I'm currently considering graduate school, and have unfortunately read too many stories quite like this.
Do you have an idea of how prevalent this kind of micromanagement is for peers in your cohort? Do you just have a particularly unreasonable PI?
Do you have an idea of how prevalent this kind of micromanagement is for peers in your cohort? Do you just have a particularly unreasonable PI?
Is hard to find someone this bad, but the worst part was not the micromanagement. That is pretty common. It was the constant lack of appreciation, being blackmailed over the visas, his holding papers hostage for years until your loyalty was proven. A colleague has been there for 4 years of post-doc, and has 0 papers published, 6 ready to go on his desk. And the first one is from 3 years ago.
I can go on all day over this.
I resigned yesterday at the second post-doc.
The system may have helped create him, because I'd bet those two things are very connected. If the path to being published is via working other people nearly unto death, well, our history shows that there are enough people who don't have a problem that you need to rely on something other than their conscience to stop that from happening.
My wife is still in the lab. And she's already facing enough shit, + the retaliations because I've betrayed the PI by leaving. We don't need any legal crap added to the mix.
However, I can tell you that there are many investigations ongoing, ranging from sexual to misconduct to stealing research money, and that he's in hiring freeze since few months.
There's a chance he will be fired. The university seems, for once, on our side. Then, it will be my pleasure to tell the world all the details.
Good luck to you and your wife!
The usual attitude I've seen is: I don't care how much or how little time you spend in the lab, as long as you get the job done on time. Granted, "the job" may be winding twenty solenoids, each of which takes eight hours to wind, and "on time", may be seven days from now. Similarly, your advisor probably won't care if you take weekends off, but the calculation he asked you about at six on Friday still needs to be done monday morning. When you do it is your business.
In my former group there was no micromanagement, nor all this crap. There was however a shitty situation too where the bully was the golden-boy. That was the place where this happened:
A, B, C write paper, submit to his pal D.
D appoints E,F,G as reviewers.
C, and E were in school together.
F was a C student.
G sends the paper back to C to auto-review it.
C cannot be bothered, so delegates the review back to A.
A reviews his first name paper.
I don't know if it's either a different culture or if only we get to read about the bad experiences and never about the good ones - I read many stories like this one, but I've never heard it from a first-person perspective. In either case, there are places where you are treated decently as a grad student.