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.

Meaningless lipservice

Someone wrote:

"There's an article in that very same issue describing how the NSF and NIH have included new instructions to grant applicants regarding their duty to "mentor" postdocs. I'm surprised you didn't pick up on that."

WOW. What an arrogant comment! Of course I picked up on that.

I didn't mention it because it's meaningless lipservice.

Or were you hoping to see me rant about why it's meaningless lipservice? Here's the rant.

There's no way to enforce that anyone actually does any kind of mentoring at the grant level. It would be more appropriate to build it into departmental-level teaching requirements and tenure review.

Grad programs should evaluate mentors and prevent exceptionally bad ones from getting new students.

Departments should have similar mechanisms for preventing exceptionally bad mentors from getting postdocs.

Along with this might be a rule for limiting the size of labs, since nobody can juggle 20+ students and postdocs and actually mentor them all.

Note that I said exceptionally bad, not just bad, since most PIs suck at mentoring, so far as I can tell.

You could argue that it's not really their fault, they don't know any better, and nobody trains them in mentoring skills.

Gosh, maybe mentorship training should be a requirement for PIs and departments to get grants and accreditation?? There's an idea.

Except that it would probably be about as useful and unwanted as sexual harassment training. Where I work, the institution of annual sexual harassment training just goaded the smarmy PIs to really show off that they know how far they can push it without getting sued.

And while these kinds of things do serve the purpose of informing students and postdocs that they theoretically have the right to complain, it drives home the point that nobody can save your career if you do, even if you're legally protected from backlash.

For sexual harassment, that is. There is no legal protection for backlash from complaining about a total lack of mentorship!

No, this business about writing a section on mentoring is just like what they already do with postdoctoral fellowships.

You can write all kinds of nonsense about the career development activities, yada yada, but so long as you write the correct things in the box, nobody cares if they don't actually exist or your PI won't actually let you do them.

For example, you or your PI can write that there are teaching opportunities, and that makes it look like you're in a good "training environment." It doesn't mean you'll get to teach even one lecture as a postdoc.

The only measure that might make a difference is if NIH and NSF include some kind of bonus points for people who have placed many former postdocs in faculty positions, which they do unofficially already for fellowships. But if they did that officially for all grants, it extends even more favors to senior PIs and unfairly penalizes young PIs. So that isn't a good policy, either.

I'm 100% certain this is exactly the same thing. It's a bureaucratic bandaid, nothing more.

Declaration of Extreme Independence

Not too long ago, I was going through some old memorabilia (my mom's a total pack rat), and found some ratty little project I did in elementary school. Thanks, Mom. We were learning about American History, of course, and the assignment was to write our own declaration of independence from our parents.

Leaving all the Freudian stuff out of it, the subject on my mind today is, how to communicate my extreme independence to the Powers That Hire New Faculty.

I realized this week from talking with other friends about their labs, just how umbilical cord-free I've been, and for sooooooooo much longer than most of my peers.

I realized this is one of the key things that really sets me apart from most postdocs, and that it's also the most likely thing that no one knows about me. I realized that I previously had no idea what most people assume is typical for a postdoc of my age. (I still really think the ageist bullshit is hurting me, on top of the sexist bias that apparently not just men but also women have toward female scientists).

Now that I have some idea, I gotta say. No wonder they didn't want to hire me. They really had no idea what they were missing out on. How could they?

One friend widens her eyes when I vent about what I think of as the usual stuff. It's irritating, because I frequently feel like I'm the only person who wants all the equipment in lab to work. I go out of my way to find manuals, call companies, get repairs done, etc. I'd like to think the reason I do this is because I appear to be the only person who cares that I need to use it. I never thought of this sort of venting as anything close to shocking, until she told me that the look of horror on her face was because this is the first she's heard of anything like it.

Another friend said something I've heard now and then from the rare, truly empathic souls, and it goes like this:

"God, just imagine how much you could get done if you'd had access to all the resources and help I've had all this time, while I totally took it for granted. Squandered it, even."

Well, yeah. I choose to take it as a compliment, though I'm sure he didn't squander it at all, since this particular friend seems to have his shit together. (Figures that he wants to go to industry).


So, assuming that I've finally homed in on an important missing variable in the application equation, and on the off chance that I take time out to do any faculty applications this year, what's the best way to make sure people know about it?

I'm pretty confident that all my recommenders used the word 'Independent' in their letters for me in the past, which evidently didn't really get the message across. Is there another word or phrase that would carry more weight? Dashboard Thesaurus suggests "self-reliant" and "self-sufficient", which both sound pretty good to me.

Would a better turn of phrase help?

As I think I've mentioned here before, someone told me that my letters were probably missing the "catch phrases" that apparently only PIs "in the know" would... know about. This person said they basically have to make it sound like you can walk on water. I'm pretty sure my recommenders would have said that, and in so many words, if they had known that was what it would take. But they're none of them very experienced at placing postdocs in faculty positions, at least not in the US. So having a list of Required Wording to give each of them might help.

I'm sure having more funding would help, but it's a catch-22, because postdocs aren't allowed to apply for money without letters from their "advisors"... I can't tell you how much this catch infuriates me, because it means I have to hunt down my advisor, and several levels of admins, deans, and business officers, to get signatures, etc. Which is really stupid when it's just at the stage of submitting something, but they don't let you send it in without getting permission first.

Just for comparions, keep in mind that grants are getting funded at something like the 10th percentile. So let's compare that to everyone's favorite risk analyses borrowed from this site chosen at random from google:


Event --- Chance This Year
Car stolen --- 1 in 100
House catch fire --- 1 in 200
Die from Heart Disease--- 1 in 280
Die of Cancer ---1 in 500
Die in Car wreck ---1 in 6,000

Let's say most of the grants I'm applying for expect anywhere from 300 to 3000 applications each round, and some of them do 3-4 rounds a year, while funding keeps going down (thanks, warmongerers). I'm not going to do the math because the comparison stats are based on national averages, but you get the gist of it. Them statistics is pretty grim.

It's so bad, that recently I had to apply for some safety clearance for my own project, as you're required to do periodically. Because the grant is technically to my advisor, my name is not listed anywhere on it! But I did all the paperwork, made all the phone calls, with NO ADVICE WHATSOEVER FROM MY ADVISOR... as usual.

So tell me again, if I have such little chance of getting the money in the first place, why make me jump through hours of university hoops just to be allowed to apply for it?

Argh. Just thinking about these ridiculous restrictions on who can apply for funding gives me a headache. Literally.

Well-meaning bureaucrats

The theme of the day is stupid hoops that well-meaning bureaucrats dream up to try to make PIs take care of their postdocs, or to try to make NIH take care of their postdocs, and why those hoops fail to do anybody any good.

So I have mentioned that I am a postdoc and that I recently applied for a grant. The astute among you are probably aware that postdocs are generally not allowed to apply for grants as such, and most universities require special permission for postdocs to do so.

The thing that really got me in trouble on this grant process was the pile of paperwork that my advisor was supposed to do, but didn't. She is usually very forthcoming about what she will and won't do, but for some reason this time she didn't, and ultimately ended up saying I should just do it for her and she would sign off on it. This is also the way she handles recommendation letters. We draft everything and then she makes minor changes.

Many PIs are like this. I don't know the percentages of people at each level who are aware of just how common this is, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't include any of the bureaucrats who think it is a good idea to force the PI to write a page or two about how committed they or the university might be to having me, the postdoc, get a grant.

I'm sure they mean well. I've even sat on committees that recommended these kinds of things, and it's supposed to be an excuse to stimulate communication, these little things that are supposed to get written. Of course the most useful ones, e.g. the annual evaluations, never get done because there is no postdoc office to enforce it.

But all things attached to money are enforced.

So for this grant I not only had to write a letter for my advisor, but I also had to write 2 pages on why I should be given permission to apply for the grant, as well as 2 pages on the facilities and other resources available for me to do the research. All of these things are ostensibly my advisor's job. And she's not unusual in expecting me to do it.

Anyway I'm just laughing because I'm reading Bridges to Independence again, and it's a lot of the same thing. It's very clear where this mentality comes from. These people mean well, they really do. It's just the implementation that totally fails.