When you work under someone who is abrasive and rude, everything you do becomes a challenge.

That was the situation for the research student in this story, who had to study under a professor who seemed to hate him and refused to help him in any real way.

When a major reporting deadline for a government grant was approaching, he tried to get information from her to ensure the report would be submitted on time. Unfortunately, she snapped at him and told him to leave her alone before he could express his concerns, so he walked away.

Finally, she asked him what he needed, and he explained that he just wondered if she needed help with the report. She immediately realized she had forgotten all about it, but the deadline had already passed. She lost her grant money, and he felt perfectly satisfied.

Malicious Compliance with my Graduate School Mentor

I went to graduate school to get my doctorate in microbiology a few years ago.

This sounds like a long and difficult process.

Normally in a doctoral program in biological science you join a lab that is headed by a PI (principal investigator) this is the lead scientist in the lab.

They are at least at the assistant professor level in the USA. The PI mentors you until you become an independent scientist and then you defend your research to earn your degree. It can take 4-6 years.

I’m sure this was very frustrating.

I had an extremely atypical grad school experience. I had the terrible misfortune of joining a lab run by a very junior PI who, a couple of years into my research training, decided she wanted to quit academic science and go have a baby.

Good for her. But I got screwed. Normally you would have to start over completely from scratch.

Good thing he made it this far.

But I had already passed the midpoint of my training and, more importantly, I had already acquired my own funding. Plus the PI who quit had just been awarded a major grant from the government.

As a side bar: when you get a grant to do science at a university the university gets a (big) portion of the money.

The university doesn’t want to lose that money.

When my PI left, the university had to either give the money back to the government or try to convince the funding agency that another PI could do the work.

Obviously they chose to keep the money and I was more or less forced to work under the “supervision” of a different PI.

Working under someone like this is awful.

This lady is and was terrible. Beyond being an awful scientist, she was extremely hateful and petty. She lost her funding a couple of years prior and only had one student left in her lab who was on their way out.

She had a reputation for being an awful mentor. Right from the start it became clear that not only was her reputation deserved, it was a bit of an understatement. She was incredibly abusive.

Why does the university let her stay around?

To give your some perspective: out of the 14 students to join her lab only 4 of them have gotten degrees, which is unheard of.

The rest literally quit science altogether. To make matters worse she also had absolutely no idea what the grant she inherited was actually about (and still does not).

I feel bad for this guy.

So, in addition to my graduate training I was now in the position where I had to work on her other projects and administrate this new grant.

The next two and a half years of my life were a absolutely miserable. I soon learned that my new PI would take advantage of my labor in any way she could.

What? Weekends don’t count as days off.

She has a philosophy that graduate students were entitled to four days off per year and that “weekends counted.”

She also loved to complain that graduate students were overpaid (we made 30k per year in 2019) because when she was a grad student she only made 22k per year… in 1992.

I’m sure this is important for justifying the use of funds.

Enter the malicious compliance. Every year when you have a grant from the government you have to write an annual report.

Normally you have four to eight people working on this research at any given time, but I was alone.

The PI is pretty careless, it seems. It would be a shame if the grant money were lost.

The new PI used the money to hire a couple of new techs to work on her “other projects” and I was supposed to somehow compensate for their lack of progress on the work that funded their salary.

These annual reports are 100% the responsibility of the PI and can determine if your grant gets renewed.

How is he supposed to get this report submitted?

The first year I was told to write the report only one week before its due date… these things are massive.

It’s important to also mention that in addition to a summary of progress you also have to submit dozens of pages of other documentation that I had no access to as a graduate student.

This PI truly is terrible.

The next year I moved ahead of schedule and wrote the report a full month in advance, but I never heard from my PI about its progress. The weeks passed by and I started getting worried, so I tried to schedule a meeting to ask her about the report and let her know I was nearly done.

She ignored my email and told me she had other things to worry about than “helping me,” and that I needed to, “learn to be independent.”

Noted.

How can this lady be so abrasive and not get fired?

The day it was due I walked into lab and her door was fully shut. Fair enough… maybe she was working on the report herself. Just in case I knocked on her door and heard a loud exasperated sigh.

She flung the door open and put her finger right in my face and told me, “when my door is shut I expect complete privacy unless the lab is on fire. Is the lab on fire?”

How condescending.

I responded, “no ma’am it is not.” Satisfied and very angry at me she said, “then leave and don’t bother me when my door is shut ever again.”

The day passed and at around 7:00pm the PI walked over to my bench with her jacket and purse in hand and said, “you see, now my door is open. Now I have time to help you. What did you want?”

Did she actually not remember that this report was due?

I simply put down my pipette and smiled at her. In my cheeriest voice I said, “oh, I am sorry for disturbing you earlier. I just wanted to ask you if you needed any help on the progress update, but you must have been working on it.”

The vision of the blood draining out of her face is a memory that will give me strength and happiness for the rest of my life.

She knows she is in trouble now.

She asked me, “When is it due,” and I responded (again, cheerfully), “Due? oh about 2 hours ago.” It took her a full 30 seconds to be able to croak out, “do you have anything for it?”

To which I said, “Well, I was working on some stuff for it earlier (it was 100% finished) but I figured you wouldn’t need it when you sent me off.”

The peace and quiet would be nice.

After that she left the bench and didn’t talk to me for over a week. A blissful blissful week.

I am happy to inform you that the lab did not get its funding renewed and has not acquired funding since. I did, in fact, get my degree.

Wait. That’s it? Did she get fired? What was the fallout from this? We need answers!

If you enjoyed this post, check out this story about a student who was threatened after refusing an elective exam, so they took the case to the district.

Check out the comments below to see if the people in the comments have any additional information.

I wondered what happened to the professor as well.

These types of people are the worst.

This person thinks the professor might lose their job because of this.

While grand students need universities, it is universities that rely on these students even more.

This person loved the story.

How does a professor like this keep their job? I’m guessing they must have tenure, which makes it nearly impossible to get rid of someone. If that’s not the case, I can’t imagine why the university would keep them on.

A mistake like this could cost the University millions of dollars in grant money, and that is on top of being a bad teacher. On top of that, it would make it less likely that they will get future grants. Oh well, at least it all worked out for this guy, even if she lost her grant money entirely.