Snowflakes, Waifs, and Calculators

I found the discussion to yesterday's entry so interesting that I decided that instead of leaving my own comment I would just write a whole 'nother entry!

A majority of my commenters seem to believe that there exists a class of people who believe (consciously or not) that bad things that happen to others will not happen to them. (I have a sneaking suspicion that this is a maladaptive trait that would have been heavily selected against in the days when people getting eaten by predators was a more common occurrence. Then again maybe they were the ones who kept the clan from starving because they ignored that Bob, Billy, Mary, Susie, Fred, Mike, Claire, and Bertha were all eaten when they went out foraging, but 'surely this won't happen to me'...but this is a digression). Since I am partial to PhysioProf's terminology, I'm going to term this type of person the 'snowflake'. But two other possibilities were also offered for people who did not heed the warnings of others.

Yolio suggested that perhaps it was not due to a belief of specialness but a true lack of appreciation for how horrible something can truly be until you've experienced it yourself. I can see this. Afterall, perhaps these kids had a bad boss when they worked for Starbucks one summer and thought it would be comparable - not realizing that it is actually very very different. What's your Starbuck's manager going to do? Run you out of the coffee business? Seems unlikely. A bad advisor really does have the potential to ruin your career, and once you realize that important difference, the psychological stress makes the whole thing exponentially worse than that snotty Starbuck's manager. I'll call this person the 'naive waif', unless someone comes up with something better.

Finally, Mad Hatter suggested that these may not be deluded souls at all, but people who make a calculated decision to work for Dr. Jackass because Dr. Jackass is internationally regarded and it will be good for the student's career. General Disarray, incidentally, agrees whole-heartedly with the Mad Hatter on this one - that the gold at the end of the rainbow is just too difficult to resist. Anyway, I'll call this one "the calculator".  While I can intuitively understand the "naive waif" and even to some extent the "snowflake" (I have succumbed to the female cardinal sin of knowing that a guy has treated all this other girlfriends like crap but surely I'm different. It was not a high point in my life).  However, I have admit that the calculator is so foreign to me. Don't get me wrong, I understand that they exist. I'm even pretty sure I've seen it in operation. But I simply cannot conceive of deciding to subjugate myself to an jackass on purpose. But then, I also know myself well enough to know that the more unhappy I am, the less productive I become so I already know that being in a jackass' lab would be the equivalent of flushing my career down the toilet (and if I really wanted to flush my career down the toilet, there are much more fun ways of doing it!).

Regardless of the cause, I think there was one unified message that came from my readers: nothing can be done for these people. They will walk straight into the lion's jaws regardless of what we do. Either they have consciously made the decision or they simply will not be able to comprehend what you are saying until it is way too late. I have to admit that the consensus of the group caught me by surprise, but I suppose this is the idealist in me. I will say that I am beginning to understand why my time spent trying to stop people from running off cliffs may be better invested elsewhere. Thanks to everyone for their comments yesterday!

Oh, and if you haven't seen this, Acmegirl has a truly fantastic post from June on related issues. I have to admit I read it after every conversation I have with a disillusioned snowflake/waif/calculator because it makes me feel like I'm less insane.

Do you understand the words coming out of my mouth?

When I was at the Ecology Meeting a couple of weeks ago, I actually spent great deal of time talking to graduate students and post-docs. One interaction in particular really hit home for me. A graduate student was seriously depressed about their advisor. Not necessarily shocking in and of itself, but the stories that began emanating from this student were eye-popping. I mean stories that would make the hair on your toes curl in horror. You might be wondering right now if this graduate student had interviewed with the advisor before accepting the position - and the answer is yes. In this student's defense, the advisor in question is very charming and there were no glowing eyes, cloven hooves, or even the subtle but disturbing smell of sulphuric smoke to indicate that this might be an advisor to avoid. So, next question - did the student talk to other students in the lab? Yes. And this is where the title of this piece comes to play - they all told the prospective student to not come under any circumstances period. They explained why and they all gave a consistent message (as the depressed student ruefully admitted). Apparently, this has been going on for a while in that lab - current students tell prospective students that the lab is hell, not to come; that they themselves would have chosen differently if they had to do over again. Still the students come. And they all seem shocked to find out that every word was true.

I honestly don't understand this as the words coming out of the current students mouths seemed to be brutally clear. But this direct and brutal communication about a potential advisor is not always the case.

Fast-forward to another conversation witnessed at the meeting - a young scientist receives a post-doc opportunity with a well-known person who is also a gigantic ass. While the individual's science is known broadly, that he is also a gigantic asshat is less broadly advertised. Young post-doc mentions the prospective post-doc position to someone in passing - obviously oblivious to this person's personal reputation - and receives this advice: "I think you would really find it helpful to talk to FormerPostdocX." This advice is reiterated several times during the conversation. There is no mention of the myriad of problems that absolutely everyone who has ever worked with this individual has experienced, but it is clear to those in the know that the individual is pointing the young post-doc to a person who will spill their guts. This indirect passage of information is frankly more common than one might think because science is such a small world. Besides let's face it, I might never see a certain prospective student/post-doc ever again, but not only will I see Dr. Jackass at least once a year, he may be reviewing my manuscripts/grants or sitting on committees with me for the next 30 years, so life is more pleasant if there is at least not open warfare.

Even if you are open-minded and truly listening to what people are saying, this subtle form of "feedback" is the most difficult to detect and process. I have one simple piece of advice that can help: ask the same question over and over and over again of as many people as can reasonably be expected to answer (I learned this one while interviewing for faculty positions). You can learn some interesting things by what people consistently say, what they consistently don't say, or by the mixed messages that you receive (do equals or superiors speak highly of the individual yet underlings burn him in effigy every morning before starting work?). And here's my best piece of advice: if all the answers come back loud and negatively clear then, frankly, it is likely that something is wrong with that advisor and not that there's a wonderful advisor waiting to be discovered who just needs the right student to come along. It doesn't work with boyfriends (trust me, I've tried) and it doesn't work with advisors either!

Advisors (Pt II): How important is the name?

As an older graduate student/young postdoc, I often noted that the people who received lots of job interviews tended to have stellar academic lineages (i.e., either their Ph.D. supervisor or post-doc advisor, or both, were scientific rockstars). The cynic in me assumed that this reflected more about the psychology of academia than anything else. However, I am beginning to wonder if there really is something about the "pedigree" that may be important.

Over the past couple of years I have run into the following scenario again and again: bright, capable student wants to publish papers in Ecology, American Naturalist, Ecology Letters, etc, but has no concept of how to write a paper that could possibly get accepted. The reasons for this vary. Some are working on projects that their advisor told them to do, but if it ever was cutting edge it was 20 years ago. Some are doing cutting edge science, but haven't learned how to write for big journals. The latter is a common scenario I run into; somewhere along the line the basic lesson has not been learned that writing for The Journal of Your Favorite Specialized Taxonomic Group probably results in a very narrowly written paper that is not acceptable for the broader, higher impact, ecology journals. Invariably these students seem to have one thing in common: they would never be described as having a great pedigree.

What I am wondering is if there is something important about who you train with. Having a big name advisor is obviously no guarantee of becoming a successful scientist. Having less than lustrous pedigree is not some unalterable death knell. I still believe a good pedigree says nothing about the inherent quality or potential of a scientist, but I am beginning to suspect that it does indicate something about the "scientific level" that someone has been trained to operate at.

Advisors (Pt I): One size does not fit all

Being a new Ph.D. advisor, I spend a fair amount of time thinking about what makes a good adviser. I was very fortunate to have a great advisor as a student (after I switched out of the lab of the crappy one I started with). My advisor (Prof. Mentor) always took time to help me when I was intellectually stuck. His enthusiasm about science was infectious and no matter how demoralized I was when I stepped into his office, I came out charged up to wrestle my project into submission. I received wonderful training on how to recognize where the cutting edge of my field was and how to formulate questions to test ideas on that front. I learned a lot of my philosophy on what type of scientist I want to be from discussions with him about different approaches to science that people take. I learned that the cutting edge was not necessarily synonymous with the most popular research areas. Most importantly, Prof Mentor gave me the freedom to develop my own questions and did not micro-manage (micro-managing always brings me to a halt with a mule-like stubbornness that I am unable to control). There is not a day that goes by that I do not find myself in some situation asking myself what Prof Mentor would do. But even when I was a student, I understood that while he was the perfect advisor for me, other students in the lab thought he was an awful advisor. They felt that he ignored them, that he gave them no direction. They floundered, never latched onto a project, or became convinced that their project was fatally flawed. Several of them dropped out of the Ph.D program. As I talked to more and more of my labmates about why they were unhappy, it became clear that my perfect Prof Mentor really was a bad mentor - for them. What was a perfect amount of intellectual freedom for me was a lack of intellectual guidance for them. What was a blessed lack of micro-managing for me was a lack of management at all for them. It is always easy to dismiss those who fail in situations where others succeed as "not having the right stuff", but many of the people who dropped out were smarter than me.

In some ways it's really too bad that there isn't an on-line "dating" service like "Matchmakers" for student advisor relationships. How great would it be for both student and adviser to know in advance that they were simply incompatible!