Congrats! Your hard work paid off! You’ve just been accepted to grad school. You’ve just been selected for a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship. You’ve just landed your first industrial job. You’ve just been awarded an international travel opportunity. Take some time to celebrate your accomplishment with family, friends, labmates, and pets (not necessarily in that order). […]

Have you ever noticed how your talent to procrastinate increases at the most inopportune time, such as a heightened workload, incoming due dates, and increased responsibilities? Do you suddenly have the urge to clean your house or continuously refresh your email inbox when you have a million things to do? Instead, you are unconsciously engaged […]

The importance of international collaborations came to me not in the form of chemistry at first, but in the form of a stranger on a bus. I was 16 years old and living in a suburb of Shanghai when a woman sat down next to me. We didn’t have much in common but what she […]

Time. It is an elusive and fickle beast. We all need more of it, and it never fails that the moment you think you have a breather, you’re sitting in your office at the end of the day, scratching your head and wondering where on earth the hours went. Time management is a surprisingly difficult […]

Many young professionals are asked to assume leadership positions, even when they are one of the least experienced people on the team. This can happen to a new volunteer who thinks they are volunteering to “help” with something and suddenly find themselves in charge, a new faculty member on a college or university committee, a […]

Let’s face it, grad school can be consuming. You start getting good results and the next thing you know, you’re pulling all-nighters in lab, sleeping on the grotesque sofa in the basement next to the liquid nitrogen fill station, and waking up everyday at 5:30 AM with the fear that the heating elements in your […]