Day 23
The latest casualty of the
University of Chicago’s budget cutbacks is yours truly. I was laid off… via
email forward. Bruce did it classy: Rather than telling me in person or making
a phone call, Bruce literally (e-)mails it in.
Literally, the guy just forwarded the message from the university
financial people; no introduction, no offer of condolence, no “hey, I thought
you might be interested in this!” Just a
forward from the financial people informing him that the university would be
unable to extend my employment for another year. In just over two weeks, I will
be crossing the line from man to bum.
So much for holding out for
a better offer. Sitting at the computer, I type out two emails. The first is to
Bruce, in which I express my belief that a man who claims to regularly brave
gang-occupied Chicago should have the courage to tell an employee they’re out
of luck. The second is to the biotech start-up guy in California, asking when I
can start.
Day 24-40
The next morning, there is
only one reply email in my inbox. Start-up guy is happy I’ll be joining the
team. I’ll be a real “value add,” he says. Bruce never bothers to reply. In
fact, he never speaks to me in person again. In an unparalleled feat of
passivity, Bruce manages to avoid me for the remaining two-and-a-half weeks of
my tenure. He accomplishes this by
refusing to enter his own laboratory, preferring to issue his most pressing
orders by summoning others into his heavily fortified office.
To be fair to Bruce, I contributed
to my own demise in a very significant way: I deliberately sabotaged my own
career. Let’s flesh this out a bit: To understand the life of a recent PhD in
biological sciences, you must understand that there are a plethora of jobs, but
few of them are any good. ‘Postdoc’ jobs are a dime a dozen. You toil away in a
lab, doing the same crap you did as a grad student, trying to build up a list
of impressive scientific publications that will woo a university to hire you as
a tenure-track faculty member.
In theory, this is OK. In
practice, it works horribly. The reasons for it are complicated, but can be
boiled down to supply and demand: professors bring in large numbers of graduate
students to use as cheap labor, creating an oversupply of new PhDs. Meanwhile,
federal support for scientific research is flat, making for more hands trying
to grab an ever-shrinking piece of pie. In practice, postdocs slave along for
progressively longer periods, with most of them eventually burning out and
finding alternative careers. At the time of this writing, exactly zero of my 50
or so classmates has graduated to a bona fide professor job.
As I said, anyone can get a
postdoc job. I don’t think I even had to show proof I had a PhD to get mine,
and this was at the University of Chicago, an ostensibly prestigious place to
work. Once I showed up, two things quickly became clear: First, my desire to
run on the postdoc treadmill for six or seven years was effectively
nonexistent. Second, my chances to do meaningful, high-impact work were not
good; Bruce had meandered into an obscure area of cell biology that no one –
other than him – seemed to care about. Since everyone has to spend at least a
couple of years as a postdoc, I was prepared to mail it in until I would be
considered a viable candidate for some other job. I wasn’t going to tear myself
apart trying to do something spectacular, because
this wasn’t a job. It was, technically, training. Training for an academic
system I had no intention of participating in, but was otherwise trapped in for
the near future. If this sounds bitter, it’s not. It’s just reality.
I spent over two years in
Chicago, playing the game. While I had been a type A graduate student. I worked
9 to 5, which gave me plenty of time to do other things. And I made use of that
time: I started a serious relationship, wrote and published a (non-science)
book, and did several Ironman triathlons. Ironically, this apathy contributed
greatly to the adventure I was about to embark on.
Almost all academic science
is funded through grants, most often through the federal government. Academics
compete for grants like dogs over a bone. Getting a grant is prestigious. I’d
had one as a graduate student. As a postdoc, getting a grant entitled two full
years of funding. This was money saved to a PI and, as such, Bruce was keen on
me getting a grant.
Here’s where things get
hairy: Due to the fine print, winning a grant would actually mean a small pay
cut. Bruce was supported by a lovely private foundation that provided me with
some extra financial incentives. For someone actually wanting to be a
professor, the prestige of the award far outweighed the incremental loss of
income. I, however, was not inclined to part with my hard-earned ducats over some
hollow (and ultimately meaningless) award. Thus was bred a unique situation: a
scientist who didn’t want a grant.
Flatly telling my boss to
fuck off was obviously not wise. I was also worried about the fallout from
coming clean and telling him why I felt I should not pursue a grant. After all,
this was a man whose whole life was about science. I once shared a cab from
O’Hare with Bruce, and all he could talk about was the epigenetic regulation of
flatworm development. It got so bad I was trying to chat up the Somali cab
driver about whether he knew any pirates. Anyway, telling this man I was
effectively out of academia might have disrupted him to the point where he might
murder-suicide us.
Faced with such unpleasant
choices, I did what anyone in my position would do: Stall. I’ll admit it: I did
almost everything in my power to passively resist the “advancement” of my
career through winning this grant. I even not-so-subtly asked my colleagues for
recommendation letters that reflected my apathy for award. I am not proud of
this. For starters, my boss put a tremendous amount of effort into the project.
We sat in his office for interminable hours, poring over the strategies to
curry favor with the bureaucrats in Washington who would decide my fate.
I accomplished my goal of
shooting myself in the foot: The grant came within a hair of getting funding,
but was ultimately rejected. Six months later, Bruce had spent away my salary
(see Day 1) and I’d been jettisoned from the cushy foundation I’d clung so
stubbornly to. It’s marvelous how a series of small actions can set me on a
course that now seems inevitable.
It’s my last day in
Chicago. Tomorrow, I will load my stuff into my car and drive 2,200 miles to my
new home. It’s the result I envisioned, just not how I envisioned it. I’m about
to walk out of the prison. The question is, can I survive on the outside?
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