打中文实在慢, 以下用英文.
Below is a fiction based on a true story I heard. "I" represents the person
who told me the story. Details are modified for confidentiality, but the
essence remains.
.................................
He published 2 small SCI papers back in his home country (like impact factor
2ish. Not bad considering where he was coming from. To protect his identity,
I will not reveal where he came from. I did have post-docs from multiple
different countries.). I phone interviewed him, and he knew his work (Now
I realize all he did was to keep memorizing what to say when asked, not
really based on understanding. My questions like Can you explain your work
was completely useless and uninformative).
I figured, well, I’m a Chinese PI, and at a mediocre university, wo CNS, so
I took him, and felt lucky. As he came, I went to the airport to pick him
up at midnight. I was about 10 minutes late, and the guy called my home 3 -4
times to rush me – strange. OK, no big deal. I gave him a small project to
start, held multiple discussion sessions. He supposedly had the background.
Two months passed, he had no idea what he needed to do. Was it my problem?
Don’t think so. Even my own second year grad student could do better - I
trained them. So it was clear he could not design expts, even after multiple
detailed discussions. Well, then how about “I design the overall plan, and
you design the details?”. Nope, that did not work either. Complete lack of
sense. OK, let’s teach him how to design expts, from the very basics. Went
through a few more sessions, gave him time to try it out. He came back with
blank sheets. No clue still. Then “I design everything and you do the
work”. That’s how he became a labor. Was he a good labor? Nope. I gave him
a Western blot to do. About two weeks later I remembered he had not talked
to me for a long time, and asked what happened to the blot. He gave me a
blank film. “What happened?” “No signal”. “I see there is no signal, I
’m asking if you have any clue why there is no signal?” The guy looked at
me, smiled a little, and did not even say a word. ‘How many times did you
try?” He smiled again, still no answer. May be he did not understand me? OK
, I asked him again in Chinese. Still just a little smile,
no answer. “You have to tell me how many times you have tried, not just
smile!” A little more upset now. “Once!” He got a little angry. “Once
after this, or once just means this one?” “This one”. “For two weeks,
you tried once, got no signal, and that was it?” “I did not know what to
do next”. “Couldn’t you even ask me then?” “ I thought you were too
busy and did not want to bother you to make you unhappy.” “You thought by
leaving it there for two weeks and doing no trouble-shooting would make me
happy?” I started thinking, but did not let it out “Even my first year
student doesn’t behave like that. You are even worse than my first year
student”. This and similar episodes went on, and I concluded that one just
CANNOT CARVE ON A ROTTEN PIECE OF WOOD.
Of course, it was my mistake to take him, but I did not want to continue the
mistake. I asked him to leave, without a 6 month internal deadline to be
sure he had a place to go (I was not really being purely kind to be honest,
I just did not want all the potential troubles due to conflict so I gave him
extra long time). He did not want to leave. Alright then, “you will just
have to do what I say”. But since then I expected him to spend 2x as much
time as my student. I thought it was fair. He didn’t need time to design
and trouble shooting. All he needed to do was to pipet. My student does most
of the designing and trouble shooting – so he needs time for that. Like a
lot other people in his kind of category, he felt I was being very unfair,
and was even discriminating him. So now he went around and started spreading
rumors how I unfair was and made him to more work than others. I wanted to
bring this up to make the point that for some people at least (actually a
lot of them in ordinary labs), there is a reason why they are labors rather
than regular post-docs and why their PIs expect to work harder than others
– simply because they are totally unqualified as post-docs.
This post-doc eventually left my lab, and since then he went through
multiple labs within several years, lasting less than two years in each lab.
The first lab he went to was a white american lab, but got kicked out
within 6 months! At least I let him stay for a year.
Not too surprisingly, he published no papers for all these years after
leaving my lab. I’m still wondering how he got those two SCI papers in his
home country.
FXXK, I wasted another 31 minutes!