My resignation

My PI's lack of competence wasn't the only reason I resigned my postdoc. It was how she treated everyone as being beneath her. So she'd get irritated and frustrated with people who she thought was stupid. Unfortunately, she's got no right to think of others that way, because she couldn't do a single experiment herself. She didn't know how to do statistics, graph anything on excel, a dissection or subclone anything.

She micromanaged everything to the point where it becomes unproductive and dysfunctional. But the part that made me resign? Her constant yelling and disapproval... complaining about lab members to everyone except the person concerned.

When she was having issues with her graduate student, she wanted me to talk to her. In my mind I thought, 'Isn't that YOUR job?' I frankly didn't want to get involved. I told her to give the graduate student a chance. She just needs to figure out how to navigate through grad school. We all needed time to adapt. But then over the months, she'd always complain to me. You might have thought she was just venting, but this wasn't just about venting. It was getting malicious. She would say it's her boyfriend.... he's a bad influence. I'd just remark and say, 'I don't know her boyfriend well enough to make judgements'. It was starting to get unprofessional.

She was very quick to pass judgement. It was only a matter of time before her attention turned to me and things became ugly for me. So I gave up trying when I realized that I was dealing with a very petty and immature woman. No matter how hard I worked, I would never succeed in her eyes. Her condescending attitude was too much for me to handle. I lost all my confidence in the process. I something sit and wonder how I managed to screw things up so badly. Where did it go wrong? Or did it go wrong at all? I worked my ass off and submitted my paper in the J. of Neuroscience which is a pretty good journal. The reviews were positive and only asked for minor revisions. It's not too bad, especially when you consider that it was 2 years worth of work, in an entirely new field.

As far as I know, I am the first of my PhD-classmates to publish during the postdoc. Some still haven't even managed to publish their first author papers from grad school. So, surely I've been doing something right and her anger and frustration at me is a little unwarranted. It doesn't matter now anyway. I'm leaving...

Bad mentors

You might think that I might be over exaggerating as to how bad my postdoc mentor could possibly be. And of-course I am biased. And I'm sure I could have done better, tried harder, worked longer... At least that's what most of us say to ourselves. I completely switched model systems and research areas from Grad school to the postdoc. Although, I thoroughly enjoyed doing basic science, I realize that it's virtually impossible to get funding these days unless you work on a disease/ disorder at the translational level. So I switched. I was a little nervous, intimidated but I was also ready for a challenge. The first year was a huge struggle mainly because I had to change the way I thought and approached experiments. And the dissections were a killer. But I did get better at it. What used to take me 10 hours, now takes me 6 hours.

I expected a more collaborative environment but 1 postdoc left before I arrived and another was on his way out. There were no students and no one in the lab knew how to do the dissections I took on. So I had to trouble shoot on my own. Each experiment spanned over 3 weeks so by the time I found out one experiment had worked, I had 6 failed ones. It seemed almost impossible to figure out. But I managed to do it... I do remember asking my postdoctoral PI if she could take a look at my dissections and tell me where she thought I was going wrong. She flatly told me, "I wouldn't be able to tell you. I don't know how to do the dissections."
Red flag #1... If you're in a lab that heavily relies on a technique that the PI knows nothing about, run away... don't even waste your time.

She often put my ideas down in the early days. Sure, looking back some of them were probably not the smartest ideas. But I was also learning. About a year on, I started to realize that my lack of confidence wasn't because I didn't know how to do something, but because I didn't know enough to see that my PI was full of bullshit.  
Red flag #2...She'd make up 'facts' to base her arguments. I was starting to catch on because every time I would do an experiment, I'd realize her 'facts' were often quite the opposite.

She often proclaimed that she was an excellent molecular biologist. Although I knew how to clone, I hadn't done much in grad school and the cloning technology had changed so much since I was an undergrad that I couldn't say that I was a pro. Well, once she had taken it upon herself to clone the promoter regions of her favorite genes. She worked on them for two months saying that it was a real tough one. At some point, I thought to myself that I ought to do it so that I could brush up my molecular skills. (This gets technical here...) Trusting her cloning strategy, I asked her how she designed her primers so that I could set the appropriate parameters for the PCR reaction (How one makes more DNA from very little). As I asked her questions, I thought to myself "God woman, who the f*** gave you a PhD?" Frustrated, I just redesigned the primers and a week later, I was done. Clone in hand, I told her it worked. She must've felt a little peeved, because she took the same primers and re-did the cloning... or should I say attempted.  
Red flag #3...If they go on and on about how good they're at something, one must ask themselves why does it require grandiose declarations?

However, the worst memory I have in this lab was when I was quantifying some data. I needed to normalize the data to account for experiment to experiment variations. I went to her with data sheet and graph in hand to tell her that it had worked. She quizzed me on how I normalized the data and she started yelling at me for being a liar and a cheat. It was humiliating, embarrassing and I was hurt. I was a little confused but thanked her for catching it and went back to my desk. I thought about it more and decided to call my PhD PI and asked him where I went wrong. He concurred with my method and said it was perfectly appropriate. I called another postdoc who was fantastic with such details and he verified the same. Now, I want to note that the stats I performed wasn't terribly complex and pretty basic when it came to statistics. I went back to her and told her that I had the methodology verified and it was a standard practice. She kept quiet and said nothing. No sorry, no back tracking, no re-viewing my data. She just didn't seem interested. Two days later, she comes up to me asking me how to draw error bars on excel (basic graphing software).
Red flag#4... How the hell did she survive in science not knowing how to do basic stats or even know how to graph error bars???

To make a long story short, several red flags later, I gave her my resignation...

The biggest mistake of my life

June 18th 2012

Two years ago when I joined my current postdoctoral position, I dreamed of working in a large lab with a well-known PI who encouraged his students to publish in well-known journals. I hoped to be exposed to a higher standard of science that low-budget grants could not fathom. I realized that the only way to be a better scientist was to step outside my comfort zone and push myself to try new things. I also hoped to make up for all my short comings as a graduate student. So I decided to switch fields and model systems.

You see, I had worked in a small lab on an independent project with no funding, constantly taught for my stipend and my PhD professor couldn't care less about my thesis project. I worked on an invertebrate system that no one cared for, in today's scientific arena. When it came time to publishing, my professor submitted it to the lowest journal that would take it. When I left, I was working on a second first author paper, but my professor inundated me with teaching rotation students and doing experiments for a grant he wanted to put together. I did all this while, I TA-ed, interviewed for postdoc positions, wrote and defended my thesis and desperately tried to finish my paper. I almost died trying to do it all in 4 months. Two years later, the paper still rests on his desk---unsubmitted. My choice of PhD lab was a terrible one.

So I had hoped that I would fare better as a postdoc. I wanted to learn new things and hopefully even redeem myself on the publication front. I interviewed with such a professor who could give me all those things. Two months away from graduation, he finally extended an offer.... to work with his wife instead. Only today can I reflect back and see that I had made the biggest mistake of my life. I sigh because I had no choice, but to take it as my professor had no more money to last me another semester. If I hadn't said yes, I would have to leave as my visa status required me to leave within 60 days from the time I submit my thesis. So I really had no choice but to say yes.

Two years ago, I had so much hope that this time round it would be different. It sure is different. It's much worse. I am now working for a woman who thinks I'm stupid and who despises me.