51 Since starting my postdoc no less than 45 days or so ago I haven’t really commented on the subject, though I think I can now comment on, at the very least, the first 3 days (what with having all this time to reflect upon them and all).
The position of a post doc is a confusing one, to say the least. You’re really not that much better than a 4th or 5th year graduate student, despite having additional initials after your name and, if you didn’t fuck up, you’re probably at a bit more of a competitive lab or a more impressive school (or it was, at the least. a lateral promotion to something equivalent.) Either way, the people around you are fucking smart and ready to take you and everyone else on intellectually. Now is not the time, of course, to retreat into your shell… this would be a mistake. Instead, you have to toss yourself out there as simultaneously self assured and humble. It is the postdoc, after all, that crashed into the delicate ecosystem of the lab and as the guest I find myself silently listening to world around me.
What is this madness that I have begun? A group 3 fold larger than the one I left, I find each of us (that is, all the members) attempt to be unique snowflakes with varying degrees of success. The office layout is horrible – the separation of the lab into multiple offices in different hallways has lead to apparent cliques and associations. While, granted, my former lab was separated by floors, we were always close. If I were to, say, go out to lunch with some of my group members, trash talking was more along the lines of “if so and so doesn’t get their shit together they’re going to fucking piss me off” and not so much the “I’m going to fuck so and so in the eye socket in front of her children.” The cordial flavor of a provincial department has given way to the cutting edge of brutality. I’m ensconced in brilliance, laziness and madness all at once and am supposed to be a leader of this ragtag crew and, while there is a clear thirst for knowledge and a love for science, there is also a dynamic that eludes me. Make no mistake: it’s a super group of the highest order and it’s sink or swim; I’m happy to be here and love everything going on around me but it’s overwhelming – daunting even, fuck… I can’t even remember everyone’s names.
So I sit quietly waiting for the first years to filter through, hopefully I can catch some of them and convince them to follow me on my own wild scientific quest for the latest in high science and high praise. For now, I’m focusing on doing something major – a novel innovation. It’s unbelievably difficult to come up with something novel, I appreciate that now, particularly when you have to keep it in the context of what the scope of the lab is doing. I have some ideas, but they’re not ripe enough to pick from the tree…
So I sit, reading the literature for 10 hours a day… waiting for inspiration to strike me.
I hope it strikes soon…
UPDATE: It struck. And I’m off to the races…
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I think I can understand you somehow, but just try to jump into the deep water and do your stuff without thinking about what the others might think. Of course everything is new and different, but give it a little time and you will succeed. I´m really interested how you are doing..keep posting. In some month I will be in a similar position. I will start my postdoc also in a high rank group in addition I will not only change the city but also the country
..so a lot to come…but hey… life is always challenging! That makes the fun!
The only way to be top dog is to have your own funding. Then you can stay home on th weekends while your pathetic unfunded coworkers are hating life in teh lab.
I loved having three years of funding.
The sitting reading shit phase sucks. Its nice to ‘catch up’ and ‘be upto date’ with journals but seriously, get on with something – you’re probably more creative when actually doing wet chemistry rather than absorbing other folks stuff. Even if its just a small project leading to a humble publication, get on and synthesise some new shit. The reading phase just delays your entry into the major group politik stuff like fighting over resources/instrument time. Best start establishing some territory early, before you’re overly committed to nurturing your fantasticly novel idea.
I got a whole bunch of really useful stuff right around the end of my second month into the postdoc and have a lot of new molecules now, crystals, etc… (not enough for a good publication though) after wasting my time for about 6-7 weeks on useless crap. So you’re close to that end of the second month, third month time, and everything should start working well by then as long as you have some sort of small project in mind and are doing reactions.
I recommend playing video games where you have to think a lot. Maybe after a very intense video gaming session, chemical ideas will come to you and you’ll forget about pesky labmates. That, or you’ll fell so guilty that you’ll come into the lab and work for ten hours straight after playing video games for ten hours straight. So, you should definitely get a PC and not a Mac for that purpose and also buy Civilization IV and Space Rangers 2. Fallout 3 is not so bad as well, but it’s too much shooting mutants and raiders and less thinking.
You know what about those huge superlabs? You start to think that with so many lab members, not everyone is going to make it. I mean some huge groups have enough people to populate a significant chunk of academic job openings in a year. So a significant number of people in the lab will not “make it”.
Then again, all it takes these days is a paper or two in JACS, the right word from your boss and you should be able to land a decent faculty spot.
Ahh the scenery of a real lab…brings back so many fond memories…
And it can get much better than that…(boss fuelling competition and struggling to meet his/her ego and having an ambitious coworker with no ethics working in your project)
Just a humble advice for your quest I always have heard form the best:
“Aim something simple but potentially innovative and significative, and then see what happens…honest”
And if things get hairy with co-workers dont hesitate to s#@? everything moving
Postdoc is only a contract job – two years (or less) and you are out. try to please your prof to give you good recommendations but otherwise stay the fuck out of the local politics. make as many contacts as possible, get people to have pleasant memories (of you bein hard-working and pleasant0 because some of them will probably be famous and influential in the future.
Also it has been my experience that assholines of the group relates to the (nasty) personality of the professor – an I was in 3 synthetic groups at Harvard, each one was quite different from another – and the most of the unpleasantness results from highly ambitious and immature types being thrown together, emulating their prof while trying to boss and bully and trash-talk other people who are just as wrethched as they are.
Well, Kyle you’re bit of an a-hole, but that’s O.K because you’re a chemist. So you shouldn’t be too surprised you’re surrounded by others of your kind.
UCLA must not have been very brutal. At TSRI people were fucking with each other all the time. You’re obviously not there, because I’d never describe TSRI as Provincial.
The only objective in a big-tiered group is to get your bosses attention. You MUST grovel and slither, lather him with accolades and affectionate worship. You are not in any way the focal point, you are a cog in a greater machine, and you must show this is your true goal in life. True individuals never get a PhD in the first place. It is a statist, conformist pursuit. All the power flows from the PI, you are helpless when confronted by his might.
P.S:
Note that reaction sabotage and notebook stealing are common in such groups. I’d duct tape my hood closed or set up a camera.
Note that reaction sabotage and notebook stealing are common in such groups. I’d duct tape my hood closed or set up a camera.
Evidence/compelling anecdotes or STFU.
If he’s working where I think, that’s really unlikely. There were a lot of people who didn’t play well with each other, and cliques, but people were generally not destructive to one another’s work. I never even heard of that line being crossed (though I could have just been really clueless and missed it – I know I was clueless). I hadn’t even heard of that happening in the more evil groups where I was.
Bengu Sezen spiking others’ catalytic reactions with product? Granted, it’s just a rumor for now. And it wasn’t really a ‘destructive’ action if it happened, but I wouldn’t call it constructive either.
She wasn’t where I was, though, fortunately. That wouldn’t have been part of the group ethic where I was, anyway [it wouldn't have been where she was, either, at least until advisor (allegedly) dumped the people who didn't get her results]. I would have figured that fiddling other people’s reactions (even more so than faking own’s own) would be verboten.
It sure would be nice to hear from Columbia on this, but I think they haven’t stopped shoveling yet.
I agree. This sort of thing is always attributed to another group (”those people” who are cutthroat, etc.) and almost never written or talked about in first person. Indirect action (not helping, not telling folks about key information, etc.) is equally damaging and not nearly as awful to the resume as direct action.
Like I said, I could have missed it out of cluelessness. I didn’t hear anything in any person, though – doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, just that people knew somehow that it was unacceptable. I don’t know if people did the “sins of omission” you list – people who did them wouldn’t say, and no one noted having experienced them (though you might not actually know if you had been the victim of a strategic omission).
Sorry man, but with your proven track record (actually scary) and the h-index of your current PI (even more scary), I wouldnt worry that much
Anthracene plus benzyne gives trypticene, Fieser, Organic Experiments 2nd Ed., 307 (1968). Even one Fieser is unbeatable.
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/bitrypt.png
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/bitrypta.png
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/bitrypt2a.png
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/bitrypt2b.png
9,9′-bianthracene to ditrypticyl, then FeCl3 in MeNO2. Add some sidechains at the start for solubility. That is proof of concept.
10,10′-dibromo-9,9′-bianthracene and repeat. Now cook it up with a nice Na or NaK emulsion and ultrasonication to polymerize. Limit MW with some added monofunctional bromide. Or lithiate and oxidize to bonding. Etc.
Oxidize to close the tripartite panels. Voila! Forced-conjugated polyphenylenes and groovy! Will it be a Hell of a rigid rod molecular conductor when doped? Will it gel or lyotropic liquid crystal spin into hyperstrong filament? If it is an ambient temp temp supercon, we share the lutefisk podium.
Youv’e got the organiker’s version of writer’s block. The way to grasp the blue rose is to reach where it is not. Make some tetracyclone, then with Ph-#-P to hexaphenylbenzene, then FeCl3/MeNO2 to the yellow product. Diddle around for a week. Your mind will do something brilliant when it is bored but not pressurized.
What are you complaining about? You got your PhD at UCLA, and you were never in the “big time”! Just get used to it. People at the top tier labs play at a different level.
Not always – just those who are so full of their top-tier-awesomenes. It takes handful of arrogant poseurs with cadet mentality to start the bullying process (and an advisor who encourages it) and it kind of self-perpetrates – those who get into the group does not know any better and take this for normal way of behaving, those that were sat upon and were required to kiss up eventually acquire their right to enthusiastically do the same onto other wretched souls. Much like the molested kiddies that grow into serial pederasts themselves.
Most graduate students get into top tier schools because they got very good grades and did well on the GRE. They do not get into top tier schools because they can do good research or have a proven track record of doing good research. That’s it. That’s, as we say it, is the c’est la vie.
And even the grade thing is questionable because after being a graduate student I found out just how many people cheat all the time on lab reports and tests, even in higher level classes. There was a mass cheating incident in a 400 level course at the university where I did my undergrad a couple of years ago in a course that I took and found quite hard. The administrators killed it. It makes me think about other people in my year now… It takes a lot of work to get an A. That doesn’t mean you have an interest in the material or you think about it after class. Plus it’s easier to publish in good journals at a top tier school as a hack than it is to do the same in a lower tier school. A lot of people bring their neuroses that made them a straight A student to grad school. So they play ‘differently’ but often not at a different level from your average grad school schmoe at a 20-100 place school.
Still, there are a lot more people who like chemistry as a vocation at a top tier school and who will go out of their way to learn something new. It’s nice for a change. Even if some of those people are jerks.
Wait, are you saying UCLA isn’t in the big time or are you saying, sarcastically, that I am complaining about not being in the big time while allegedly getting a PhD from UCLA, which is indeed “big time”?
Sorry to say, but UCLA is not the “big time”.
Sorry to say, but UCLA is not the “Big Time”. I’d leave that to the Ivies, MIT, Stanford, Caltech, Berkley and a handful of other schools.
I never understood the appropriate lines for segregating the “big time” from the “large time”, “medium time” etc.
UCLA is not the big time! It’s a well funded Chemistry dept in the same vein as UC Santa Barbera or San Diego. Any respect you get or opportunities you experience as a result of that UKLA meat bag stamp on your forehead is a result of the top tier business/law, programs. Yeah, you get some undeserved associative gravitas. Go to Harvard or TSRI is you want to experience the big-time.
So what’s your chemical genealogy Kyle? People in the sciences are ranked according to their academic lineage, first and foremost!
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/chem.....trees.html
Dan is 100% correct. UCLA is a good school, but not big time.
So aside from Harvard and TSRI, what are “the big time” schools? If you say Yale you’re fired btw.
Is Pitt part of the big time? I would throw Berkeley into the mix, too.
The big time schools are the ones most dream of going to but can’t. MIT, Caltech, TSRI, Columbia, Haavaad, Stanford, UC Berkeley.
No one dreams of going to UCLA for chemistry.
A fine fucking pissing match indeed.
You know there are plenty of shitty professors/advisors to work for at these “big time” schools.
Yes, it’s completely ridiculous. I think I burst out laughing the first time I read “MIT is a school that most people want to go to but can’t”. This is one of the schools I avoided on purpose because of it’s terrible reputation (for the things that matter for me) and I was annoyed to learn that it was #3 on my post-doc list when I made up a top ten list of people I want to work for.
My advisor at the previous no-name place was hands down smarter and a better chemist than most people in his field, including MIT profs. I have realized this pretty thoroughly by now. It’s easy to have a good track record when you have an ambitious army working for you. The problem is that there are a lot of casualties along the way and tsars make really bad military operators on the ground.
The statement that I would actively ‘choose’ to go to a place with an unhealthy atmosphere like MIT or Harvard if it wasn’t for a particular advisor is, to me, absurd.
Who’s going to take you further – Omar Yahgi at UCLA or Dalibor Sames at Columbia?
I don’t think the departments make that big of a difference
Actually… is there a good, logical method of predicting function in metal organic frameworks based on design? That’s why Yaghi bought a robot to make them, after all. At least with Sames’ chemistry, it feels like there is more thinking involved and more synthetic ability asked for on the part of the plebs.
But I agree that you probably will get a better job afterwards by going the UCLA Yaghi route; but only since it’s all the rage with BASF, some academic circles, etc… right now.
Isn’t Yahgi setting sail for Northwestern? That is the rumor I heard some 8 months ago.
The rumor mill says: not until his U Michigan students are all gone…
Look son, I kind of was impressed when you wrote that blog entry about how you were never challenged in grad school. But then I find out you went to UCLA. Son, sorry to say this, but you were never in the SH*T. But that is ok, because now you are knee deep in the SH*T. You’ll sink or swim, most likely swim, but you WILL be challenged.
I think there are some odd assumptions being made here.
From my standing, it’s pretty much fucking hilarious.
Be sure to quote this thread the next time you solicit reviews of institutions outside of “the Big Time”
Yeah, it’s true that people in top tier schools are often mal-adjusted. But the atmosphere is different and I think a huge part of it is that people who get into those programs are generally on average more motivated to succeed. That and they are more willing to devote X number of hours to their work to the exclusion of their outside lives. In other words, hyper-competitive, driven people with no lives.
Sad, but it kicks the atmosphere of top tier school to a whole other level.
Here’s your guild of chemists Kyle. I think you should bring your complaints to your local Union official.
“UC Postdocs Form Union”
http://tinyurl.com/lgwjt9
Perhaps the much heralded UC Postdoc Union can do something about the impending furlough/salary cut engineered by the great people of California. Judging from the press releases, this nice little reach-around will cut 4 to 8% of salary no matter where your funding is from.
I feel especially bad for the schmoes getting the university minimum $34K.
Even if you are on an F32?
Science had a story about this this week. Yes, it looks like everyone but grad students will have their salaries cut, regardless of whether or not your funding is state-derived or not. Sux to be at a UC school right now:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/...../5936/19-a
Interesting. I know when I was a UC postdoc, it was never very clear whether I was staff or not, because of the F32 grant.
This sucks for those affected.
It’s not just CA. Similar situation in North Carolina at the moment.
It appears that all salaries will be affected unless you have an unsponsored fellowship. Besides chiseling half-a-paycheck from its lowliest staff, the most fucked up part may be it may actually cost more money than it is worth due to loss of overhead.
An then there is the legal issue of using research funds to pay for operational expenses. Those bitches in purchasing—they are all high-strung bitches in purchasing, at every university—get all huffy at the notion that you can use an inkjet printer for actual research. Let’s see if those bitches can square away this budget mess with their fucking teleological standards for research expenses. It would all be worth it if I can be there to see their goddamn heads explode.
A blood-curdling gang could be an effective alternative to unionization.
A postdoc gang syndicate could be for example named NMR-C13
Ahh, I see. So you are advocating that the Joint Educated Tertiarty Students (JETS) take on their old adversaries, the Supervisors, Heads, Academic Residents and Kibitzer Society (SHARKS)?
I don’t think that ends well… But it looks damn fine while they are doing it.
That reminds me that I was recently telling a staff scientist about a professor I once knew that would scream at his postdocs regularly if they didn’t have good results, and on the first day they got there, threaten to fire them if they didn’t do enough work or didn’t meet his expectations.
The senior staff scientist (in his 50s), who used to be a prof for a bit, said very nonchalantly, “then you simply punch him in the face”. I told him that then you would be fired since in America it’s very easy to replace even good postdocs and you might end up in jail. He said that Americans are too proper and are always afraid of the law. Without blinking an eye, he said, “Then, what you do, is go to the bad part of town, find a few people and give him some money. A little while later, the jerk comes into work with a broken foot and his car has been totaled by baseball bats. He gets the message. Simple solution.”
I admit, I was impressed. I’m already starting to learn about different scientific cultures and approaches to research by being outside of the country.
http://www.redmeat.com/redmeat.....index.html