Science can change the world, if you dare to ask the right questions

Hey, my Name is Carla and I will give you an insight into my job as Project Assistant and how a PhD can level up your career.

You are working at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology at TU Graz. What is your working week like, can you describe a typical working week? 

It is a lot of lab time, laboratory time, wearing the white coat all the time, hair up, putting on gloves. The morning usually starts either with checking the emails or directly go to the lab and start experiments. 🥼

Although there is a lot of work, there is also a lot of waiting time. In between you go back to the office and prepare for further experiments. You then do some calculations, check if everything is prepared for the next experiment, so it is a lot of planning, doing, and waiting. ⏳

Also, a lot of research and reading, every day there are coming new things and we have to be on top of our field, so we have to be aware of all the research that is coming. And as a PhD it is very critical, maybe you have an idea and then there is a new publication and you need to find something different or adapted.

What is your PhD topic?

I work with the yeast, Pichia Pastoris, to characterize rare-random integration events that give a super-producer phenotype. So, in other words, Pichia Pastoris is used to express proteins and sometimes is very good at it and others not so much. We want to find out why is it good. 🧫

We have a lot of business partners in Austria, the US, Germany, Denmark and Spain and also Med Uni in Graz. I would like to finish my PhD may be the end of this year.

What do you like the most about your job?

Well, my colleagues. It is a really fun environment at the institute and in the lab. Because we are all focusing on what we need to do, but at the same time we are aware of each other.

I felt welcome from the beginning and I really like the mentality of the people at TU Graz, they are really open minded and welcomed me in Graz. You can feel a real honest interest in myself. Everyone is friendly and curious. (Note: Carla by the way haven't been home to Mexico for 2 years!)

How did the idea came up to move to Europe?

I discovered the Life Sciences very early in my life and saw the studies “Biotechnology” which combined Biology and the Engineering, which I found very interesting. I was reading about the topics and the studies and soon decided, yes, this is what I am going to study. And I did.

After Bachelor and Master, now I'm doing my PhD in the same field. It is still my passion, right now I have moved away from the medical part, but my first idea was always to help people. To help a patient to fight against a disease.

I wanted to move to Europe 🇪🇺 for more career opportunities, so I searched online for PhD programs. I had visited Austria some month before and liked it a lot, so when I was searching for positions in Austria soon, I noticed that TU Graz had a lot of good research in Biotechnology. After applying for the program and having the first interview online, they invited me for the on-site assessment. There I met the people I would be working with and discovered that Graz is a nice place to live in.

Photo by: Lunghammer – TU Graz

What is important in this job? Which skills, knowledge etc. are helpful? 

It is very important to be organized, otherwise in the lab, you would lose a lot of time.

What I have really missed, is not to be afraid to ask questions. I can say that this was my mistake at the beginning. We are in the lab with the experts in this field. It would be crazy to think that they expect us to know more about this field than them. Of course not! It is also crazy that we have them in the lab and not approach/use them, use their knowledge.

For example, I was may be spending one week or more looking for an answer in books and then asked this question to the expert, and there was the answer straight away. 💡 In 2 minutes. Why was I not doing that before? But maybe I was afraid to ask questions and wanted to show, that I can do it by myself. I know that better now.

Are there any challenges?

Some days are really long, like super long, they need to, because if you stop in the middle of the day during experiments, you are kind of lose everything you have done.

And of course, there are some days, where everything you did just failed, that’s not satisfying, that is really hard. It is hard not to take it personally.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. That’s science. But on the other hand, if it failed, and you think about it why it failed and design something different, and then it works, it just feels amazing and a thousand times better than the first time.

Not to worry so much, everything will work out! Well, I hope so 😉

The advice would be: "Don’t be afraid to approach for help!”

Photo by: Lunghammer – TU Graz