In undergrad, my lab had a fantastic post-doc who made everyone (including the undergrads!) feel like valued members of the group. He not only organized the group to get work done efficiently, but also created a warm and friendly social atmosphere with regular group lunches/dinners and just a general sense of belonging and family. The culture of my lab here at Princeton is vastly different. Grad students often feel a lot of pressure to get work done unreasonably quickly. We set unrealistic goals and then constantly feel like failures when we have to report at group meetings that we didn’t meet our deadlines. Expectations are often unclear and the majority of the burden of the lab’s work usually falls on only a few graduate students. It can be difficult to value one’s own time and to set healthy boundaries when that is not the culture of the group. Individually, the people in the lab are wonderful, lovely people, but together, we have created a somewhat toxic environment. It has taken me quite some time to recognize that I can’t be dependent on my advisor or post docs to guide my education and career trajectory. As grad students, we are not technicians in a boss/employee model. Our purpose is not to churn out work for our advisors (especially not at the expense of our sanity) but to learn and grow so that we can prepare ourselves for our longer-term careers. We are in grad school because we decided to be here to better ourselves. Realizing that has been incredibly empowering and liberating for me. We shouldn’t have to be afraid to tell our advisors that we don’t want a career in academia or that we dislike one aspect of lab work and would prefer to focus our time on a different set of tasks. Something that has helped me feel better is to try to be more like that post-doc I admired so much in my undergrad. I don’t get to work with him anymore, but perhaps I can be some approximation of that person for the younger students in my lab, and that gives me hope.
Anecdote #13
