Issues with PI

[grindszn]

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[965978]

How exactly do you spend your 15-20 hours in the lab?

How involved are you in learning the hypothesis and background information? What efforts has she made to help clarify these things?

Have you learned any specific, scientific protocols?

 

[ndafife]

Although I have a good grasp of what we're doing, she'll try to make me look stupid when asking her a question and often gets angry whenever the smallest of mistakes is made. She only teaches one lab section that happens once a week, so she's around the lab a lot.

Small mistakes cause big errors. It doesn't take a whole lot to ruin an experiment/affect the end results.

Naturally, I'm putting a lot of time and work into what I'm doing and although she's hinted at a publication down the line, she knows she has me for the next three and a half years so this can really mean anything. There were flyers in the department building for an ACS run research poster vendor night and I asked her if I could present in it. With her citing that the person's contact info on the poster had a ".com" email address, she said she wanted to protect our data and results and wouldn't let me do it. I could be wrong, but given entrenched ACS' association is in academia, her rationale seemed strange and obtuse to me.

Some local ACS poster presentation means nothing to a PI (especially if you are doing research in a non-surgical field).
Your PI is a new faculty appointment who doesn't want to half ass her first big project by putting it out there too early. People in academia can be pretty slimey. It just takes some other PI with more resources to see your poster and data and decide that with their superior resources and multiple grad students/PI's that they want to hurry up and publish it before your PI. Then your PI has to come up with some sort of excuse for "what have you been doing for the last year that we have been paying you and funding your research? Why have you wasted so much time and money on this project that Dr. So and SO just published?"

 

[subdermallight]

You can always continue you work there and simultaneously start volunteering at another lab. Hopefully not too close by. And if it’s a better fit then jump ship. Summer would be a good time for this if you have the time. If they find out you can just say you had more time in the summer and wanted to explore a range of fields and procedures