Standard Deviation EP4: The Gamble

🚨 NEW EPISODE: THE GAMBLE 🚨

Episode 4 of Standard Deviation with Oliver Bogler on the Out of Patients channel is called “’The Gamble” and it tracks exactly that. 🎰

Dr. Rachel Gatlin started her neuroscience PhD in 2019. COVID hit 6 months later. She joined a brand new lab during lockdown. Her advisor was on maternity leave. She couldn’t run her first experiment for three months. Her research?

(This is not a joke)

Social isolation in mice.

“I kind of know what these mice are going through,” she said, watching them attack each other after weeks alone.

Rachel survived COVID chaos. Published groundbreaking work on aggression circuits in the brain. Defended her dissertation. Lined up a postdoc at University of Washington.

Then Trump’s hiring freeze hit.

The call that should have finalized her start date became a shutdown notice. Her future evaporated while she smiled politely on Zoom. “Had to kind of keep a smile on my face and be like, yeah, totally, it’ll be fine.”

She texted her mom instead of calling. Knew she’d cry if she heard a voice.

What followed: Writing a training grant while finishing her PhD. Switching research fields under pressure. Waiting weeks to learn if NIH would even honor the funding. Living one day at a time when she’s wired to plan years ahead.

She got it. Barely. After the system almost broke her.

“Science used to be this thing where people would be like, you’ll get a job, you’ll make money. Now it’s like, will you? Should you do a PhD in biological sciences? I don’t know. It’s more of a gamble than it used to be.”

Her survival strategy? Get a cat named Yoshi. Network like your life depends on it. Because it does.

Oliver Bogler brings you these stories every other Thursday on Standard Deviation. Real scientists. Real chaos. Real survival.

Listen. Then leave a review. Five stars help us reach more people trapped in this broken system.

If this hits home, tell me where you have seen it happen. Add a comment or a rage repost and drop your story in the thread. One reply pushes this in front of more people who deal with the same mess.

Are you new here? My condolences and my thanks. Follow along and stay loud with the rest of us. More voices means more pressure on a system that counts on silence

EPISODE LINK ➡️ https://www.outofpatients.com/standard-deviation-ep4-the-gamble/