- since I worked on culturing mammary organoids and prostate cells. My cousin (a business man) and I were going to go into business and call our creations the Ho-bot and the Gigilo-bot. As a post-doc I was working on engineering liver, so the joke was I would make everyone a replacement liver for when their years of heavy drinking caught up with them and they needed a transplant. Now I’m working on intestine and colon, which doesn’t make for as good a story.
What society things I do: As mentioned earlier, I think this is pretty good and a large part of my work involves tissue engineering. However, now I’m doing a lot of stuff with (mouse) embryonic stem cells, so I’d probably put a picture like this (even though I’m working with MOUSE stem cells)-
Source.
What my boss thinks I do: I’d probably put a picture of a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat since it seems to take very little time away from actual benchwork for advisers/supervisors to completely lose touch with the reality of how long it takes to do experiments.
What I think I do: Not sure what I’d put here, but it DEFINITELY wouldn’t be quantum physics!
What I really do: Since a picture of any of the work I mentioned in this post would make too many people puke, I’d probably put a picture of my computer- since I feel like most of my time is spent on the computer making Power Point presentations, finding/reading papers, responding to e-mails and crunching data.
