Today would be different; Mark will be back from his conference, and I am ready to roll. Full of positive energy, I jump onto my bike before eight and ride to campus. I drop off my coat and bag in the corner of the small office, as I have done on previous days, and walk straight to Mark’s office down the corridor. Through the slit of the door I see that his office is dark. I knock and there is no reply.
“He doesn’t come in early, he’s usually last of all,” Hanna says when she sees me staring at the clock.
“But he will come in, right?”
“Sweetheart, just enjoy the time he isn’t here!” says the Italian guy, who I now know is called Erico.
At 9:30 a.m. the heavy wooden door of our lab opens.
“Hi Karin,” Marks says, good-humouredly. “I see you settled in already!”
“Yes,” I say happily, assuming he is being ironic. But I remain a tad uneasy.
“Good, let’s get you started!”
He pops his head into the office that is completely filled with people. “Hi, I’m back.”
No one looks too excited. “We missed you,” Erico jokes, puncturing the tension in the air.
“I bet you did.”
Erico and Mark briefly discuss the latest football results, like two friends meeting up for a drink after work. I have always felt envious that guys have this universal topic for small talk. It sounds dull as ditch-water to me but it is unquestionably a fail-safe. I have watched thickos and geniuses delight in each other just because twenty-two men kicked a ball about a slab of grass some days previously.
“Hanna, you’ve got a student starting tomorrow on the fatty acid project” Mark says after the football topic fizzles out.
“Me?” Hanna asks in disbelief.
“Yes, you,” Marks says, impatiently ticking his key chain on the doorpost. “Have you ordered the primers for the project yet?”
“No, I didn’t know I would get a student to supervise.”
“Get it organised, so we don’t waste time,” Mark sighs deeply and shakes his head in disbelief. “And you should show Karin around the hospital.” Hanna nods.
“Have these guys shown you the lab yet?” he asks, looking in my direction.
“A bit, yes,” I lie.
“All of you, get her started!” he says looking round the office but, alas, no one takes it personally.
Mark walks in the direction of the door, indicating that I should follow. We enter his office and he empties a chair for me. He’s full of positive energy as he had been during my job interview. He talks a lot, and has this disconcerting habit of laughing when there is nothing to actually laugh about. He is a bouncing bunny enthusiastically showing me a plethora of scientific papers while expounding research ideas. Having read myself into the field a bit, I am at least able to partly comprehend what he says. Then he speaks about the other lab members, and does not hold back on criticism – unsparing criticism. I have no reason to doubt what he says. To me he is the only normal person in Lab 262, the only one who is actually talking to me and one of the few who does not faintly disdain my mere existence. Encouragingly, he adds several times that for me there is nothing to worry about, I will be different… different from the others. “You will do better! We will conduct great research together!”
The projects he wants me to start working on are quite different from what was written in the original PhD description, which was also discussed during my interview, and which he received funding for. But, thankfully, the big picture is unchanged; I will still be working on a super bug killing people with cystic fibrosis – just the proteins I will be researching are completely different. I will work on a different biosynthesis pathway than originally planned but I don’t really care. After listening to him for over two hours, and feeling exhausted by all the information, we order the first set of DNA primers together. I can get started in a few days when they arrive.
Before leaving his office I gently enquire if, per chance, I happen to have a desk somewhere? And if I might, just possibly, be granted access to a computer? “A desk you can share. You don’t need to sit in the lab, sit in the office. Like the others.”
“Eh... eh... okay... And a computer?...”
“You don’t need a computer.”
“I don’t need a computer?” I meekly respond, trying not to sound as if I am questioning his sanity.
“You should read the papers from the lab,” is his only elaboration.
Am I dreaming? My mind is racing. How could I have forgotten to ask during my interview where I would be sitting, and what the computer situation would be? But then why would I have asked? During my job interview and in the original project description, it had been clear that the PhD would include a lot of bioinformatics – that is what I had been doing before, as a master’s student, and I want to expand on that. We did talk about that, right? I had a virus making my body dysfunctional to a certain extent but I’m not suffering from Alzheimer’s. I recall my interview! That said, I didn’t write a protocol of the interview. I received the offer of penetration from Quasimodo’s twin brother during my stay but I did not receive a contract with a detailed project description… Mark did most of the talking during the interview and now, reflecting on it, he mostly waved the few questions I asked away with rather non-specific remarks like “yes, no worries… you get all that…” Maybe I was clear enough that day that I wasn’t interested in shrivelled genitals yet failed to express how important bioinformatics is for me? Maybe I wasn’t clear enough in expressing my wish that the project exists in reality?…
I clutch at the doorway, anticipating the worst. I even sense bile rising in my throat and fear my face is losing its colour. My belly starts to cramp but I nod passively at Mark, turn around and walk back to the lab. I am feeling tricked by empty promises.
For hours I sit with my back against my rusty fossil friend, just gazing around the lab. I resolve to be positive. I reflect that had I coded for Stephanie Shirley in the early 1960s I would have gotten by with pencil, paper and telephone. That consoles me not one jot. And I go back to hours of muttered expletives and fantasising about asking Mark “what the hell century are you living in?!” At five on the dot I unlock my bike and cycle to my apartment. I call Daniel to complain.
“Good you are calling. I’ve got fantastic news, but I didn’t want to phone you so early; I thought you wanted to check out this swimming pool after work today.”
“Yes, I did. But I am too tired from sitting around the whole day doing nothing. I can do it tomorrow night.”
“What’s up?”
“Turns out that indeed I do not have a desk or a computer. And the other PhD students… I’m not sure. Mark says they are all hopeless. It is all kind of strange here… Whatever, I shouldn’t be complaining, I’m lucky to be here and have the chance of a PhD at this university… How has your day been? What’s the news?”
“I will come to Edinburgh!”
“Really?”
“Yes. This professor I told you about in the biology department, he finally replied… And I am welcome to come and do an internship.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, I’m not. And I phoned the University of Groningen straight away and they are happy to give me the credit points for it.”
“Wow, you’ve been active,” I say, knowing that it would normally take Daniel quite a few days – or weeks – to pick up the telephone and sort such things.
“You think I would want to be separated from my doctor-to-be for three years?”
I could imagine that... In contrast to me, Daniel lacks the ambition to become a doctor. He follows me wherever I go like a loyal puppy, which is touching but also indicative of the fact that he has nothing much else to do with his time.
“Have you got a starting date yet?”
“I’m free to pick, meaning that I will come soon. I looked at flights and I can be there as early as Sunday afternoon.”
“Cool!” I say so excited that it surprises me
.
After spending an intense year in Shanghai together, part of me was happy to have some distance, especially as our relationship had been getting more serious by the day and I strongly doubt we are a good match. But another part of me is looking forward to having him here – just to have someone familiar around. Oh the passion.
“We should celebrate!”
“Definitely. I’ll buy a bottle of wine for Sunday evening and cook something nice.”
“Love you.”
“Love you too.”
© Springer International Publishing AG 2017
Karin BodewitsYou Must Be Very Intelligent10.1007/978-3-319-59321-0_6
Chapter 6
Karin Bodewits1
(1)Munich, Germany
Karin Bodewits
Email: [email protected]
As the lab stool is back-breaking, I start to play musical chairs, hopping from one temporarily free seat to the next. I sort of read paper after paper, which is to say I flick through a few PhD theses written by my predecessors; mainly perusing the acknowledgments page and looking curiously at the number of publications in the appendices. Some don’t contain any, others only a few. As publications are the key measurement in research performance, this is bewildering, faintly alarming. Oh well, I convince myself, I will indeed be different, as Mark had said.
I feel lonely, have nothing to do really, and start to regret that I weaselled out of the introduction day at the first opportunity. I wish I had been more patient and played along, because then I might know someone. As it is, my breaks are no less lonely than my “working” hours.
To occasionally escape the work I am not doing, I stroll around the department. In contrast to our lab, most labs have windows facing the corridor. This allows me to look inside and observe researchers, mostly at benches with fume hoods. Some labs are well-equipped and very modern, while others are kitted out with olde worlde apparatus like our gothic autoclave. The rigidity of academic hierarchies, which would make Medieval Japan look like a hippie commune, is writ large in the size of the lab and the equipment therein. The status of the person running the lab is as plain as a peasant smock or a gilded robe.
On the ground floor there are at least two gilded robes. I had never heard their names before but they have super-cool status stuff, which they may or may not need but I bet they like having it anyway. They also have lots of serfs working for them in their tidy, airy, spacious labs. I will soon learn that they are professors who were actively courted to boost the university’s reputation. Apparently they make an impact, at least in the scientific community. That will be me one day, I muse, while I dodge the autoclave en route to my non-existent computer.
I am clearly not working for a gilded robe. I’m beginning to wonder if he’s even a peasant smock. Perhaps he’s threadbare underpants. His enthusiasm, youthfulness and size of his research group appealed to me. I didn’t want to sink into insignificance or jostle for the supervisor’s attention in a large group. Now I am not sure if this was smart thinking, but at least Mark is eager to get things going.
Passing the small chemical stores, I remember Mark telling me this is the place to get myself a lab coat. It has an aura and familiarity which is comforting; shelves filled with glassware, pipette tips, tubes and solvents. There is the inevitable small room filled with containers for dry ingredients. In the back left corner I dig through the lab coats wrapped in cellophane and find one my size. Despite the straight cut of those uniforms making all human bodies look equally squared and yet saggy, like a granny’s bathrobe, this uniform will prove my work is real and serious.
At the counter a good-looking young guy sits behind a computer filling in order forms. Another, older grey-haired man has a friendly chat with the lady in front of me. I understand what he says but, as far as my ears are concerned, every syllable coming out of her mouth is gibberish. She has red curly hair pulled tight by a hairband, a black pullover and a very round ass stuffed into jeans that are about two inches too short. The white sport socks atop her black leather shoes slightly disturb me. Chemists. She issues forth some syllables, laughs raucously and waltzes off, whistling. This is a happy shop, a world away from the lab. The older man greets me with such a friendly smile that my loneliness evaporates. He scans the barcode on my lab coat.
“To which grant shall I charge it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you have a stores card?”
“No,” I say with polite, pleading eyes, which make no difference at all.
He gives me another charming smile, though I think this one is tinged with exasperation. My loneliness is reforming as he explains how the system works. I need to get a card with a grant number so they know where to deduct the payment.
“Okay, I will ask someone in the lab and come back in a sec.”
Up in the lab I finally learn something. All of a sudden, my new colleagues are willing to talk to me. It is carefully explained to me that on the ladder of respect our lab is subterranean. And my miserly stipend does not extend to a lab coat, or any money for equipment or other consumables for my research – my tuition fee and my “ample” monthly salary of £1100 is all that it covers. It transpires that only two out of the eight students have any access to grant money. And neither wishes to splash out on my lab coat. I had to literally beg for a card to take to the store. What I don’t know yet, not at this stage: today is just the start of the begging, and in future I will have to beg and beg and beg, just to buy basic stuff for research. I appear to be at the bottom of the pecking order in a sub-respect lab run by threadbare underpants man.
“That took long,” the older man says.
“Apparently my grant doesn’t cover anything like this, so I had to ask a few people how it works.”
“Yeah, not all grants cover consumables.”
“I would have expected that all PhD students are the same.”
“Nope. Totally depends on who is funding you. Even the salaries differ from one student to the next.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“You’ll learn,” he says, nodding with compassion.
“Bring this as well, you need it; then you will not need to ask for a card again so soon.” He places an A4 sized blue lab book on top of the lab coat on the counter.
He gives me the same friendly smile as he did earlier, but this time it barely affects me. I feel helpless and small. I take the stairs back up to the lab. When I see the autoclave, I want to climb in and die. Instead, I make my way downhill from the King’s Buildings to a small newsagent and buy a ten-pack of cigarettes. I walk a bit further down the road to Blackford Pond, which I presume is man-made. I plump onto one of the wooden benches and watch the ducks. I try to console myself with the veritable fact that the only way is up…
On my return I find myself desperately hoping that my colleagues do not smell my consoling Marlboros. Part of me knows this is a long shot because, in my absence, they have not all had their noses chopped off. Still, the futile, self-deluding desire to go undetected is an essential part of the smoker’s social survival kit.
I start browsing another thesis but cannot concentrate at all, not even to find the acknowledgements page to sneer at. The room is ten square metres. It’s too full with eight PhD students and now, for no clear reason, several undergrads are busying about too. I stare out of the window, watching people depositing empty chemical bottles in a container. The antique autoclave is hissing away and the cacophony of voices never lets up. The two most mature PhD students, Bubblegum-Bobline and Diet-Coke-Girl, continuously whine about how they hate this place and haven’t been paid this month. After three years, their stipends ran out and Mark does not believe they have enough results to write up their theses. Oh well, at least I am not the only person feeling vexed and defeated…
In the evening I sit on the window sill, my laptop connected to my speakers. I listen to the song Hey There Delilah by Plain White T’s, over and over again. Once I can no longer bear to hear
that plaintive yearning I call up Queen with I Want to Break Free. Scientific breakthroughs and dreams of fame seem far away, on Planet Ridiculous.
© Springer International Publishing AG 2017
Karin BodewitsYou Must Be Very Intelligent10.1007/978-3-319-59321-0_7
Chapter 7
Karin Bodewits1
(1)Munich, Germany
Karin Bodewits
Email: [email protected]
“Would it be an option to walk a bit faster?” I say to Daniel, who is walking half a step behind me in the direction of the university campus.
Autumn has arrived suddenly, with bitterly cold mornings. It has been exactly fifteen days since Daniel came to Scotland. Today would be his first day at campus. He won’t be greeted by the gothic face of Joseph Black in the morning but instead will enter the modern, swish Darwin Building, to accrue the final credits for his master’s degree.
It is a few miles from my Gorgie Road flat to King’s Buildings, but as Daniel didn’t get round to buying a bike yet – he only had two free weeks in Edinburgh – we opted for walking together.
“Don’t be so hectic, enjoy the beauty of the city, the smells of autumn coming…” he answers dreamily.
Such comments often make me wonder how Daniel came to study natural science. He would be a much better fit in a social science or arts faculty, where talking about feelings and emotions is an important part of the daily business.
“It’s Monday morning and I have actually got work to do, Daniel.”
I started my research project as soon as the stuff I ordered for my research arrived. Thus far it is yielding no results, so, Mark gives me tasks so I get familiar with the lab equipment. From sitting around passively like a chicken expunging an egg during my first week, my PhD quickly transformed into a challenging full-time job. Apart from Bubblegum-Bobline-Girl, the other PhD students started to thaw towards me. At least that was my impression, but maybe their form of communication – or rather the paucity of it – is slowly becoming my new norm.
You Must Be Very Intelligent Page 5
