An amateur video was posted on YouTube last January and rapidly developed a cult following among people who have survived the trials and tribulations of biomedical science graduate programs. To date, it has over 3 million hits and I would be embarrassed to tell you how many of those hits came from my computer. I find this video to be among the funniest and most creative science bits I’ve ever seen. I also find it spot-on about the grad school experience –despite the fact that, unlike the video’s star, I was one of the lucky ones who *did* finish grad school in less than 5 years, and I *was* first author on a two-author paper in the Journal of Neuroscience (which my department chair blithely referred to as JBD–“The Journal of Big Di**s.”)
So as I face yet another holiday season where I will be working straight through the holidays on a center grant, and find myself in need of a chuckle, I invite you to join me in viewing the Zheng lab’s classic parody, “Bad Project”:
