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Ah, okay, if you want to be an unpaid lab tech I agree that you can get that job pretty darned easily. It hadn't occurred to me, recently, to have such low sta

Ah, okay, if you want to be an unpaid lab tech I agree that you can get that job pretty darned easily. It hadn't occurred to me, recently, to have such low standards for hanging around in a lab. ;) The novelty wears off, you see. EDIT: just to summarize for the audience, I believe cperciva and I are in agreement with Patrick that it's easy to flawlessly impersonate a university student for free; We are debating the extent to which one may also impersonate a junior professor. ;)

cperciva 15y ago
Yes, "unpaid lab tech" is a pretty low standard. But if you hang around as an unpaid lab tech for long enough, you start picking up more useful skills and have a good chance of eventually getting paid. (No, I never did this. But I know people who have.) As for impersonating a junior professor: I wander into seminars and if anyone doesn't recognize me they just assume I'm from the university on the other side of town. Given my age they usually assume I'm a postdoc; but if I was ten years older I'm sure they'd assume I was a faculty member. Of course, "faculty member from a different institution" doesn't really get you very much.