S.L. Forsburg wrote:
>Strategies:
Thanks, Susan, for the valuable advice! This is the sort of thing that
really ought to be taught explicitly and systematically in grad school, but
for the most part, isn't, unless you're fortunate enough to get a good and
caring PI.
It seems (at least to me) as if this thread and related ones have gotten a
little heated, with people seemingly misconstruing what the others write.
I wasn't very clear in what I meant by "trial by fire," or I may have
misunderstood the original poster. None of the situations you're
describing here sound particularly "fiery;" rather, I think that even
though I count myself a part of the "anti-hazing" side, I find substantial
agreement with everything you write here, its motivations, and its value.
When I think and write of "trial by fire," I am more thinking of situations
such as the gratuitous drubbing a paper of mine got from a colleague a
couple of months ago (which I posted about in a very low moment--she said
things like "I wouldn't bother publishing this," and "this isn't
interesting," and wrote "So what?" next to a paragraph she didn't
understand. Her whole tone was completely contemptuous and dismissive), or
the situation I described in a previous posting, where a professor told a
student from another institution after her seminar that if that had been
his PhD thesis, he would be "ashamed." I don't think that any of us on the
"anti-hazing" side want to be patted on the head, told "there there all's
well," or have our hands held. We just think that ordinary civility and
courtesy ought to carry the day.
In another related posting, you wrote:
>"And if you do a lousy job on something, shouldn't I tell
>you?"
To me, the answer to that is a yes and no. On one hand, I can't honestly
think of a situation in which "you did a lousy job" is a helpful or
constructive thing to say to anyone. On the other hand, something like "you
should have included a lane of wild-type DNA on that Southern to show that
your probe was working. As it is, without that positive control, the
experiment is uninformative and has to be repeated," would seem to me to be
a very appropriate thing to say.
Karen
