Toxic Academia | Part 4: Semester 1 — do I need to disclaim I’m married to avoid inappropriate contact?
I’ve graduated with my MS degree! Officially, I’m a PhD student. I feel a sense of accomplishment just in that of itself.
The first semester involved becoming acquainted with my first project. I will have a Co-PI at a second university, whom will be providing my funding. Let’s call her Eileen. I will refer to my home university as “my school” and the second university as “my collaboration school”.
I had an in-person meeting with my Co-PI at my collaboration school, and also the scientist I would be working closely with on this project, who is in my Co-PI’s lab. This scientist I will refer to as Rob. Rob and I discussed the project details and aims, then took me to grab a coffee with his lab mate, another scientist in this lab, whom I will refer to as Mike. Mike has helped prepare some of the data we will be using for the project, and is an expert in the field for what we are researching, so it was logical for us to meet over coffee and get to know each other.
Rob and Mike were very kind and welcoming. While having coffee, they were very candid about how to navigate my relationship with my Co-PI Eileen. Eileen is very knowledgable about one aspect of this research, but is naive in other aspects. More specifically she may ask me to do something that is either not possible or unrealistic, and she may not realize why what she is asking is either too complicated or not possible. I think most PhD students can appreciate this… Their advice was don’t be afraid to say “no” to these things. Eileen also may reach out to me via text, phone call or email outside of typical work hours. Like 6:00 AM or on weekends. While she may not purposefully be adding stress by doing this, it is important to set boundaries early on — she can wait until Monday. This is all really great advice, especially as a people pleaser and a newbie PhD student. Thank you Rob and Mike for being candid and transparent.
After a couple of months of learning how to do this project with Rob, a post-doc from Eileen’s lab I’ve never met before reaches out to me over email and asks me to take on another project. I’ll call him Alan. I speak with my PI and ask if this is a good idea, and he says yes, so I decide to meet with Alan to learn the project details. Alan insists on coming to my school in person to meet with me, so we meet in person, and I’m promised that it will be a quick project that we can get a nice paper out of. Sounds great. Every PhD student with some experience will know this is almost never the reality of a project, but I was a non-experienced newbie ready to trust all of these experienced scientists.
So now, I have two projects:
Project #1 with Rob, call this “Project Alpha”
Project #2 with Alan, call this “Project Beta”
It takes some time management, but I fall into a routine of working these projects, lab meetings for my school, my collaboration school, and one on one meetings with my PI, my Co-PI Eileen, Rob, and Alan. I’m busy, but I’m happy for the opportunities I have with these projects.
I had exchanged phone numbers with Rob and Alan, since sometimes communicating over text or phone call is necessary and convenient. Since I started working with Rob first, my experience communicating over the phone had been respectful, professional, and M-F 9:00 AM — 5:00 PM. I assumed Alan would be the same, so when he asked for my phone number, I didn’t think twice about sharing it with him. Unfortunately after a few weeks of working with Alan, I had numerous texts in the middle of the night asking for updates, and even a very uncomfortable posed selfie, with flexed muscles, that he sent “on accident”. Yeah sure. So early on with Alan, I had a very stern Zoom meeting telling him to only email me and to only text/call me in an emergency. Oh and by the way, I’m married. Didn’t realize I needed to disclaim that in order to avoid inappropriate contact. After setting this boundary, Alan thankfully respected these boundaries moving forward. That will not be the end of my issues with Alan… more to come on that later.
This was the semester COVID happened. So I transitioned to working from home full time, and before I knew it, we had our annual lab symposium again, but it would be virtual this year. Picking up from there next.
XX Rosie Frank
