…and this is a 
Grad school was great! I recommend it to everyone!
Category: Academics • Personal
Posted on: December 18, 2006 10:11 AM, by PZ Myers
The latest Ask a Science Blogger question is one I've already answered, so I thought I'd just repost this unpleasant little vignette to answer this question:
What's a time in your career when you were criticized extremely harshly by someone you respect? Did it help you or set your career back?
But first, I have to mention that every scientist must have a nemesis or two, as has been recently documented in the pages of Narbonic.
Thinking about graduate school? Here’s a little story, all true, about my very most unpleasant experiences as a graduate student—and they all revolve around one person. It is a fact that you will find honest-to-god flaming assholes in positions of considerable power in academia.
Imagine some quiet nebbish of an undergraduate, a bookish kind of guy who is naive and completely unaccustomed to asserting himself in a classroom. That’s me. Maybe it was you, too—artlessness of that kind is endemic among college students. I traipsed off to graduate school in biology, not knowing much more than that I liked science and thought it would be a wonderful career (which it has been, so stop worrying; you already know this story ends well, so it can’t be all that bad).
I was expected to take a few classes to deepen my knowledge of subjects in which I was going to do research, a plan with which I was comfortable. Taking classes was familiar, much more comprehensible than this independent research stuff I was also supposed to be doing, so I was taking a grad level course in physiology. It was terrific. The professor was a brilliant guy with an international reputation, someone even callow PZ had heard of in his undergrad days, and the subject was enjoyable. The labs were challenging, and we had to do a lot of writing, but that was all good. I was learning.
Then, one class day after we’d turned in a major term paper, I sat down near the front of the room as I usually did. The prof sat down with the stack of term papers in front of him, and made an announcement: he had just read the most ghastly paper ever turned in to him, and he read the first sentence aloud.
Yeah, it was mine.
This was cringeworthy enough. I was thinking that at least he hadn’t made my personal humiliation public.
So then, of course, he turns to me and hisses, literally sneering at me, “Well, Mr Myers, what do you have to say for yourself?"
I didn’t have anything to say for myself. My brain was busy trying to burrow its way out my cranium via the foramen magnum, and the compression as it was trying to squeeze by my spinal cord had shut down my speech centers. What little motor control I had left was dedicated to the task of keeping sphincters clamped shut.
Getting no satisfactory answer, and seeing only my rather impassive expression (entirely an artifact of the growing separation of my panicky cerebrum and my trigeminal ganglia, I assure you), he started to read my term paper. Every sentence. With scathing commentary, and the odd snide query spat out in my direction. It just went on and on.
I want everyone to know that I graduated with my Ph.D. in a fairly typical amount of time, 5 years. However, I think two of those five were spent in that classroom on that one afternoon, so I really ought to be credited with completing my degree in record time.
But wait, don’t leave yet. The misery isn’t quite over.
I made it through the term, although I really didn’t find the class quite as much fun afterwards, and I was treated like some contemptible pariah. At the end, we all had to come back individually to his office to get our lab notebooks back, and to get his personal evaluation. You can imagine how much I was looking forward to that. I had to sit in a nice, comfy, low, cushioned chair, while he sat behind his desk, peered over his glasses at me, and gave me his assessment. At least it was in private.
It was no less unpleasant. Once he got on a roll, he really could dish out the venom. We started with the usual dry discussion of lab results, worked up to a solid, “you do not belong in science, I suggest you immediately leave graduate school and seek employment elsewhere”, and wound up with a truly vicious declaration that he would make sure I did not complete my preliminary exams and that I would never, ever graduate from this university while he had any say in the matter. I dealt with it with a total loss of affect; my mind had long since given up on trying to run away and had just shut down.
And of course he ended up on my preliminary exam committee. I had resigned myself to that inevitable expression of unavoidable destiny, so it honestly left me unperturbed. He had succeeded in becoming such a pervasively inimical presence that it had become unimaginable that he wouldn’t be there with the knives sharpened.
The exam didn’t go as badly as I feared. It was an oral exam on a relevant topic of my choice; I was going with the cytoskeleton. My bête noir fired off the first question: “Enumerate for me the biophysical parameters that determine the spike rate of a bursting pacemaker neuron.” If you aren’t familiar with the subjects, I’ll tell you that the question has pretty much nothing to do with the cytoskeleton.
I may have passed the exam with my answer: “No, I don’t think so.” I felt good about that reply. The committee just kept me there for the next four hours, grilling me on actin and tubulin and intermediate filaments, just for form’s sake.
The poor man was mostly impotent against me for the next several years. I remember that every once in a while we might end up in the elevator together, and he’d always take the opportunity to make some malevolent remark about my research. I’d shrug.
The son-of-a-bitch actually died on me before my final Ph.D. defense, which I thought was terribly unfair of him. I half expected to see his rotting corpse pounding at the door of the seminar room, like something out of EC comics, and that he’d point a bony finger at me and demand that I derive the Goldman equation for him, or join him in hell. Didn’t happen. I even kinda missed him. Oh, well.
Maybe this story doesn’t sound so awful now. It could have been worse—I could have been a coalminer and had to struggle with firedamp and cave-ins and hard physical labor, after all! All I had to deal with was self-doubt and depression and intimidation and fear for four years, which are relatively small things, and fairly common in graduate school, and that’s really my point. Grad school can be petty and demeaning and vicious, and most of the time you have to plug along with no encouragement of any kind (although I should say that I was also lucky enough to have a good and supportive advisor, which makes an immense difference). But I survived. I came out of it with a bit more independence than I probably would have without that mean old man hovering over me. My current students can also thank him for teaching me that public humiliation is probably not a good classroom management tool.
I should also mention that despite the cruelty, I actually respected and sometimes even liked the old bastard. Another thing he taught me was that you can value someone even if they aren’t at all nice to you; it’s a useful perspective to have.
Comments
Just curious: do you have any idea why the old guy had it in for you? Writing one bad paper -- if it even was bad -- doesn't seem like enough motivation.
Posted by: Jolf_Moosenhoeger | December 18, 2006 10:28 AM
No, not really. I think I may have naively stepped into an ongoing debate between a couple of the bigshots in the field of neuroscience I was writing about, and unintentionally took the side of that professor's ARCH-NEMESIS. I don't remember much about the paper, but the first sentence was something about the modulation of synapse strength in learning and memory in which I mentioned some of the ideas Eric Kandel had published at that time.
Posted by: PZ Myers | December 18, 2006 10:33 AM
Maybe this story doesn't sound so awful now. It could have been worse--I could have been a coalminer and had to struggle with firedamp and cave-ins and hard physical labor, after all!
... just like a redneck.
Posted by: redneck | December 18, 2006 10:34 AM
Grad student (who is to become my wife some years later) turns in her first dissertation-chapter draft. She has worked very hard on it, putting everything she knows and every original idea in there. Advisor sez come back next Friday at 2 and we'll talk about it.
Friday. 2. She knocks, walks into his office. Without even glancing up from his work, he picks up a pile of paper (she recognizes her chapter) and drops it unceremoniously into the waiting wastebasket.
"Start over," he sez, still not looking up.
Conference over.
Posted by: CCP | December 18, 2006 10:35 AM
Ooooh, that's helpful.
Posted by: PZ Myers | December 18, 2006 10:39 AM
I don't understand -- how did someone you dislike end up on your committee? Didn't you get to *choose* the committee? We did. Of course, it turned out that one of the people whom I chose (a famous scientist whom I idolized) turned out to be a rather tough critic during my oral exam.
Posted by: Jonathan Badger | December 18, 2006 10:45 AM
Well, my thesis advisor once said to me, although tongue in cheek (I think),
"You can tell how influential someone is in their field by how much they can hold back progress"
Posted by: Stuart Weinstein | December 18, 2006 10:47 AM
Do you still have a copy of that paper?
Posted by: Jeffo | December 18, 2006 10:47 AM
I don't understand -- how did someone you dislike end up on your committee? Didn't you get to *choose* the committee? We did. Of course, it turned out that one of the people whom I chose (a famous scientist whom I idolized) turned out to be a rather tough critic during my oral exam.
--- Was this person fair? A Ph.D. defense is not supposed to be a rubber stamp.
Posted by: Stuart Weinstein | December 18, 2006 10:51 AM
Your response to the utterly irrelevant question reminds me of something I learned at my PhD defense and try and pass along to all grad students I meet now: your committee are not omnipotent and they will often ask questions that are completely irrelevant. Sometimes I believe they do so intentionally, just to see how you'll react (after all, at conferences, we all get used to being asked lousy questions). In my thesis defense, when I was asked, "How does your work relate to subject XXX?" I was able to answer, "Not at all, I think."
Posted by: gg | December 18, 2006 10:54 AM
Oddly enough, it sounds a lot like a novelist's career. Which may explain why there are so many academics working in fiction.
Did you ever get that copy of Jeff VanderMeer's The Exchange that I sent you, btw? A little chapbook with a beautiful block print of a squid on the cover.
Posted by: Jay Lake | December 18, 2006 11:06 AM
Yes, in retrospect. Some of his questions weren't particularly relevant to my proposed project, I thought, but his main concern was that I shouldn't run off and focus on my research without having sufficient background. I ended up passing my prelim under the condition that I take a couple of courses (which I did). He was trying to be constructive by increasing my chances of having a successful project.
Posted by: Jonathan Badger | December 18, 2006 11:15 AM
What part of the "even if" in the "even if they aren't at all nice to you" do you not understand?
Posted by: J. J. Ramsey | December 18, 2006 11:22 AM
I had a friend in college (whom I'd love to hear from - Judy B, you reading this?) who told me about some advice her father had received from his advisor while working on his dissertation.
In a very thick Russian accent, he addressed friend's dad by his last name (which I won't repeat for privacy reasons, but for some reason it makes me laugh whenever I think of it) and said: "If you vomit upon looking at the title page, it is almost ready."
Posted by: Sammy | December 18, 2006 11:26 AM
My experience has been that creationists are generally not disrespectful to, nor do they insult evolutionists.
Hello, Ambassador from Backasswards Land; I believe you'll find things a bit different on Planet Earth.
Posted by: speedwell | December 18, 2006 11:44 AM
Did he act like that to other people? I can't imagine he had time to read everyone's paper in class, especially if he had to stop every few sentances to hone his snideness. Did anyone else notice?
Posted by: Molly, NYC | December 18, 2006 11:45 AM
"Grad school can be petty and demeaning and vicious, and most of the time you have to plug along with no encouragement of any kind (although I should say that I was also lucky enough to have a good and supportive advisor, which makes an immense difference)."
So it IS just like being an undergrad, only with fewer people having greater power over your education and future career. Well, and also the good stuff like learning independence, etc. And the chance of a rotten advisor, in which case you're really screwed.
"It could have been worse--I could have been a coalminer and had to struggle with firedamp and cave-ins and hard physical labor, after all!"
Maybe it's because I'm too weak to take five more years of that skool treatment, or maybe it's because I come indirectly from a lineage that actually did work in coal mines for a living, but I think I can understand why people choose physically exhausting jobs (coal doesn't talk back, though the foreman might) rather than going for a degree. Who knows, maybe I'll go back to school eventually. But stories like yours aren't exactly motivating, although I love their honesty and candor.
Posted by: justalabtech | December 18, 2006 11:48 AM
My original Ph.D. committee, back when I was a grad student in olden times, included a faculty member from outside my department (as required by the university rules) and he did not want to be there. My department chair had twisted his arm. He asked the first question at my quals -- it had almost nothing to do with what I had been working on -- and I didn't know enough (or have the cojones) to just say, "Well, I really don't know much about that. What's the next question?" It turned into a fiasco.
Good times. Good times.
Posted by: Zeno | December 18, 2006 11:51 AM
Re: Arch-nemesis - At least you weren't in pre-med/life sci. These crazy whackos think everyone is their nemesis. I was doing biology but was taking a chem class with a bunch of pre-meds, and my lab partner arbitrarily decided that a highschool classmate of mine was going to be his archnemesis, and quickly developed real hatred. Now, considering this former classmate narrowly beat me for top academic standing in my highschool, it would make more sense for me to take the crazy archnemesis route, but that didn't happen.
Posted by: King Aardvark | December 18, 2006 12:03 PM
PZ, sounds like things are just as bad on both sides of the border. But I'll give you some scorchers. Earlier in my grad career I recall working during the SARS outbreak in Toronto at one of the major hosiptals. The hospital admin instructed all non essential personnel to stay home until further notice. This was followed by an email from the thesis supervisor saying, 'get into the lab or else.' Having gotten back to the lab, the prof was nowhere to be found. He let us know that he wouldn't be coming in because he didn't want to get his kid at home sick.
Lesson 1 learned: Grad students are dispensible
Another story, involves the same prof instructing me to 'steal' a certain reagent from another lab via another grad student. When I asked why we couldn't just ask the supervisor for the reagent, he informed me that he didn't wish to have said supervisor on any published papers that might result from our studies.
Lesson 2 learned: being number 1 is more important than academic integrity
I have more stories and lessons, but I think this is satisfactory for the time being. Needless to ay. I left grad school disgusted. I took several years hiatus add after earning another degree I came back and decided to start again. Science is wonderful but it's peppered with a number of jackasses who ruin it for everyone.
Posted by: Krakus | December 18, 2006 12:05 PM
Regardless of whether or not he intended to be constructive, do you ever think that the cranky, demeaning, old-bastard routine helped? I find that there's never a shortage of CDOBs around and that I handle them far better having suffered through the first few.
I had a great graduate advisor for my MS in geology. He'd studied under one of the great masters at the forefront of the science who was also apparently a master CDOB. It made my life much easier since my advisor had pledged against, and zealously guarded against, being a similar CDOB.
On a side note, I would go in to pick up chapters of the thesis and, while hearing "great work, only a few minor things to consider" (which set my expectations), I'd look down and the text would have a new red background - corrections and comments were in red ink. I saved the best pages for framing. There would be corrections, comments on the corrections, and corrections and comments to the corrections and comments. On the bright side, they were never malicious and we'd go to the coffee shop and discuss. I later realized that he was thinking out the problem in red - something I do to date - and the result was that I had a better grasp of the process.
PS, thanks to all the post pre-med students who set the organic chem and p chem curves. Thanks a lot.
Posted by: Jim in STL | December 18, 2006 12:38 PM
Advice to all grad students: Read "The Examination" by W.D. Snodgrass (can't find a link, sorry). It got me through on numerous occasions.
Posted by: Frank Schmidt | December 18, 2006 12:51 PM
WHAT? WHAT? You mean science and academics are not populated by people who's only goal is the advancement of knowlege and the betterment of mankind, to which they welcome you to their fraternity of saintly practisioners with open arms and a 'hail-fellow-well-met'?
I'm shocked, SHOCKED I tell you.
At least in Art school the only thing I had to face was sitting in class with about 15 other young struggling artists with our quarter's final drawings neatly matted and leaning up against the chalkboard. The instructor walked in, studied the drawing briefly, walked along the row and swept them to the floor. He then proceeded to walk all over the drawings, kicking some aside until he picked one up, tore pieces off it until he held up a scrap and said 'this part's ok. The rest of you suck.'
Well, at least it got us over being precious about our work...
Posted by: A lemur | December 18, 2006 12:55 PM
I had to deal with several abusive faculty members during grad school. I let their abuse roll off my back, but tried at every convenient moment to evoke more abuse. Why? Their responses usually directed me to new areas of the literature, and after several years, they were of no further use to me as educators.
I went on to a successful career as a chemist, and forgot about them. This blog posting motivated me to Google them. They're all dead. Must be a drag to be remembered as an asshole.
s.
Posted by: steve | December 18, 2006 1:01 PM
My advisor asked me to make a presentation to the Head of Chemistry on a research proposal. We needed his OK to proceed. The Head of Chemistry was also a Nobel Prize winner.
I stood in front of his desk while he skimmed the proposal. There were no guest chairs. We all stood. He sat, however. Finally, he peered over his glasses and spoke to me.
"Analytical chemists," he intoned, "they're like carpenters, aren't they?"
If I could have willed myself into the bowels of Hell, I would have.
Posted by: Doc Bill | December 18, 2006 1:02 PM
I didn't have a cranky old bastard on my dissertation committee. Instead, I had a total loonie. I hold the never-to-be-beaten record for the longest qualifying exam in the history of the CIS department at the U of Delaware. At UD, the quals are an oral exam on the subject area of your planned dissertation that come after you've passed with written preliminary exams. They're supposed to be a 30 minute talk, where you present your research plan, followed by 30-45 minutes of questions from the committee. Mine broke the three hour mark - and I didn't get more than *half-way* through my presentation. Not because anyone was being hard on me, not because I was having trouble answering questions, and not because I was being overly verbose about my answers.
Because the loonie guy kept interrupting with just plain *goofy* questions that were incredibly long-winded. The one I remember was basically a question about "Is data-parallelism currently the predominant model of parallel computation for technical reasons, or for historical/political reasons?". But instead of asking it that way, he had to go into a whole story about how when he was a child, he never understood why they had cranberry sauce on the table at thanksgiving and he never ate it, but then at the first thanksgiving with his second wife, he accidentally got some cranberry sauce on his turkey, and it was good. And that was contrasted with sweet potato pie, which is just gross, and doesn't go with turkey, but everyone has it on thanksgiving because it's tradition. So, he wanted to know, is data parallelism more like cranberry sauce or sweet potato pie?
Posted by: Mark C. Chu-Carroll | December 18, 2006 1:10 PM
Wow, you've got me beat - I thought I had a world-class "terrible grad school moment story".
During my M.Sc. (recently completed), I had many more committee meetings than is normal or average - because my work was highly technical (Radiolabelled-PAGE, quirky PCR) and my advisor didn't have the experience in the techniques I needed to complete the work, so the other person on my advisory committee wanted lots of chances to correct problems with my techniques before too much time was wasted on minor problems. Anyway, during one such technical-steering meeting, he was dissatisfied with my progress:
"The most parsimonious explanation for your data is that you are incompetent."
He then went on to describe my career prospects should I ever wish to work in any of the local biotech and biomedical research labs as a technician ("If you were working at X, you'd have been fired by now for incompetence"). His opinion of my ability to a) graduate with a Master's and then b) go on to a PhD was so low that this option wasn't even discussed.
I start my PhD in 3 weeks. He and I are currently co-authoring a paper, with no hard feelings.
Posted by: TheBrummell | December 18, 2006 1:19 PM
As someone in the midst of writing his dissertation, I can not agree with the title of this post. I'm questioning my entire career choice and the utility of any work I will produce (indeed of the academic enterprise), and I'm reinforcing my very intense hatred of writing. If it weren't for my love of teaching (and the fact that i won a fellowship to write the thing), I'd have been out of here.
Posted by: MAJeff | December 18, 2006 1:30 PM
PZ
Well, I was 99% certain that I knew who you were talking about (knowing where you went to grad school, the approximate time, and the fact that it was a fairly well-known scientist who died a while back), but after reading your first comment regarding Eric Kandel, now I'm certain. One of my undergrad professors was one of his first graduate students way way back. I also have one of his books sitting on my shelf. Given that my work is in invertebrate neuromuscular development, it's not surprising that I figured it out quickly, I guess.
I had a rough time of grad school too, and I can completely relate to the idea that you can respect someone that you don't really like. It's a bit more complicated than that, but it's pretty much the way I feel about my graduate advisor. He nearly killed me (not literally, mind you, but I'm sure he thought about it).
Posted by: rjb | December 18, 2006 1:31 PM
I defended my dissertation last month and this post fit in with my reminiscings of the past five years. During my general exam, a member of my committee (a Very Important Scientist) asked me how I would address a certain question if I had infinite knowledge. I had prepared myself for many questions, I even tried to think of questions that might come from left field, but this one left me momentarily speechless.
Posted by: Ros | December 18, 2006 1:32 PM
Seems related, but I remember a joke list of "things not to say during your thesis defense" and I found a link to it on teh intarwebs...
http://www.stefan.winkler.net/defense.html
My favorite thing not to say...
"I don't know, I didn't write this."
Posted by: rjb | December 18, 2006 1:34 PM
Grad school is like catholic school. Traumatic? You bet. Educational? Mostly.
But what a source of conversation starters ;-)
Getting things done in Academia
toward building your intellectual infrastructure
Posted by: Mike Kaspari | December 18, 2006 1:36 PM
As someone in the midst of writing his dissertation, I can not agree with the title of this post. I'm questioning my entire career choice and the utility of any work I will produce (indeed of the academic enterprise), and I'm reinforcing my very intense hatred of writing. If it weren't for my love of teaching (and the fact that i won a fellowship to write the thing), I'd have been out of here.
Oh pah. Is there anyone here who didn't feel that way writing their dissertation? That's normal, son, welcome to the club.
(Actually I part ways with you on the 'writing' issue -- it was by far my favorite part of the entire enterprise, and the only part I was semi-decent at. Once I dove into the literature in earnest, for my papers and my dissertation, it all started to click and I had a euphoric sense of the "big picture." Nothing else like it.)
(Also I'm pretty sure the title was meant ironically.)
Posted by: minimalist | December 18, 2006 2:07 PM
I've got one of those 'hyper-critical' types in my committee meetings. I value his advice deeply (he'll find EVERY possible error in your methods/analysis/etc). But sometimes, standing in front of people, proudly presenting your new ideas just to have them chewed out can be REALLY demoralizing.
I've found an excellent solution. I've added a new member to my committee who is quite well known to be very positive. They work to cancel each other out so that I don't get too full of myself but retain a sense of pride in my accomplishments!
Posted by: carlman23 | December 18, 2006 2:20 PM
Hey Carlman,
He's not a DICK is he? I think I still got you beat with my SARS story....but then is grad school a competition, even through this mutual exploration of epicaricacy?
Posted by: Krakus | December 18, 2006 2:31 PM
Wow. Painful.
I have a couple good ones. Comittee wise, I had a prof that I absolutely worshipped from a class he taught. I learned more from that class than I did with any other class. He was also on the opposite side of a department politics game from my mentor.
Simply put, one side kissed butts and ignored problems with the program (them), one didn't, and offerred suggestions on how to improve the program (us). I really can't figure out any other reason for the crap he put me through. One time, he told me that no journal that HE read would accept my work or anything with similar findings. When we pubbed it a few months later in the journal of record for our field, he pretty much shut up at the rest of our meetings. It didn't hurt when my mentor mentioned that the editor of the journal, who had visited the university while we were getting ready to submit the paper, had praised my work and told us to send him the paper instead of to a lesser journal.
My other story goes back to classes, similar to Mark C. Chu-Carroll's story about quals. It was a presentation for a topics class, where the person running the class had asked an "expert" to come in and offer thoughts on the presentation. The presentation didn't was supposed to last about 20 min with a 10 minute Q&A. My presentation started with a history of the field, which was immediately attacked because I didn't go straight to the facts, but rather briefly mentioned the hyperbole that infected the public knowledge of the topic (cocaine as a nervous system teratogen), before moving on to initial findings and the state of the field today. I was lucky enough to have a combative expert, and my talk went over by an hour.
It was bad enough that one of the people in the class with an overdeveloped sense of fairness had to get up and leave a few times to keep from telling the prof off. The person running the class was still pre tenure, and didn't know how to deal with the situation. The next day, somebody who wasn't even in that class joked that they heard that I had defended the day before. To this day, I know that if I can make it through a presentation about a field that I have only a passing interest on, while being harassed by an expert with anger issues, I can present on anything. Neither quals nor my defense were nearly as bad for the experience.
I have to say that anybody who decides to go through grad, med, dental, vet, etc. school, if they aren't "crazy" yet, they will be soon. Every student, when they go through orientation, should be given a coupon for an evaluation and scrip for some anti anxiety/ anti depressant of their choice.
For all that, I would do it again, but pick a different comittee, along with getting on meds a few years earlier. You would be amazed by the number of PhDs and MDs that are quietly on meds, afraid that their peers will look down on them for recognizing a problem and dealing with it. But being an uncontrollable drunk is OK...
Posted by: Robster | December 18, 2006 2:54 PM
All these stories make me almost irrationally glad that I quit grad school a few months ago. If you think science academia is bad, try visiting the humanities (I was in music history). At least the sciences have a potential effect on the real world. Nobody really gives a crap about music history except music historians. Whenever anyone asked me what I was going to to with a PhD in musicology, I'd say -- only partly in jest -- that it was pretty much only good for teaching other people how to be musicologists.
Now that I've quit, I work with an after school program at one of the high schools in town for which I get paid to play games and hang out, I bought a house, and I'm happier than I've been in at least 15 years.
In retrospect, I wonder why I put myself through all the struggle and strife.
Posted by: Dan | December 18, 2006 3:05 PM
Of course, it turned out that one of the people whom I chose (a famous scientist whom I idolized) turned out to be a rather tough critic during my oral exam.
LOL.
Oh yeah, boy did i learn that lesson the hard way. In fact, I would add a corollary:
NEVER pick people for your orals committee that your primary advisor does not approve of, even if you like them and have tremendous respect for them.
I picked two people he REALLY disliked for my orals committe, and both of them slapped me upside my head during my exam.
coincidence? not hardly.
the message was loud and clear:
don't challenge your major advisor until AFTER you get your degree.
Posted by: Ichthyic | December 18, 2006 3:37 PM
Every student, when they go through orientation, should be given a coupon for an evaluation and scrip for some anti anxiety/ anti depressant of their choice.
that's seriously good advice, actually.
I'm reminded of an ex ER nurse, who, after 15 years of doing it (and that's a LONG time), relayed similar stories of how nurses are undercut at every turn by the rest of the staff, and there was no support system for them to fall back on when the stress got overwhelming; hence the massive burnout ratios in that field.
Fortunately, many hospitals are now implementing support systems for nursing staff to mitigate some of the stresses.
It made me think that something similar would be very usefull for graduate students in just about any field.
Posted by: Ichthyic | December 18, 2006 3:43 PM
don't challenge your major advisor until AFTER you get your degree.
This might be the safest bet, except I would never have got my @!*& degree without challenging my advisor - I'd be re-running those %!%=*! samples for the 20th time instead of just writing the shit up :)
Posted by: windy | December 18, 2006 3:46 PM
Regardless of whether or not he intended to be constructive, do you ever think that the cranky, demeaning, old-bastard routine helped?
nope. Moreover, at times it can cause enough friction that the advisor can catch some serious heat for that kind of approach; it just depends on the exact circumstances.
I'm sure we all have stories along those lines.
Posted by: Ichthyic | December 18, 2006 3:49 PM
I'd be re-running those %!%=*! samples for the 20th time instead of just writing the shit up :)
well, that's sometimes the case too; one of the students prior to myself in my old advisor's lab actually sued him to get her degree (she won easily, btw).
I'm just saying that unless you HAVE to go up against your advisor to even get your degree, it makes life much easier if you don't.
there's always time later to bring challenges that aren't absolutely necessary.
Posted by: Ichthyic | December 18, 2006 3:56 PM
Every student, when they go through orientation, should be given a coupon for an evaluation and scrip for some anti anxiety/ anti depressant of their choice.
Or given the name and number of a reliable weed source.
Posted by: MAJeff | December 18, 2006 4:01 PM
Friday. 2. She knocks, walks into his office. Without even glancing up from his work, he picks up a pile of paper (she recognizes her chapter) and drops it unceremoniously into the waiting wastebasket.
"Start over," he sez, still not looking up.
Conference over.
Thinking about that one, I'd bet her professor had been teaching grad students for at least a couple of decades, and from hir experience, I'm sure, had rarely seen any first draft worthwhile to pursue, so had simply gotten into the habit of automatically insisting on a rewrite before even delving into it.
Were they right?
maybe.
is that teaching?
not at all.
which leads me to make another recommendation to prospective graduate students, based on much experience:
try to find younger profs who haven't spent so many years teaching grad students if you want a "teaching" type experience.
If you want someone well connected with a good perspective on the history of your field, and you're SURE you already have all your "shit" together, THEN go with the ancient tenured curmudgeon.
Posted by: Ichthyic | December 18, 2006 4:08 PM
My my scntsts cn b nplsnt nd nprfssnl? Rlly r y sr sch ppl rn't rlly cvrt thsts?
s fr y rn n wth th nsty Prf, PZ h ws rght wsn't h? Yr 'scntfc' crr sn't nythng t rght hm bt s t?
Posted by: MOMUS | December 18, 2006 5:07 PM
So ...
What is data parallelism more like?
Or is some completely different?
Posted by: Babbler | December 18, 2006 5:21 PM
Ichthyic,
I make the free psych meds suggestion every time there is a campus health care meeting focusing on grad/med students. Sure, it is included on insurance, but you go over what the university will pay for in a year very quickly (hence the free part), and unless your doc knows how to game the system, therapy isn't paid for (one case I know of got visits paid for as migraine treatments (stress triggers), while I got mine for insomnia (anxiety kept me from sleeping)). It would keep students in the program, get them out faster, etc.
Posted by: Robster | December 18, 2006 5:50 PM
Wow,Ichthyic my husband and I have the opposite experience. My advisor is tenured, nice, understanding, and very helpful. My husband's is a new faculty, crazy slave-driving evil bastard. He calls my hb's cell at night (constantly) to complain he left to early (is 7-8pm too early? should you even care if we have good data?) and refused to give even one day for holidays. And that's just the latest...
Posted by: Tinni | December 18, 2006 5:54 PM
I may have passed the exam with my answer: "No, I don't think so."
Omigod, PZ, that is brilliant: the Spock maneuver!!!!! Remember the episode where the crew beams down to the planet and Spock gets stoned and discovers "love"? And he's making out with some woman and Kirk (aboard ship) demands that Spock beam up? Spock's reply: "I don't think so, Captain."
Well done, PZ.
The big bastard who sat on my preliminary exam committee was content to pass me with the caveat that "The only reason I'm doing this is so I don't have to sit through it again." Then he told me that I was doomed to fail at every endeavor unless I changed my attitude.
Whatever. He's dead. I'm alive.
Posted by: Great White Wonder | December 18, 2006 6:29 PM
My arch-nemesis was one of my co-supervisors. B. was a fluid dynamics guy, and wanted me to take a fluid-dynamics approach to my project. I refused to do this for what I felt were pretty good reasons: (1) I knew very little about fluid dynamics, (2) we didn't have the computing power needed to include fluid dynamics in the model, and (3) we didn't actually NEED fluid dynamics to answer the question I was investigating. (Fluid dynamics was an important part of the process involved, but it was possible to abstract the FD bits of the puzzle into something much simpler.)
B. was offended and stopped talking to me, except in reviews where he did his best to tear strips off me in front of the other staff. It wasn't until I went to my postgrad coordinator that I discovered B. was as unpopular with his fellow academics as he was with me; I've never seen an academic so happy to receive a written complaint about one of his colleagues.
(I think it's probably wiser if I leave my name off this one; for all I know some of those who were involved read this blog.)
Posted by: A regular commenter | December 18, 2006 6:53 PM
It wasn't until I went to my postgrad coordinator that I discovered B. was as unpopular with his fellow academics as he was with me
In my case, after I told my adviser about what a dick this bastard was during my prelim, my adviser set me straight: "He's an asshole. Fuck 'im."
Posted by: Great White Wonder | December 18, 2006 7:31 PM
My thesis advisor turned out to be my arch-nemesis. I did manage to graduate within the usual time-frame (4.5 years), but the damage, material and emotional, our feud caused me seriously compromised my subsequent career (and probably still does), although I had my committee and department's chair full support. Sadly, I can't even say my story is the among the worst I've heard. In view of all this, I can never bring myself to recommend graduate study wholeheartedly. I feel there are people (I was in that group) who will do it no matter how difficult it may be, and then there are the "undecideds". I'm afraid I'm inclined only to say "flee!" to the latter.
It may be important to note I was a foreign student, studying on a F1 visa tied to the institution that offered me the scholarship, with little knowledge of the US school system and very different expectations, my background being very Old-World European, with near-military hierarchies and authoritarianism, and feeling very vulnerable should I displease the witch. I don't think an American kid would have put up with her--indeed, she's never HAD a US student--in fact, I was her first non-Indian, non-Chinese student. Oh well. I lived and I learned but I can't say the experience was worth the trouble.
Posted by: Lola Walser | December 18, 2006 7:34 PM
I was told by a kindly grad student colleague to pick people for your committee that wouldn't give you trouble. I had pretty much done so, though the member of my committee chosen to ask me the first question did so in German. I had taken German as one of my foreign languages in pursueing a degree in Entomology and I guess he was just seeing how good I was at it. I replied that my foreign language requirement was that I learn to READ German, not speak it. Good thing too, because the spoken German I knew, I had picked up from my Schwabisch soccer teammates and it wouldn't have done much good in the exam, save to insult someone.
Posted by: PengieP | December 18, 2006 7:54 PM
Being a bit literate in addition to being an engineer, more than once I've found myself reviewing colleagues' or students' papers that were quite bad--terrible sentence structure, poor reasoning, grammatical errors, you name it. They were bad, bad papers, and more than few deserved to be mocked for how poorly they were written (being a nice guy, though, I don't mock the writing quality of people who have asked me to review their work).
It is quite a different experience--humbling and humiliating, in fact--to have a logically-, syntactically- and grammatically-correct paper savaged because your advisor doesn't like the topic, doesn't like the argument, or simply doesn't like you. There's a real venom that comes out in the kinds of encounters that Dr. Myers describes that is absent from the kind I usually take part in. I suppose, though, like so many unpleasant things in life, such experiences "build character."
Posted by: ThomasHobbes | December 18, 2006 8:00 PM
Being a bit literate in addition to being an engineer, more than once I've found myself reviewing colleagues' or students' papers that were quite bad--terrible sentence structure, poor reasoning, grammatical errors, you name it. They were bad, bad papers, and more than few deserved to be mocked for how poorly they were written (being a nice guy, though, I don't mock the writing quality of people who have asked me to review their work).
It is quite a different experience--humbling and humiliating, in fact--to have a logically-, syntactically- and grammatically-correct paper savaged because your advisor doesn't like the topic, doesn't like the argument, or simply doesn't like you. There's a real venom that comes out in the kinds of encounters that Dr. Myers describes that is absent from the kind I usually take part in. I suppose, though, like so many unpleasant things in life, such experiences "build character."
Posted by: ThomasHobbes | December 18, 2006 8:00 PM
Woops!
Posted by: T-Hobbes | December 18, 2006 8:03 PM
I was actually advised that a diverse committee was good (although in my case, I didn't get to pick the examining committee). The idea is that you could get them into a good brawling argument with each other while you hid in a corner until the shouting was over.
It didn't quite work that way for me, though -- there was argument, but since there also wasn't a time limit, they still had plenty of time to rend me.
Posted by: PZ Myers | December 18, 2006 8:16 PM
Krakus, I've talked with Carlman23 in meatspace about the nasty person who rips apart presentations. I've not met him, but I don't think he's a DICK, I think he's just completely round-the-bend-batship-crazy loco.
Carlman, tell us the story of his criticism of a published paper based on the fact they used empirical data. I love that story.
Posted by: TheBrummell | December 18, 2006 8:19 PM
Does this count as a grad school horror story, or not:
I was supposed to go to one the top schools in my subject area, near east languages & cultures, with full funding (tuition waved, 20,000 a year stipend, etc.) but my parents decided that it was a good idea to call me the "laziest child ever" the whole time I was in college because I "wasn't doing anything" (just working 2 part time jobs and taking a full course load), and sabotage my ability to complete my course assignments by shutting off the electricity every time they wanted to work on some damned home improvement project forcing me to take 10% and 20% hits off my final paper grades for papers that were worth 40% of my overall grade, and to top it off they decided that because they were paying for it (yes I'm grateful that they paid, but I seriously think they only paid so that I could graduate 'on time' to beat my cousins) I could only take 15-16 credit hours a semester and had to graduate after four years (my sister got to go 21 credit hours at a time for 4.5 years). Well my degree was 135 credit hours for the major, minor, and general education classes and taking language classes was 'stupid'. (Since I was supposed to be going to a languages and culture graduate program, foreign language proficiency was an absolute necessity.) Instead of graduating with a B.A. in History with a Computer Science minor, I graduated with a B.S. in History just because I was stupid enough to think that if I graduated 'on time' my parents might actually be proud of me. Graduating 'on time' meant that I did not have the qualifications to get into the school that my professors were trying so hard to get me into. I went on to go to the cheapest Library Science graduate program that I could find only to come back home after I finished and have my parents sabotage my attempts to find a job. I've been trying for years now to recover and attempting to finish my education, preferably by getting a masters & doctorate in Near East Languages & Cultures but it just hasn't worked out unless I want to pay through the nose to go to the same school that had considered giving me full funding until my GPA and B.A. with a minor were trashed.
Posted by: Anonymous | December 18, 2006 8:39 PM
I went into grad school with only one intention: earn my PhD so that I could be qualified for a lecturer/instructor position at the university level. I had no intention of the doing the post-doc/migrant-worker thing, followed by the hell of the job application cycle. I just wanted to teach at the college level.
I stacked my committee with people who wouldn't give me a hard time, and it worked great. I got a great job right out of grad school and have been there ever since.
My only negative experience came on a trip to Europe when I was asked to present the latest simulation research of a faculty member I had been warned to stay away from. I figured, why not, I was pretty familiar with his work and it was a free trip to Europe.
I didn't realize I was being thrown to the lions. I presented this guy's research essentially to a convention mostly filled with his arch-nemesis and colleagues. I got totally savaged in front of the whole conference when I couldn't respond to every question and criticism, and at the conference wrap-up speech, the jackass couldn't resist a parting shot at my "unprofessional" talk.
It was pretty humiliating to get beat up on like that, but in the end, I suppose I didn't mind so much. It just made me completely confident that my decision to follow a career in teaching instead of research was the right move. The stage fright I got as a result of that experience really only affected me at other conferences (still suffer from that a little bit) but not in the classroom.
I've been quite happy at a job I love (and my department loves me, fortunately) for the past 10 years, and as far as I'm concerned, all those involved in that dispute can rot in their private hell. They don't GET to be my arch-nemeses because they're stuck doing mostly pointless research while I get to do what I love. Our mutual cross-section is now zero, though I would love to show up to a class of one of theirs one day and have a good laugh at what crappy teachers they are.
As an aside, I would love to see a post about what the scientific community is like over in Europe. I found that I really enjoyed being around the Dutch, the Belgians, the Germans and the Canadians. The French, English and Americans were all insufferable, like they were unhappy to be there, better than everyone else who *was* happy to be there (this wasn't in France or England) and wanted everyone else to share their undeserved misery.
Posted by: Observer | December 18, 2006 8:59 PM
Anonymous, I say this with all due respect:
Your parents suck. A lot.
Posted by: Dan | December 18, 2006 9:17 PM
Wow...the Thread of Pain....
Some funny items from my lamentable academic career:
1- Pre-Meds: Indeed, the pre-Meds bear watching. As an undergrad, taking a practical in Comparative Vertebrate Anatomy (say it with a heavy Hungarian accent), the kind where the class has to rotate from station to station every few minutes. I kept noticing that the questions at each microscope station did not match with where the pointer was. So each time, I'd as the Prof.to check it, and he'd have to re-adjust the stage. This happened maybe five times in a row. Finally, he goes to the person ahead of me, stares at him, and then announces to the class that anyone seen touching any controls but focus "vill be ejected." It stopped immediately. The person ahead of me was a pre-med,and had also chosen me as a nemesis.
They also had a tendancy to steal common study materials, necessitating a raid one night to liberate cross sections of squalus acanthius from a certain off-campus apartment.
Committees: In my grad department, there were two Professors whom it could be useful to both have on your committee, because they were known to get into looooong arguments about arcane points, thus shortening the candidate's suffering considerably. Neither was on mine, alas.
Nausea: I used to literally belch bile as I fired up the old PC-AT to work on my dissertation. This led to my progress growing more and more like Zeno's Paradox as the writing progressed.
Saddest Day: When I realized I was done, finished, has shot my wad and had absolutely nothing left to give. That it had all ceased to mean anything to me. That a single erg more expended on my doctorate was more than I could afford. That it had all been long and expensive detour, and that I had to stop or die.
How long? That was the same day that I mailed the copies of my dissertation to my committee....
Posted by: cory | December 18, 2006 9:21 PM
My thesis advisor turned out to be my arch-nemesis.
From my experience at a couple of the high pressure institutions, it is a huge mistake to choose an asshole as an advisor. I have seen too many students choose the assholes as their advisors because they were the top dogs in the field. This is a really risky strategy: the student may make it through and be very successful, but they end up being much more likely to burn out. It is really hard to tell how many YEARS of bullshit you can put up with. Usually it seems like they start to have trouble 2-3 years in, when it feels like it is getting too late to switch (it may not be, I switched labs after three years to another area of research, really glad I did it).
Research is really important, but when selecting an advisor/grad school try to make sure that there are good people doing what you are interested in.
Ivan
Posted by: Ivan | December 18, 2006 11:32 PM
I'll have to remember this one.
"The most parsimonious explanation for your data is that you are incompetent."
One of my mentors also had what I came to think of as the all-purpose question: "you can't be serious."
My experience was actually pretty good. I hope anyone reading this who is going into grad study takes home the message to check potential advisors out very carefully with their current and former students. It's better to work with someone who is slightly lesser-known but who is a decent human being who will take the time to write you nice recommendation letters than with a prima donna most of whose students are in therapy. Even if you have to shift the topic a bit -- your Ph.D. work is an apprentice piece, not the thing that will determine the rest of your research life.
Posted by: c | December 18, 2006 11:52 PM
Brummel,
I too have spoken to Carlman23 in meat-space, and I know of the 'member' of whom he speaks...personally.
[whispered] The horror, the horror...
Posted by: Krakus | December 18, 2006 11:58 PM
As a grad school survivor (twice!), I feel obliged to chip in.
My first Masters was in German Studies, and while the intellectual growth during those years was very gratifying, when it came time to write the thesis, I really hit a brick wall. I was quite disillusioned with the way they taught the subject at my alma mater, but couldn't quite place a finger on why, exactly. How they took a subject I loved so much as an undergraduate and utterly sucked the life out if it and turned it into a joyless shell of itself; I managed to alienate more than a few professors, some unwittingly, others not-so-unwittingly. I could have signed on with the resident Linguist, who was looking for an understudy who knew a Slavic language (unlike most Germanists, I took Russian as my second "research" language--and by the end I was wishing I was a Slavic Studies grad student, except they didn't TEACH that at the graduate level at my particular institution), but this linguist was working in such an obscure field, on a topic of nearly zero interest to me, that I declined; plus my unabashed atheism deeply offended him, so that was the end of that (He was himself deeply religious, also taught Medieval German lit, which is heavily based in religious tradition, which I simply had no patience for...and made the mistake of saying so, and why--I outed myself as a vulgar modernist, and that was simply that--he treated me like the devil incarnate the rest of my time there).
My first thesis advisor actually specialized in literary Modernism and so seemed like a natural person to approach for the kind of interdisciplinary thing I was interested in doing (that was another mark against me--the department as a whole frowned on interdisciplinary ANYTHING). But I was unfocused that second year when I was supposed to be solidifying my topic, regularly meeting with my advisor, etc. I managed to piss him off enough that he stopped being my advisor, though reluctantly agreed to stay on the committee. The Department had a change of Chairpersons while I was still a student, and the incoming Chair, whose specialty was Germa