Toxic Academia | Part 5: Semester 2 — meet the new student, something’s off.
It’s summer time, which means annual lab symposium time. It’s also the first summer during COVID, so my lab mates and I are all logged into a Zoom call and take turns presenting our research. It’s a large lab, with about 10 PhD students plus some MS students. Our annual lab symposium is a formal lab meeting where we each take 30–45 minutes to present our research, and with so many of us, it’s a long day. Fortunately with COVID I’m able to at least sit in sweatpants with no one knowing.
Our PI introduces us to an incoming PhD student whom will be joining us in the Fall semester. He asked her to join our lab symposium so she can meet everyone, and apparently he asked her to present a short presentation, about 15 minutes. Let’s call her Elizabeth. Elizabeth introduces herself, and presents what she has been working on, a tutorial for the same kind of analyses I’m doing. Great! It will be great to have someone else in the lab doing something similar, there are only two of us in the lab doing this type of work and now there will be a third to bounce ideas off of.
It’s clear that Elizabeth is nervous and trying to make a good first impression. Of course, who wouldn’t? I kind of zone out (it’s been a long day) until I perk up towards the end of her presentation when she started referring to a very common type of plot as something she completely made up. No, I’m not saying she’s calling it the wrong name, she’s naming it and presenting it as something completely novel as if she came up it with all by herself. Say it’s well known as a “scatter plot”, she’s saying “so this is a new plot I came up with, I call it a ‘rainbow plot’”, you get me? Weird. This is a very common plot that you learn how to make in the tutorial that she (and I, and everyone else that does this type of research) copied and pasted the code for. Why is she presenting it as if she came up with it all on her own, giving it a new name? I don’t know. I guess she was just nervous and wanted to impress us. Whatever, she’ll figure it out. Honestly I didn’t think too much of it at the time. Keep this story in your back pocket.
XX Rosie Frank
