Grad School- Thesis Defense

Thesis defenses have different formats depending on your program and your university. The format for my program is a public defense of about 1-2 hours which anyone can attend followed by a private defense with your committee which can be anywhere from 1-3 hours long. Typically, your advisor introduces you at the public defense. By introduce, I mean that the advisor tells where you did undergrad, what publications you’ve written and mentions any other honors your earned while in grad school. Prof Sunshine totally fucked up my introduction- about the only detail he got correct was my name. He got my undergrad university and program wrong, he also “forgot” about a major first author publication or that I won a prize for my presentation in France. To make matters worse- all of this information was in the program- which Prof Sunshine had in his hand! He then said “well, she took a break for a while and now she’s here to defend finally.” Prof Sunshine also “forgot” to remind the audience that I have a hearing deficit (which I had asked him to do). So I got to start my thesis defense by stammering out that I have a hearing deficit, so I need people to catch my attention (by waving of clearing their throat) and look at me when asking questions. Not the most graceful way to start. So I start giving my public presentation. Everything is going well when a cell phone starts ringing. Prof Sunshine then proceeds to take the call!!! WTF?!? Can we say rude. So I glare at him (and found our later that Mum flipped him off) until he hangs up and then continue. I get back on track- until I realize that Prof Sunshine is busy texting someone! HELLO?!? I completely lost my train of thought and just stood there. My department head who was at this point glaring at Prof Sunshine too, then gets me back on track by asking me a “gimme” question. I complete the talk and handle the few questions.

I then got a brief break while my committee went to get coffee. At this point I should probably explain that counter to “tradition” Prof Sunshine did not provide refreshments for my defense. Technically, I could have ordered refreshments and charged them to Prof Sunshine, but I didn’t even make the effort. One of my committee members referenced the lack of refreshments, so I pointed out that “having been away from the department for 3 years, I thought Prof Sunshine would have handled the refreshments because I wouldn’t even know what grant number to charge them to.” Yes, it was passive aggressive but I was beyond “playing nice” at that point. During my private defense, Prof Sunshine then sprung a “we haven’t been able to replicate any of these experiments” on me. WHAT?!? Then, Prof Sunshine proceeded to tell my committee that the lab was unable to replicate my in vitro results with a DIFFERENT cell line than I had used. I seriously wanted to say “well of course you couldn’t replicate the results you dumbass.” Instead I had to play all nice and say “well, introducing different conditions, such as new cell lines, is not REPLICATING the experiment- it is determining how the experiment works under those conditions!” Luckily my committee agreed with me and over-ruled him. I then spent the next 2.5 hours talking about what I would have done differently if I had “unlimited” funds to design ideal experiment. I was then dismissed to go “wait outside in the hall”. This is when your committee decides whether they will pass you or fail you.

Traditionally, if you pass, your advisor comes to get you and greets you with “Congradulations, Dr. ________!” That didn’t happen. Instead another committee member came to greet me. Prof Sunshine did not even acknowledge me when I re-entered the room- just gave me my list of revisions and left. Didn’t even say congrats. Never called me Dr. And the traditional party with cake and champagne? Yeah, that didn’t happen either. Instead, I went with my husband and parents to Panara to get a bite to eat before we traveled the 400 miles back home. Mum and Dad surprised me with Dom Perignon when we got home, though, so at least I got my champagne!

Grad School- Returning from a Leave of Absence

After finally distributing my thesis to my committee, I got to deal with the paperwork of returning ti university from a leave of absence. As a doctoral candidate, you are expected to be continuously enrolled from the time you pass your last exam (making you a doctoral candidate) until you defend your thesis. By continuously enrolled, they mean that they expect you to pay tuition. Well, I had serious issues with this because the reason my leave went on so long was because I clearly wasn’t a priority for Prof Sunshine. So I appealed the requirement for continuous enrollment. The dean hears such appeals. The dean thought that I should never have been permitted to take a leave of absence so close to completion of my degree. However, when presented with all my evidence (emails showing when I had submitted each chapter to Prof Sunshine, postmarks on the envelopes which I received feedback in, time stamp provided by the department secretary when I picked up feedback on the last chapter), he decided that Prof Sunshine hadn’t acted in my best interests and made Prof Sunshine pay 50% of the tuition accrued in my absence. Actually, my program secretary took care of me there. She back-registered me for off-campus dissertation work- which is about ¼ of the cost and doesn’t have any computer, lab and facility fees added in because you’re off-campus. I didn’t even know such a course existed!

Now, once I was back-registered, I expected the bursar to issue me a bill. So did my program secretary. A week went by- no bill. So I called the bursar. They don’t issue paper bills anymore- you need to log in to your student account and pay it. My student account had been deactivated 2 years prior. So I asked to be transferred to the person who deals with students returning from leave of absence. That person was completely unable to help me. She informed me that if I couldn’t log in, then I would have to come to the bursar’s office in person. Did I mention that I was living over 400 miles away from the university? So I called my program secretary to verify that the bill had to be paid prior to my defense date (generally, all bills have to be paid in full before you can defend). When she heard what was going on, she gave me 2 numbers. One for the IT department to try and get my student account reactivated and one for a bursar that she dealt with. IT informed me that they couldn’t reactivate my account until I had paid the bill AND my advisor had requested that my account be reactivated. So I tried the bursar number and got the bursar that I had worked with on the student health committee. Said bursar decided that I was getting the run around. She logged in, told me how much I owed and asked me to FedEx the check to her. Two days later, she had straightened everything out for me regarding registration and the bursar. However, she still couldn’t activate my student account, which is an issue its very post.

Grad School- Living with my family while completing my thesis

Now, you might be wondering why we chose to move in with my parents rather than get an apartment. First, the metro area we live in is VERY expensive. My husband is also a graduate engineering student, so without my having a salary, we could afford rent some place, but we probably couldn’t afford to eat very healthy and we definitely wouldn’t be able to afford to keep our cars on the road. Second, my husband knows me too well. If I took a job to help with finances, I’d get so involved with the job that I would put off completing my thesis.

Originally, when we moved into my parents’ basement, it was supposed to be for 3-6 months while I finished my degree. I still had a hard time wrapping my mind around the necessity for it. I’d been independent for 10 years, my husband for about 14 years. The idea of living by someone else’s rules was hard to adjust to. Compounding matters, my 2 adult brothers still live at home and have never lived elsewhere. Therefore, it drove us bonkers that they expect the “laundry fairy,” “cooking fairy” and “cleaning fairy” to take care of them. My parents wouldn’t accept rent from us, so we tried to help out a lot around the house. However, it is extremely frustrating to look up from yard work to see my brothers looking out of the window laughing at us. Still, my pride wouldn’t let me move back in without doing SOMETHING to pay for rent! So I’ve spent the past few years doing the majority of the vacuuming, weed pulling, raking and shoveling. I would also like to add that I’ve also spent some time “repairing” things for my mother- and giving my husband credit as Dad won’t admit that I may have learned a few things while living on my own. I also took over driving my grandmother to all of her medical appointments to help my father out. Actually, I initially felt bad for my grandmother- until I was reminded WHY I didn’t spend much time with her once I had the excuse of living at least 400 miles away. The woman is an emotional vampire- spend a few hours with her and she sucks your will to live.

So I spent the first 2 months living at home doing a very careful re-write of my literature review chapter, which was submitted to Prof Sunshine by the last week of October. I then spent the next 4 weeks writing and re-writing the 3 experimental chapters and the conclusion chapter. I was sending Professor Sunshine weekly updates every Monday morning. I had agreed to the weekly updates before taking a leave of absence. The theory was that this way Prof Sunshine could keep up with my progress and give me feedback. The reality is that the only feedback I got was a bitchy email the week I submitted my weekly update 3 days early because my husband and I spent 5 days in the Caribbean and I didn’t want my update to be late! I’m sorry, but I met the terms of MY contract- weekly updates by Monday morning. Where was my feedback?

Remember how I said that I submitted my re-write of the lit review chapter during the last week of October? Want to know when I got Prof Sunshine’s feedback? The first week of March- 5 MONTHS after I sent it to him! This is his definition of “timely feedback”? While I worked under him, God help me if I took longer than a week to review his grant or latest article. Oh, and I had to read his chicken scratch handwriting because he couldn’t figure out how to enable comments in Microsoft Word. I didn’t get feed back on 2 of the other chapters until May when I sent a nasty email and Cced the department head and my program director. It then took me until August to get the 3rd chapter and the following April (17 months AFTER I submitted it to him) to get the final chapter. To get that one, I had to drive the 400 miles to the university and request a personal meeting with him. F@*!$% couldn’t figure out how to drop it in an envelope and put a stamp on it. Have you ever tried to revise something that you haven’t even looked at for 17 months? Yeah, it goes real quickly because it is so fresh in your mind.

In any case, it took me 3 years to get permission from Prof Sunshine to submit my dissertation to my committee and request a new defense date.

Grad School- The Beginning of the End

I’ve spent a week writing and rewriting this post. I didn’t want it to sound like I’m whiney, but I am still bitter about how I was treated. However, if I remove the whininess, the post reads as cold and uncaring. So please pardon the whininess.

One of the first steps to writing your dissertation is to write your literature review (lit review) section. This section is supposed to demonstrate the state of the field when you began your research (and also demonstrate your ability to read and discuss primary literature). Some universities have detailed guidelines about the content of each section of your dissertation. Excluding font, font size, margins and table of contents requirements, my university really doesn’t have any dissertation guidelines at all. Pretty much, at my university, your dissertation committee tells you what they want in your dissertation- especially for your lit review chapter. So I submitted an outline of my dissertation to my committee prior to receiving permission to begin writing. Said outline was approved with a few minor revisions (a few topics added into the lit review). I then wrote the lit review and submitted it to Prof Sunshine on March 17. I expected to have a lot of revisions on the lit review because I was writing it while finishing my experiments, so my focus was a bit split. However, by the time 3 months went by and I hadn’t received any feedback, I thought I might have done a better job than I initially thought (I do tend to be a bit of a perfectionist). WRONG! On July 2nd, less than 24 hours before I left for home so that I could spend 6 weeks out of the lab writing the remaining 3 chapters of my dissertation (materials and methods, and one experimental chapter had already been approved), Prof Sunshine then gave me his required revisions on the lit review. Essentially, he wanted it expanded by 100 pages. This made my already tight timetable even tighter. Me being me, I attempted to re-write my lit review and write the remaining 3 chapters (2 experimental chapters and 1 “what does this mean in the grand scheme of things” chapter). I was so nervous about getting my dissertation done that I couldn’t keep anything in my stomach but watermelon and toast. I was also running 3-6 miles a day in at least 80F heat. With this level of exercise, a diet of watermelon and toast just doesn’t cut it- there aren’t enough calories. I didn’t sleep at all the 2 weeks before my dissertation was due. I’d go to bed, but my mind would be racing, so I’d end up getting up and working some more on my dissertation. The one time that I actually fell asleep in this period, my phone rang- it was Prof Sunshine telling me that he wanted more revisions on the chapter he had already approved! Needless to say, I came very, very close to making myself extremely ill. 2 days before my dissertation was due to my committee, I opened up one of my experimental chapters and found the last section I’d worked on written in French (and not very well I might add). At that point, I realized that I didn’t have enough time to fix everything before my defense, so I called the university and canceled my defense. I then shut my phone off, handed my laptop over to my dad (so that I couldn’t work), took 2 Benadryl and went to sleep. I slept for exactly 4 hours (normally 2 Benadryl knock me flat for at least 8 hours). I then returned the pissy phone call from Prof Sunshine letting him know that I wasn’t returning to the university until I’d had at least 12 hours more of sleep. I don’t really remember that conversation (can we say Benadryl hangover?), but I’m sure that I was a complete and total bitch. Actually, as I’m writing this, I’m realizing just how sketchy my memory is of this time- which tends to make me think that lack of sleep had me in a borderline (OK, probably not so borderline) psychotic state.

I returned to university to face the consequences of canceling my defense. Prof Sunshine was furious. He had been counting on me finishing so that he didn’t have to pay my salary and tuition. After talking the entire situation over with Prof Sunshine, my program director and my department head, I decided that I would take a leave of absence. This would free Prof Sunshine of having to pay my tuition and my salary and allow me to set my own timetable for completing my dissertation (it would also allow me to recover). It seemed like such a good idea to my sleep-deprived mind. So I took a leave of absence, packed up all my stuff and moved into my parents’ basement with my husband and our Great Dane.

Comments

I received several emails from people who couldn't comment. Apparently, if you are using a browser other than Internet Explorer, embedded comment sections (such as I had) require you to accept 3rd party cookies. To hopefully take care of this issue, I've switched my comment section to a pop-up window. Please email me if you still can't comment. Thanks!

Grad School- Stint as Student Death (oops! I mean Health) Representative

When I arrived at grad school, our health plan was beyond bizarre. For example- our health insurance would pay for a mole to be removed IF it was cancerous and ONLY if it was cancerous. So that left us in the state of hoping to have cancer so that we wouldn’t have to pay $600 ($800 if they gave you a pain killer first!) for a mole to be removed. In what sort of sick world do people HOPE to have cancer?

So after spending 2 years trying to navigate the system, I volunteered to be the grad student rep to the student health board. The student health board consisted of the dean (who never attended a single meeting), a rep from the insurance company, the head of student health, the secretary for student health, a rep from the bursar’s office, a med student, a nursing student and a grad student. Our job was supposed to address the concerns of the students as presented by the student reps. The grad rep who preceded me nicely provided me with all of her notes. This was extremely useful when I’d bring up an issue and the head of student health would claim, “We’ve never had that complaint before.” I could then turn to my predecessor’s notes and give the head the exact date when she HAD in fact heard the complaint before. I was also a pain in the ass in that I was really good with paper trails. If a student brought an insurance complaint to me, I would request the bill in question as well as the insurance company’s response. I would then photocopy it, remove the students identifying info, and then make sufficient copies for the board. With concrete evidence in front of them, grad student concerns started to be addressed. The med student rep and the nursing student rep immediately started following my example. By the time I had completed my term as the grad student rep, the head of student health was openly hostile to me. I just wish I could have been a fly on the wall when my replacement showed up not only with my notes and my predecessor’s notes, but with detailed instructions for how to lay a paper trail.

The most controversial issue we dealt with on the student health board was the actions of one of the student health doctors. Said doctor refused to prescribe birth control because she considered it akin to abortion. The head of student health adamantly stated that this doctor had the right to choose which treatments she would administer. Normally I would agree, however, she worked for STUDENT HEALTH- I would say that 90% of the female students visit student health for birth control once a year. To make matters worse, said doctor was also assigned the task of negotiating with the pharmaceutical companies for discount birth control. Can we say conflict of interest? Luckily the med student rep and I quickly convinced the insurance rep that he should support the students on this issue. Basically, all we had to do was point out that a single pregnancy cost the insurance company at least 10x what a year’s supply of birth control does. Next thing we knew, the insurance company rep offered to take over sourcing discount birth control- and surprise- we got the best deal we’d had ever! However, nothing was ever done about the doctor. The best the student reps could do was make sure that we informed the rest of the students of said doctor’s stance on birth control. Word of mouth isn’t always the greatest, so we still fielded a lot of complaints. As far as I know, this doctor is STILL working at student health…

Grad School- Conference in France

After a few years of working in Professor Sunshine’s lab, I was fortunate to be invited to present a poster and give a talk at a conference in France. I should explain at this point that Prof Sunshine is not American, but is British. He also did research in several different European countries as part of his doctorate. Most European science labs speak English, but you generally need to learn the local language to speak with support staff. So I assumed that he spoke enough French to get by. Well, apparently Prof Sunshine’s idea of speaking the local language is to say English words with the accent of the local language. It was absolutely hilarious! Even better- everyone at the conference knew that the scientist and student from our lab consisted of 1 American and 1 Brit. However, I was consistently identified as British and Prof Sunshine as American! Boy did that tick him off! Perhaps Prof Sunshine should have chosen a wardrobe other than sneakers, stained shorts and ripped T-shirts. Presenting while wearing a T-shirt that said “F-You!” probably didn’t help matters any. To add insult to injury- I was wearing American dog tags (replicas of my husband’s), yet I was still consistently identified as the Brit. Silly wanker.

One thing that I did learn was that my education in French was woefully lacking in such useful items as how to order a pint of beer that was on tap. Luckily, a professor from Quebec quickly taught me this key phrase (Une pinte de bière pression s’il vous plait). However, the language barrier defeated both the prof from Quebec and myself at lunch the first day. Lunch was served as a buffet. However, no one was permitted to serve themselves- you had to indicate what you wanted to one of the servers. I noticed that the servers were getting a bit disgruntled as people pointed to the dishes they wanted. So I politely said “I would like these three dishes, please” (Je voudrais ces trois plats, s’il vous plait). I then pointed to the dishes that I wanted. If the dishes had been labeled, I would have asked for them by name. I was then given 3 servings of the first dish I indicated. I glanced at the prof from Quebec, he shrugged and then pointed to what he wanted. When we reached our table, he told me that he would have asked the same way I did! For the rest of the conference, I just followed everyone else’s lead and just pointed.

The language barrier also resulted in my being offered a post-doc at this conference. After my talk, I was invited to sit with some of the senior scientists (presumably to discuss my research). The waiter came around and took everyone’s drink orders. I ordered non-carbonated water as I was quite thirsty after talking. If you didn’t specify “normal” or “natural” water, then you got carbonated water by default. After the drinks arrived, one of the senior scientists asked me how I obtained “non-bubbly” water. When I explained I had ordered it, he asked me to order him a bottle of regular water. I caught the waiter’s attention and made the request. When the bottle of water was delivered to the table, the scientist turned to me and asked if I’d like to post-doc in his lab! So basically, by using a phrase that anyone with access to an English-to-French dictionary could come up with, I was offered a post-doc. Apparently my ability to order non-carbonated water in French was more important to this gentleman than completion of my doctorate. Made me wonder what the “qualifications” of his other post-docs were!