Tough Gigs: Stories about unsuitable jobs

The Story Collider

From bizarre job requirements to downright horrible bosses, sometimes our jobs just don’t fit. In this week’s episode, both our storytellers share stories about what happens when work doesn’t work.

Part 1: When fertility research scientist Sarah Adelman gets a job at a sperm bank, she’s apparently the only one who finds it funny.

Part 2: In her new job at a neuroscience lab, Anna Zhukovskaya’s boss starts to pick on her.

Sarah Adelman is a born and bred New Yorker, former fertility research scientist, and stand up comedian. She performs regularly at all the top NYC comedy clubs and independent shows, can be seen on two episodes of HBO Game Theory and has over 35,000 followers across her platforms . Her content has been featured on The Today Show, NBC News, Meta, the 92nd Street Y, and more. Sarah graduated Cum Laude from Dartmouth College in 2019 and earned her Masters of Public Health from Columbia University in 2021. She trained as a research scientist in NYC where she studied fertility and ran human subjects trials at a sperm bank. Her one hour comedy solo show, EGG, brings audiences through her hilarious and heartfelt coming-of-age journey to her present-day career in science, the day-to-day of studying male reproduction, why she started comedy, and culminates in an earth-shattering clash of her two worlds. EGG premires in June 2024.

Anna Zhukovskaya is a neuroscientist studying the role of somatosensation in social behavior and its effects on stress. She is currently doing a postdoc in the Abdus-Sabor lab in Columbia University's Zuckerman Institute. She did her PhD at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute in Ilana Witten's lab.

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