im doing my dissertation this year so i may also end up in The Lab doing Experimence >:)
i just need to figure out wtf im doing lmaooo i had to change topics because my original idea was gonna involve a lot of field work and then i got diagnosed with Walking Hurts Me disorder so back to the drawing board i guess
Yay dissertation! We can lab post together! I'm sorry you didn't get to do your original idea but there are lots of cool things you can do with little to no fieldwork!
Most of my undergrad research was only a couple field days per semester and I had a field site very close to a road so it wasn't too physically intense. Do pay attention to terrain if you're doing that, though - I climbed some very steep river banks. I'm not sure if this is a thing in environmental science but in archaeology everyone wants to do the fieldwork instead of the lab work so there's like a massive backlog of specimens in desperate need of analysis, and I have been offered environmental projects that were essentially piggybacking off someone else's field samples and/or data. Also worked on a project that was done in a greenhouse instead of the actual field - the botany folks do a lot of that.
Point being, science is done in a million different ways and I'm sure you can find one that works for you.
Also, don't be afraid to use accomodations in the lab! It can be physically demanding in ways you might not expect, although I didn't have too much trouble with it until I started doing it full time. I have to do a lot of things sitting down that other people do standing and that's fine. I can still do everything I need to do, just a bit differently. Currently troubleshooting ways to hold 3 liter beakers so they don't fuck up my wrists, and I have a coworker who had to get smaller beakers because the heavy 4L ones were hurting his bad shoulder.
