"If I had more time I would have written a shorter letter"
And when you read their comments, you get through the first few pages and think, "Hey this isn't so bad."
And then you get to the part where you're introducing your original work, and you start to wonder how hard it would be to live on minimum wage.
Yup. Revisions knocked me down Several pegs... all the way from "I think I'm competent" to "how did I even get accepted into the program if this is what they think of my work?"
A reviewer once remarked that I'm not worthy of being in my field of study. I'm so much happier since I left academy behind. I obviously love science, but fuck the current culture and people that enable and encourage such behaviour.
Goddamn... yeah, my PhD program was fucking toxic, but if nothing else, it was a learning experience. Doubly so when my advisor gave me the bad news that I failed the third prelim, and wouldn't be continuing on. I was so relieved... it kind of hit me right then.
Careful, snail mail takes a while. "Four days later" (!)
Or when you ask for feedback on the structure and what to include before you polish a bunch of stuff that would be cut or rewritten, only to be returned a half-finished low-effort style ("grammar") nit-pick of a draft with increasingly angry comments about repeated "errors", culminating with swearing at you, how dare you waste his time, how dare you not read his Grammar_Lesson.docx (God help you, you did) and submit a draft that doesn't follow its rules (it was largely compliant), you're a native English speaker anyhow and should know better, and what the fuck is compound 12a, you didn't define it anywhere but keep referring to it (it was defined in-text in the previous paragraph and in the figure above it), fix it all and the rest of the doc before you bother him again.
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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