What utter bullshit.
This fall, I'll be starting my fourth year of graduate school. After a particularly impassioned rant to my advisor, he is 100% on board with my need to publish something, anything at all really, so I can start to gain some science cred. We had a weird discussion Friday. He said I should shoot for a publication in JBC, the Journal of Biological Chemistry (full disclosure: I had to look up the acronym when he said "JBC" because I'm useless remembering shit like that). He described JBC as "reputable, but crappy." After trying 4 possible definitions of "crappy" in a bid to figure out just how fucked I am, it turns out he meant conservative, un-groundbreaking science, and I had a moment.
A moment, when I almost did a double-take to his face, because people, NO ONE outside of maybe 20-something people in the whole world give a rat's fart about what comes out of this lab. Like, hello, you are the principle investigator of this lab, are you not? You dictate the direction of all of our research, am I right? Have you NOTICED how completely arcane the subject matter is that you are studying? Let me put it this way; we are not curing cancer here. But a publication is a publication. I don't care, but to describe JBC as crappy because it publishes conservative science? Whaaaat.
Anyway, that's why I was working on Sunday in a foul mood. I slouched in wearing my nubbly Adidas slide-on sandals (they are truly magical; it's like having a foot massage as you walk), and I noticed this professor as I walked down the hall towards my lab. He is always sitting in his concrete cube looking ancient, and if he's not in there, he's shuffling around the building staring at the floor/walls avoiding any and all eye contact, still looking ancient. One time I spoke to him because his -80 C freezer was beeping in a way that signaled its imminent failure. Mainly I was glad it was his freezer and not him. I see him literally ALL THE TIME, and try as I might to just make eye contact and smile, nary a word passes between us.
So he's sitting there, on his office door is an NYU sticker, and I thought to myself, "Hey, we share an alma mater, maybe I should start a conversation," because I was wearing an old pair of NYU standard-issue shorts, and, you know, we could bond over the purple or something... And then I thought, why bother him? Obviously he's here, sitting in a concrete bunker sans even a window on an uncharacteristically gorgeous, cloudless, warm, dry Sunday in late July, for a reason. As I plated my cells, I mused on why the hell he'd opt for a weekend like this. Maybe he's henpecked. Maybe his plumbing is getting fixed. Maybe this is a form of mental illness.
That's when it struck me. The academic ideal IS a form of mental illness. What joy can someone get, closeting themselves away from the rest of the world WITHOUT EVEN A WINDOW every single day for the rest of their life? What kind of person does it take to do that? Who do you have to be to be willing to obsess over one problem literally for the rest of your life? Because that's what you're SUPPOSED to do if you're a good academic.
Granted, the stereotypical tweed is lovely, but that's quite a price to pay to wear tweed. And no one does, at least not here. It's bad sneakers, even worse khakis, and polo shirts. Unless, of course, you opt for socks and sandals and ill-fitting jeans and the odd Hawaiian top.
I did make it to the gym after doing the plating and prep for Monday. Hopefully soon, I'll be writing a paper. Hopefully not too long after that, it'll be thesis + graduation time, and I'll be done with this idiosyncratic hodgepodge of questionably sane people before I start looking as antique as my fellow NYU alum down the hall...
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