Unsatisfied with research project

[Arcadian]

I'm in my first semester with my PhD program, and I am involved with a research project that I don't really want to be involved with. I am actually working on two projects, call them project 1 and project 2. Project 1 is fine - it is a combination of my own ideas and an extension of a post-doc's past research in the lab, we have collected pilot data and are beginning to analyze it, and there are prospects for a publication. That is not the point of this topic, but it provides context.

Project 2 is...strange. It is a topic that does not interest me, and it has almost nothing to do with my desired program of research. Data was collected for this study three years ago, but it's one of those datasets that various researchers continue to analyze to produce easy publications. I showed up on the first day to work in my lab, and the post-docs told me about this project. They did not ask me if I wanted to work on it. The next day, they told me to begin compiling the data. There were so many problems with the coding, and the data was so disorganized, it is frankly a pain in the ass to deal with it. At first I didn't mind helping out because I was eager to get into research, and I have heard that it is good for a new grad student to be involved with more than one project. But now we're deep into the semester, things are getting busy, and I literally don't have time to work on this Project 2 in light of my other obligations. And yet every day, I am pushed to get more work done on it. Now, my adviser wants me to present analyses by next week.

The only reason why I might want to keep working on this is because I might get a publication out of it. But is it really beneficial to be a third/fourth author on a paper that has absolutely nothing to do with my future research? And it sort of pisses me off that everyone in my lab just assumed I would want to work on this without asking me, despite the fact that there are lots of other research projects in and around our lab that I would rather be working on. My adviser is just really insistent that this project is important, but I completely disagree. Frankly, I view this entire project as frivolous, difficult to generalize, and uninteresting to most people. My adviser even seems to think this might be dissertation material down the road, and I do NOT want this to be my dissertation topic.

I'm debating whether I should press on and get this done, or just tell my adviser that I don't care about it anymore. If I press on, that might create the false impression that I care about it. But of course it's hard to tell someone that I don't care about their research program.

[Genomic Repairman]

You might find this project or projects frivolous but your PI may be emphasizing them so that he can churn out some published or preliminary data in order to get a grant to study what is going on. You can and should carry more than one project, you can get your name on another paper (wherever in the authorship list it may be) and it allows a project to get wrapped up and not go cold. Plus it will serve as an extra chapter in your thesis.

As far as projects go, remember your PI is your boss and what they say is law. If they tell you to do the project, do the project. If you really feel this isn't a good thing for you, its time to switch labs and do it quick, don't waste even a single day.