The devil is in the details

Stoopid grad student tricks

Every Wednesday afternoon we have a graduate student meeting in our lab. The grad students and the boss all get together and talk about the data that each student has generated over the past week as well as the implications of the data and the theory behind the data, etc. The meetings vary from benign to hard core-some days the boss is energetic about teaching us and starts to quiz us lots (which we joke means that he wants to play the "what is the advisor thinking" game) and other times the meetings are much more of a formality. There are certain rituals that happen...whenever he wants immunological background (most of the other students are virology students or medical students) he asks for my advice as "the card-carrying immunologist." Whenever someone starts to plow into an explanation of their data assuming everyone knows what's going on, he stops them and says "No, no, X (the name of the newest person) doesn't have a CLUE what you're talking about, start again, give background, and go slow and explain it to them. This is invariably a good skill to learn, but makes the new kid feel like an idiot for a while. Another ritual involves what happened today. Whenever there are new people, when there are visiting students just coming to check the place out, or sometimes just when he is having a very enthusiastic day, we have to do tricks. Today, the boss was enthusiastic over a new grant and we had a new student and a visiting student, so it was particularly bad. On these occasions, our dear advisor delights in asking us difficult theory questions for an enormous amount of time, largely designed to make us show off our knowledge of the field, history, whatever to show the outsiders just how smart we are and how well we can reason and all that stuff (presumably to show them what a great learning environment our lab is) As a result, these meetings serve only to exhaust the current students and to terrify the new students, who are told repeatedly that they obviously don't have a clue about what anyone is talking about and who are constantly on edge that they too will be called on.

Today: We talked about the projects of 2 of the 4 current graduate students in the room for 45 minutes each. (Usually we spend maybe 15 minutes per project) Frankly, we were lucky that there were some people missing or it could have gone on all night. He was relentless. At one point he asked me a question and then said: "Eh, let's hear her try to answer that nasty question and hang herself." (Important note: I got it right.) At another point, I mentioned a vague possible reason for an observation that a fellow student had made, and his response was:

"Okay, now imagine that I have David Baltimore, Fred Alt, and Tonegawa sitting next to me (All Nobel-caliber immunologists). How would they answer that question? Actually, since I'm not sure everyone in the room knows the historical context-so why don't you tell them why each of those three people are important and then how they would answer the question."
I answered.
"Good. Now what if I added Laurie Glimcher. What would she say?"
I answered.
"Exactly correct. Now what about Benaceraff?"
I answered. I was wrong. But anyway, you can see that this was not graduate-student meeting lite.

Bad news: we will likely have a new student each of the next three or four weeks, so we'll be doing renditions of stoopid grad student tricks for a while now.

I suppose the only good part is that he stopped calling me "the card-carrying immunologist" and started calling me "the senior card-carrying immunologist," which is weird since the other immunology student was not there and since I was really the second most senior student in the room. But hey, upward movement is good, right?

posted by Immunegirl @ 4:59 PM