yesnomaybe

This is more of a rant than a question, but maybe others can commiserate or offer advice. This will be somewhat long, so thank you in advance for your patience. I am currently a graduate student at a top program in the US in my field. I am set to defend my dissertation in a few months, after which I will presumably move on with the next phase of my life. I've been on the job market this year, starting in the fall, and still continuing now. I've done quite well for being ABD - several interviews for TT jobs with top schools at my field's professional conference, a couple of skype interviews, but only one has converted into a campus visit and honestly it's not a job I want. I'll go on my visit next week and see how it works out, but I hear they have an inside candidate so I'm not holding my breath. By all objective measures I have a very strong CV and probably good chances of getting a job in a couple of cycles, or so I am told. I am very grateful to have strong support from all of my professors, but at this point in time "I'm sure you'll be alright, someone with your skills has to be able to get a good job" is not making me feel much better. I am very tired of the uncertainty of it all. Since in all likelihood I won't have a permanent job this year, I won't know where I'll be living next year for at least a few more months - anywhere from March to June (that's if I get a postdoc, which everyone seems certain will happen later in the season). I am not a US citizen and do not want to go back to my home country, so this is introducing some extra anxiety. I need to get something or I will have to leave. Wherever I go won't be permanent, so I'll need to do the whole job market thing again, starting as soon as I arrive at my new postdoc/job, because most postdocs and temporary positions in my field are just one year long. So more uncertainty. On top of all this, my SO is also a grad student who is graduating and going through a similar job market process in his field, with unclear conclusions. This has put a lot of stress on our relationship, so much so that we have talked about breaking up in order to ease the pressure. We are not in a place to decide about staying together forever, but having a long-distance relationship for an unknown number of years without that commitment seems crazy. But we do love each other, and want to be together at least for now. Long story short, I don't know if my relationship will last, if I can live in the country I want to, if I'll have a job, where and for how long. All of this is making me question whether or not it is all worth it. Some days I'm about ready to just leave without the PhD, though my rational self knows that would be a really really stupid thing to do.The stress is making it hard for me to sleep at night and concentrate during the day, so I am having a hard time getting any work done on my dissertation. In fact, almost all of my time between November and now has been dedicated to the job market (which as I mentioned hasn't exactly been the success I had hoped for), but I really need to get back to work now. My campus visit is next week, so I absolutely need to get my act together. I may (for some jobs, whose outcome is of unknown at the moment) need to defend in about three months, and I'm no where near ready right now. I've been staring at my job talk slides all day today, but haven't even been able to make one slide. My friends say everyone goes through this process ("oh yeah, that was the worst year of my life") and hating your dissertation is how you know it's really time to graduate and move on, but it's still hard to get motivated. I used to really enjoy my work, and now I'm just too tired or too jaded to care. I am making arrangements to talk to a therapist because I think being able to articulate this all will help, but I also wonder if anyone here can commiserate or has advice to share on how to make it through this difficult period of my life. Thank you for reading this far, I know this was quite a lot, but it was good to write it all down.

Sheesh. That never even occurred to me. Fortunately I think these guys won't do anything like that. They're just taking advantage of the situation that has been handed to them. Thanks, I think your way of characterizing the difference between what is deemed acceptable behavior for men vs. women is spot on. I think I'll try and concentrate on the good things that are going on in my research and not dwell on others enjoying the results as well. Can't say I'm happy about it, but I've accepted that I'll always have to work harder than the men around me for the same rewards and so I guess this is just an instantiation of that.

Thank you for your replies. The lab I am working at is pretty new. In fact, this batch of abstracts and the paper are the first things to come out of it. So, for better or worse, there is not established authorship protocol. I had made sure beforehand that I would be first author on anything that was primarily based on my work (which happily is everything that was submitted, actually) and I had agreed to the prof's suggestion that X should get credit for his contribution to the stats, but it never occurred to me to say that Y should not get credit. His name didn't come up until the very last minute, when we submitted the abstracts. We worked until the VERY LAST MINUTE and literally submitted ON the deadline. So when X said that Y should get credit, the prof had to make a fast decision and said OK. I didn't even have time to object. Right after this X sent Y an email inviting him to participate in writing the journal paper (again, without asking the prof); the meeting was the next morning and again I had no time to object. Now it may be too late to do anything, but I'm still pissed. Especially since during that meeting Y was making fun of me with regard to an aspect of how I do my work (apparently it's funny that I make detailed checklists of all my tasks). Now, the prof is in a very delicate situation. None of the students in the lab are actually funded by the lab itself, we are funded directly by our department. That means that we don't have to work for any specific prof on any specific project we don't want to. From his perspective, he want as many people as possible to actively participate in projects, and he wants as many publications to come out of the lab as possible. I may have influenced the decision to include Y if I had time to discuss it with the prof, but who's to say that he wouldn't have made the same decision? I do know that the prof realizes that my contribution was greater than that of others, and he has been more than fair in giving me authorship credits (after all, he didn't have to invite me to write a paper with him in the first place). I realize that approaching this will be very delicate; I worry about blaming others too much, about (justified, but still) whining about carrying a larger load than others, about Y's attitude towards me (X's also, to a lesser extent), about the way decisions are made. I get along very well with the prof and I don't want to antagonize him. I don't want to come off as threatening to leave, although if things go on like this I can't see any other solution except removing myself entirely from the situation. Ugh. Why does everything have to be so complicated?

Hi all, I am a regular poster on this board but would like to keep anonymous for the purposes of this post. <rant / details> I recently joined a lab in my department headed by a relatively inexperienced professor. Over the summer he managed to recruit five people to work on three different projects funded by an NSF award that he had won a couple of years ago. I led one project, a team of two students led another project, and a third team led the last project. During the semester, three of the five people basically stopped contributing to the projects, with me left working on my project and one person, call him X, completing the project he started with his team-member, Y. My project turned out to produce very good results, which I have used to expand the project and produce contributions of my own; the other project turned out to be pretty disappointing and at most could be regarded as a control for my results (though pretty unnecessary, since I ran my own pilot and control experiments regardless). This means that throughout the semester, I have been working on designing experiments (4 in total), writing up experiment items (ca. 200 items per experiment, a matlab command script, instructions), proctoring (twice a week, morning to afternoon for the last two months), analyzing results and coming up with a theory to explain them. X helped me run some of the stats. A few weeks ago the professor and I decided to submit the results of two of my projects (the NSF one, plus one of my own developments of the project) to two conferences. I did the actual abstract-writing and it was decided that X would also get authorship credit. The professor wanted to mention X's experiment results in the abstracts and he did help with stats, so I was not terribly upset. I am new to lab-work and from what I understand that's how things happen in that world, so it didn't seem out of line. But then X said that his team member, Y, should also be given authorship credit, and the professor agreed. This whole discussion happened just minutes before the submission deadline (we were working into the night on those abstracts) and though I objected, there was no time to discuss and the professor said to add him. So Y, who did not contribute anything throughout the semester, is now co-author on two of my abstracts. To make matters worse (well, also better) - we are writing together a paper, which the professor has been invited to submit to a leading journal in our field. Specifically, the professor invited X and me to write the paper with him; and X promptly wrote an email to Y and invited him to join the writing. Again, this is last minute: the deadline is in 9 days. Again, Y did nothing during the whole semester; he doesn't understand the experiments, the results or the theory we have for explaining them. But, of course he did not decline. He showed up to our meeting where we decided who would do what. . and since he really can't do much of anything, he is "helping" X with his part; the prof and I each will do a third of the paper. </rant> Now, rant over. I have a few questions. I had originally decided not to confront the professor about his choice to include Y. I do appreciate it very much that he has given me many opportunities during the semester, including funding to run my experiments, mentorship and support in designing them, and first authorship on all our work. But three weeks have gone by and I still feel taken advantage of. I have a meeting scheduled with the prof for early next week and I am wondering what you think of the situation. As I wrote, I am inexperienced in this type of work; it's a unique opportunity in my department so I can't switch labs or stop working with this prof (nor do I want to). I understand that it's probably too late to take away credits from Y, but: should I still bring this issue up? The thinking is that since this is a new lab, what happens now is likely to become protocol. I don't want my work to be credited to other people like this again. Separately from this, or not: I am the only female student in the lab. I feel like the two other students, X and Y, are letting themselves take advantage of me, and I feel like I have to do three times as much work to get the same kind of acknowledgment as them. Specifically, X did stats and gets co-authorship on my paper; I did matlab coding, but in a discussion about turning X and Y's project (that used this code) into an abstract of its own (and again, pretty soon it became apparent that it's not interesting enough -- which cut the discussion short), the prof said to X "...and I don't know if yesnomaybe should be co-author on that," to which X agreed. I didn't say anything, and I'm still mad at myself because of that. Thirdly, I feel like Y behaves strangely towards me: ignoring emails I send, making little snide remarks about me in other people's presence. I have nothing concrete to back the feeling that he is being chauvinistic, but I hate it that this person gets credit for work I did. I wonder if it's attitude towards female students, or maybe he just doesn't like me. .. should I bring this up and say I don't want to work with Y anymore, or suck it up and accept that there will always be some people that will act like jerks? Thanks for reading this and for any comments. As you may have noticed, I am pretty upset. I don't have experience with this type of work and unfortunately my department doesn't have any young female faculty members who I feel like I could approach for more advice. Any advice from those of you who are more familiar with situations like this will be greatly appreciated.