Your favorite D-List Monktress is emerging from her central-AC cave to yell at the n00bs on her lawn. Today’s topic is about idea ownership, and how it doesn’t mean what n00bs think it means. I am really only speaking about the S&E part of STEM, there have already been kerfluffles amongst our nerdy brethren about different conventions for intellectual property and I do not want to go there. I don’t know what mathematicians do and I don’t know what field goes in ‘T’, so disclaimer: This ain’t about you, fool.
First grumble is about the eternal battle of I Came Up with This Awesome Idea and Now My PI Talks About it Like it’s Hir’s. Listen to the D-List monktress when I say you probably did not conceive and formulate the research in question all by yourself. I know, I know, you totally came up with this idea way outside your prof’s area of expertise and hir doesn’t know hir ass from hir elbow anyway, so how could they have helped you? Bullshit. Even if your PI doesn’t know shit for beans about the problem, your PI knows how to sell it. There are always exceptions, but most PI’s know how to get shit published and how to get money to get shit published. This requires a certain amount of salesmanship and political maneuvering you don’t know a thing about. Your PI knows how to paint a big picture question compelling enough so that hir colleagues will be interested in it, and furthermore so that funding agencies want to hand over the monies to see it come to fruition. Even if you come up with the solution to cold fusion, you probably do not know how to obtain institutional support and money for said project.
Figure 1: I mean, your PI clearly lies in wait outside your office just drooling for your brilliant idea fruit to ripen so he can win a Nobel Prize. Clearly
Line break!
Speaking of money, another area where n00bs lose their shit about idea ownership is grant-writing. I have noticed the number one hurdle cited by n00b PIs is not knowing How the Fuck to Write a Grant Proposal. There are many graduate students and postdocs who sail through their academic careers never seeing how the grant sausage is made, or, at most, write the methods sections of the grant. If your PI solicits your contribution on a grant proposal, he is doing you a favor, not ‘robbing’ you. Sometimes students, especially post-docs, get this idea in their mind that they should ‘at least’ be listed as co-PI on the grant in exchange for their boss stealing all the good ideas they will Evah Have. Except in certain, very special, circumstances, it’s not going to happen. Being Co-PI means a very specific thing in terms of institutional commitment and support to the person listed as such; it’s not like throwing you on as co-first author on an article. Framing, budgeting, overhead, revising & resubmitting, etc are all just as crucial to writing a grant above the payline as a good idea and ANY experience in learning how to put a grant together before ‘Prof’ comes before your name is a BONUS. How are you going to get credit for it, you ask? From your PI’s recommendation letter, i.e. don’t piss hir off with your lamentations of intellectual property theft.
Finally, comes the issue of acknowledgement during public presentations. It is kind of lame, but not unusual, for PIs to use ‘I’ exclusively when talking about work done in the lab. Of course it would be super nice if he included a picture of you rock climbing Mount Kilimanjaro and said ‘and look at all the cool research X does!’ when your research came up in his talk. Unfortunately, that is not every lab’s culture, but do not fret. No one is sitting in the audience thinking your PI pulled all-nighters to get the super-sweet data on the slide, everyone knows there was a postdoc or grad student minion grinding their soul away to produce those results. And if your PI gets nitty-gritty, in-depth questions about the protocols and phenomena involved, guess who’s going to answer the call? You are. Your focus should be getting your n00b ass as first author on some papers before you graduate, not ensuring your PI uses proper pronouns during seminars and lectures.
Research is not a mystical lala land where anyone who comes up with a great idea is immediately given all the equipment and $$$ necessary to complete it, and then given a fast track to IEEE or Nature publications. Are there PI’s who rip their students off? Of course there are, but they are not as common as the eternally suspicious student thinks. And even if you’re getting ripped off, unless you want to go down in a blaze of glory, there’s not shit to do about it other than learn as much as possible about the process and then get the hell out. Learning to formulate your ideas for the scientific community is an important skill, and one that your PI may very well be trying to teach if you’d stop being butthurt for 2s and listen.
well said, grumpy Hermitage
I do love a good rant. Must file "stop being butthurt for 2s" in "folder of useful phrases".
Great rant! When I defended my PhD, I had no clue how to put together a complete paper, what a proposal looked like, or how to balance big picture and details in a talk. I would have liked for my professor to show me these things, "exploitative" or not.
This makes a lot of sense. I not only lack my PI's ability to toss out brilliant ideas every day like they're candy-- no, dude is seriously brilliant-- but I also lack his deep understanding of scientific networking, grantsmanship and publishing. All I can do is work hard and hope to be like that myself one day. I am sure as hell not like that now.
P.S. I find it totally hilarious that you ninja-style inserted an apostrophe in "pronouns". It's like a test that I failed, because I couldn't help noticing it instead of entirely absorbing myself in the truth of the need to get my n00b ass on some first-author papers before I graduate. Very sly.
OMG I FIXED IT FINE. Stop oppressing the ESL, mmkkay? lolcats is mai furst language.
AHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!! I thought you did it on purpose.
Word.
My PI actually did that. He is officially awesome, especially since all I had contributed at that stage was a half-assed preliminary analysis of previously generated data. (Oh, and I was in the Caribbean, not Kilimanjaro.)
In grad school I wrote a ridiculous number of grants and papers (a couple of which where I wasn't first author) and I considered myself spoiled for it. I was very grateful to my boss for his acceptance of my "low activation energy of writing" and that he trusted me enough that I only had to show him the completed draft and fix a few grammar errors or phrases that he might not like. And while I was not always first author and never appeared on the grants I knew that he's convey the breadth of my writing skill in my letters of recommendation (which in retrospect I usually wrote as well).
In regards to number two, I would say that is the exception rather than the rule in the biological sciences. In my grad program I was sitting through at least two seminars a week and half of those were profs from different institutions and I almost never saw work unacknowledged. In fact most speakers stated explicitly who did the work on the slide as it appeared rather than at the end. I think the few cases where it wasn't stated the speakers were in the 50+ category. I know in our department it was a point of pride to show how you recruited the "good" postdocs and grad students.
The T in STEM stands for tatertots. Science, Tatertots, Engineering & Mathematics.
This actually happens in industry a lot. Many engineers have decent technical knowledge but lack the skills to write a good report, a compelling memo, put together a clear presentation, or process a configuration package. I received a bunch of excellent guidance on this from my last two bosses. And most of the time they even let me take credit. It was weird how some stuff I felt that I had done 99% of would end up with one of my superiors' names on it, and other things where I'd been handheld and edited and guided the whole way would have just my name on it. Though this is not academia, so you're mostly concerned with whether you're getting "credit" at a higher level, not so much about IP or publications.
I had that drama. A mild version, mind you, but I was all like, "That's MY idea!!!!11!!!" when it came to certain parts of my project, for all reasons listed in your rant. PI paid/is paying for me to rock those ideas so I'm much more "eh" about it these days. For me, I think it was the *first* real bit of "original science" and I felt like it was a minor miracle. I now have so many cool ideas about things to do I'm giving them away. Really. I don't have time to do that, ihaztogradu8!!
PS: People are annoyed by the non-slaveatthebenchminion part of their job??!?? Why?
This is a great post. I'm always amazed at how many graduate students think that their PIs are hanging on their every word/idea like this. I even had one fellow grad student say that the only reason one of the profs wanted us to turn in a good works cited section for a class paper was so that he would be saved the work of his own literature search. It's really hilarious in light of how incredibly brilliant and successful this dude was as a scientist - like he really needed a bunch of first years to comb through the lit for him!
On more that one occasion, I've pitched an idea to my boss, he's shot it down and then two weeks later, he'll have the same great idea! I used to think this was just petty, and now I realize it is two things-
1) I obviously didn't explain my idea very well, or at least stick to my guns long enough to be sure he knew what I meant.
2) Outside of the lab, he portrays the lab like a well practiced team, where ideas mingle and brilliance is produced. It doesn't really matter who first suggested the knock-down controls, or checking enzymatic activity- he talks about his lab like a place that only works because he hires bright scientists, he is always profoundly supportive during my committee meetings, and very prompt to give acknowledgement in public.
Inside the lab, it's hard to lose that Me vs. Him mentality, since I just have to convince Him to let me graduate. But his view is a little more My Lab vs. The World (or at least the grant review/editorial Board), and he totally thinks I am on his side.
@Gerty-Z: Why thank you kindly. Now gerroff mai lawn!
@Zuska: Butthurt is generally the best description EVAH
@Prodigal: Good to hear corroborating stories from real grownups ^^
@PiT: Up
@theshortearedowl: Jealous of the Caribbean! You're not a real scientist! *pouts and sits in corner*
@CrystalVoodoo: Good to hear acknowledgements from the PI are becoming more common
@FrauTech: Tatertots! That's what I've been missing all this time. Good to hear this is at least somewhat applicable to industry *fist pump*
@Pharm Sci Grad: That's how you do it! There are too many people who refuse to acknowledge that there is any benefit whatsoever to helping their PI write anything. /facepalm
@BLG: Glad you liked it!
@C Scientist: Being able to pitch your ideas to your PI is important too. Otherwise the half-formed idea will roll around in their brain until they poop out a GREAT IDEA, which is what you had been trying to say in the first place. And then you gnash your teeth.