research assistant

teaching assistant

postdoctoral fellow

postdoctoral researcher

research associate

McGill University

McGill University is an awful place to work. Even if they pretend to be for equality and people's rights, actually, they are breaking all the rules. They don't respect you as an employee, the management is awful. Workload level and abuses are incredible. They're people who actually are doing the work of 4 persons. They prefer to use workloads instead of overtime. They went even to promote someone, in order to fire her couple of days later. Because she was in a probation period, it was easy for them to do it. Management is braking all the rules, using intimidation, psychological harassment, they don't answer on time to your vacation request. And everything becomes worse day by day. McGill prefers to intimidate people in order to save money. They lost already lawsuits. People got their jobs back, and transferred to other departments, in order to avoid management. Things are generalized, but, as a specific example, House and Hospitality department is rotten to the bone. Lot of hypocrisy and double standards. Management is allways late to work, likes to bully the employees, they are looking to find any reason to use disciplinary meeting for any reason at all. They created and cultivated a toxic environment. If you like to be submissive, and to allow them to destroy your rights, then, is a good place to work. Salaries are pretty good, good benefits also.

My typical day at work consists of literature review in the field of my research, lab discussion on my work progress with colleagues, exchange of ideas, programming and high performance computing. I learned how to be self-reliant and effectively use resources (researchers with different backgrounds and computational tools for medical image processing and analysis) available at Montreal Neurological Institute to advance my own research. In the Brain Imaging Centre I am given full freedom of thought and there is no micromanagement. My co-workers are scientists who came to the field of neuroscience with different backgrounds (physics, biomedical engineering, psychiatry, computer science, statistics and mathematics). I had a great knowledge enriching experience collaborating with them. The hardest part of the job was invention of a novel methodology that would be applicable to the challenging dataset of MRI scans of early developing brains. The most enjoyable part of the job was attending conferences and disseminating my research results to the neuroimaging community.    

I was enrolled in MEng(Thesis) program thus I had to manage my time for assignments, exam and research work. Initially, it took some time to get used to the workload but once I was into the system I really enjoyed the experience. Working with Prof.McClure as my supervisor helped me in becoming better at both engineering and management of activities. Currently, I am working on an industrial project with a Spanish company and Chinese supervisor. This international experience has grown my capabilities of understanding the client expectations and coordination.  

The hardest part of my research work was understanding the science and mathematics involved in the problem. The problems we are dealing with were not part of regular civil engineering courses. Thus had to put an extra effort of taking courses(CFD) in other engineering departments. 

The effort put in to solve such problems has developed my perspective of looking at new problems. Now I enjoy more while finding solutions to problems.

Being a grad student isn't a classic job but I treated it as a job nonetheless. I was paid to complete my thesis and teaching was meant to help subsidize my funding for my PhD. Overall I learned a lot about scientific research and analysis, and what to do and what not to do as a team leader (and hopefully supervisor) in the future. I enjoyed collaborating with other professors at the University and I thrived under the supportive academic atmosphere in my program. The best part of being a grad student is the flexibility of my schedule. I was able to accommodate the requirements of my teaching responsibilities while going into lab to complete work on my own projects. However, it was also difficult to put much time and effort into one job (teaching vs. research), there was always a balance that needed to be met, or else I would fall behind in either side of my responsibilities. Time management is key in this situation!

I plan to keep what I learned at McGill in mind and try to recreate that supportive academic atmosphere in my next position.

Basically it's your typical grad school experience, just the employment side of it, which is fun while it last, but unfortunately it never lasts long, meaning that every year anew you and your co-students/co-workers scramble over the few teaching or research assistance contracts that are available. Teaching (not only at McGill) is a lot of fun though! For me, the most rewarding aspect is to work with young people who are eager to expand their minds and improve themselves as persons. The hardest part, aside from the daily stress of having to juggle classes of sometimes enormous size and your own research agenda, is the job insecurity, so that on top of effectively two highly demanding jobs (teaching and research) you also constantly have to keep applying for the next job and/or scholarship. Of course this is, like I said at the beginning, a general fact of grad school experience, but as such I believe it adequately describes the life as a student staff employee at McGill University.

I was extremely happy when I received a job offer from McGill University. However, after the first month I realized that there were many issues here. The manager was extremely critical of my work , always said negative feedback without ever talking about the positives.  She constantly put me down, gave negative criticism and micro managed. The hierarchy was also felt in this environment. The only good aspect about the HR associate job were the team members, they were positive and made the job tolerable. If you do receive a job offer as a HR Associate at McGill University, beware that you will be responsible for taking calls from 10am -3 pm (basically a call centre). You will also be responsible for approving as many requests as possible because they only care about numbers.  Working in the SSU team, you will shortly realize that you are unable to express yourself/have a say and have to constantly always here bad news. I also never felt secure here.

•	Managing mice colony, including breeding, weaning and arranging mice for different projects as well as keeping  records of mice;
•	Collecting tissue sample for PCR purpose, DNA/RNA extracting,  PCR-based genotyping, data entry & analyzing.
•	Overseeing a variety of tests and procedures following protocols;
•	Running developmental projects for different technology platforms;
•	Maintaining  the laboratory inventory and checking financial statements for the lab; 
•	Maintaining systems software and purchased systems software packages, determining and resolving problems occurring in systems software or hardware and acting as a technical liaison to computer manufacturers.
•	Supervising junior staff;
•	Maintaining laboratory equipment in proper working order, following appropriate laboratory safety protocols. Having extensive knowledge of laboratory equipment;
•	QTL analyzing using GenBank, Swiss-Prot, PDB, BLAST, and NCBI Entrez;


My coworkers are excellent.

Project 1: Study atypical heterodimer LXRα:PPARα regulating hCYP7A1 gene expression in vitro and in vivo.
1) Construct plasmids, express recombinant protein and purify protein by magnetic beads and HPLC, identify protein using western blotting.
2) Cross-linking Chromatin immunoprecipidation assay (ChIP) for HepG2 hepatoblastoma cells as well as for liver cell of human CYP7A1 transgenic mice.
3) Checking hCYP7A1 mRNA level by using Q-PCR for transgenic mice treated with various diets.
Project 2: Study the function of FABP1 (fatty acid binding protein 1) on absorption of high amount of dietary pufa
1) Determine transcriptional level of FABP1 in double knockout mice and wild type mice.
2) Develope microscale high throughput diagnostic assays for plasma bile acids, total cholesterol and free fatty acid.
3) Antibody purification from rabbit serum by the affinity of Protein A, design peptide antigen to make new antibodies (protein secondary structure and hydropathy prediction).

Covering practise or meets began with checking into the Windsor Clinic to retrieve the travel pack. This required ensuring the that pack was filled with gloves, band-aids, atheletic tape, scissors etc. Afterwards we would follow the team to the grounds where they would practice and/or compete. If during this time any athlete required additional stretching or massage we would act accordingly. After the meet or practice is over we would return to the clinic where sometimes ice baths would be needed or further assisted stretching and massage. There would normally be two student therapists around and one head therapist, a small yet manageable team. The hardest part of the job was making sure that all athletes were given adequate attention while still attempting to stay within the clinics opening hours. The most enjoyable part of the experience was the incredible amount of hands on learning that was available, and always being able to learn new techniques from your superiors.

A typical day at work is going to the lab at 9.00. A.M. in the morning and planning that day's work. Since my project involved cell culturing,  I would start the day by checking on my cells and passaging them and proceeding with the things planned out for the day which includes a number of stuff such as PCR, SDS-PAGE, etc depending on what is required for the project. I learnt a lot of new techniques such as cell culturing, immunofluresence microscopy and also helped me gain experience to work independently on a project and troubleshoot during the project. The lab environment was a very nice place and people who worked with me were very helpful and knowledgeable. The hardest part of the job is sometimes the extended hours that I had to work in order to run and finish some experiments and the most enjoyable part of the job is being in lab and being able to work on a project and troubleshoot the problems and to come up with solutions and being able to learn so many new techniques on a day-today basis.

Top Job Titles	Average salary
Research assistant 14 salaries reported	$29.43 per hour
Teaching assistant 28 salaries reported	$33.57 per hour
Postdoctoral fellow 17 salaries reported	$52,580 per year
Postdoctoral researcher 13 salaries reported	$55,795 per year
Research associate 12 salaries reported	$71,417 per year

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