By request, and heck, I needed to call it something…
Shorter version told before.
Location: a very large American university. Many people also think it’s very good, simply because they hear its name a lot; it happens to have a large and well-funded football program. For anybody who finds this thread on a search or who isn’t sick of reading me say it, I’m from Spain.
Arrive to grad school. Join research team. Senior student, Marcos (renamed to protect I’m not sure who), shows me the ropes. He’s only missing his proposal and thesis for his PhD.
About eight months later, Marcos says he misses his fiancée too much and “drops out” to move to her grad school and start a completely different PhD. Color everybody extremely confused.
We send a very fat article to that journal any chemist would love to be published in. The reviewers say “we love it, but it is very fat and we think it actually should be fatter… can you fleshen up some more splitting it into a three-parter?” Boss says no. ¿Qué? He could get three articles in that journal, for the work of one, and says no? We have no idea what has he been drinking but, since we all hope to get published some day, do not wish to try it. The other professor listed in that same article is the Grad Studies Advisor (henceforth GSA), who agrees with the “no”. All together now, “do these two pendejos know that drinking methanol can make you blind?”
Time for my oral. I prep the presentation and report, hand them to Boss for review. Boss makes me chop up a bunch of stuff under protestation. GSA is the president of the trio; he asks about all the stuff I’ve had to chop off. Boss grovels about how he “can’t believe I missed that!”; I’m fuming internally, thinking “you coward, have the balls to admit it was your fault!”. I am requested and required to turn up a reviewed version ASAP. I state it will be on the trio’s desks the same day. I go back to the lab, pull up my Zip disk, change the date on the original I’d kept (I may be slow but I ain’t totally stupid) and hit send. Fifteen minutes later, the third professor comes to ask if what I’d just sent, and which had every single item that had been marked “missing”, is my original with the dates changed. I say yes, he says “that coward!”
One of my coworkers bounces into the lab, saying “hey, Nava’s second article is out!.. Uh? Nava? Isn’t this stuff yours? About… over half of it?” It is indeed; in fact, half of it is my oral and then there’s stuff I did post-oral on the same subject. I go to Boss, say “I’m sorry to interrupt you, but our new article is out and there appears to have been an error.” He laughs and tells me it’s not an error, since I am “just a fucking foreigner who can’t do anything without my permission” and “the best researcher I’ve ever worked with”, plus I’m self-financed thanks to my local government, he plans on keeping me around till the cows come home in a chorus line. When he was doing the same to Marcos, Marcos already had his two: this led to many questions. Therefore, my second article will officially not be published until he has decided he’s willing to let me go. That explains why he didn’t want to split the big fat article… if he had, I would already have had my two (three, in fact).
I go to speak with GSA, still hoping that he’s been conned and not a willing accomplice. In the middle of one of his depressions, his solution is “ah, but what can you do?” What I can do is get thoroughly mad, which thankfully is my usual reaction to realizing someone’s been trying to stick his unlubed dick up my ass, and start the wheels to get even (and change, ideally). I go to Professor Mata Hario, who’s got clout, a very solid spine and good connections and has had very little direct interaction with me (never my supervisor, never any work in common, never my teacher), explain that apparently Boss and GSA have decided to keep me until I mummify, as well as steal from some of the other students, and give him a few places to start verifying the situation. I don’t spell things out because I want him to come up with his own conclussions and tell me both if I’m crazy or they are, and whether he sees any solution for my continued studies in that particular department or it’s “master’s without thesis” time. You see, being “a fucking foreigner”, staying in town for as long as a formal official investigation would take, with no source of legal income, is not appealing.
After Professor Mata Hario confirms that it’s them, not me, I inform Boss that he’s got until April 29 (it is now March 29) to come up with a Plan B that’s got me getting my PhD in what I, not he, consider a reasonable amount of time. I go back to working normally.
April 29, Boss has not come with a Plan B. I go to his office and tell him to sign the form authorizing me to get a Master’s without Thesis. He says he won’t. I explain that he’s one of three people who can sign, the other two are GSA and the Dean. I happen to know that the Dean is in today; I know it because his secretary of these last three years happens to be from Spain like li’l ole me. Not only do I know he’s in, I also know that if I go there I’ll be allowed into the sancta sanctorum with barely enough propriety to avoid damaging the door. He whines “but, but, but… I didn’t think you were serious!” “Let me see if I understand. You’ve been stealing my research, you stole Mario’s research, you’ll steal the research of any and all of us that you can, and you thought I ´wasn’t serious´ when I said that wasn’t acceptable? What did you think it was, some sort of stupid joke?” “I’d thought you had PMS or something!” “Sign. Just. Sign.” He signs. I get a paper saying I’ve got a Master’s, get a job (you automatically have a 1-year work permit after graduating from an US university).
Several months later, I’m on campus one day when I run into my old team. People greet me happily except for Boss, who attracts curious looks from the way he stares at his shoes like he wants to drown inside them. My ex-teammates tell me that GSA is retiring for medical reasons.
After Boss’ Seven Years of Hell are over, internet searches place his unique name in his hometown’s CC.
Wow. Depressing, too, but I’m happy you’re doing well.
Now I’m trying to figure out the school. Since you said it’s a football school, can you give us te conference? As a Midwesterner, I just don’t want it to be the Big Ten.
Big football always makes me think Notre Dame first. I think she spent time in Florida(?) but that might’ve been work. And with grad school: the professor/department is completely diviorced from the school in the sense that good school != good department and vice versa.
I finished and in retrospect probably never should have gone. But my advisor was not one of the bad parts, and would’ve taken the blame for things that aren’t his fault (if only because he forgot whose it was!).
I’d consider CC a career upgrade but that’s why I think leaving isn’t a bad thing.
Re: 1-year permit: is that specific to your circumstances/Spain? Because I know some graduate and have to GTFO in a week.
It was for anybody getting a Master’s, but this was in '97. I’m sure regs have changed now, plus there are many people who have strings attached for other reasons.
When I wrote to American schools asking for information on Chemistry or ChemE (my original field) PhDs, several pointed me towards La Caixa fellowships or Fullbrights.
La Caixa: must go back to work in Spain as soon as you’ve finished the coursework and never, ever, ever again move out of the country or they will ask for the money back, plus interest. It’s probably illegal under EU rules, but most likely their lawyers are better paid than your lawyers. There’s an “old gypsy curse” which reads “may you sue somebody and win”: whomever came up with it was thinking of the expense and pain of something like this.
Fullbrights: must leave country for 2 years right after graduation. This can be solved by the simple means of getting your first postdoc somewhere else, but it’s a PITA in that it interrupts any time count towards immigration, not to mention that if you’ve met someone in the US it’s still a damn big complication.
The Second Stone, simply running the investigation above the table would have required over a year, during which my immigration situation would have been compromised, I wouldn’t have been able to obtain any income… Adding a suit to that, I could still be bouncing around American courts of justice today. Got better things to do, plus the solution applied got the department cleaned (other dirt eventually got sweeped out as well), so all is well that ends without too many bloated corpses.
I mean, yes, I understand, your advisor was a class-A douchebag. But I don’t understand why he’d want or need to steal your research. I run a big academic lab (Biology; 5 students, 4-7 postdocs) and I don’t need to steal anything. On their papers, they are first author, I am last author. Everyone gets credit.
Makes no sense to me. Do things work differently in chemistry?
There are some broken chemists out there. I’ve met many of them.
It sounds like this PI or school had some sort of two publication requirement for graduation. This is unusual. He could keep productive members of the lab in lab by keeping their names off publications. Thus they could never graduate.
It’s not unheard of for journal editors to add authors to papers after publication.
Depending on the school, it’s not actually up to the PI when the student defends or passes. This is, in part, to prevent hinky shit. Students will also sometimes switch labs and still be able to use some of their original work in their dissertation.
I had quite a few problems in grad school and I think part of the problem was that I was afraid of underestimating how high it went. I knew there was some rampant cheating going on so I brought it to the professor in charge. She denied it outright. I complained to the Business College head that a professor had no idea what they were doing and showed a grievous error on an exam handed out that invalidated the entire exam. It wasn’t a typo or a quick fix - it was an error that proved the professor didn’t grasp the material they were supposed to be teaching. He sided with the professor and that was that. I grinded out, got my degree, and got the hell out of there.
A year down the road I ran into the Business College head at a charity event and he admitted they were in a process of attracting better faculty but needed a better reputation as a college of business first. He didn’t like it but was in deep enough to not do anything about it.
Part of you wants to fix the situation and part of you wants to just get the fuck out of the stink of corruption before you stink too.
Also, you aren’t on a level playing field. You are an honest person dealing with dishonest people who have had MUCH more practice with underhanded tactics.
As explained twice, going to the Dean would have had me out of income, unemployable in a foreign country, for upwards of a year. I would easily have been Visa-less before things got solved. Thanks for following procedure, here’s your deportation.
Boss didn’t need to steal our research, at all. In fact, it would have been much more profitable for him to do the right thing, but it would have been more profitable long-term. Marcos would have gotten his PhD, found a post-doc close to his wife with Boss’ help (fiancée/wife’s grad school was Boss’ undergrad) and continued collaborating with our team; I would have gotten my PhD, found a post-doc or two, continued collaborating… But short-term, he got dizzy and thought himself She-Lob when he was more about the size of Boris the Spider, and went for “minions are for squeezing” rather than “colleagues are for collaborating”.
Having a GSA who became a drenched ball of tissue paper when depressed (that is, most of the time) and a new Department Director who was perhaps the most useless piece of meat I’ve ever encountered, as well as venal and childish, didn’t help things. Trying to figure out whether the Director was worse as an administrator, a researcher or a teacher is a comparison between zilch, zero and zip. At one point, Professor Mata Hario started to ask “why not go to the Direc… wait, I know. Never mind that.”
Another thing about stealing research: there are some people who, when seeing an opportunity to cheat, are so blinded by it that they can’t even think of comparing the consequences to those of doing the right thing. I have a cousin like that, she can’t understand things like “I need the invoice for these repairs in my office to be official, because that way yes, I need to pay VAT but I deduct it back plus I get to count the principal of the invoice as an expense; no VAT means no deductible expense”. Her field? Taxation law. I think Boss just got dizzied and, with none of his supervisors steering him, went for the cheat.
Yes, I got this. What I meant was, what about going to the Dean after you dropped out and got your Master? At this point you were independent from that university and didn’t have anything to lose.
By the way, many sympathies with what you went through. I am in academics and saw a few abusive assholes (my PhD adviser was not abusive, he was just stupid btw), but I never saw anyone simply steal someone’s work.
A university where someone can get away with that isn’t worth working in.
Depressing tale. It can’t happen in math because it is not our practice to publish jointly with our students (unless the work is truly joint, which is rare). So they get the credit even if, as sometimes happens, they have simply followed the trail we gave them. And most often it is all their own sweat and tears and they deserve the credit.
Ah. Nothing much to win either, I had Professor Mata Hario on the cleanup (which for me was the important part) and had kissed my PhD goodbye. Could I have gotten my name on that second article? Possibly, but once I was moving from academia into industry, and specially since it was looking like I’d be coming back to Spain*, it just went into the “what-ever” list.
I don’t know if it’s cos I work like a dog only more efficiently, cos I’m a brown-on-brown-on-brown medium-sized woman, or what, but apparently a lot of people think I’ll be a great target. And to a point they’re right: when the abuse is directed exclusively to me, I can take absurd amounts of it before too-politely explaining that this is not acceptable (PMS. Right). But Boss wasn’t attacking only me, he was attacking my coworkers, my trainees, my friends… and that’s a great way to find out that I’m not a problem when I’m making lots of noise, that’s just a Spaniard being loud, business as usual; when I speak too politely, start looking for a kevlar vest.
Dad’s long-expected based on family history diagnosis of cancer came up that month of May; later my employers helped make my decision easier by deciding that it was “better for all involved” if I continued working for them without a permit. Their HR lead hadn’t been aware that the company’s Legal department was pulling that shit as a basic worker-retention policy, if you sad you were leaving they threatened you with La Migra; I understand her reaction once she verified things and found the extent of the rot was rockingly epic. If Tarantino ever filmed a board of directors meeting, it would have been the one that she crashed.
It’s for anyone completing a bachelor’s degree or higher at a U.S. institution in F-1 student status. Details on page 2 of the instructions for the application for employment authorization. It’s still the same for most people, but there is now also a 17-month extension possible for people graduating in STEM fields (because employers were tired of hiring STEM grads, having them not get selected in the H-1B lottery, and then have to get rid of them when their employment authorization was up). I can’t imagine why anyone graduating would have to leave in a week - it’s pretty much automatic employment authorization to work in your field for a year after graduating.
There are also options for J-1 students. Further details here.
**Nava, ** I know that ship sailed long ago, but one option to remain in the U.S. would have been to get a job that on paper, anyway, didn’t require a full Ph.D. based on the education you’d already completed in the U.S. and Spain. The minimum educational requirement for an H-1B visa is a bachelor’s degree or equivalent in a particular field/fields. The equivalent can be made up of U.S. education, foreign education, and/or professional experience. So an employer could have required, for example, a bachelor’s degree in Chemistry plus two years of graduate coursework, or plus X years of post-bachelor’s research experience…something like that.