The boss just walked by and said “hello”. A nice, normal “hello.” I am relieved. In times passed, he has followed up tearing me a new one with saying he’s concerned because I seem unhappy. At least he seems to be in a chipper mood. See, the bossman lhas a very compartmentalized style of working. It seems that if something is bothering the guy, whether or not he knows exactly what or who or why it is, he will target the first person on his radar and dump all over them, and then consider it over and done with, check it off his list, and gets on with things. I’m also guessing that he defers to some sort of running talley of who ends up on this little shitlist and picks a person to scapegoat based on statistical likelihood. It’s not as insanely farfetched as it sounds; several profs have been rumored to habitually scapegoat unlucky grad students.
This is also not a normal job, with normal people, and normal bosses. It’s kind of taboo to complain about the arduous workload. After all, if PhD’s were easy to get, everyone would have them. Every year there will be new grad students; we are worker bees until we graduate. All night experiments are not a-typical, nor would many grad students consider such work as unreasonably demanding. Staying on the cutting edge is demanding. But some bosses are more cut-throat than others, some are more accepting of human imperfections than others. It depends on the person, and probably has a little to with what they experienced when they themselves were grad students.
There are terms used in academia, “academic father” and “academic grandfather”, to describe the family tree of research ‘bloodlines’. There are 4-6 divisions of chemistry, depending on how you choose to group them, and several subdivisions within each group. It’s all very branchy and specialized. Typically, the type of research one does in graduate school influences the type of research they will do for the rest of their lives. Hence, the director of the lab in which you do your PhD is known as the academic father, and the person they did their doctorate with is the academic grandfather. My boss did his doctorate under a guy who is world famous for pioneering his particular field of analytical chemistry and is rumored by his colleagues to be in contention for a Nobel Prize. I’m sure that the level of work my boss did as a grad student and the prestigious reputation of his former boss account for some of the things he expects from the workers in his lab. What might be considered harsh conditions by normal standards are probably typical according to my boss.
Sometimes – nay – oftentimes, I go to work thinking, “I am insane.” Insane, not because work drives me crazy, but because I feel like I belong in this nutty field, even when I’m getting beat up.
siiiiiggghhhh, grad school is all about the smackdown.
