GingerNeuro

RIght. I agree regarding comparing myself to others and have even become friends with the Lab Manager. But it's not so much about comparing as it is being expected to do work for this person who is not even a grad student. I guess I'm having a hard time digesting the notion that one should abandon one's dignity for the sake of completing a degree. At what point does a person say to him or herself, "pursuing this degree is not worth reducing myself to a subordinate peon."

I have collected data in the past. Albeit, I'm in a Cognitive Neuroscience program and I've collected hardly any imaging data. I did one behavioral study where I collected all of the data, and some interesting results were obtained, but my advisor would rather me work on this old data. I've also collected data for other projects which I'm supposedly a secondary author on, but I had no part in conceiving of the project--in fact, our lab manager, who started off as an undergrad RA, was given a project that was of his design, and I've been asked to collect data for that on multiple occasions. Is it wrong of me to feel belittled by that experience?

In fact, what I learned from being a band leader for years is that trying to control the performance of everyone in the band results in resentment and sub-par material. For years, my partner sang in a band with me, and was pretty inexperienced. She came to me for guidance at the beginning and I did my best. However, at some point, she developed autonomy and became a great performer, but I was too busy trying to control things to see that, and she never lived up to her potential because she always felt like she was walking on egg shells. Now, we are back in a band together--she is the singer, and I don't tell her anything. She has complete creative freedom. What's the outcome? She is better than she's ever been.

"I don't tick that way" is a way of saying that I'm not going to excel doing work that I have no interest in. Would you excel doing work you have no passion for? To me, Ph.D. training is intended to make you an independent, thoughtful, and erudite scholar, capable of synthesizing knowledge to produce meaningful, expedient work. It is not a means of receiving technical training in order to complete projects which one has no interest in. If he doesn't believe in my abilities, perhaps he shouldn't have agreed to take me on as a graduate student. Correct me if I'm wrong in thinking this way--I realize that I asked for advice and am being annoying right now (this is me thinking on the page). To better contextualize this, my friend owns a business and recently told me that she has given up her tendencies to micro-manage her employees, realizing that they are much better at their job when given some creative freedom. I don't think it's too much to ask that I be given more independence, especially considering I'm the first grad student to publish under my advisor's supervision. Which is one reason I find my circumstances so perplexing--I was given the freedom to draft an extensive review article, finished it in a timely manner, and it was published swiftly thereafter. So why am I now being denied the freedom to develop my own projects?

I'm going to. My only concern is that the department head is required to report my concern to my advisor, I believe.

Sort of. We just approved secondary advisors. We have a department head, but she is very close to my advisor, and I'm not super comfortable going to her.

I've proposed several projects. I've done so verbally and written detailed reports, as well as grant applications. He has shown very little interest--but has said, "When you get these projects done, we'll sit down and think of something." The problem is that, unlike my fellow grad students, I'm funded directly by his grant, rather than the department--which is how everyone else is funded (with the exception of GRFP fellows).

I've discussed it with him. He basically told me that once I finish two more projects, he will help me come up with my own. Fast-forward 8 months and I'm flailing around with some data that is equivocal at best, and expected to publish it with sporadic input on his end. To place this in context, I'm analyzing diffusion tractography data and no one else in our department works on it, so I really have no one to go to for help and he has basically relegated my work to the bottom of the pile, so I rarely get help from him. I honestly get the feeling that he thinks I'm an idiot and given that I'm kind of a shy, introverted, and humble person, I feel like I get walked on a lot. At the same time, he's a really nice person a lot of the time. So I don't know if any of this is necessarily malicious, or if he is oblivious. He might also be manipulative. There's really no way to know.

Hi all! So I've reached an impasse in my graduate career and I don't know how to proceed. Since I've been in my program (going into my 3rd year), I've had almost no creative control over what I do. My advisor gives me projects, ones that frankly aren't very interesting to me, and I'm expected to analyze old data and publish the results. I find myself having zero intrinsic motivation because I'm not compelled by the work. On top of that, everyone else in my lab, including an RA, has been involved in projects that they had a hand in conceptualizing. Additionally, recently a fellow grad student scoffed at my lack of experience doing neuroimaging and the fact that I was working on data somebody else collected. I feel like my advisor doesn't trust me to do my own work, and as a result, I'm stuck in this loop where I'm unmotivated because the projects I'm assigned don't interest me and due to the lack of motivation, I'm not given an latitude to do my own work. It's as if my advisor is testing my ability by giving me these projects, not realizing that I don't tick that way. I was a musician for many years before becoming a scientist and as such, I'm motivated by creativity. Without the creative element, I feel like I'm doing banal, menial labor--which I've done in the past. So I guess my questions are: 1) is this normal, 2) if not, how do I address it, and 3) if it is normal and I'm misinterpreting the situation, how am I misinterpreting this situation? Thanks! -J