All you ever need to know
I never really learned to work well with others. I suppose that was one of those essential skills I should have picked up in kindergarten, but never quite got to. This lack of teamwork skills plagues me to this day.
My crisis du jour yesterday was putting together an abstract for a conference coming up. I didn't realize that the abstract solicitation had come out, and this particular conference is limiting the contributions to 240 posters. 193 abstracts had been submitted. Mine was written in an hour and out to collaborators by mid-afternoon. Here's where I begin to vent.
I've had some serious issues with some of my collaborators. Authorship, for one. My advisor is part of a pretty large collaboration and this group has collected the data that I am using for my thesis over the course of the last 4-5 years. So I appreciate that they all deserve authorship and the opportunity for input on my papers. (And I get over the fact that none of them add my name to their papers despite my having been part of the observing team since I started here.) But I have been chastised in the past for putting too many authors on an abstract for a poster at a bi-annual meeting. We're not talking about an earth-shattering Nature paper here. It should not have been a big deal. Yet I got a serious email-bitch slap for that "mishap" of mine. I've also been instructed to add a former undergraduate student of one of my collaborators as an author to a journal paper that I wrote. The claim here is that this undergrad did some work similar to mine a while back and deserves to get some recognition. Never mind that I have neither met this student nor used any of their work or results in my paper. Their former advisor just want to get them some published credit.
So imagine my joy at sitting here still, more than 24 hours later, waiting patiently for my collaborators to get back to me with their critical reviews of all 250 words in my paragraph and a half-long abstract. All while there are 32 spots remaining for the conference. I seriously do not like working with other people sometimes.
My crisis du jour yesterday was putting together an abstract for a conference coming up. I didn't realize that the abstract solicitation had come out, and this particular conference is limiting the contributions to 240 posters. 193 abstracts had been submitted. Mine was written in an hour and out to collaborators by mid-afternoon. Here's where I begin to vent.
I've had some serious issues with some of my collaborators. Authorship, for one. My advisor is part of a pretty large collaboration and this group has collected the data that I am using for my thesis over the course of the last 4-5 years. So I appreciate that they all deserve authorship and the opportunity for input on my papers. (And I get over the fact that none of them add my name to their papers despite my having been part of the observing team since I started here.) But I have been chastised in the past for putting too many authors on an abstract for a poster at a bi-annual meeting. We're not talking about an earth-shattering Nature paper here. It should not have been a big deal. Yet I got a serious email-bitch slap for that "mishap" of mine. I've also been instructed to add a former undergraduate student of one of my collaborators as an author to a journal paper that I wrote. The claim here is that this undergrad did some work similar to mine a while back and deserves to get some recognition. Never mind that I have neither met this student nor used any of their work or results in my paper. Their former advisor just want to get them some published credit.
So imagine my joy at sitting here still, more than 24 hours later, waiting patiently for my collaborators to get back to me with their critical reviews of all 250 words in my paragraph and a half-long abstract. All while there are 32 spots remaining for the conference. I seriously do not like working with other people sometimes.
posted by Meredith | 10:24 PM
4 Comments:
Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.
With ya man, I failed "sharing" in kindergarten. Working with other people is soooo over-rated. ;-)
You people are the ones I have to explain to their parents how people skills will, in fact, affect them in the long run. They really never see a need.
I don't think it's ever occurred to me to send around a conference abstract to all the co-authors, and I know I don't recieve the ones other people put my name on. Of course, odds are I'll change the list of authors between abstract submission and presentation anyway. This may be one of those situations where "Oops, it's already been submitted," comes in handy.
Post a Comment
<< Home