Research assistant

Pay in the destination countries

Monthly, in US dollars. Each country is an Imora admission package — open one for that route's fees, language requirement and deadline.

What does the day look like?

Your working hours handle the logistical and mechanical foundation of a scientific project. Concrete daily tasks include querying databases like PubMed, Scopus, and IEEE Xplore, maintaining reference libraries in Zotero or Mendeley, designing surveys in Qualtrics or REDCap, and tracking research subjects. In STEM laboratories, you prepare chemical reagents, run autoclaves, pipette, execute PCR assays, maintain cell cultures, and log protocols in Benchling. You also clean messy raw datasets, scrape web data, and run statistical models using R, Python, Stata, MATLAB, or SPSS, while plotting figures in ggplot2 or GraphPad Prism and formatting manuscripts in Overleaf (LaTeX).

Enrolled Graduate Research Assistants (GRAs) work on 20-hour weekly contracts during semesters, though biological cycles or deadlines regularly push hours further. Full-time pre-doctoral staff work 37.5 hours per week in the UK or 40 hours in the US. Weekend and overnight shifts occur when cell cultures, incubators, or participant schedules demand monitoring. Scientific discovery, professor debates, and poster presentations take up only a tiny fraction of your time; the vast majority is spent cleaning corrupted spreadsheets, debugging code, recalibrating pipettes, washing glassware, and tracking consent forms.

Where does this lead?