Feeling not good enough.
It's funny how, no matter how much you can rationalize that your manipulative advisor is trying to make you feel inconsequential and replaceable,
and the "colleagues" in your field are all socially awkward, self-centered and weird,
and the grad students in your department are all saying they'd work with you if you had your own lab
you can still feel like a complete and total failure when your western blots stop working and you still don't have those papers published in time to apply for jobs.
Labels: blah, i used to be desperate, now i'm just depressed
posted by Ms.PhD @ 1:23 PM
5 comments
5 Comments:
Nothing like failing at your very own bread-and-butter techniques to make you feel worthless. Same shit happened to me today. Hello Monday.
I'm sorry to hear that; I hope your blots become happier soon (even though I don't really know what they are). As for the pubs, I don't have any good advice, unless you can engineer a Freaky Friday and switch places with your advisor. Good luck.
manipulative advisor who tries to make you feel not good enough, and socially awkward and weird colleagues ... that unfortunately all sounds very familiar to me :-(
Yeah I can totally relate. I'm back at LargeUniversityInCanada. And my old supervisor makes me feel inconsequential and inadequate. I'm so glad I moved.
I find it interesting how you can be around some people and they make you feel great about yourself, while others...
I would say don't hang around with those that make you feel bad about yourself, but I know that not really a solution. Especially, when the person is a. your supervisor, and b. you have and need a job.
One solution: find alternative ways to support yourself - i.e. internal validation. Academia is never going to be that.
what makes me feel not good enough is when my funding ran out and I got canned. My research that I had invested years into developing, just evaporated completely. And then no one would hire me despite my list of highly-cited publications in good journals in a hot field and prestigious fellowships and past history of procuring grants independently. Why won't anyone hire me?? what is wrong with me?? Do I need to win a Nobel prize in order to get a job? Why do those people who haven't accomplished as much as I have, get the jobs while I keep on being told I don't have what they are looking for? my postdoc advisor recently phoned me to ask for some technical advice on a new grant he's writing. Then he casually asked how my life is going so I told him. And he laughed!! He thought my situation is humurous!!
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