Not good enough.

Is it just me? How come, in some fields, it's perfectly acceptable to put out absolute garbage?

I'm talking about everything from poorly formatted files, complete lack of replicates or error bars, ugly raw excel plots, to absolutely fabricated data visualizations with way too many variables and complicated crap thrown in just to look artistic.

If I brought anything remotely like that to my advisors at any time from grad school through postdoc, I would've been shot on sight.

I keep thinking about how my advisors had no fucking clue what to do with data in unusable file formats. Even if it was the default output from equipment we used all the time. And how come the companies that made that equipment somehow managed to stay in business, in spite of their complete lack of understanding of what their customers actually needed.

And if someone showed up to lab meeting with a graph of n=1 attempt with no replicates, any of my advisors would have just laughed and tell them to do it again in triplicate.

How, if I tried to make a figure with a different kind of graph, as a clever way to represent trends in the data, they would simply refuse to even try to understand what was going on.

But I see people doing this all the time in other fields, and when I point out how uninterpretable and useless it is, everyone looks at me like I'm the one who's being "too demanding".

I don't get why it's good enough for everyone else.

I can only assume that most people don't know any better, which means they don't appreciate that it's worth taking the time to develop tools to convert data into usable formats. Or to do an experiment correctly. Or to figure out how to represent data clearly and simply.

The other thing I keep thinking about is how, when I was struggling to do all of these things at an exceptional level to please my impossible advisors, they were rarely any help. But because of the way most people interpret authorship, they still get all the credit.

Meh and you too.

The request was to expand on the 5 big W questions + 1: what, who, where, when, why and how.

So I'll start with a secret: this is the seed of all writing. So I could write something for this topic over and over and write something different each time.



1. What

"What do I do now?" I've been struggling a lot with this question about what do I want to do. I've been through this once before, and that's how I ended up doing science.

So I think I've covered heart and head. What's next? Gut feeling?

I feel like doing science for so long has had two contrasting effects on me:

1) It made me braver, and made me realize courage is not really an area where I'm lacking
2) It put me relatively out of touch with my own gut feelings.

The thing about science is that you're taught not to be superstitious, that hunches don't count unless you can explain them with data, and that you should often ignore your gut feeling, especially if your gut is telling you to run away from public speaking or doing animal work.

Right?

Truthfully, I think my best weapons in science were my gut feelings. But I was told to ignore them, that I was being paranoid about the people I worked with (who were every bit as crazy and back-stabbing as I feared), and that I was making logical leaps (all of which turned out to be right once I had the evidence to demonstrate my hunches were good).

And I wouldn't have done science at all if I had listened to my gut feelings way back when I interviewed for graduate schools.

Regardless, my goal now is to spend a lot of quality time focusing on my gut feelings.




2. Who

"Who is going to help me?"

At this point I'm not sure if anyone can help me figure out what I want to do, but once I figure that out, I will probably need help to do it.

One thing I fucked up royally in my science "career" (according to the blamers) was not getting the right help from the right people. I realized too late that I needed help from different people, but I couldn't figure out

a) who were the people with both the interest and the power to help me, and
b) how to get them to be interested in helping me

Also, "Who are the people I want to work with?"

This is something I'm focused on right now. I really hated most of my coworkers for a long time in science, maybe because we weren't really coworkers at all, just competitors pretending to be polite. The whole system was set up so that there was never enough to go around, and we were basically trying to climb over each other to get to the good stuff: the money, the attention from our advisor, the jobs.

So I'm wondering who are the kinds of people I can work with? Would I be better off with more creative types? Should I just steer clear of male-dominated careers? Am I better off doing the kinds of things where everyone works independently but in parallel? Are there any careers anymore where there's plenty to go around? Or does this economy pretty much preclude that from happening at all?



3. Where

Also known as, "Will I have to relocate?"

I like where I am now. I am learning new things, slowly, and the pace is more or less up to me. But what if I decide the thing I most want to do in life is something I can only learn in a city far away? Am I going to make MrPhD go with me? Is there anything I want to do so badly that I'd make him quit a job he loves to follow me on a hunch about my next big thing?




4. When

Yes, when. When will I figure this out. When will I feel better. When will the bolt of lightning strike me down, or give me that aha! moment I could use right about now?

One thing I'm certain I'll miss about science are the aha! moments. I loved that. I loved problem solving, I loved getting new data, I loved finding something unexpected in the middle of an experiment designed to look at something else, I loved reading a paper and having so many ideas I had to scribble them all down excitedly.

The good news is there are other kinds of aha! moments, and I wish I had the perspective to realize that years ago. They are there when I cook, and when I shop for gifts, and when I read good books. When I listen to really good music. And when I write.

But mostly I want to know when I will stop having dreams about the bastards who fucked me over in science. I am so tired of the nightmares where I have to go back and work with them again, or I find out one of them is taking credit for everything I did in his lab, even though it was my idea, etc.




5. Why

The one I'm doing the most lately is "Why is this happening to me? Why do people say I chose this? Did I choose this, really? Why would I do that to me?"

Also known as,

6. How

"How did I end up here?"

I keep retracing my steps and saying "No, I couldn't possibly have known any better at the time, I actually got a lot of bad advice, or people seemed to think I could figure it out from obscure hints, and I didn't. I didn't figure it out until it was too late."

I made a lot of mis-steps. One foot in front of the other, right?

But it's pretty much impossible for me to see how I could have known to do any differently, given where I came from, my family, and a general lack of good advice.

Does that make me feel any better? Only slightly.

Also, "How do I move forward and get on with my life?"

If you can't take the heat, I don't blame you.

I'm kind of saddened, but also heartened, by these comments from other women postdocs saying what a miserable time we're having.

Yes, we are.

I was talking to some older women scientists recently and one of them said to me,

If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen!

Get out, yourself, you old bitch! You're the reason it's like this!

Yes, you!

So today, instead of blaming the men, I'm going to take a moment and blame the cowardly women who keep their heads down and try to pretend like everything is okay and will resolve itself eventually if we just put up and shut up long enough.

Newsflash: IT WON'T.

We need some kind of scientific equivalent of a pink underwear resistance .

What should we have? Pink pipettes? Suggestions?

I'm sorry girls, but the women who came before us? HAVEN'T CHANGED ANYTHING. And they're NOT going to help you. Or me.

Meanwhile, the men are all acting like whiny little preteens. I'm disgusted to hear men complaining about open scientific discussion like it's somehow uncouth... although come to think of it, they're all assholes to each other and to us, but they seem to be really uncomfortable with seeing women talking about science with other women.

Hmm. What is that about? Could this be the opposite of the whole two women = automatic lesbian fantasy? Are we causing some kind of cognitive dissonance when we're more than a singular anomaly?

Or is it just the possibility that we're actually more objective and more detached about our work, precisely because we have a better view of the big picture of life? Is that what makes them so nervous? Why do I think they're really the emotional ones?

Oh right, because they're so insecure.

I don't know, I don't know where we're supposed to go. The men mostly aren't going to help us, and even the sympathetic ones can't because they're all in the same boat as we are- getting screwed over. The women aren't helping because of the "poor me syndrome", thinking they had it so much worse (they didn't).

Meanwhile, everyone is talking about all these hiring freezes etc. like the axe is still on the way down. I'm just trying to decide if I'd rather walk the plank, or if it would be better to get shot instead?

Optimism is for suckers.

So this week, as you'll recall, I had that moment of thinking, well I should really give it another try, being more positive.

It was sort of nice to talk to my therapist again and have her say,

YES, WHAT YOU'RE TELLING ME IS REALLY FUCKED UP. NO WONDER YOU'RE UPSET.

Validation is usually kind of reassuring. I thought yeah, it's not just me. It's my environment. It's these wackos I work with.

So I decided to try, as I mentioned in my last post, thinking maybe this is the darkest before the dawn. Or whatever.

So that lasted like, 2 days.

Today I'm trying to remember if anything good happened. I guess it's good that I'm only mildly annoyed that my experiments are not working as well as I hoped.

And I sort of pretended like today was Friday. So I'll go in tomorrow like it's Saturday.

Get it? Saturday. Hahahaha.

So I actually had a couple of days this week when I was kind of excited to get up and see if something worked. And I thought "oohh, maybe I'll get some data!"

And I had an idea in the shower one morning for a cool twist on an experiment that might yield more information than the way I was originally planning to do it... I love those moments. The aha moments.

And I'm kind of glad that I did manage to reproduce (convincingly!) one of the interesting results I got a little while back.

So that's good I guess... I should probably be more excited about it.

Um, yay. (How was that? Yay?)

But lately I have this feeling that I'm just amassing a ton of data that will never be published and therefore, none of it really exists or contributes anything to the progress of science.

Yeah, you know the feeling, don't you?

Mostly I'm annoyed because a positive pilot result I got a week or two ago has not held up to further testing. There are lots of variables, I'm still testing, but when the best case scenario is that your system is ultra-sensitive to lots of variables? That's a bad scenario.

And while in my "okay, I am troubleshooting and trying to be optimistic" mode, I had just about convinced myself I could deal with a career issue that I can't blog about.

I had come to accept how to try to be optimistic about it even though I wasn't feeling very optimistic. Or at least, I figured, I could be realistic and just take it in stride and keep going.

And then I found out why I shouldn't have bothered trying to have a good attitude.

Here's the ugly secret that is the main purpose of this blog:

There is always, always ALWAYS something else going on behind the scenes in science.

Don't let anybody tell you otherwise.

Your worst paranoias can't even begin to cover it.

That feeling you get that people are talking about you or your work behind your back?

Well, they are. What's really sickening is, nobody tells you this until you've been doing it long enough to feel well and trapped:

They're allowed to. It's built right in. It's part of the way the system works.

This is the kind of shit that makes me want to quit science and just be done with it. Somehow I just can't stand it being so fucked up.

I don't care what you say, I don't think I can get used to it or accept it or whatever you call "growing up." Somehow I'd rather go work on something I don't care about. I think that would be easier than watching something I actually really do value turn out to be, you know, completely false and evil.

Oh, which reminds me, one small light of sanity in my week: I got home in time to watch the Rachel Maddow show today. I love Rachel Maddow. And I find it absolutely hilarious when they show those group shots of her with the other 5 white guys, er I mean, all of them with their short hair and she's as close to a woman as they could bring themselves to allow. I mean, sheesh. But she's so darn cute!

And in other angry, depressing news, I had to give up on mentoring at one of our new postdocs. I say "at" because she asked me for advice repeatedly, and I tried to be honest and really did enjoy talking with her, but she apparently took none of my advice.

This was confirmed for me today and I realized I was really kind of disgusted. Why do I waste my fucking time on these people? Should I just assume it's all an act? Why do they bother ASKING? I don't have time for this shit. But I hate assuming that. Some of them are genuinely grateful and I'm glad to help. But not this one.

It's really fucking hard to try to be upbeat about things when on the one hand, some people are saying your work is great and everything is going to be okay if you'll just cheer up, and on the other hand, some snothead in your lab is clearly sending the message that she thinks you're an idiot-loser.

Oh, I know she's an arrogant little twit and she'll find out the hard way (hopefully).

But something about watching the cycle repeat itself just makes me sick. I've really only known one or two grad students who were this bad, but not postdocs.

I guess I thought that if grad school had one thing going for it, it's kicking the living daylights out of most of the arrogant twits who think they know more than anyone.

I know that's not really true, but you know what I mean. If you can get through grad school with your arrogance fully intact, that's pretty impressive (or pathological).

Oh and in other news, one of my best friends on campus here got a job and is leaving soon. I might have mentioned this in a past blog post. I'm kind of depressed about it, for purely selfish reasons. Somehow he figured out how to get what he wanted to move his life along, and I'm still stuck here. And it definitely sucks losing one of my closest allies.

Meanwhile, my still-unemployed friend had what seemed like an almost-offer to do what she's actually really trained to do... after what she described as an awesome interview...

But it turned out that the company had also interviewed a guy who was a friend of someone in the company... and guess who they had already offered it to before they invited my friend to interview?

So it didn't matter what she did, the job was already his. Only she didn't know that.

In other words, if it were a level playing field, we wouldn't mind if we lost fair and square. But it's not level, and it's not fair.

And one of the things that pisses me off the most about that is having to work with a bunch of snot-nosed kids who still think it is.

Or maybe I'm just in a really fucking bad mood today?

La fea mas bella?

I see this Telemundo show sometimes in the tv listings, but I've never actually watched an episode of it. My Spanish is minimal but I know enough to translate it: the prettiest ugly girl.


I was especially struck by an anonymous comment I read today in response to this post on FSP.

Sigh. The upshot of the discussion on this post was that looks matter more for women, although it seems to be just as bad to be good-looking as bad-looking. But it might depend on where you are.

The post is an example from Europe where the committee actually told one female candidate that they would probably hire their other female candidate because she was better looking.

As I'm writing that I am still hoping it was said in jest (though it must have had some truth in it).

I'll admit to clinging to denial in the face of the most egregious examples of sexism. It. Just. Can't. Be. This. Bad. It's 2008. Can it really be???

In contrast, several of us noted that in the US, the women we're seeing hired lately tend to dress as much like men as possible. For women trying to get a science faculty position in the US, it seems to help if you're less-good looking.

It's a different kind of sexism, but still sexism nonetheless. I suspect they are actually stages, but I can't decide if I think that Europe is more advanced than we are or not.

---

I'm reprinting one anonymous comment here because it really hit home. I strongly suspect this is the same sort of thing, from top to bottom, that people would say about me (if I had any faculty interviews, that is).

Anon: "When I was doing the interview process to become a US FSP I actually thought that my looks and social skills were a detriment to my getting hired.

I was told on more than one occasion that although I interviewed wonderfully, all the faculty liked me, the students loved me, my research ideas were interesting and fundable, I was envisioned to be a great teacher and a wonderful mentor to my future students that I would not be hired because I hadn't convinced a few members of the faculty that my research would bring in heaps of money and I wasn't quite as good at selling it as I should be. Which I understand to a point"



I have heard, verbatim, the same thing this anonymous comment describes: All these good things, but that I need to figure out how to sell my work better and especially to emphasize how it will bring in money.

I can understand that in the current funding climate, this is especially critical.

But I have to wonder if there is a tendency to be especially critical of female candidates who are otherwise good in all categories? Does it really correlate with looks? In a job market where there are so many candidates to choose from, is it really possible that it comes down to splitting hairs, like it does with grant reviews?

I'm particularly curious to ask, has anybody else ever gotten this criticism in particular? Is this another example of a coded message that actually means something slightly different than the literal interpretation of the words?

In a really cynical, outdated sense, for a good-looking woman to really "sell" her work she might have to sleep with someone. Or at a minimum, respond positively to flirtation at the interview.

Surely that's not the issue nowadays, at least not in the sense of outright expectation. Right?? But that doesn't mean it doesn't play into fantasies and perhaps unconscious biases...

Dear PI

Dear PI,

You may not be aware that your age is apparently affecting your memory.

That figure looks the way it does because that is how you wanted it when last we met to work on this paper. Which was, by the way, embarrassingly long ago because you are always postponing meetings.

You may not be aware of how infuriating it is that you think co-authorship means you get to re-write everything in your own words. It does not.

You may not be aware that we mostly indulge your requests because we are beholden to you in order to get jobs. Or maybe you do. It does not mean your suggestions always have merit.

You may not be aware that we notice when you are nice to some lab members and let them show crappy data without controls, while you are nasty to others and pick on every little detail on every revision including when the changes were your idea.

We notice.

You may not be aware that this letter is directed at you. You might think you are not one of 'those' PIs. Or maybe you don't care.

You may not imagine in your wildest dreams how we spend every waking minute trying to figure out how to get out of your lab and on with our lives.

We do.

My job sucks.

Bad day.

Well, it's a new day, and nothing is working.

It's probably fixable- most bench things are, with enough time and elbow-grease (and sometimes money)- but I'm frustrated to the point of wanting to go home and cry.

But benchwork is not the only reason why.

...

Spent part of my day counseling yet another distraught grad student, who is being bullied by a sexist visiting professor in her lab. Her somewhat sexist advisor is nowhere to be found when she needs an authority figure to step in, and while her co-workers all agree that this guy's behavior is inappropriate, nobody will stand up for her or with her to either confront this guy or the advisor.

This is such an old story, but this poor student feels like we all feel when this happens:

Is it me (no)?
Am I alone in this (sort of)?
Is it because I'm a girl (probably)?
Is this what I can expect if I go into academia (or maybe the workforce in general) (yes)?

Is this worth putting up with (questionable)?

I wish I could go over there and give the advisor a piece of my mind, but I somehow doubt that would do any good (?). After all, I'm a Nobody.

Meanwhile, she can't get any work done because the bully is literally monopolozing her equipment, and sending her harrassing emails.

He's only there for 6 more months, so I told her that she's tough, if she has to she can suck it up. I gave her a bunch of other suggestions (including to document, document, document), but mostly I just hate that she has to go through this at all.

Perhaps most nauseating about this whole scenario is that she asked another postdoc what to do. This postdoc (whom I don't particularly like or respect) told her to just act sweet and stupid and do whatever he says to do. And then he will like her.

Thankfully, this grad student is more like me than this other postdoc. We agreed she would be setting a bad example and hating herself if she tried to 'act sweet.'

...

Worse than that for me on a personal level, the interview talks are starting up, which means I'm getting details on the people who are getting the interviews.

What's most sickening is that they aren't much different from me. They don't have more papers. Their projects aren't even that interesting.

What they do have is pedigree. Their papers are in Nature Something journals and always with famous co-authors.

I'm trying to be happy (?) that at least some of them are women.

...

In other news, while I'm thinking about going to industry, it's also because I'm worried that I'm either way too smart or way too efficient to be in academia.

(You're either standing in the shoes of a genius or a fool?)

Bear with me for a moment while I explain.

I agreed to host a speaker for a group.

I invited the speaker. Speaker agreed and we set a date, time and place and picked a title.

When I informed the group that this was all set, they were amazed that I had done this so quickly (it took 1 email, and 1 to confirm).

I was stumped, but pleased that they seemed impressed.

Some time goes by and we need to confirm the room. There's a staff member who is supposed to help print the flyers and book the food, etc.

Group Leader asked me to make the flyer. I said I thought the staff person did that, and I had already sent all the info that would go on the flyer (date, time, title).

Two more emails back and forth, I just made up the flyer and sent it, just because it wasn't worth the time to argue.

Eventually Group Leader writes back that Staff Person will make the flyer with the Logo.

I was thinking: Ok so you didn't send me a template, but now you're saying my flyer wasn't good enough? Does anybody even recognize the logo? I know I don't pay any attention to those things.

But I didn't say anything.

Now I am getting emails about the room. The room we wanted is booked. There are literally dozens of other rooms on campus we could use.

They are conferring amongst themselves about which room. Several emails about this. The most obviously available ones, they argue, are too hard to find.

I'm thinking: Um, is this a college campus? Shouldn't we assume that people are capable of reading a map? Or asking for directions?

But I don't say anything.

This is not a big event. The audience will definitely number less than a hundred, maybe less than 50, maybe less than 20, I don't know and I don't care. I wanted to see this speaker, I will be there.

All of this got me wondering, is this how academia does things? Because I am horrified at how inefficient it is. How pointlessly democratic. Do we really all need to agree on the logo? The flyer with the logo? The room? NO. We don't. It just has to be functional for what we want to do.

And I have to wonder what Group Leader and all the other group members do all day. Because it can't possibly be actually productive, actual work.

Admitting it is the first step.

I saw this over at ianqui's page, where she cited this article in the Chronicle by a particularly disgruntled professor who writes under the pseudonym Lagretta Gradgrind.

This essay is basically a rant about the worst kinds of grad students and how these bad experiences have made her not want to advise them anymore.

Ianqui says she had no idea how much work it was to advise grad students, but she still thinks it's important (I'm paraphrasing based on her blog).

I guess for me Lagretta's disgruntlement rings true, in the sense that I know the worst kinds of grad students and how disappointing it can be when someone chooses to do something else with their life despite all your encouragement and hopes for them.

More importantly, Lagretta acknowledges that the problems may actually be in grad school admissions as much as anything. I've said this before and I still think it's true, so I was pleased to see she called attention to that as a potential source of the problem.

But I also think she understands that many would-be professors go the 'alternative' routes because the system is so broken right now.

In a way, I was really relieved to see that somebody seems to actually get it.

On the other hand, I have to wonder if part of the problem is that Lagretta isn't very good at reading people. She complains that she feels used because it seems like some of these students were just putting on an act to get her to help them. It's hard to know if the students were deliberately manipulating her, because she's gullible, or if they just genuinely realized, late in the game, that this game was not for them.

Most of us struggle with the choice. It's a choice you have to make over and over again, every day. Just yesterday I was talking to someone who is on the verge of turning down an offer for a faculty position, because the reality of the commitment forced a really harsh assessment that was, until now, easy to deny. This is a story I've heard a few times recently, and I'm wondering if it's a new trend.

The story goes like this:

Young, idealistic person applies for jobs, gets interviews, goes on interviews.

Meets faculty, young and old.

Is put off by the reality of complaints, which go like this: "Funding is crap. Tenure is hard to get even when it's done fairly, which in many places it still isn't. Real estate is expensive. We're all getting divorced."

Young, idealistic person gets job offers, and turns them down.

Meanwhile, rapidly-becoming-less-young people like me are at home, not idealistic at all, not getting interviews.

Hmph.

Anyway I guess I think it's unfortunate that someone like Lagretta is so bitter that she doesn't want to mentor graduate students anymore, but in a way I can't blame her. I think I feel much the same as Lagretta in that I feel my calling is as much in mentoring as it is in research. But sometimes it's hard to buy into being part of a system I have so little respect for.

I guess you have to wonder if academia is, as I heard Chris Dodd say this morning, "a country of laws, not a country of men." And which one is better. Chris Dodd was saying that laws are good, because people will come and go with varying levels of integrity (I'm paraphrasing again).

I would like to think that if academia is nothing more than the sum of the people who make it work, then it has the potential to change.

But if academia is just a collection of rules, too heavy and collapsing under its own weight, instead of trying to put your finger in the dike, maybe it makes more sense to just get out of the way.