Academia is Dumb

A few weeks ago I submitted my CV for a departmental scholarship competition - it's very similar to the one I gave a presentation for last year, but this one is meant for 4th year students (while last year's was meant for 3rd years, logically) and it's worth more money. The presentations are scheduled for May 5th.

Unlike last year, when I had over 2 weeks notice, I'm looking at having less than a week's (official) notice. That's right, the presentations are scheduled for 9 days away now, and I haven't heard a peep about whether I'll be presenting or not. Since I made it to presentations last year, it's a reasonable assumption that I'll make it through the initial selection round to the group of students that give 30 minute talks, but it would still be really freaking nice to know. If I'm not presenting, fine, it would still be really nice to know. It really drives me crazy that the chair of the graduate program committee doesn't seem to think students would like more than a few days notice before presenting to the entire department. I'm sorry, at this stage of my "career," the idea of giving a talk to the entire department still freaks me out big time. More so than the talk I'm scheduled to give at a national meeting the first week of June.

At subgroup today I asked the Queen what the hell the deal was. She said the deadline had been extended, so they hadn't decided who was presenting yet, but that they would Friday. Assuming whoever is presenting is actually notified Friday, that leaves them a week. Personally, I'd really like a little more notice than that. My labmate presented in this competition last year, and she said she definitely had more than a week's notice. Extending the deadline to submit your CV sounds to me like not enough people applied. I'd assume my classmate who won last year's competition submitted - it seems traditional for the 3rd year competition winner at least to present in the 4th year competition. My entering class was unusually small - only 25 students, as opposed to the 35ish that is more typical, and we had a couple people drop out, a couple people take masters degrees, a couple people transferred when a professor left, and one just defended last week. So there aren't that any of us who would be eligible, and when you consider that the current chair of the graduate program committee will insist that people have publications at least submitted, there is really only a small handful of us who already have stuff out the door. This unspoken stipulation is pretty well-known, so I know a number of my very talented classmates who have done really good work but haven't yet submitted any manuscripts (for a huge variety of reasons) didn't bother applying at all. Talking to my friends, none of us even knew one other person who had definitely applied, which is completely ridiculous.

While the rumored/inferred numbers may sound like they're in my favor, I can't help but think this is a huge waste of my time. There are an awful lot of departmental politics that goes into deciding these things. For example, a student from E's group has never been selected to present in either of these competitions, despite in some cases clearly being more qualified than other applicants. I know that I gave the best presentation last year. It may sound super arrogant, but I'm really not exaggerating. I'm a pretty decent public speaker, and I know I gave a strong presentation. My classmate who won (and whom I like very much)? She mumbled, didn't look up, used really casual, bordering on inappropriate language, and spoke negatively about some of her data. What probably hurts my odds most however, is the fact that my labmate won this competition last year, and another of my labmates won the 3rd year competition the year before last (i.e. also the year before I presented). I would put a substantial amount of money on them not giving it to yet another student from my group. The idea of spending an obscene amount of time and numerous late nights preparing for this thing when I'm really quite sure I have no chance of winning is incredibly frustrating.

Since this talk that I may or may not be giving (ok, probably giving) is not very far away at all, I went ahead and talked to the Queen about what material would be best to present. Last year there was a pretty obvious answer, but this year it's not so obvious. It really drives me crazy that her response was, "I think you should go for broke. Try to get 16.9 to work." It would be really, really cool if I could manage to collect the spectra that prove this protein behaves as we think it should, but it will also be really, really, really difficult to get those spectra.

As if these experiments themselves weren't already difficult enough, further hindering my odds of getting the data I want is the currently very high demand on the relevant instrument. The instrument that I did most of my earlier research on has been down for a few months. I've been working on it since the problem developed, but there always seems to be a new problem to address, and because I absolutely have to be still getting results, I can't work on this instrument all that much. There are 3 of us heavily using the instrument in preparation for the conference, plus about another 5 people who have less, but regular and significant need of the instrument as well.

Who's excited about lots of late nights, lots of caffeine, and lots of bad food????! Speaking of which, I'm starving, and at quarter past 12, there obviously isn't anything open. Time for a trip to the vending machine I guess. I've already eaten the dinner I grabbed out of the fridge before coming back to campus after softball.

As nice as it would be to have more time to prepare, I suppose I should be glad I'm only looking at a week or so of this...