You are sacrificing your future

I received this email today from a faculty member:

> Hi ...,

>

> ... has told me that you have decided to withdraw from our PhD 

> program.  I am very sorry to hear this and I am writing to see if I 

> can change your mind.  You are a bright and talented young person.  

> You are so close to finishing and I would be disappointed if you did 

> not to receive acknowledgment and your doctorate degree for the work 

> you have performed over the past 4 years.  I would like you to think 

> carefully about if you really want to end your chance of being Dr. 

> ... and the future possibilities that this degree would bring for 

> you.  You already have a thesis drafted so all that is left is 

> defending.  I know you are frustrated and angry with your situation 

> but I would hate for you to sacrifice your future.  I will be around 

> on Monday and Tuesday afternoon next week if you would like to meet 

> and talk.

>

> Warm regards,

> ...

That's what I wanted to answer

Hi ...,

Thank you for your message.
I'm not the one you need to talk to and convince to act differently. My position and demands on my "situation" are clear and the department and the university have chosen to treat me like dirt. I was scientifically raped and they decided to watch me being raped over and over again and not interfere. What you are asking me know is to keep the child. No! Thank you. I'm not interested.

The department doesn't even have the courage to apologize to me. I don't want to be part of a department who tolerates what has happened to us. It is indeed a shame to be part of that department and I choose not to. It is a fucking big shame for me to be part of a group that tolerates student abuse and chooses to be silent about it.

Leaving Rice does not in anyway mean that there will be no chance for me to become a doctor. Do you really think you are the only university with a graduate program? I already AM a doctor; more qualified than many others, more qualified than some of the seminar speakers. I didn't sacrifice my future. Maybe you should ask yourself who did and then you will understand my decision. Can you imagine the opportunities that leaving this hell will bring me? Maybe you should try. I can imagine infinitely many future possibilities. The earth is so big!

I know my capabilities; I prefer to keep my dignity than to have a doctorate. I prefer to choose my affiliation based on what is important to me and not how cool two letters before my name would sound. I take my future in my own hands. Sorry, Rice lost the game. It is over.


But I never did. I don't respect that department enough to talk to them about how I think about them.

Eureka Eureka! It's him.

I recently came across a blog where I read

According to Wiedmer (2011, p. 38)  the bully at work often

• Possess vindictiveness in private but charming in public;
• Display self-assuredness to mask insecurity;
• Portray self as wonderful but actual behaviors contradict this
• Can’t distinguish between leadership and bullying behaviors
• Counter attacks and denies when asked to clarify
• Manipulates others through guilt
• Are obsessed with controlling others
• Use charm and behave appropriately when superiors are present
• Are convincing and compulsive liars in order to account for matters at hand
• Excel at deception, lack conscience, and are dysfunctional

And basically this is a very good description of my stupid advisor.

Here is a link to the source: 
http://bulliedacademics.blogspot.com/2013/01/academic-bullying-in-social-work.html

We know he is an asshole!

The problems I had with my stupid advisor made me take my complaints to the department. I thought the people there were logical enough to understand my complaints and help me get out of my mysteries. When I first talked to members of the department's graduate studies committee they all confirmed my accusations verbally. I was advised to document everything and Indeed I have been keeping written details of every meeting.

To give you a background, my stupid advisor was threatened to be sued by a previous student for repeatedly asking for personal favors. He did the same with me. He asked me to drive him to the dentist, wait there and drop him back home. On another occasion he asked me to take him to the hospital, wait for him and take him back. Just to clarify, these were not emergency situations. On each occasion I first said no and then was asked so many times until I gave up and said yes just to shut him up.

He was also banned from teaching undergraduate courses because he showed up half drunk to the class, missed quite a few classes and was extremely rude to students. He told them there were too stupid to become chemical engineers. Undergraduates should be saved from such behavior but apparently it is ok for a person with alcohol problems to supervise graduate students.

Dr. Michael Wong admitted that he has also experienced the paranoid behavior of my stupid advisor and that he is manipulative and tries to change facts to his advantage.  I told him to inform any students who want to work with my stupid advisor to contact me so that I can tell them what mistake they are making and he said he himself will make sure that my stupid advisor won't get any new students. So if he thinks my stupid advisor shouldn't take any new students why hasn't he informed the university? If he is not capable of handling students why should I work with him? Dr. Wong didn't do anything for me though. He "politely" threw me out of his office telling me his time is precious. What about my time? What about my life?

I talked to other faculty members. They made statements like "he is psychologically unstable", "he frequently lies", "he is manipulative", "there has been similar problems with other students", "he is a liability for the university", "he does not understand your experimental results", "your situation is a clear example of abuse" and "my favorite one he is taking very bright students from your country and takes advantage of them". You! Distinguished professor at Rice University! You know that and you watched it happen? You let it happen and didn't do anything about it? I'm speechless.

I also went to the counseling center at Rice and they told me I had a real case.

I was later passed to talk to the department chair, Kyriacos Zygourakis. When I started my complaints, he stopped me and told me I do not need to express my complaints. He has known my stupid advisor long enough and is aware of his unprofessional behaviors. To put it in his words we are used to his you.are.great-you.are.worthless games. You knew his judgement was impaired and you didn't report it? Could you explain why my stupid advisor was allowed to do the same to another student?

All these people knew what an asshole he was and either didn't have the courage or didn't care enough to do anything about it. Mostly though they told me they are willing to help me and be the hero and get me out of my mysteries. They told me I should talk to the dean of graduate studies about my complaints and to Russell Barnes because my situation falls under hostile work environment issues. I will telling the rest of the story which didn't end up having a happy ending in future posts.

Sending Videos

My research at some point involved imaging domains of fluorescent colloids. I needed to take long videos of these domains for further analysis. In these analyses it was important to store each frame with no compression to avoid loosing significant data. I had about >2 hours of video stored with no compression. The capacity I needed to store them was greater than 2 gigabytes.

Wanting to be able to show my videos to other groups and scientist especially at conferences and presentations, I uploaded the videos on youtube and labeled them as unlisted so that only people with a link would be able to see them.

So one day my stupid advisor sends me an email asking me for ALL my videos although I had previously sent him many links to those videos. So I go to my playlist and share it with him. He replies back to me that he has not received any videos. This time I share it again with him, myself and my officemate to ensure that the sharing actually works. My officemate and I receive the link and everything works perfectly. He again replies back and claims he has not received any videos.

My head starts to smoke so this time I just forward the sharing email I got from youtube to his email address and tell him that My officemate and I have tested the link and it works. He this time replied and I quote: "Cannot open attachment please reformat."

After laughing myself to death for a long long time and trying, really really trying to stay polite, I reply: "It is a link. You click on it."

That was one of the moments I realized how my time is being wasted with this stupid advisor with no fucking good reason. I shouldn't be spending time explaining the difference between a link and an attachment to my stupid advisor. I don't know where people who can't distinguish an attachment from a link should be but one is clear they shouldn't be a professor at Rice!

When I save a word document where does it go?

Another one of my favorite moments with my stupid advisor was when he asked me this question: "When I save a word document where does it go?"

So I answer it will be stored wherever you specify. You can tell it to be on your desktop, your documents folder or any other folder you want.

He being all confused tells me he doesn't know where the document went and keeps yelling at me that the document is lost.

I don't even bother to explain to him that saved documents don't go missing on a computer and of course he does not remember anything from the infinite times I explained him how to do a search for files on his computer. He again lost the paper on which he wrote the instructions.

I find the default saving route and show him where his document is. He tells me I am a genius and I see a corpse of a tenured professor fading loosing respect and credibility with every passing moment.

It's raining JPEGs

This story is written by a contributor:

As I was writing my thesis, I had to send a draft to my advisor while he was out of the country for a while. This was an advanced draft, so it was about 300 pages, and I sent it as a PDF, of course. Rather than using Acrobat's little comment widget feature to suggest revisions, my advisor insisted that he would rather print the whole thing out, and write his comments and suggestions in the margins with a pen. Of course, he's still in another country, so to get these revisions back, he would then have to scan his printed and revised copy back in as a PDF (at significantly reduced image quality, of course), and send it to me.

But he didn't even do that.

I just got his revisions back. Fifteen emails, each with a .rar archive attached. And what's in each one? Twenty. Fucking. JPEGs.