Babies and grants

Last week at lab meeting, my advisor told the group that he had just received word that a third major grant he submitted this year has been funded. We now have more than $2500 to spend PER DAY for the next five years. So, he continued telling us, he won't need to write any more grants for about three years. Now, it's time to get out lots of papers.

Gee, thanks. So glad I could be with you during more than three and a half years of babies and grants. Three and a half years when you were often absent, or holed up in your office, refusing to speak to anyone. Three and a half years with scant guidance because you refused to hire a post doc because you didn't think you could get one good enough. Three and a half years of hanging wall clocks, ordering basic supplies, and building equipment. (Did I mention that I started in the lab just 6 months after my advisor got here?) Three and a half years of being cramped in a too-small lab because we grew so quickly, but didn't have the clout to get more space.

To his credit, I guess, my advisor is now trying to get me interested in a bunch of "side" projects, each of which he expects will take only 4-6 weeks, and each of which will get me authorship (2nd or 3rd) on the resulting paper. But, here's the thing. I'm about to enter my fifth year in this lab, and I am already well into my 6th year of grad school over all. At this point in my career, 6 weeks for 2nd authorship on a paper just isn't worth it. I'm exhausted, spent. I don't want to spend even 5 minutes on anything that isn't going to directly advance me towards graduation.

I'm done. All done. It's time to move on.

Really??

As in all labs, our lab has a lot of equipment that is shared, and for a few heavily-used items we keep a sign up sheet and designate specific time blocks for equipment usage. I had an experiment running this morning that I wanted to continue into the afternoon, but there was a peer signed up for the equipment after me. Hoping to gain some extra time, I asked him if he intended to use his time. (It's not uncommon for people to skip out on their time and not inform the rest of the lab, as they should.) "Sorry," he said to me, "I will be." So, I stopped my experiment and cleaned up all my stuff. It's now 45 minutes into his time slot and he is still sitting NEXT TO ME at his desk, reading online gossip columns. Really???

Not again!

So, I just got back from another failed attempt to get work done at the shared facility where I'm trying to make some samples. This morning I checked the facility website before taking off to ensure that the tool I needed was up and running. It was! And, it was in use. Great! So, I packed up, headed in, and when I got to the tool I was immediately faced with a malfunction. I checked with two other users who were nearby, and both were as baffled as I was. So, I called the tool manager. His response: "Yeah, that happened to me this morning when I tried to use the tool. I was hoping it would just go away." You were hoping it would just go away?! "You're best bet," he tells me "is to log out of the tool, file an incident report, and leave it to us to look into later." REALLY? I'm not usually the type to say this sort of thing, but do your job!!! At a facility like this, a tool manager's main responsibilities are to keep his/her tools online and to train new users and help troubleshoot when they run into problems. To me, it is absolutely unacceptable that a tool manager would encounter a problem, not report it so that users (from all over the country, mind you) would be aware of the issue and could plan according, and then continue to in fact ignore the problem. My husband has worked at a few other facilities of this type and assured me when I started that this one was by far the most well-maintained and well-staffed. I'd hate to see the other facilities he's worked at, because my experience has been pretty frustrating and unsatisfying.

When is enough enough?

Back in the Spring I began using a shared facility at a neighboring University to prepare some samples for my research. As the summer hit the number of users at the facility increased dramatically and it became more difficult to get time on the tools and with the staff members. Being fortunate enough to live close to this facility, as many users are not, I made every effort to be flexible regarding my use of tool and staff time. I really pushed myself to be diligent about timeliness (I'm usually late for everything), and I strove to be forgiving when staff arrived late for training appointments with me because I understood how very busy the summer season is and appreciated their time.

Now, each new user at the facility is assigned a "host," who performs most of the new user's training. My host and I had a really good working relationship going, until the summer hit and my host began constantly running late. I waited on him for as long as 30 minutes on several occasions, and was eventually completely stood up by him. I let this stand up slide because, again, I know how busy the summer is and because I've learned that you can get farther with kindness than with confrontation. But then it happened again, and I got ticked. As a grad student I'm used to being walked over a bit, but this seemed ridiculous. My host claimed he had been pulled into an impromptu meeting, but I contend that he could have called. There are pager phones EVERYWHERE in the facility. So, I sent him an email and suggested we take a "break," and that I return when the busy summer season was over. I was pretty sure I had ticked him off in return, because he didn't immediately return my emails when I contacted him a couple weeks ago to get started up again. When he finally got back to me, though, and we had our first appointment back at the facility, he was on time, we chatted amicably while at our task, and I walked away feeling good.

Then today happened. Despite really needing to return to my own University today (2 hours away), I arranged an appointment this morning at the facility because I knew it was a convenient time for my host, and I wanted the task out of the way. When I showed up at the facility this morning there were 4 people there. Four. And guess how late my host was to our appointment? 30 minutes! Really?! What could he possibly have been doing? I honestly don't know what I am going to do at this point. Well, sadly, I do. I'm going to hang in there and deal with it because I am literally days away from finishing. But how do I prevent this type of situation in the future? I worry that if I'm too stern I'll upset the person I'm working with and ruin the working relationship. But is the alternative really to be walked all over?

The laser is down

Four words I dread to hear or utter: the laser is down. This morning I had been happily aligning our laser system and bopping away to tunes on my iPod, when I moved over to the computer to switch the microscope into scan mode and found the display black and the keyboard and mouse dead. I punched keys, unplugged and replugged cords, shut down and restarted the system. Nothing. I called in the IT guys and we agreed...fried motherboard.

Our laser/scope system is not even four years old, but the computer controlling the system is ancient. It's not that we were cheap when we set up the system; apparently it is always the case that microscope companies prefer that their consumers use well-tested (aka old) computers to run the necessary software because there is known and documented compatibility. Even with little else installed on this computer, an old computer is an outdated computer, and just isn't capable of handling such long and heavy usage. And because we have proprietary PCI cards installed and there are apparently known software compatibility issues with some motherboards, I'm not at will to frantically run down to the computer store and buy a cheap Dell and load it up. Instead, I'm in the middle of a phone/email tag game, looking for recommendations for the right system to buy as a replacement. This will probably take the better part of two weeks or more. And so I had to send out an email to the lab this morning, subject: the laser is down until further notice.