scientista ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Smarmy, Almost-Ph.D Portrait of A Young Female Scientist, A Coworker She’s twenty-nine now but I’d put money on my guess that from kindergarten to bachelor’s degree she thought that she was--or at least thought she was--the smartest kid on the block. (And I’d put an even bigger chunk of change on this sure thing: She was a smarmy know-it-all because of it). But now she’s five years into what she expected to be a four year Ph.D. and she’s nowhere near the end. I’d say she’s got another two years. Smarmy, Almost-PhD, is inept at lab work. I don’t just mean that she has difficulty doing it, I mean that our P.I. knocked her out of the first author slot on a paper and put the lab tech who did all the successful experiments in her place. Smarmy know-it-alls like her almost never like to be taken down a peg. They never ever, when it happens, check the mirror to find who’s to blame for failure. They’d rather point fingers at everyone else. When our P.I. is not in the room, Smarmy, Almost-PhD, is nothing but rolling eyes and anti-Dr. P.I. critiques. But the minute Dr. P.I.. is in the room? Smarmy, Almost-PhD, becomes a giant puckering/sucking machine. We have less powerful vacuum aspirators in the lab. I don’t even think she knows she’s doing it. It’s just her nature. Smarmy, Almost-PhD, has this way of talking about other people that is always just this side of openly critical. It’s like she was born with an overactive insinuation gene. I mean, I’ve met women like Smarmy, Almost-PhD. Women like her think that no one likes them because everyone else is jealous. Women like Smarmy, Almost-PhD, think their failure to graduate is due to an unforgiving P.I. Women like her think that everyone else is beneath her because she has an Almost-PhD. So she gets scooped by a lowly tech and that little fact crawls under her skin and eats its way into her brain and triggers the bitterness. She’s got two more years of Almost-PhD hell followed by about nine years of post-doc hell--and even then its really unlikely that she’ll end up with her own lab. (And when she doesn’t, she’ll blame the system.) And even if she did manage to get her own lab, I’d lay money on her shutting that lab down within a few years for a lack of grant money. (Which she’d blame on the government.) I don’t care about her because I know she’s not worth caring about. She’s just one of those women who flit about at the edge of science, never contributing much of use to the cause. What I’m saying is that women like her never make Scientista-hood. 10:40 p.m. - 2007-07-12 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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