Warning: Rant · 10:03am Apr 13th, 2014
Feel free to ignore. I just have to write it here, or else I'd mail that to the person in question.
So, as some of you may know, I'm currently writing my MSc thesis. More exactly, after numerous technical problems (I almost lost half of the photos due to the HD failure), I finished measuring the thickness of my mice's retinas (the fact that I hate working with mice is a different thing. Not that I'm against animal research, work with them is simply frustrating), and then I made the plots comparing the various groups of mice.
After that, I sent the plots to my promotor – a PhD, whose task is to check my research and help me with it. Well, that's a theory. Recently she started to complain that I'm a bit slow with my research. Says the woman who needed almost a year to come up with the title of my research. Okay, nevermind. When I sent her the first version of the plots, she told me that generally they're okay, but the method I used to make them is wrong. Okay, I changed it and sent them back to her on Friday.
On Saturday morning I got mail:
Thank you very much. Too bad, it's not exactly what I meant. We'll meet on Monday and I'll tell you what's wrong.
Then what exactly is what you meant? And I'm slow with research, right? If I were a promotor, I'd write a mail to a student, explaining what's wrong, so he could spend the weekend correcting it, instead of fucking wondering what I mean. Too bad, she prefers only vague explanations. Seriously, I receive better and more detailed feedback from Tired Old Man, the proofreader of A Kingdom Divided than from her. Really. The fucking fanfic about ponies getting more feedback than my thesis? That's not how this fucking universe is supposed to work...
Well, I remembered from the last meeting with her that she wanted me to do some more plots. I think they're unnecessary, because they're basically the same as the ones I did earlier, but arguing with a PhD is like playing chess with a pigeon. It'll shit on the board and announce that it won. So, I made them and sent them, hoping that it was what she meant.
Well, apparently it didn't. Today I got mail from her. Out of the blue she asks me how I measured the retinas because she thinks I did it wrong and I should do that one more time. Jesus Christ, I sent you the first measured photos six months ago, how come you suddenly notice that they're wrong, dumb cunt? It's you who's a fucking eye doctor here, not me...
Second thing is that I didn't make all the corrections of the plots. Well, I spent most of the Friday evening, which I should spend curing my sore throat, on correcting those fucking plots according to what she said. I have no fucking clue what she wants this time.
She ends her mail telling me that my approach to writing a thesis is too nonchalant and that if it continue like that, I'll have to write a new thesis in an other department. Well, fuck you too. Maybe I'd get a promotor whose comments I wouldn't have to interpret first, like a fucking poetry. And maybe I'd get something without mice. Seriously, apart from the fact that I write a thesis, I have to clean the cages, feed the mice, filter water for them, perform OCT scans (not only of my mice, of other people's mice too. Simply because I'm one of the two people in the department who can use this machine, and the other one is too busy. Hmm, if I leave the department, she'll be pissed. Also, this stuff cost about a million Euro, and the only two people who can use it are a student and a post-graduate student?) everything for free (well, recently she considered giving me 1000 zł – which is about 250 Euro or $330 – for my work. But I think it's no longer a thing). My friends and I are volunteering in there for three years. We won three first places on various medical students' conferences. And that woman can't even get my name right. I sent her three or four versions of the introduction to my thesis (last one on February, I think) – apparently she only skimmed the first one and still asks me to fix things I fixed in the second version. And, mind you, I wrote it without even knowing exactly the topic of my work.
I'm seriously considering changing the department, writing a new thesis and presenting it next year. Even though my friends and family tell me not to do so.
Jesus, talk about getting fucked around.
2005921
Exactly. The same woman told my friend to work in the lab for 600 hours (sic!) because "she didn't see him working enough". We consider leaving the department just to see it drown in the murine shit...
Not to mention that half of the delay in my research came from the fact that she couldn't get which group of mice in my research was which one (to be honest, it got so complicated that even I got lost in it).
Do as your heart tells you. If it tells you to switch departments, screw them all, in a not-so-polite way.
Woah, man
maybe if you leave that department, they'll beg you to get back!
haha, no, just keep up with that. it'll be over soon 
2019852
So far I'm not leaving. Apparently that woman just had a really bad weekend, because she also sent similar mail to the other worker...