Can you get the cadidates e-mail? An anonymous word to the wise might look good on your karma balance cheet.
I didn’t get a look at the person Bastard was showing around. If I knew who she was, I’d definately send an email telling her want happend to the last candidate and mention the two sexual harassment complaints against The Spineless Bastard.
I’m getting to worked up over this. We’re dead. Its over. This department will fold, and as long as the fucking football team is funded and this campus looks good, no one will give a flying fuck.
Its really tempting to pack up my stuff. Email my boss, “Call me when you’ve made a god-damned decision” and go home. :mad:
, Oh, that can’t be entirely true - Otherwise someone would’ve muzzled Ward Churchill a long time ago.
But yeah, I hear you. Morale is in the crapper, and the Uni Admin ain’t doing anything to help. Bummer, du. Don’t do anything too drastic in the bridge-burning department - Academia has a loooooong memory. Also, considering how near to term you are, hormones may be playing a substantial part in your low morale.
Good point. The whole Churchill debacle had a lot of things the media likes: 9/11 and Nazi reference, race, free speech issues.
We just had our funding taken away. It would be hard to explain that the U. is getting over its head financially because of the Fitz contruction.
The only other thing we have going on that’s “news worthy” is some blatant sexism. The Spineless Bastard has had two sexual harassment complaints filed against him. A (woman) PI left the U. rather than put up with his shit any longer. He is actively trying to keep two (women) post-docs from this department from getting jobs with other labs.
Another good point. sigh I’m out of venom. I’ll hope that the Bastard has a streak of bad luck similar to Herr Starr’s.
Well, now what? Do you get another paycheck, or is this it - de facto layoff?
Whatever, may everyone get the karma they deserve.
I have no idea - its driving me nuts!
I want to walk away from all of this. Relax, regroup, and pull my head out of my ass. Sadly, I’m listed on all of our hazardous waste and bio safety protocols. If my boss is leaving research, there is a set procedure to shut down the lab. I’d get called up to sweep the floors and turn out the lights - so to speak. Dr. Boss doesn’t bother to answer my emails, pages or phone messages I doubt he’d step up to close things down.
Also, I have 700+ hours of sick and vacation time built up. The U is generous with giving time off, but researchers aren’t willing to let you go. *You *can’t ** leave for a week! Who’s going to check on the mice/order supplies/dissect? For the past couple of months, I’ve been using up the sick time - a sudden allergy to assholes.
I’m not doing a damned thing until I know I’m getting paid!
Mouse Maven, could you clear up a few points for us civilians?
My only experience with college was attending one and getting a degree and leaving. My vague understanding of the various labs that colleges and universities run was that they exist to help students learn the various specialized “things” that don’t translate well from the written page.
Your posts seem to show that there is a quasi business aspect to the labs that goes way - way beyond anything required for higher education. Seems more like a self perpetuating business model.
Who pays for all this? Is it tax money? Private funding? I don’t understand who foots the bill and who should be holding Dr. Boss’s feet to the fire. As a manager it’s obvious he sucks. Who is his boss?
Can you clarify some of this for those of us not in the trade?
Thanks!
By the way, unless your employee manual specifically states **in writing **that you will be paid for your unused vacation on termination, I’d recommend going on vacation right now! You need to remember that you are Job #1.
Since I have worked at this University my entire career, I can only explain how this U’s research branch does things. Please take whatever I have to say with a grain of salt, this is strictly as I see it.
A research lab serves two main purposes. One is to give training to students - undergraduates, graduates, and fellows (typically, these are students with a doctorate or MD that are going into a specialty). The other purpose is to bring in funding. Grant money from the NIH and other health related agencies and charitable foundations are the most common source of funds. Also, research can lead to actual products, ideally medications. If a researcher discovers something as could be marketed to the outside world, the U. will offer help with copyrights, patents, etc. This assistance is given with the understanding that the U. will receive a percentage of any profit made off of the product. (It is not uncommon for a researcher to find something promising, resign from the U. and start their own business or join an established biotech company.)
The lab I work for is not considered a “money maker.” We study the immune response to organ transplants. Our goal is (was?) to identify what parts of the immune system are responsible for organ rejection, and work out a way to prevent or stop this process. Hopefully, this would end - or at least reduce - the need of an organ recipient to take immune suppressants. To the world at large, organ transplants are old news, so there are very few grant opportunities in our field right now. Cancer, heart disease and stem cell research are some subjects that get more attention, and therefore more money.
The University offers very little assistance to the research labs, unless the researcher brings in a lot of prestige and money. When another institution was wooing our now-departed Department Head, this U. gave a large sum of money to the department in order to keep the DH. (At an immunology conference, the DH was introduced as “The man who needs no introduction.” He’s very well known in this field.) A year after the U’s gift, DH announced that he was taking a position in Canada. Last week, we were told that the U. was taking back what was left of the funding given to this department. This loss, coupled with the defection of the DH – he was our “headline” researcher, his name alone could bring in funding - has bankrupted us. None of this department’s junior researchers have the experience or reputation to quickly bring in more grants. (Getting grants is a strange game all by itself. It’s a combination of good ideas, knowing “the right” people and luck.)
I work for a Pediatric Cardiologist; Dr. Boss’ supervisors are at the local Children’s Hospital. This hospital’s cardiology department has been understaffed from months, so Dr. Boss has been picking up the slack. From what I’ve heard, Dr. Boss’ supervisors want to keep him happy and support his research. They’ve offered funding, but have not given Dr. Boss the time needed for him to leave the hospital and come to the lab. I can do a lot of things, but I need to know what direction Boss wants to go in. Without that input, I’m useless.
Two years ago, Dr. Boss had a stress-induced heart attack. I will not be surprised if he quits research and goes into private practice, all of this insanity may be what pushes him to that decision.
I hope this clears things up a little. Sorry it’s so long.
Whoever they can convince to pay for it. I was only attached to one research team (a small one) for a few years, but I added up the time, once, and we were spending about a third of our time applying for various grants. We applied to government funding agencies, organizations promoting industries or interest groups, and non-profit funding agencies. When the grants couldn’t keep up with the cost of the research, the project closed down.
Mouse_Maven, does about a third of the time sound about right to you?
Yep. Also, the more senior the researcher, the more time s/he will spend on grants and networking to get funding. A PI can get to a point were all they do is network, politic, fill out grant applications and write papers. They just come up with ideas, delegate them to the lab manager and check on the project’s progress occasionally.
Seems ike a horrible mis-use of a supposedly-brilliant researcher’s time and mental energy. One would think they’d be better employed coming up with brilliant ideas, and leave the money-grubbing to specialists…
Yeah, I know, it doesn’t work like that. I sit in an office right next to the Medical Education Group in my Pharma, and I hear the conversations about grant requests. Mostly, at our level, the research grants* are based upon merit - if it’s a good sounding idea, and presented in a credible fashion such that we think there’s going to be good science on a subject we care about, we’ll fund it - no schmoozing required. But the kinds of grants we give out will not, generally, fund an entire project - only fill in some of the financial gaps. The MEGO people are the ones the PIs apply to, after they’ve got their main funding, and once they’ve identified the shortfalls in their funding structure.
- There other grants for symposia and the like, for purposes of spreading general scientific knowledge, and for spreading specific product-related knowledge, too. We generally don’t set those up, but we will fund PIs and others who want to go to such events to present their papers on what they discovered whilst researching our products, and so on.
The main reason DH left us is because the Canadian University offered to hire someone to do the money-grubbing, freeing him to actually do research.
Nice work, if you can find it… Oh, wait. I suppose he did. Can’t say as I blame him. And it’s probably to the Uni’s benefit, too - more science productivity means more grants, thus more income.
I can. The fucking DH was very picky about what got published. He was always listed as first author, so he looked great. His grad students, post-docs and the junior researchers he was mentoring got fucked by a lack of journal publications. He sent us an article written about him by the Canadian U. DH was talking about how great he is and the plans he has. Never mentioned us, or the work we did as a team that got him that great fucking job. :mad:
On a positive note:
I am one step closer to the mouse daleks!
Exterminate! Exterminate! 
Much to discuss here.
All Hail Mouse_Maven for using mice! The minuscule scale will hide defects!
RE: “A wrongly shaped” WTH writes like that? The British invented a language they cannot speak.
RE: “make you Dalek look wrong.” Oh yeah? Who’s gonna live long enough to tell him?
Perhaps we should deploy a larger scale prototype here and crew it with my terrier. She is half wire haired dachshund and already looks wrong. And I have that little list that grows each day.
Ah. That’s different. Sadly common, but different.
I deal with publications a lot, every study report I publish has typically a dozen or more referenced publications cited, and I keep seeing the same authors over and over again, per subject. It’s interesting to read the list of co-authors. It’s uncommon to see two heavy-hitters lited in the same article. Three is downright rare. It’s also common to see a PI who never has a repeat co-author. Some of them switch out a lot. I wonder why…
Edit:
Oh, and: I welcome our new M.Musculus overlords.
This made me laugh out loud. Thank you!
Your dog could make a good gold Dalek. Leading all of the little mice into battle against our enemies! ** Yes! ** My cats are acting suspicious. We may have to silence them. ::furtive glance at cat. Cat arches his back and runs like hell.::
The U is in the news again. Apparently, the regents are looking at a tuition increase that will apply to all campuses.
I’m so fucking burnt out and cynical. Its sad that students have to bare the brunt of the lack of funding. If you want a decent-paying job, the common perception is that at least a BS is needed. With government funds for higher education being cut, colleges have to make up the gap.
It strikes me that you’ve left out the fact that the purpose of research is to discover new knowledge.
If it also has commercial applications, awesome. The fact that it helps pay faculty salaries and equip laboratories with equipment is also terrific. But the point of research is to advance himan knowledge in the field.
I also take issue with the allegation that academic research “used to be” cutting edge. Some of it still is.
I am sorry you are getting the shaft.
Ah, but too often it’s not. About half of the guest seminars we got when I was in grad school were “for beauty’s sake” - I’ll take that in the Art School, but in Chemistry I’d like to have seminar speakers who can actually answer the question I asked them every single time:
“what have we learned from your research?”
Real example:
one of the basic formulas of thermodynamics is DG = DH - (TDS) where the Ds should actually be deltas but I’m lazy. If you look at the compiled tables of G, H and S for well-studied reactions and apply the formula, you’ll find differences between “the best value of DG” and "the best value of DH - (TDS)" as high as 20%.
We had a guy who had been able to obtain values of DH with 16 decimals. They still had a similar error margin as the ones already in the literature, but hey, his had 16 decimals! Previous work had 8!
Using double precission variables doesn’t mean your results are better than other people’s… :smack:
A friend of mine (who just got his Professorship, woohoo!) is in the field of crop prediction. He’s developed “ruler, tailor’s tape, fingers, pen and paper” methods to guesstimate crops - this is essential for the agricultural insurance industry; the guys currently doing those guesses by reading the guts of moles that have been run over by the farmer’s tractor would like to study his guts, because they fear he’ll take them out of their jobs. He’s been told that his pursuits are “too practical”…
Nava, I don’t doubt a word you’ve said. But ‘too practial?’ Wubba?