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Scientiae: inspiration or desperation?

I'm going to paraphrase this title because the dichotomy reminded me of this, one of my all-time favorite scenes in a movie. From the trailer scene in Kill Bill (dialogue helpfully provided by this site).

Budd: So, which "R" you filled with?

Elle Driver: What?

Budd: They say the number one killer of old people is retirement. People got 'em a job to do, they tend to live a little longer so they can do it. I've always figured warriors and their enemies share the same relationship. So, now you ain't gonna hafta face your enemy on the battlefield no more, which "R" are you filled with: Relief or Regret?

Elle Driver: A little bit of both.

Budd: Bullshit. I'm sure you do feel a little bit of both. But I know damn well you feel one more than you feel the other. The question was, which one?

Elle Driver: Regret.

...and then later, she says:

Elle Driver: [to Budd, as he is dying] Now in these last agonizing minutes of life you have left, let me answer the question you asked earlier more thoroughly. Right at this moment, the biggest "R" I feel is Regret. Regret that maybe the greatest warrior I have ever known, met her end at the hands of a bushwhackin, scrub, alky piece of shit like you. That woman deserved better.

.....

I am definitely feeling a little bit of both.

.....

I definitely have a tendency to self-sabotage, so when I am particularly stressed out I am always looking for escape routes. Lately I feel anxious in the mornings, but if I keep busy I feel pretty good during the day, and I have been getting enough sleep most nights.

I am aware that I tend to always want to have one foot in the career grave, as it were, because I do have a fear of committing to this all-or-nothing lifestyle that seems to be required for junior faculty. So whenever I hear something awful from my now mostly-faculty friends about how stressful their jobs are, or how their personal lives are suffering because they work so much, I think "Well at least I'm glad I won't be dealing with that." Totally unhealthy, but it's how I'm coping right now.

Part of me still wants to run away, and that part is sending off for catalogs related to things I would do if/when. That part gets really excited about envisioning all the other things I could do now that I couldn't do when I was younger.

.....

And of course there is still the little voice that says, "Well even if you did that now, don't you think it will just turn out to be the same as what you've already done? Won't you just end up in the same place, having the same problems with political bullshit, several more years down the road?"

And I try to tell the voice, "Maybe, but it might also be more fun?"

And then, laughter.

.....

At the end of Buffy, there is that scene where they are standing on the edge of the cliff, and talking about how Buffy will finally get to have a normal life. It's like that. Almost impossible to imagine, but very tempting to imagine nonetheless.

And on the other hand, I am still doing experiments and printing out articles to read and pretending like everything is going along just fine. And in a way, it is. But it can't go on like this forever.

How would you fare if science were a meritocracy?

First, in answer to the summer student who wants to submit a co-first author paper:

Use asterisks. You'll see examples of this all over the literature, and it will look like this (sorry I won't do it in LaTeX here!):

Name, Yours*, Name, Friend's*, Name, Supervisor, Name, Figurehead PI.

Name of University.

*These authors contributed equally to this work.

------


Anon asked in a comment:

What would be your opinion on a scenario in which all PhDs/postdocs were qualified individuals who actually wrote their own papers and grants? Surely, of all the people who actually make it to the coveted tenured positions, some people actually deserved it. My question is basically if the system only allows a chosen few to ascend, what do the rest of us hardworking, decent scientists do? Clearly, there are biases that prevent this from happening in reality. I'm just saying if these egregious offenses weren't happening, would you feel any different? Like, ok, I gave it my best shot but it just wasn't meant to be. Or maybe something else?


Honestly I haven't thought about this in a long time.

I would have quit before/during grad school if I thought that, objectively speaking, everyone else was better than me and therefore I had no shot at a job in this business.

In fact, I had no expectation of a job when I started my postdoc. I was kind of figuring I would hate it, the way I hated grad school.

But you know how YFS is, she had to do the experiment.

Instead I had this bizarre realization: I am good at what I do. (Maybe even really good!)

It took me a while to figure this out.

Not many people have ever given me compliments on my work, until very recently.

But during my postdoc, I've gotten lots of little clues that I'm doing things the right way.

1. Lots of people cite one of my papers from grad school. In fact, it is my thesis advisor's most-cited publication of all time (so far!). This was a weird little ego boost, since to this day, when I go to meetings, most people have not heard of me or my advisor. But the ones who have, know of us because of that paper.

The whole idea of that paper was my idea, not my advisor's. Nobody knows that from looking at my CV (!), but it is nice for me to know that I have good ideas and I know how to test them.

2. After I left my thesis lab, the senior postdoc who had never really been friendly admitted to me that nothing got done after I left. She hadn't realized, until I was gone, that I was the one ordering anything when we ran out, refilling the tip boxes, autoclaving everything, taking out the biohazard trash, making all the buffers, etc.

Needless to say, I had to laugh at that. Minor victories! Not only did I keep my work going, I kept everyone else's going, too. Not to underestimate the amount of work it takes to set up and fund a lab and hire people (a lot), but there's no question that I could run a lab, if I had one of my own.

3. A couple of years ago, I had the opportunity to do an experiment that would test one of the main hypotheses of my thesis more directly than had been possible at the time. Hooray for technological advances!

And, yes you guessed it. It worked! Hooray for confirmation! That was very satisfying.

Even if it's not the sort of thing I could publish on its own, it was very nice to get that result.

(I'll admit though, one thought that crossed my mind was, "Okay, that's my contribution, I can quit now!")

4. More minor victories: friends who come to me to help troubleshoot their experiments. I have one friend, a couple years ahead of me, who needed to learn some basic molecular biology (not her field). So she came to me. And we got her stuff going.

My proudest moment of that whole story: when she told me she was helping other people do their molecular biology now, using my protocols.

Another random example, I have a grad student friend right now who swears her project would not be working if I hadn't given her a couple of little suggestions along the way (and she actually followed them!).

This got me thinking that yes, I do have the expertise, I could be a good advisor. I like that part of the job.

5. This is the last one, because my timer is about to beep. I think I've mentioned it before on this blog, when someone told me they never believed my data before, because they could never get a certain (critical) technique to work that well.

I was totally baffled by this, since it was sort of a backhanded compliment. (Because it was brought up in the context of, now they believe me....!)

It had never occurred to me that not everyone's data looked that good. I mean, sure, I've read lots of papers with crappy looking data and wondered why it looked so bad. But it took a long time for me to realize I'm good at that technique, and it's actually a useful skill.

It is one of my (last remaining?) missions in science to get everyone to learn how to do it the way I do, and get great results like I do.

So I guess my point is, I think if science were a meritocracy, I would be one of the chosen few. Otherwise I would have quit by now. Any rational person would!

But since science is not a meritocracy, I might quit any day now. As any rational person would.

Cultivating Apathy.

Already this morning, I have heard a few horror stories that in the past would have made me really upset.

But now, I just don't care.

While watching my grad students friends freak out about committee meetings the last few weeks, I was struck by how little I cared about their agony. I used to be such a sympathetic person, I once fainted when I saw my roommate injure herself by accident. I don't mind the sight of blood, I was literally faint at seeing her in pain and being powerless to stop it.

And now, I just don't care. It's quite bizarre.

This morning I heard about a lab accident, which caused a permanent and pretty serious injury to an acquaintance. It's a sad story, but I was oddly unmoved. In the past, I would have had some kind of emotional reaction, and usually a physical one too.

Is my empathy broken? Am I becoming a PI?

Then I heard a couple other stories about the usual kind of lab bullshit and PI politics that used to make me really angry.

But I am not surprised.

And I just don't care.

I am, in a purely objective way, somewhat worried about this degree of apathy.

Is this why I'm so unexcited about my science lately? Why I just feel like I'm going through the motions?

On the other hand, watching grad students spontaneously combust under their own fear, pride and misguided ambition, I can see how apathy can be a protective and almost more mature response.

If you don't get upset, you can't sabotage yourself.

In the past, I would eventually reach apathy only AFTER having a meltdown (or blowup). As I got older, I moved my meltdowns and blowups behind closed doors, but I still had them pretty frequently.

Now it's pretty rare. I seem to go straight to the I Don't Care, and stay there.

Sometimes later, after replaying the events over and over in my head (whether I want to or not), I realized that I am indeed at least mildly annoyed. Maybe deeply insulted, even, but I recognize that getting upset gets me nowhere.

It's an interesting transition. I'm curious to see if it will last. In some ways, it's a relief to be so detached. I know I am much calmer, and more productive when I am not wasting time having meltdowns. I'm also more useful in advising others in this capacity than in my previous, highly combustible state.