the power of goo

I know, this is not really a post belonging onto the scientific blogosphere, or is it?

You may be familiar with certain dress styles across disciplines — looking back at my times at university we always used to joke about the “law” types or the “economics” students — always dressed to kill, or rather with collar shirt, not necessarily tie and suit, but always neat, stylish, serious.

Well then there were the engineers, where you would have many shirt guys as well, but also the more “outdoor,” practical types. Women in engineering? Not at my uni.

And then the natural scientists. Starting with physics: only computer science and math majors would come close in disregard of clothing styles, not? How about biologists? Better, much more diverse, and women. Chemists? Usually, due to certain lab restrictions, nothing too fancy, acid stains in jeans and T-shirts. Well, lab coats in some cases, anything goes. Biochemists are, in my experience, more dressy than chemists, usually a bit more “focused” as well in their minds, but maybe that is just because during my times we still had the old diploma chemists, who didn’t have that clear guideline in their studies so anything was OK, whereas the biochem majors all were in a bachelor/master program where pretty much everything was set — including the visits to certain brain washing programs… elite this, elite that and such. But this seems to be the case everywhere in Germany these days?

Good to know a letter to nature just recently questioned the training of chemists for academia only… missing many soft skills and broader abilities which were necessary for industry work. But that’s a post for another day.

And back to chemists dressing up: ever walked into a big player in industrial chemistry? Ever seen chemists walk around in a lab coat with shirt/tie underneath? Drastic changes for anyone, especially those of us “anything goes” chemists. But not to despair, this seems to hit anyone in big business, not?

Clothes make people.

Do they?