Rest in Power, Ben Barres

I recently learned that Ben Barres died at the end of the year.

When his article about gender came out in 2006, I was in grad school at Yale. (Also known as Snooty U, in past years). I wrote to Dr. Barres - and I don't remember, all these years later, exactly what I said - but I wrote that I was frustrated, and I could see discrimination around me, and I could feel the discrimination, and I didn't see how I would ever become a research scientist.

He wrote back to me, a great kindness to a stranger amidst what must have surely been hundreds and hundreds of similar messages.  The West Coast is nicer, he wrote; maybe you could be happier here.  The Yales of the world are the worst places for a young woman like you to be, he wrote.  I hope you find perseverance and strength and success.

I didn't end up as research scientist, and I doubt I ever will, but I will always remember his kindness.  Rest in power, and the knowledge that you did righteous work of so many kinds, Dr. Barres.

Unsolicited Advice: Choosing a Postdoc (or Grad Student Lab)

Although I have not been a postdoc (you couldn't pay me enough... ha, ha) I did get to play along for five years while Dr. S enjoyed a passive-aggressive, backstabbing, lying advisor who liked to take people down in front of others.

He and I both got, and followed, lots of advice before choosing our various labs.  He talked to many people who knew this person (including his grad advisor, who had known her both personally and professionally for 30 years).  None of them told him the truth, which was: Run, don't walk.

So here's my unsolicited advice for anyone choosing a new lab: Do all the things people say - talk to the oldest grad student, talk to the postdocs, discuss possible projects and degrees of autonomy. Then find the last 5-10 people who have left the lab and gone elsewhere, and call them up on the phone and ask them what they really think of the lab.  "What were the five best things and the five worst things, and what advice would you give someone thinking of joining this lab?" is a nice neutral way to ask.  People with permanent jobs already (who no longer need the advisor's goodwill) have the least to lose by telling the unvarnished truth. Also, if there's rumors that someone left in a fit of bitterness, especially talk to that person.  Their reasons may or may not be good ones, but you should hear them.

And if you are a naive young grad student who thinks "But it will be different for me!  I will work extra-special-hard/ graduate in four years/ totally be the teacher's pet/ never be as bitter as that!"... well, don't say I didn't warn you.

In Which I Return Early To Tell You All's Kind of Mostly Well That Ends Well

Very short version: Mountain U offered the spouse a TT job-of-his-dreams, here in the exact place we most want to live.  So.

Much longer version:

Dr. S took this visiting-assistant-professor job here despite... well, despite practically everything.  It was the equivalent of putting all your money on one horse.  Also:

* the department interviewed four people and the other three were female
* I understand their legitimate desire to hire a female scientist BUT
* two applicants sucked and the other one they apparently hated (this on the direct word of Dr. S's chair)
* so naturally they weaseled around, told Dr. S when they'd decide and then didn't, then made an offer to the one they hated and lied to him about it.
* AND when he called everywhere else he'd applied, they told him they figured Mountain U had written him such a fantastic recommendation that they would surely hire him, so these other places didn't even call him, and now they'd made offers elsewhere.  Way to get screwed coming and going, right?

To give you an idea of the time scale, he interviewed on Halloween.   I have spent the last week both grieving for all our dreams, and applying for jobs across the state.  Also I basically haven't slept well in months.  Do they make IV Valium?  I could really use some right about now.

We are both under the impression that something screwy was happening.  Either the faculty are deeply divided - which is very very bad-  or the administration was applying some kind of pressure and/or leverage that the department either couldn't or wouldn't counter, which is maybe less bad.

However, the only remaining questions are, can he get anyone to tell him what really is going on, and can he convince them to offer him more money?  (This is in accordance with my firmly held principle that one should always at least ask for more.)  They've burned a lot of goodwill by fucking lying but, on the other hand, this is pretty much the life we've always wanted: here in my home state, somewhere we can afford to buy a few acres, plant a bunch of fruit trees and an enormous garden, and grow old watching the sun set over the mountains.

Excuse me, I'm going to go drink a few stiff ones out of sheer relief.

(P.S.  If you've been wondering why the hell I haven't emailed you back - you know who you all are, and you are legion- I'm sorry.  I was too full of sadness and worry to even get as far as "Hello World".  Hopefully the emotional hangover will wear off soon.)

Ask A Scientist: Lab Politics Are Eating My PhD Project

Unearthed from the vault.  Apparently I wrote, but never published, this one!

***** 

Reader T. asks:

'My jerk of a boss wants to give away my project, which I spent many years on and which I've just gotten to work! To another lab, with whom I thought we were collaborating! And I'm worried the boss will kick me out. What the hell. What can I do???'

Dear T,

Your boss is a shortsighted, egomaniacal idiot. Does he, perhaps, lack tenure?

In Which I Wish To Exchange The Spouse

My dear spouse is, as I've mentioned, interviewing for academic jobs. Personally, I think it's all a giant Ponzi scheme, liable to collapse at any moment amidst cries of woe, but who asked me?

Anyhow.  Despite the fact that we both have fancy PhDs, marketable skills in biology, marketable skills outside biology, and the collective willpower of a bulldozer, he is becoming panicky. 

Before he started turning in applications, we discussed the terms of our Marital Agreement Re: Where We Go Next: near my family, no temporary or visiting positions, if no TT job this year, then end of game, thank you for playing.

Do you know where he's flying this Sunday?  To interview for a one-year visiting position, on the off chance that a) he will receive no other job offers; b) this job might have some miniscule chance of a permanent hire; c) I will not then murder him for being gone all but 56 hours of the next two weeks; d) my response to having to move twice in two years will not be divorce.

Sadly, I am reliably informed that he is out of warranty.

In Which A Giant Ego Is Good For Something

My former advisor and I did not get along for many long years; in fact, until one day when I politely told him off.  He was, in fact, delighted that I had come up with a whole new project, made it work, set the old one on fire, and tossed it out the window.

You see, his ego was big enough to take being wrong.  Like a good parent, he was pleased that his lab children had outgrown him- that I had proved his theory wrong. *

Dr. S's current advisor... let's just say that the self-esteem isn't nearly as large as my advisor's was. 

And as a result, this advisor is more like the hand-holding helicopter parent whose 30-year-old children don't know how to do their own laundry.  Scientifically speaking.

I never thought I'd be grateful for overwhelming ego.

*To be fair, it was a good theory.  There were 73 reported instances in the literature of Condition X + Thing Y= Result Z.  I got Condition X + Thing Y = The Sitting Alone In The Dark Crying Experiment. 

Ethical Issues

Your postdoc advisor informs you that all three completely new projects that you came up with, developed, and started publishing in said advisor's lab are off-limits to take with you.  Even though the advisor knows nothing (no, really) about two of the three.  Do you:

A) Decide that your advisor is having a psychotic break and have him/her forcibly committed?
B) Take this as further evidence that your advisor is a passive-aggressive jerk?
C) Lie down, roll over, and accept being completely screwed?
D) Start working on a fourth project, and don't tell your advisor?  Or, as a friend of mine put it, "Listen up, kids... two wrongs do make a right!"

 -More later.

Placeholder, For Reflection later

* Went to a party full of scientists, with kids in tow. Only housewife there. Reactions from amusing to infuriating. ("What do you do?" "I study evolution." "...of WHAT? I edit all of Dr S's papers and grants.")

* Grad school in retrospect; working with my embittered ex for six years sure killed all the good memories from THAT relationship.  Also, my advisor seems saner after the fact.

* How much I look forward to a day when I don't feel I neef to pinch every penny until it screams.

*Toddler.  OMG toddler.

* Must watch Sesame Street with toddler now GAAAAH.

Because I Can't Say It To My Spouse

Or, more accurately, because I already said it to my spouse and he found it extremely annoying: I TOLD YOU SO.

(Crazy bosses don't get less crazy, and then was, perhaps, the time to stomp down a foot and say "!@#$ you.")

On the other hand, if someone's consistently screwing me over, I'm likely to take a Colin Powell approach: analyze the risks and benefits, then strike with overwhelming force.  WHAP. (I refer to this as the Flyswatter Doctrine.)

Yet again, we have demonstrated that I am unsuited to academia, and that my spouse is a much nicer person than me. 

Annoyance By Proxy

Dr. S's boss, as I have mentioned before, is a mildly psychotic tinpot tyrant. 

They are trying to get a paper published.  They submitted it; the rejection came back today.  They agreed to consider their options for a day.  Dr. S and I talked about it; he would have to do a lot of reformatting, but he wants to submit it to Appropriate Respected Journal, one of whose editors has already told him, in person, at a conference, that they would be very interested.  He went downstairs to email his boss and try to boot her into action (her turnaround time for editing papers is eight months because she is insane; normal people do this in two to four weeks).

She had ALREADY submitted it to Third Tier Completely Inappropriate Journal- without Dr. S's consent.  If it is published in TTCIJ, his job-application prospects go down by an order of magnitude.  Also, it's a journal full of unicycle-repair diagrams, and this paper is about how to grow orange trees in cold climates: completely inappropriate.  He's upset, I'm upset, and I don't see any way this is going to end well.  He can and will withdraw the submission, but then it needs to go somewhere else, and will she take another eight months just for spite?  Probably. 

And people ask me why I don't miss academic science. 

Academics Can Be Real Jerks

Not you, dear reader. Dr. S's boss. She epitomizes the petty-fiefdom ideal, complete with serfs of varying castes.

Dr. S has just departed for a week-long conference. In general, his boss refuses to pay cab fare. But! She will pay for parking at the airport!

We have one car. So:

1) I drive 3 hours, with angry toddler, to and from the airport. My gas, time, and annoyance are not recompensed. I must leave the house at, respectively, 5 AM on a Sunday and 8 PM on a Friday, which is Shabbat, when I don't !@#$ing roll.

2) We park the car at the airport all week, leaving me on foot, or by deeply-inconvenient bus. (It takes a bus hour to go 15 minutes away. Don't even ask.) I can walk to: the drugstore, the library, the gas station, and the hardware store. I cannot walk to: anywhere useful.

3) Dr. S takes the bus. For 3 hours. Each way.

4) Dr. S, his luggage, and his poster ride his bike 14 miles. Each way. At 4:30 AM, and then back in the dark.

Or, what we actually did:

5) He takes a damn taxi anyways, and harasses his boss until she pays him back. And if she doesn't like it, SHE can a) lend me a car all week or b) take my spouse to the airport herself.

This is so amazingly unprofessional. How do academics get away with this? (No, I know. It is rhetorical.)

Devil On Your Shoulder

Belle once told me that the voice of her conscience sometimes spoke to her in my voice, saying "And people in Hell want ice water!"

Dr. S is currently a postdoc. His boss is... well, unbalanced is a polite term for it- in a way that is not immediately apparent, but instead a joy saved for a few years' experience of her. The last experiment she suggested to him was something like this:

1) You are putting rubber balls in a bucket, punching holes, and adding water. The water comes out. Great!
2) For a control, you did not punch holes. The water stayed.
3) I want you to cut out shamrock shapes and leprechauns and see what happens to the water. It might not come out! YOU NEVER KNOW!

He is becoming increasingly disillusioned with academia and really, who can blame him?* So every so often he asks what I think about X, Y, and Z. After the last round, I have decided that 99% of all the advice I ever give people could be summarized like this:

Decide what you really want, what you're willing to sacrifice to get it, and what you're NOT willing to sacrifice. Example: I want to be faculty, but I will work no more than 40 hours a week, not 80-and-never-see-my-family.

Think about what happens if you don't get it, and will those sacrifices then leave you bitter, angry, and furious with the world? If so, don't make them. Example: My kid is five and I see him 30 minutes a day and those years are never coming back: FAIL.

Decide whether it's worth it to keep doing what you are doing. Example: I will give this one more year, apply for faculty jobs next fall, and then say, screw you all.

If it is, find something you can learn or get from the experience, and make it happen. Example: Hey! I will go learn to run, fix, and use mass spectrometers! That is marketable!

If it's not worth it to keep on... the classified ads are this way.

Tell your boss/ partner/ coworkers what your terms are. Firmly. Repeatedly. One more time, all together now. Example: I need this paper to be out the door in two months. I need you to choose which of these seventeen experiments are most experiment, because I can only do two. And I need you to actually READ THE DAMN PAPER, bitch. (The last part, maybe in the inside voice.)

If they don't like it, they can take a, repeat with me, long walk off a short pier. Example: Go to hell, I'm getting a job in industry. Take your grant and shove it.**

* Thanks, Amelie.
** I worked in industry; yes, I know what it's like. Also, someone in this lab walked away from a Damon Runyon fellowship to get away from the PI. Everyone together now: OUCH.

Latent Something

I have a long-standing theory that PIs at large universities are not selected for either management skills or teaching ability, and therefore, generally possess none.* (There are, of course, some who have it nonetheless, but not from any selective pressure on them.)

Dr. S's boss has, all unwitting, made it a personal mission in life to validate my theory.** She does an excellent passive-aggressive I-won't-send-your-paper-out. She tells people to their faces that they are terrible writers, that she understood nothing, and she will have to rewrite their entire papers (this to people who, I know personally, are excellent writers). She chides people in front of their entire lab for such sins as summarizing previously presented data. She is upset when Dr. S has a conflicting theory, and even more so when he is right.

What on earth is wrong with her? Latent psychotic tendencies? An inferiority complex? A tragic and possibly fatal lack of acquaintance with being contradicted?

In any event, she surely does not possess any management skills at all. Except the BAD kind.


*Some people do manage- I'm looking at you, JP- but it's all about their own skills, and usually not about the university hiring for it. I mean, when's the last academic job interview where they asked you about your personnel and budgeting skills? If you have a grant, well, very good. If you already have a job and postdocs, you must have skills! Yes! Brilliant syllogism.

** Come to think of it, Dr. S's former boss, who let a single postdoc single-handedly run the lab into $100,000 of debt, harass other postdocs such that they filed formal complaints, poison the entire lab atmosphere with entitlement and resentment, and directly cause the firing of four people (to make up the debt).... didn't have any skills either.

Wouldn't Have Thought Possible

Snooty U. regularly attempts to hit me up for cash. You know, because of all my warm fuzzy grad school memories. Their spiel is 1) Contribute To Continuing Excellence and 2) C'mon, don't you want to help the poor widdle grad students?

This school has an endowment on the scale of the national debt*. The science grad students are funded by a ludicrous number of NIH training grants, plus the equally ludicrous overhead, followed by their own advisors' grants. So, you wouldn't think I could be any less sympathetic.

But! This latest "donate now" letter was signed by the new Grad School Dean...

...my old advisor.

Ding!


*Strictly speaking, on the scale of about a week's worth of the national debt. STILL.

Things I Will Not...

... tell my former advisor in response to his increasingly annoying shrill panicked urgent emails, regarding our poor little doomed manuscript from six months ago:

1. What... think I CARE?
2. S-the-grad-student can do whatever he darn well pleases.
   
3. If you take my name off the paper, will you stop asking me questions?
   
4. I no longer remember if I tried X, Y, or Z. Want my lab notebooks?*
5. Tell you what: you pay my salary and I'll answer your questions!
6. Die. Die. Die.

*My lab notebooks are completely incomprehensible. Even to me, at this point.

Except for a note from 2006 reading "PI Wears Chairman Mao Hat To Lab Meeting!!!"

Dear Former Advisor:

Thanks so much for sending the reviews from my doomed little manuscript. Again. I wrote you back once. What's that? You want more? Let me explain a few things to you.

1) My baby is crying.

2) I already have my PhD. It's in the frigging mail.

3) My baby is way more important to me than your lame manuscript (all right, my lame manuscript), not least because

4) I already have a job and

5) I need nothing further from you.

You get 15 more minutes of my time. CHEERS.

Sincerely yours,

No Longer Your Grad Student So Bugger Off


Seriously though, what's a polite way to say, "I am doing this as a favor to you, but I am very busy and this is all you get" ??

Ladies' Night Out

Recently, three women joined my lab, more than doubling the female population. (Just in time for me to leave.) There was instant bonding, which I had only seen before among married postdocs or among single grad students. But it is lovely to have other women about. We go to lunch together; every couple weeks we all go out together for drinks or dinner. (Which I love, by the way.) Every so often one of the men comes along- we are outnumbered about 3:1- but mostly, not.

Dr. S argues that this is discriminatory of me. What if the poor dears fell left out? I felt left out for years, I said. That doesn't make it right, or nice, he said.

Well, no. But for one, It's so much easier to spend time with the women in lab. Social taboos? Herd pressures? Who knows. We certainly have faced many of the same challenges as women, and it's nice to not be judged for talking about pretty skirts or gossip. And for another, the men have made minimal efforts to include me. Do I care if they feel excluded? I do not. In an ideal world, everyone would get along and be socially fair and equitable. In the real world, I like some people better than others.

So, are we mean? Or are we apathetic? Or both.

Learning To Play Nice

I recently heard about a situation in another lab. To be intentionally vague: They have a Difficult Personality. Said Difficult Personality has been very successful professionally, and has had snits about any number of other people, for no good reasons. They also have a Very Nice Person. Said person has been less successful professionally for no good reasons.

Difficult Personality asked Nice Person a mildly offensive question one day. Nice Person gave a terse response.

DP threatened NP with professional blackmail if NP didn't 'treat DP better'. DP, in fact, threatened to try to ruin NP's employment prospects.

Nice Person, feeling somewhat less nice, filed a harassment complaint.

The thing I'm writing about, though, is my response to the story. When I heard it, my first response was, 'DP thought DP could do WHAT????' And then, second, I started thinking up how, were it me, I would take DP down.

This isn't necessarily the best response: hitting back as hard as you can. My first years in this lab were extremely difficult, and plagued with aggressive people. I suppose I worked up to it rather; I tried pushing back gently, and then harder and harder, until my reflex became to always apply maximum force, to shut the other person down, to have no tolerance for being talked over or condescended to or whatever. (Last week, I actually smacked a postdoc who was trying to take something out of my hands. Gently. I smacked him gently.)

Yet one more thing to unlearn on my way out of town.

This Is Where Memes Go To Die; On Thinking; etc.

I know that many of you kind readers have tagged me for memes. I assure you that there is only forgetfulness and no malice whatsoever in my utter failure to do any of them. I can barely keep track of what day it is, at this point; anything else is a lost cause. Apologies. Maybe one day I'll catch up. (Ha ha ha.)
***
Yesterday I, quite literally, spent five hours doing heavy manual labor, ate lunch at 2:30, and went to lab where I worked my fingers to the bone for another five hours. Then I went home, cooked part of dinner, helped fold six (6!) loads of laundry, made a pancake because I was finally hungry instead of nauseous from fatigue, and went to bed. This is what I'm doing instead of blogging.
***

I was all set spend all of Sunday on a boring set of experiments, whose answer I expect to be, roughly, 2+2=4.

As I was planning the week, I sat down and tried to figure out how my competitor had made the almost-impossible-to-make brick cited in his abstract. It's quite elegant really: he took several bricks out of sample walls, then made random foam replicates to replace them. If the wall didn't fall down, right size brick. Instant selection.*

So I thought about it for an hour, and came up with a simple, elegant, and definitive way to test my new brick models. It requires another month of prep, but then I make bricks out Sculpey clay to make them less brittle, do the experiment three times and am done- done!- forever.

Thinking it through is not encouraged in my lab- at least, not explicitly. We are pressured to produce RESULTS- pretty pictures every week, or else- that if you instead work out a complicated problem, in Advisor's book, that's a week where you did nothing. So although I do spend a lot of time thinking about my experiments, I don't always spend enough. In retrospect (like every other terminal grad student**), if I'd known five years ago exactly how important it is, I'd already be out.

As a famous scientist once said to me, 'Three weeks in lab will save you a day in the library.' Or in your brain. In the end, it's more efficient to do it right the first time: why is there so little emphasis on efficiency?

On a larger scale, I believe this is part of the problem with grant agencies. They want the pretty pictures in your grant, not for it to be really interesting and/or exquisitelywell-reasoned. If you want to throw things at a wall to see what happens, well, as long as there's a picture of something , you can get a grant. (Or as long as you already have a grant, in which case, instant 2x advantage.) The NIH goes on about how it wants to promote transformative research, and then funds 24 'New Innovator' grants. They don't fund great ideas; they fund preliminary data.

And don't even get me started on the waste and inefficiency in my lab alone. Let's just say, that time I found $5000 of custom-made grout in the back of the freezer? Not an isolated incident.

*Of course, the reason he didn't waste six months doing it the obvious ways is that I told him they wouldn't work. Wasn't that nice of me? That'll teach me.

**I often wonder, terminal in what way.

Excuse Me, My Brain Is Full

Er... I have nothing coherent to say. I have been conferenced. There were lots of people. Lots. And lots. The company reps gave me a dizzying assortment of stuff, including several demo bricks and a stylish messenger bag (I might buy some expensive special copper wiring from that company, so they were nice to me).

Since I don't intend to stay in research, this conference is a peculiar experience. I'm there to talk to people, hear about jobs, and talk to more people. Oh, and hang out with my friends who are putting me up. I might go see some gardens and visit a particularly good bakery.

There was only one presentation I really wanted to see: the title indicated that they may have done the work I'm about to do, and, er, I'm a little NERVOUS! Alas, neither the author nor the poster showed. So I'll wait in agony until I can set the advisor on him, and go take more chocolate from the copper-wiring booth. Sigh.