Knowing your way around Powerpoint is vital. It is not uncommon to be accosted by a professor shortly before they're due to fly off to an important meeting, demanding or pleading for someone to fix their $%^ing laptop. Less common, but out there, are the faculty members who know a thing or two about technology. If possible, these are people you want as your boss. The lab will have up to date computers and technology, and you might get to play with some cool toys. A certain promiscuity with platforms can be propitious. It's great being a mac person in a mac lab, but being the sole maclot amongst a sea of Dells can have its disadvantages. Likewise, the lone start bar in a herd of apple menus can be a lonely place to be. Expect to frequently come across antiquated computers connected to important pieces of equipment that are in all probability aren't even networked. You'll think about trying to upgrade the hardware and OS. The thought of important data being captured under OS 8 or Windows 95 is a scary one, but the program you need will have ceased development, or it'll cost extortionate amounts for a seat license, or maybe everyone else made do with it and they want you to suffer too. Some buggers even spend all their time in front of a screen. The rise in bioinformatics and the sheer mass of data that comes off a microarray means that database miners will always be busy at the virtual coalface.
The volume of work one is confronted with also seems up for debate. Common wisdom is that you'll spend all your time in the lab. Evenings, nights, weekends. There's another, more controversial school of thought that says this doesn't have to be true. A lot has to do with the type of experiment you conduct. Some might take four or five hours over two days to yield results. Others might involve spending 10 hours at the bench in one sitting. As you go through your orientation at the beginning, the importance of planning will be come up. This really is crucial. With successful planning, it is perfectly possible to have a productive week in the lab with time replete with late nights out, late mornings in to work and everyone in the pub by 3 on Friday. Important things to note: always be in early for lab meetings. Nothing draws attention from all the wrong people like being late. As I mentioned earlier, department heads are often clinicians. That means they like doing things at ohmygoditsearly o'clock. Being a first year PhD student ensures that, when you go to the pub with your department, they'll probably buy your drinks. Don't abuse it, and repay the favor as you move on up the chain. Writing down your results is vital. Knowing where you've written them even more so.
The next few years are not always plain sailing. Friends who graduated with you move on to high paying jobs whilst you remain in relative penury. Experiments don't always work out. There are assessments and committees to deal with. If you're unlucky enough to have classes, there will be homework! Although you're researching a particular niche of your own, you are also being formed in the same crucible as the scientists who precede you. They all had a tough time of it, and they'll be damned if they'll let some young upstarts off the hook easily.
I mentioned earlier the beauty that is Pubmed, and the way it's transformed the way we can access the literature. Prior to the 1990s, if you wanted to search for a reference you had to pick up a volume of Index Medicus and dig through it. Although you can now download PDFs of journal articles from the comfort of your office chair, it's still worth getting to know the dusty stacks. Journals will send out e-alerts and now some are using RSS, but not everything is available online, and midweek hangovers respond well to an hour or two in the library catching up on current journals, reading the New Scientist or Scientific American and making silent pacts with various deities regarding the wisdom, or lack thereof, of mixing your drinks.
It's about now that conferences start to take on importance. These come in various shapes and flavors, from small local meetings to the largest international ones. Conferences serve several functions. You get to show your work to your peers, some of whom will try and make you cry with hard questions you can't answer. Sometimes, you get to present something that's in direct contradiction to the person who was up before you. Showing your work involves either a poster presentation or giving a 10-minute talk. Opinions are divided on their merits. Posters can be less nerve wracking, but you do have to stand by them for several hours. You might be constantly swarmed, or you might get ignored and resort to busking to draw attention to your breakthrough discoveries.
