It’s not, and it really doesn’t.
I feel like you’re as entitled to your opinion as I am to mine. 
So far, he’s 1 for 1.
Except mine’s not an opinion. It’s a statement about how people who speak english use the word ‘feel’. If you personally don’t want to use feel to mean think or believe, that’s your bag. But if you want to argue that other people are incorrect to do so, you are factually wrong.
Academia is filled with assholes, unfortunately, as it’s a sheep-eat-sheep world. People will go after one another for the most petty and trivial things.
Thick skin is seriously required.
If she’s confident in her work and carries on, good on her. If she just throws all her toys out of the pram and decides to bin her life’s work and interests just to show up people who probably won’t even notice, oh well.
I feel that you may have missed the whoosh.
You know what’s my touchy point? Pedants. They don’t create anything useful or inspiring. They make the SDMB the laughing stock that it is and perpetuate the unfortunate myth that intelligence and social ineptness go hand-in-hand.
I really wish every single one of them would shrivel up and blow away like the fecal specks they are.
If they run the gamut regularly, they’re probably not fat.
So, to show up the rude PhD who said that fat people don’t have what it takes to become scientists, she demonstrates that he’s correct? That’ll show him! Take that.
I’m not in her shoes, and I’m sure her situation is a hell of a lot more difficult than this post presumes, but I wish she’d have taken that as a challenge, a call to war rather than another reason she shouldn’t pursue her dreams. Take moments like that as an opportunity to tell people to go fuck themselves by being successful, not by proving that they’re right by bowing out of what you want to do.
So she’s an “advocate” now? Advocate for what, butthurt fatties?
So as the only examples of the pervasive attitude she can no longer work around she gives the following:
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A job she didn’t get because she perceived the interviewer had a problem with her weight. But she offers not evidence so it may have been in her head.
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A peer questioned her about having a milkshake. Which could have been a well intentioned but not very tactful way of being concerned for her health and welfare. But the author infers motivation and further thoughts in her colleagues head without evidence.
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A tweet from Geoffrey Miller from over a year ago. The author has no connection with Miller and never will. Different school. Different scientific background. A quick look shows that the tweet was quickly deleted and Miller apologized at least twice for it.
Her tendency to put forth theories without any evidence makes me think she is a lousy scientist. Or maybe she is using this to try to springboard herself into another career that doesn’t involve lab grunt work. In my early adulthood I worked in a chemical research lab as a tech. You couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a PhD. Someone with a B.A. just out of college was little more than a lab tech. Less in most cases since the techs had been doing it for years and knew what they were doing. She may be looking at many more years of school and saying “Fuck that.” And really, what recent graduate just a couple weeks out of school can make an educated judgement about their entire field?
But the real question is, how fat is she?
She graduated Wesleyan on May 25th 2014. This article was posted on June 17th 2014. I think she fought the good fight for long enough don’t you? Time for someone else to take up the banner.
Meh. She’s 22 years old, emerging from what is likely a tight knit and supportive community with a freshly minted degree she probably doesn’t fully realize is probably just barely a golden ticket to an entry level grind. Life is a bitch, and it can be a pretty tough realization. You fight for it-- your dreams, your ideals, the narrative you had in your head about “if you can dream it, you can do it.” And it strikes to the core of your being that so much of life is outright shitty and unfair.
Eventually you readjust your expectations, find workarounds, choose your battles and roll with the punches. But the post college years can be a tough transition.
Sounds like someone finding an excuse for not continuing to pursue an endeavor that she either is not good at or in which she is not interested.
Short version:
“Some people I don’t know or barely know were mean to me, so I quit my entire career before it begins.”
This is probably a dumb question, but is a career as a scientist really that exciting or lucrative that it’s worth putting up with people that are overly competitive annoying or rude? I’ve only known one scientist in my life and he said it was low paying and dull, but didn’t mention anything else.
A question I had is what exactly she intended to do with her degree before she decided that fat prejudice was driving her out of the field. Most of the people I know who make a living in the sciences have a Ph.D. She doesn’t appear to have even tried to get into a grad school, so like, what was the plan there?
All of this is true. And I don’t have a problem with Rachel finding a sympathetic message board where she can anonymously create a thread and kvetch to her heart’s content. Lord knows that is what I use the internet for. It doesn’t matter how pathetic or crazy your problems are, you will usually find someone who says “Do you, boo.”
But I guess I don’t see this piece as deserving of the gravitas of a reputable journal. It’s not very well-written. It contains specious conclusions. It’s not exposing problems that we don’t already know exists (i.e, how hard it is to be obese). The author mentions how great she is, without providing anything to back it up. It lacks self-awareness. It’s cringe-worthy.
I worry that she’s communicating to other overweight girls, “You aren’t wanted in science! So let go of your dreams like I have and let’s go running over to the fat-embracing women’s studies program! It’s easier this way! Plus, look at me! I’m famous now just for being a victim! Who cares about being inspirational!?”
I have a 17-year-old niece who is into science. She’s also a big girl. I want her to be whatever she wants to be, for her own reasons alone. In a million different ways she’s told she’s not good enough and that the world is against her. She doesn’t need yet another voice, served up by a fancy-pants journal, doing the same thing. I didn’t have to worry about this happening to me when I was her age. But nowadays, everyone’s opinions and thoughts can be heard, no matter how off the chain they are.
I’m actually relieved the internet wasn’t like it is now when I was in college. Maybe if it had been, I would have felt compelled to write pieces like this one to justify my brash decisions. Maybe I would have made brash decisions just to get published. I’m concerned the internet is having this effect on some people.
I chose science (environmental science) not because it is exciting or lucrative but because 1) I like it and 2)I’m good at it. Maybe I’m just a simple person, but as long as these requirements are met, I can put up with a lot of stuff. Including a nasty attitude on occasion (I can be nasty myself, so maybe that helps).
“Science” is pretty dang broad anyway. The analytical chemist that never leaves the lab is a scientist. So is the guy who studies snow monkeys in the Japanese mountains. You can work in isolation or as a team. You can spend your life “publishing or perishing”, or you can push papers as a government bureaucrat. Some scientists are jerks. Some are saints. The vast majority are normal people who have their good moods and their bad moods just like everyone else. There are some fields that have more than their fair share of jerks (ecologists definitely have some strong personalities!). But that’s the nature of every profession. Stock brokers and lawyers aren’t known for being particularly warm and fuzzy either. That doesn’t mean you can make accurate generalizations about how “non-scientists” will treat you.
A “scientist” is too broad a description to have any meaning whatsoever.
It could refer to a lab tech who runs routine assays over and over and over again.
It could refer to someone running a cancer research lab doing cutting edge work.
It could refer to a professor teaching and doing research on gamma rays.
It could refer to a mid-level manager who oversees a group in a federal lab facility
It could refer to a person on a ship in the mid-atlantic taking fisheries samples.
And on and on.
PS: In my examples, all of them are fat. Really, totally fat.