I’m against/biased against a lot of “hard science” grad work, because (maybe outside of a small number of labs/PIs) I think you often just serve as cheap labor that doesn’t actually involve a lot intellectual activity (this is a distinct from the other problem a lot of research activity is winning games in academia).
I’d offer a slightly different perspective on this point, as a hard science graduate student doing a lot of cheap labor with most of my intellectual activity done on the side.
When you do cheap “non-intellectual” work in a hard science lab, you learn:
A practical sense of how to design an experiment to answer an important question
An intuition for how to connect data in papers (and content in textbooks) to what the scientists actually did in the lab, and what the limitations, implications, and importance might be in light of that.
The skills to develop and troubleshoot new methodologies
How to collaborate and communicate with your supervisor, colleagues, tech support, other labs, core facilities, and authors of papers you’re building on
A sense of what bottlenecks hold things back in the lab, as fodder for future research directions as well as any possible future management role you may have
I have gotten a ton of value out of both rote lab techniques and the arduous process of troubleshooting methods for a novel experimental design.
I’d offer a slightly different perspective on this point, as a hard science graduate student doing a lot of cheap labor with most of my intellectual activity done on the side.
When you do cheap “non-intellectual” work in a hard science lab, you learn:
A practical sense of how to design an experiment to answer an important question
An intuition for how to connect data in papers (and content in textbooks) to what the scientists actually did in the lab, and what the limitations, implications, and importance might be in light of that.
The skills to develop and troubleshoot new methodologies
How to collaborate and communicate with your supervisor, colleagues, tech support, other labs, core facilities, and authors of papers you’re building on
A sense of what bottlenecks hold things back in the lab, as fodder for future research directions as well as any possible future management role you may have
I have gotten a ton of value out of both rote lab techniques and the arduous process of troubleshooting methods for a novel experimental design.