- Joined
- Jan 1, 2012
- Messages
- 353
- Reaction score
- 194
Hi, all --
I'm in one of those Undergraduate Student Research Fellowship programs currently, and I've come to realize something: my PI does not think well of me. I realize he's a PI who deals with high flying graduate students all the time, but I think his expectations of me are a bit unreasonable and he's grown to dislike me for it. I want to continue in the lab, but at the same time, I'm not sure if this relationship is salvageable for that, or even a good LOR from this summer alone.
Here's the short version. I had a sickness for a good few weeks that completely knocked me out. PI seemed very persistent that I still be active in the lab and I feel he resented me a bit for being sick for so long. Not a day went by when I didn't get an email or phone call from him asking what is up, even if I were to sick to get out of bed. Then, once I recovered enough, he put me to the task of developing a MATLAB program to analyze data. I have no background in programming. I'm a philosophy major with a few pre-req science courses behind me. So, trying to gain traction, I try my hand at a free MIT introductory course on MATLAB. I get through the very basics -- arrays, vectors, simple matrix manipulations, if/ifelse functions, calculator functions -- when he gives me the barrage of data I would have to extract and analyze. He seems annoyed with me when I ask him a series of questions to help me out.
I realize this is a new dip into grad school world and that grad school is notorious for making a person feel stupid. At the same time, I feel his expectations are unreasonably high and I'm ill equipped to stand up to them within the two weeks I have left. I want to learn MATLAB. I want to finish this program and do others for him during future breaks, but I don't want a bad LOR at the end of it all.
Would it look bad to not have an LOR from a summer PI? Should I press on and hope for a good LOR if I persist?
Opinions?
I'm in one of those Undergraduate Student Research Fellowship programs currently, and I've come to realize something: my PI does not think well of me. I realize he's a PI who deals with high flying graduate students all the time, but I think his expectations of me are a bit unreasonable and he's grown to dislike me for it. I want to continue in the lab, but at the same time, I'm not sure if this relationship is salvageable for that, or even a good LOR from this summer alone.
Here's the short version. I had a sickness for a good few weeks that completely knocked me out. PI seemed very persistent that I still be active in the lab and I feel he resented me a bit for being sick for so long. Not a day went by when I didn't get an email or phone call from him asking what is up, even if I were to sick to get out of bed. Then, once I recovered enough, he put me to the task of developing a MATLAB program to analyze data. I have no background in programming. I'm a philosophy major with a few pre-req science courses behind me. So, trying to gain traction, I try my hand at a free MIT introductory course on MATLAB. I get through the very basics -- arrays, vectors, simple matrix manipulations, if/ifelse functions, calculator functions -- when he gives me the barrage of data I would have to extract and analyze. He seems annoyed with me when I ask him a series of questions to help me out.
I realize this is a new dip into grad school world and that grad school is notorious for making a person feel stupid. At the same time, I feel his expectations are unreasonably high and I'm ill equipped to stand up to them within the two weeks I have left. I want to learn MATLAB. I want to finish this program and do others for him during future breaks, but I don't want a bad LOR at the end of it all.
Would it look bad to not have an LOR from a summer PI? Should I press on and hope for a good LOR if I persist?
Opinions?