“Yep!” Greg says. “We know you’re not into it, neither are we. But let’s just go for the atmosphere…”
Felix adds, “For the sheer joy of feeling that you are part of something and you are breathing!”
“Sounds great!”
© Springer International Publishing AG 2017
Karin BodewitsYou Must Be Very Intelligent10.1007/978-3-319-59321-0_38
Chapter 38
Karin Bodewits1
(1)Munich, Germany
Karin Bodewits
Email: [email protected]
“Mark is in my office, eager to start,” Prof. Gilton says and I think I detect a note of sarcasm in his tone.
Though Prof. Gilton has, so far, always been ever so correct during our chats between the chemical waste containers, I find it impossible to imagine that he does not hate Mark. I have no evidence that he does but I cannot believe a decent person wouldn’t. But maybe that is my problem, after all Mark was his PhD student, and Prof. Gilton seems to be his mentor…
“That’s great news,” I mutter and stand up from my desk to follow Prof. Gilton to his office, holding onto an A4 piece of paper with my notes.
I try to hide how distressed I feel. “It will be fine,” Prof Gilton states, just before he opens the door of his office.
I am not sure if he means that he will not grill me in the way he did during my first year exam or if he is hinting that he won’t let Mark cook me alive. The door opens and Mark has a smile plastered on his face. To me it is laced with horror-movie malice but maybe he wants to put on a good show for Prof. Gilton – I hope he does. I shoot him the most sympathetic face I can manage and sit on a chair on the other side of the table. I feel my heart pounding fast. I am overwhelmed by a desire to mentally shield myself from any humiliation which might follow. In the two and a half years I have been working for Mark I have had, at most, a handful of normal conversations with him. The rest has just been him bulldozing me with one of his monologues, shouting at me as the mood takes him or admonishing me with contempt.
Prof. Gilton sits on a chair at the side of the table, strategically placing himself between me and Mark. He quickly explains the aims and formalities of the second year viva and emphasises a few times that the final goal is to define a clear end-line to the PhD and to discuss the table of contents of the thesis.
“So, where are you standing now and what can you still finish?” Prof. Gilton asks calmly, looking at me.
I take a deep breath and look at my notes in order not to say anything unplanned. “So, I have many projects going on. I think three might yield good enough results to write a thesis about – assuming I am not given any more projects.”
I explain which projects I have in mind and that I believe, with the available equipment and lack of research funds, the only project that realistically might still lead to a paper is the work I took over from Erico when he left. Mark is sitting with his arms crossed, head shaking, clearly disagreeing with every word I say. A few times he tries to interrupt, but Prof. Gilton always gestures to him to stop, saying, “Let her speak first.” Prof. Gilton is writing, crafting a table of contents for my thesis. He asks a few clarifying questions about each project.
“What about the LptA…, and the LpxC project?! I even bought you the plasmid!” Mark asks aggressively.
It was true that Mark finally bought me the LpxC plasmid, but unfortunately the protein doesn’t want to express in E. coli. I am replaying a conversation with Lucy in my mind: “Take a stand, alright? Don’t work for free and stay strong! Promise?” “Promise.” I take a deep breath and say: “The plasmid doesn’t work. And it is all too much. I want to be out of the lab by the end of June, so I still have two months to write up.”
“What?” Marks asks, as if this is the stupidest thing he has ever had the misfortune to hear.
“Shsst,” Gilton hisses, giving Mark a warning sign with his finger.
He starts counting on his hands how many months this boils down to, looks back at the notes he made, and concludes: “With five months of lab work to go, the projects you have in mind sound plausible to me.”
“She has more than five months to go!” Mark splutters.
I open my mouth to speak, but Prof. Gilton is speaking instead: “Her stipend runs out at the end of August?”
“Yes, but that doesn’t mean…”
“Shsst,” Gilton interrupts. “So five months lab work plus two months writing it is.” Thank you good man, thank you, thank you…
“Are you joking?” Mark asks, looking at Prof. Gilton.
He has not properly started shouting yet but his eyes are bulging – a sure sign the detonator is set.
“No, I am not.”
“This is ridiculous!” Mark is properly raising his voice now.
Prof. Gilton slaps hard on the table. “Enough! This is how we are going to do it! Period!!”
Mark opens his mouth to utter another protest, but as he looks at Prof. Gilton’s face he decides to take his losses and nods resentfully.
Prof. Gilton prepares the paper work, writing up exactly what we have just agreed upon. Mark and I wait in charged silence. All three of us sign a copy.
Prof. Gilton speaks with the same calm voice he had at the beginning, “Thereby the content of your thesis is standing. You know now what you still need to do. However, as you know by now, research is not predictable. In case you run into issues, you can come to me and we can discuss it again.”
He stands up and both Mark and I do the same. Before I walk out of his office, Prof. Gilton lets his hand rest shortly on my shoulder.
“Thanks,” I mumble.
“You’re welcome.”
I instinctively walk to Felix’s desk to tell him about the meeting, but then remember he flew back to Denmark for a funeral. I opt for Greg’s office instead and cross campus to the School of Mathematics. I enter the large, silent ground floor office with desks and numerous computers. There are a few people working, completely focused on mathematical models predicting phenomena I don’t understand. “Hi, petal!” Greg says, lifting his head from the rugby match he’s watching on screen.
“Working hard, I see.”
“As always. You’re early for social time. That will be very confusing for the people here. To move this by an hour, oh, a very big deal…”
A few weeks previously I got into the habit of dropping by late afternoon, mainly to score an espresso from their first-class machine, but also to chat with Greg. The silence of all the number nerds in the office felt terribly awkward, and I was curious to see what kind of people they were, so I started calling out “twenty minutes social time!” on my arrival. The first day I explained what the idea behind it was – that we would have a break together – and on the second day all inmates obediently left their desks. They were far from enthusiastic; in fact they were rather lackadaisical about “social time,” shuffling indifferently towards the coffee corner like bundles of clothes being swept along by a giant invisible brush. However, by now I know all their names, except for the one postdoc everyone refers to as “Number Three,” on account of him having been the third candidate interviewed for the open position. It didn’t seem to bother Number Three that he was called Number Three, so it stuck.
“I’m not here for social time yet. I just had my second year viva!”
“How did it go?”
“It was weird, but the outcome seems really good!”
I tell Greg about the disagreement between Prof. Gilton and Mark, the shouting and the paper we signed. “Oh Jees, Mark will be pleased,” Greg states.
“I know. I guess this can go two ways; the good way, meaning Mark doesn’t talk to me anymore. Or the bad way, meaning he unleashes hell on me every day.”
“It seems Gilton is on your side. Is he the alcoholic Prof.?”
“How do you know he’s alcoholic?”
“It’s gossip all across campus…”
We chat a bit longer and I walk back to the
chemistry department. I copy the note with all the points three times and stick one of them on the side of my computer. That will remind Mark every day when my years of servitude will be over… lest he suffer from Alzheimer’s…
I stare out of the window and spend at least five minutes reminding myself that getting my degree will be doable and the submission of my thesis is only a few months away. Surely I can manage it; going through this a bit longer to get the hallowed title – even if it does seem somewhat tarnished now.
Right now I am emotionally exhausted and just want to beam myself to my parents’ sofa; there I would passively watch a farmer ploughing the land behind our house in preparation for sowing seeds… The village seems far away in another world, another life, it seems idyllic too, but I left that behind, for this?!…
© Springer International Publishing AG 2017
Karin BodewitsYou Must Be Very Intelligent10.1007/978-3-319-59321-0_39
Chapter 39
Karin Bodewits1
(1)Munich, Germany
Karin Bodewits
Email: [email protected]
Spring has manifested in a yellow glow, from the numerous gorse plants in and around the city. The summer semester has started, and campus is filled with young and lively undergrads. Babette has left the lab and is now writing up. With another inmate down, it is only Linn, Logan, Barry and me left in Lab 262. Linn and Logan are dating each other, which is kind of cute. It is also something of a relief after the long pussyfooting love bird phase of will-they-won’t-they-oh-just-get-on-with-it-and-fuck-each-other-senseless-would-you. We all came to think of it that way but I noticed the pussyfooting phase particularly riled Babette. Barry is not in the lab much, unless there is a student to supervise. That sits well with me and, I suspect, some others.
Mark hasn’t uttered a single word to me since the exam. It is uncomfortable to be so completely and utterly ignored by one’s boss but it is joyous compared to the alternative; being shouted at and perhaps fired at the eleventh hour. The exam has motivated me. Despite finding myself staring unproductively out of the window several times a day, questioning what I am doing with my life, I am working hard to meet the agreed targets.
Best of all, over the last three days it appears that the project I took over from Erico really is bearing fruit. I have Peter, an overly enthusiastic and – thankfully – very competent bachelor student, spending hours and hours on the bench with me; we are both convinced we’re onto something. Maybe we have indeed found an old, almost forgotten antibiotic and we might just lay the foundations for its novel use; in treating cystic fibrosis patients with fatal infections. Of course, it would need many more years of research, clinical trials and God knows what, followed by many bureaucratic steps that could stall the project forever, and certainly well before mankind might actually benefit from it. But even so, it is promising. The results are still in their infancy and more work needs to be done, but it feels good to have hit on something just before the finishing line. The end of my PhD is nearing and it might yield something of genuine interest after all – I am happily incredulous.
Giving a final presentation of my work, at a spectacular location in the Highlands, in front of the bio- and organic chemistry section, is a box that still needs to be ticked – a compulsory part of the PhD curriculum. It’s potentially a good opportunity to test the waters with ground-breaking research. But unfortunately I haven’t got anything to present yet. Alas, I cannot move the dates; I am compelled to drive north bereft of interesting results.
Logan, myself, all other second and third year PhD students, and three members of staff gather in front of the department to drive up for the three-day stay at Loch Tay, about 85 miles north-west of Edinburgh. There is just a seminar room, a canteen with view over the loch, a few bedrooms with wooden bunk beds and a cheap makeshift bar in the basement serving beer and wine. It is Spartan bordering on tawdry, but the gorgeous, dramatic scenery more than compensates. It should be a highlight of the PhD programme. I loved it last year when I had just been in the audience, but this year I am nervous about the paucity of my presentation.
“Jees, Ka, you aged by ten years overnight. What happened? You went to the pub?” Logan asks when I walk towards him.
I have a heavy backpack on my shoulders and am holding a takeaway coffee from the new coffee stall parked on campus.
“No. I spent last evening assaying proteins, was home at midnight and got up at 4:00 a.m. to get here in time and give Peter instructions for the next few days.”
“Hardcore motivation, haven’t seen you like this for ages.”
“I know…”
“Who’re you driving up with?” Logan asks smiling at me, standing next to his small car.
“You?” I say, a desperate look in my eyes indicating there are not really many alternatives.
He knows damn well that I had not replied to a single one of the emails going around concerning practicalities like travel to Firbush. I just hoped he had kept a seat in his car for me, which he had. He is a good man. He understands my motivation has limitations.
Together with William and Jonas, the Swedish guy, I get into Logan’s old Fiat Panda. We all need to keep our backpacks on our lap as Logan’s has filled the little trunk. I move my seat as far as possible to the front so the guys in the back have a tiny bit of space as well.
“Yo Billy, how are you doing?” William asks Jonas as we are driving off. Oh Jees, good start.
Thankfully, I see Jonas smiling in the back mirror, otherwise this could be a long-long trip.
“Still think I am named after an IKEA wardrobe?”
“Yep. Looking at your face, I even think you walked into one this week.” What the hell!
“I hope you are referring to my black eye?” Please say yes now.
“Yip.”
“That was a baseball.”
“Why are you actually coming to Firbush?” I ask William to change topics.
He is neither staff nor a PhD student. “My boss, the dude you refer to as Homer Simpson, considers the Firbush concept a burden rather than a jaunt. Hence he sends me instead.”
“The bottom minion in the pecking order gets dumped on…” Jonas says.
“Ho, ho, ho, Billy, mince your words!” William says, laughing.
When we are well into the greenery and the roads are narrowing with tight, scary bends, Logan asks: “Did you hear Mark is getting a baby?”
“No! He scrapped me from the to-talk-to list”
“Apparently it’s due in three months.”
“Maybe it will change him in a positive way.”
“Hopefully.”
Nobody is really hopeful.
On arrival we are warmly welcomed by our seminar hosts. They outline the programme and tell us that between presentations, they offer sailing classes, hikes, windsurfing and so on. Last year, I had gone on a memorable hike with Lucy and a few girls from the Johnson group, into the hills around Loch Tay. But this year the weather is dismal and I guess I will mainly bunker down in the dorm room that I am to share with three other female students.
I recognise the faces of my room-mates, who all seem nice, but I don’t really know any of them. However, one of them is the ex-girlfriend of Thomas – I recognise her from the pictures in his flat – who is now in Canada. Does this girl, with whom I am sharing a bunk bed, know that he loved her so much that he turned his room into a shrine of worship for her?… Maybe he sacrificed every single picture of her in ritual fashion before departing for Canada? But maybe he also took her pictures – and underwear – across the ocean with him. I would love to know if she knows about this, but it seems a strange subject to raise with someone you barely know. “Hi, did you know your ex treasures your used undies? ”
We have lunch together and then the first session of presentations commences, which lasts until the early evening. Some of the presentations are just good, others are very good. I am increasingly nervous. It will be me on stage tomorrow and I know,
for certain, my presentation sucks.
After dinner, many head for drinks in the basement of the building but I hurry to my laptop in the dorm instead. Is there any way to pump up my presentation and add the latest results?
I scroll through piles of photos of antibiotic assays I made in the past few days, but as the critical measurements of the plates are only in my lab book in the hospital, it doesn’t make sense to add anything. The protein purification graphs and assays are all stored in computers in Lab 262, only some of which are accessible via a floppy disk drive. It had been too hectic to bring it along, and even if I had all that… they would doubt my results before I repeated the experiment twice. I close my laptop and lie in bed with my eyes wide open. I hear the other girls entering and remain silent. I stare at the roof for a long time before falling into anxious sleep.
The room breaks into feeble applause and everyone seems to be wobbling on their seats with unease. The blond, Spanish PhD student, Elena, who normally always smiles, walks back to her place in the audience. She looks utterly defeated and humiliated. Her face is red and it’s possible she’s about to cry. If I were her I would probably cry too. Maybe not here and now, but later when I returned home I would sit at my window sill and weep. She gave a good and enthusiastic presentation, but she was fried alive in the Q&A afterwards. It ended up in a public argument. I have never seen anything like it. One of the members of staff, who has just started his group in the chemistry department, bit into her work like a shark that wouldn’t let go. He made it plain that what she was presenting was simply all wrong, that she had used the wrong techniques to prove what she wanted to prove and that her interpretation of the results was entirely inaccurate. I know too little about the topic to judge who is right. The other two young group leaders and William nodded along with his comments indicating they were onside. They did not believe in the work Elena was presenting either. Is it plausible? That Prof. Johnson, one of the two gilded robes at the school of chemistry, would let a final year PhD student from his group present research that is fundamentally wrong?…
You Must Be Very Intelligent Page 34
