Tales from the Lab

While all this job searching is going on, I'm still coming into the lab and working full days and so I thought I'd start throwing up some stories from the lab up here simply for your enjoyment.

Our boss has slowly been getting better. He talks to us a bit more every day and is now in a decent mood 2-3 days of the week. Still not back to normal, but better. This morning he walked to the doorway of our lab, didn't say a word and with both hand did the "come with me" finger motion. The last time he did that to me I got told I was losing my job. Needless to say my stomach flipped over. Turns out that it wasn't really that much of a big deal. My official first day of work was July 7th of last year and since I signed a 1 year contract that would make my official last day July 6th. Well, the administration wants to clean out at the end of the fiscal year, meaning that my last day has to be June 30th. I reassured my boss that I had kind of assumed we were going with fiscal year and that a week wasn't going to make or break me. He was very relieved, although I'm not sure why he was so nervous about telling me I had a week less than I may have thought.

Our graduate student has just submitted a first authored paper. Actually, our boss did the physical submission - he's a bit of a control nut like that. It's been a long time coming. When I first joined the lab the paper was supposed to be submitted in September. A publication would be a great boost for the lab. Maybe not the boost needed to get more funding and keep going, but a boost nonetheless. The process of getting this paper together has been painful to watch. I'm hoping that the reviews come in with minimal changes to be done for all of our sakes. We'll see.

My department is seminar-obsessed. We have faculty yearly updates every-other Monday at noon. The in between weeks are for the postdoc yearly updates. Tuesday mornings at 11 we have an invited speaker seminar series. Thursday mornings at 11 we've got student seminars and Friday's at noon we have student research in progress seminars. Everyone is pretty much expected to show up at every seminar but that doesn't always happen. I was "raised" by a PI who really didn't want to sit through a seminar unless you were going to tell her a whole, nice neat story. She found "in progress" seminars to be a waste of time. Additionally, I came from a department that was not at all seminar obsessed. We had a weekly invited speaker that I always went to because the speakers were generally very good and we had a weekly "in progress" seminar only ran from September to May, featured graduate students and postdocs, but we weren't required to participate every year. Basically, in the summer the coordinator would e-mail the PI's and ask for a few names from each lab. Our boss put us on the schedule if we had something useful to say and that was about it. Because of all this I'm very choosy about what seminars I go to. I make great effort to go to the outside speakers' and the PIs' talks out of respect. Everything else is negotiable with my schedule.

I am scheduled to give my seminar on April 20th. I knew going in that it was going to be horrible - I will have 9 months of postdoc under my belt by then and while things are getting there, I certainly won't have enough of one coherent story to make it worthwhile. I had finally convinced myself that it would be fine. No one would expect me to have moved mountains in 9 months and I could give a sampling of the things I'm getting off the ground. Then I found out I wouldn't have that time to follow up on anything I'm doing and in my head my seminar truly became a profound waste of time for all involved. I decided that I wasn't going to give that seminar - now all I had to do was convince the boss who is a bit of a stickler for seminars (and for hiding the fact that there's not a thing wrong in here). I've put it off for a month and I've rehearsed all my logical reasons for why I should cancel and I even asked my husband how to best approach the subject (he's much better at phrasing and dealing with people in general). This morning was the ideal opportunity to bring it up since I was in the boss' office anyway. And so I took a deep breath and launched into my request. The "conversation" went something like this:

C: So, I have a question. Actually not so much a question, but a request. (Big breath) So, I'm supposed to be giving a seminar in a month......

The Boss: "Cancel it."

C: (shocked silence) "That was easy."

The Boss: "Come up with a good excuse and cancel it and just don't reschedule."

It was a nice and unexpected boost to my day. Sometimes people can surprise you.