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I've tried to keep the ranting here to a minimum, but I need to froth at the mouth some for like...two minutes.
I've been feeling increasingly down about lab positions and my inability to find one. There are still faculty members I haven't e-mailed, but honestly, the thought of spending a whole afternoon reading papers to write an e-mail that I get no reply to (and which has a decent chance of having wound up being deleted without being looked at) just makes me want to cry.
This is not being helped at all by Yana, who got a great position with tons of help from me (as to why I didn't go for it myself - not my department), and now won't shut up about it. At all. I hate to say it, but the clueless academic with no life outside their research or lab is not cute or endearing, it's boring and irritating and makes them into the kind of people who don't get invited out at all because nobody wants to be around them. And it's doubly irritating when I have spent the last month trying to find something myself with no success.
I snapped at her yesterday - if she does it again, I'm going to be sorely tempted to hit her and/or throw things.
I've been feeling increasingly down about lab positions and my inability to find one. There are still faculty members I haven't e-mailed, but honestly, the thought of spending a whole afternoon reading papers to write an e-mail that I get no reply to (and which has a decent chance of having wound up being deleted without being looked at) just makes me want to cry.
This is not being helped at all by Yana, who got a great position with tons of help from me (as to why I didn't go for it myself - not my department), and now won't shut up about it. At all. I hate to say it, but the clueless academic with no life outside their research or lab is not cute or endearing, it's boring and irritating and makes them into the kind of people who don't get invited out at all because nobody wants to be around them. And it's doubly irritating when I have spent the last month trying to find something myself with no success.
I snapped at her yesterday - if she does it again, I'm going to be sorely tempted to hit her and/or throw things.
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suck it up
Date: 2007-03-05 10:30 pm (UTC)From:One of my colleagues who's been a post-doc for about 4 years has been recently looking for an assistant professor position in academia. He's applied to over 70 institutions, gotten replies from about 15 of them, 3 of which turned into interviews. Over 12 were polite "no thank yous" and the rest didn't even deign to reply to him.
Get used to it. This is how academia works. Your friend Yana was extremely lucky. I've been extremely lucky in finding good research labs willing to take me, sometimes it just doesn't work out. So you've got two choices. Either give up or you suck it up, hurry up, and e-mail and call as many professors as possible. Research is about 2% luck and 98% hard work and if you're going to whine about all the work you have to do, maybe you're not in the right field.
Re: suck it up
Date: 2007-03-05 11:26 pm (UTC)From:Crossing my fingers that the one 'possibly' I get will pull through, but in the mean time, this is my journal, and if I want to bitch about how Yana is driving me up the wall, I will, and you are free to ignore it.
no subject
Date: 2007-03-06 12:26 am (UTC)From:I hope that works out too. If not, I dunno. Have you tried looking in other bio-related departments? Also, you don't need to read whole papers. Just read the abstracts, and the discussion if you really want to know what happened in the experiment. Remember that academics are interested in what you know, what you want to know, and not what you know about them.
no subject
Date: 2007-03-06 12:49 am (UTC)From:And all the people I've talked to here, both faculty and other students, have said to read the papers, and talk about that, and what you find interesting about their research :\
no subject
Date: 2007-03-06 12:13 am (UTC)From:Email everyone, I say. a-a
no subject
Date: 2007-03-06 12:15 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2007-03-06 04:02 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2007-03-06 04:15 am (UTC)From: