EPISODE 7: FEELING BULLIED

In this episode of "A Postdocs Journal," we jump to the middle of October 2012, about two weeks after EPISODE 6. I discuss the challenges of changing research directions, my struggles with standing up to my boss, and the impact of past experiences (bullying, in particular) can have on professional life. Join me as I attempt to breakaway from the past by developing self-awareness and reframing past experiences.

[00:00] Welcome to a Postdocs Journal

[01:27] Reflecting on October 2012

[02:26] Journal Entry: 18th October 2012

[06:25] Analyzing the Journal Entry

[09:45] Connecting Past Experiences

[16:00] Was It Really Bullying?

[18:50] Concluding Thoughts and Reflections

[19:26] Looking Ahead to December 2012

[20:16] Closing Remarks and How to Support

For more information about the podcast and for my contact information, please visit https://a-postdocs-journal.captivate.fm/

Please leave a review on Apple podcasts or Podchaser

Follow me on Instagram and/or LinkedIn and/or BlueSky

Next:

EPISODE 8: YEAR IN REVIEW

Hello, and welcome to a Postdocs Journal,

the show that takes you through my journey

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into and eventually out of academia

as a postdoctoral research scientist.

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My name is Simit Patel.

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Hello, thank you very much for joining me.

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For those of you who are perhaps new

to the show, a very warm welcome.

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And for those of you who may

have listened before, thank

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you very much for coming back.

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If you don't already know, I'm Dr.

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Simit Patel.

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This podcast is based on my own

personal journal in each episode I

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read out a journal entry from about

12 years ago back when I was working

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in academia as a research scientist

as a postdoc Then I reflect on it.

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I analyze it I try to make sense of it

and share my thoughts with you today

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with the benefit of 12 years of hindsight

If you are a student or a postdoc, or

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you're just someone struggling a bit

in academia, or if you're just someone

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who can relate to things like imposter

syndrome, loneliness, and just dealing

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with mental health challenges in the

workplace, I hope that by sharing my own

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personal experience with you, that helps

you to feel a little bit less alone.

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In today's episode, we jump to the

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of weeks after last week's episode.

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This was my first autumn in Germany,

and that's when I realised just

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how beautiful autumn is in Germany.

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The colours you get on the trees

is just magical, especially if

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you just get a little bit of sun.

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Unfortunately, in this journal entry,

it doesn't sound like I'm enjoying

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any of that, and my mood certainly

does not reflect the scenery.

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In this entry I write about how

I thought I was being bullied

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a little in the workplace.

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This is a sensitive subject for me.

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I experienced quite a lot of bullying

early on in my life and I think those

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wounds were still with me back in 2012

and arguably are still with me today.

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So please have a listen to the

reading and I'll be back at the

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end to share some thoughts with

you after 12 years of hindsight.

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Enjoy.

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18th October 2012

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My boss is pushing my, or I suppose

our, research in different directions.

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He wants to abandon the GBS slash RADTAG

sequencing and do pool sequencing instead.

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I'm a little uneasy about it.

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I'm worried I'm being pushed

down a path that isn't good.

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For example, when my PhD supervisor

said doing a linkage mapping

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study with Sapir Nemoralis and

AFLP markers was a good idea.

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I just went along with it

because my supervisor told me so.

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I was inexperienced and

I didn't know any better.

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It turns out it was a flawed

study design from the start.

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The wrong type of marker with

the wrong type of species.

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And it was a mistake to go down that path.

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And I paid the price for it

with a substandard PhD thesis.

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When my current boss gets a new idea,

he tends to get carried away with it.

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And I'm worried he's doing that

because he doesn't have a full

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grasp of the nitty gritty details

of implementing the new idea.

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The details become my problem.

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It's very hard to argue against him,

partially because he has this knee

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jerk reaction to counter any argument

with another argument, and partly

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because I don't have the confidence or

strength of character to argue with him.

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My worst nightmare is having our

collaborator coming to visit,

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and me having to explain to them,

actually, We're not doing GBS or

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RADTAG sequencing anymore, and

the collaborator asking me, why?

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I would have to say we thought

Pulse Seq would be better.

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I wouldn't feel right about saying

that, because it's not true.

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My boss decided it would be better, and

I'm too weak to counter the argument.

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I've basically been bullied into it,

not through any fault of my boss,

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but through my own inability to

stand up for myself and to argue.

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The other side of it is that I've

put so much effort into getting

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the GBS stuff to work in the lab.

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In all honesty, I find the

technique more interesting.

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To have all that work go to

waste is a tough pill to swallow.

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This feels like a test of setting

my emotions aside from the science.

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Rather than making decisions based on my

emotions about a particular technique,

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I have to look at it more objectively.

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The truth is, we don't need individual

genotype information, and it is

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cheaper to do the project by pooling.

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The truth is, I can't come

up with a scientific argument

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against doing things this way.

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The only argument I have against it is

is based on my own fears and concerns,

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which are purely emotive, not scientific.

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I just worry that we don't

know enough about how any of

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the Paul Seek stuff works.

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We're going into it blind

without any relevant experience.

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I don't want any nasty

surprises, not like with my PhD.

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Should I just stay quiet

and go along with it?

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I feel embarrassed to say that I'm doing

it just because my boss told me to.

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Rushing in without thinking

or planning properly.

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And without understanding every

little detail, was the problem with

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my postdoc from the very beginning.

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That's why nothing was working

in the lab from the start.

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No one tested the enzymes, no one designed

the oligos properly, everyone, including

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my boss, just rushed in totally blind, and

I ended up making a complete mess of it.

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Okay, thanks for listening to that.

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As usual, I've written down

some thoughts after reading

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that back and hearing that back.

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I think in general, this entry is

really just about me struggling

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to come to terms with the change

of direction in my research.

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Change isn't easy for, for

a lot of people, and I think

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it's particularly hard for me.

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I think there are many layers to this,

some of which I actually already tried

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to analyze in the journal entry itself.

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First, I'm going to discuss how past

experiences can really influence

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how we perceive things today.

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And then I want to address the question

of, was I actually being bullied?

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Firstly, I think this journal

entry is a nice example of how past

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experiences can really influence your

perception of things in the present.

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This is a known phenomenon in

psychology, and it's clear that

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negative memories seem to have more

of an impact than positive ones.

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We've talked a little bit about negative

bias before in a slightly different

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context, but the same principle applies in

the context of past experiences as well.

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In general, this is thought to

be evolutionarily adaptive, to

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focus on the negative things.

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In my case, I had some bad

memories of how my PhD played out.

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As I described in the journal entry,

Uh, half of my PhD project was basically

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just a badly conceived research idea.

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Uh, it was completely unfeasible

from the very beginning.

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And I only realized that my, half of

my PhD project was flawed when I was

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actually writing up the thesis at

the very end, in the last six months.

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And that was really the first time that I

had the time to really go in depth and do

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that in depth reading and research around

the topic that I really needed to do.

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And I actually had a bit of crappy

data at that point, so I was actually

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able to make those valid comparisons

between my project and previous

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studies that were previously done.

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I remember now that my PhD supervisor

actually, very early on in my PhD, he

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said, That the research project idea

that he put together, uh, he just kind

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of cobbled it together, just for the sake

of getting the, the grant application,

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and he wasn't too sure about it.

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He actually wanted me to disagree

with him and challenge the, the, the

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research idea in the first place,

which ultimately I never really did.

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And at the time, I didn't

realize what this meant.

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I should have realized that this

meant that he didn't know what

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he was doing, and, uh, I needed

to fact check the feasibility of

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this project from the very start.

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This was a big red flag that I just

totally didn't see at the time.

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In my defense, and to be fair, I

think it's very hard to, to do that

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when you've just started your PhD.

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You know, I was 21 years old,

uh, and I was expected to be

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the, the expert right away.

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Uh, it took me about four years

of very hard work to get to that

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expert level, where I was able to

challenge the feasibility of the

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project and have that discussion.

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But expecting that from me

from the very beginning, I

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think was just asking too much.

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And of course, by that point

where I did have the expertise

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to challenge the feasibility of

the project, it was too late.

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It was the end of my PhD.

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The lesson for me in that scenario was

that when your boss comes up with an idea.

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It's not necessarily going to be a

good one, because bosses don't always

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know what they're talking about.

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Even in the journal entry, I said

something like, bosses often don't

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understand the nitty gritty detail

of what actually needs to be

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done to get from the start of the

project to the end of the project.

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And I've got to say, in all my experience

since then, That still holds and that

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holds outside academia as well I think

a lot of bosses don't really understand

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the nitty gritty detail of The ideas

they come up with and that becomes their

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underlings problems And assuming that

your boss does know what they're doing

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is a very dangerous strategy Coming

back to this journal entry, I can see

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how 27 year old Simit was drawing those

parallels between what was happening,

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or what happened during my PhD, and

what was happening in my postdoc.

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But the two scenarios

were slightly different.

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I think one interesting parallel

between those two scenarios, uh, was

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the requirement for me to argue better.

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My PhD supervisor actually

needed that from me, he literally

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told me that when I started.

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He wanted me, he needed me to argue and

come in and be the expert to challenge

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the feasibility of the project.

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He needed me to be the expert and say,

This is gonna work, this is not gonna

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work, this is why it's not gonna work,

this is what we need to do instead.

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And of course I couldn't do that,

I wasn't at, I wasn't there.

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the sort of expert level I needed

to be at the very start of my

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PhD to have those arguments.

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In this journal entry and in other

journal entries we've covered in

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previous episodes, I attributed my

inability to argue to my personality.

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So it wasn't about my expertise

anymore, it was about my personality.

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What I wrote in this journal entry

and others, I decided that my

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inability to stand up for myself and

to disagree with other people was a

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character flaw in me, and that's why.

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I wasn't, um, able to,

to have those arguments.

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Today, I still think it

is part of my personality.

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Don't like confrontation, I

don't like arguing with people.

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But I do think it's very unkind

of myself to call it a flaw.

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Me not wanting confrontation,

not wanting to argue with people

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is, it's just a part of who I am.

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And sometimes that causes

problems in my life.

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But there's very little value

in punishing myself for that.

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That's just Is what it is and there might

even be times where other people tell me

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that that's that's a fault in my character

and that's them not being very kind to

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me, but the bottom line is that is a

part of who I am and I accept that about

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myself and fuck everyone else who thinks

differently over the past say 12 years or

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so I think the way i've learned to cope

with this part of my personality is to

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just avoid scenarios where I have to argue

and Disagree with people and on balance I

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think Not having too many conflicts with

other people has probably benefited me

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more than it's helped me back overall.

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So maybe my inability to argue, as I put

it, is actually one of my superpowers,

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not one of my major character flaws.

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Another interesting parallel between

what happened during my PhD and what

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was happening in my postdoc, in this

journal entry, was that decisions

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were being made by people who perhaps

don't really know what they're doing.

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As already discussed, my PhD supervisor

didn't know anything about the type of

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study that I was supposed to be doing.

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In this journal entry, I wrote about

going into a new research area totally

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blind without any relevant experience.

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Now some of the problems I

experienced in the lab, which

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we've talked about in previous

episodes, were very much due to that.

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No one really tested anything, and I

was just kind of given everything at the

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beginning of my postdoc saying, these are

the things that we've worked out so far,

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so this is what you need to build on.

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I assumed that everything was fine.

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had been tested properly and everything

given to me was correct and then

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all the things that were going wrong

were due to me doing it wrong but it

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turns out a lot of the things that

were given to me were not designed

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properly and not tested properly and

that's why I pissed away so much time

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trying to get everything to work.

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I did eventually get everything to kind

of work although it sort of ended up

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falling flat on its face in the end but

I definitely wasted a lot of time because

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I made that assumption of other people.

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Knowing what they were doing me not

knowing what I was doing So ultimately

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I was paranoid about the same thing that

happened during my phd happening again

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in my postdoc Now I want to be clear.

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I don't think my phd supervisor and

my postdoc boss Were bad scientists

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at all for taking this approach?

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I suppose that's what research is.

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It's the blind leading the

blind until something works.

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Think a big part of being a research

scientist because you do have to

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go into new things all the time.

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That's why it's, it's research.

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It's stuff that no one's ever done before.

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And I wasn't really comfortable

with that level of uncertainty.

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That's just another aspect of

my personality that made me

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unsuitable for a research career.

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And that's fine.

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Now, I think the big thing that's

different between my PhD experience

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and my postdoc experience here,

in my PhD, my supervisor actually

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didn't have the expertise in that

particular topic that I was working on.

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In my postdoc, we tried this one

approach in the lab, and I talked

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about it already, it didn't work

ultimately, and time was running

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out, so we had to change direction.

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It was a pragmatic move and the right one

to make from my boss's point of view and

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from the point of view of the research.

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And with hindsight, I can tell you

now that the change in direction

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for my research was actually

absolutely the right choice to make.

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The original plan just wasn't working

and the new direction did end up working.

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And that actually put me on the path to

some relative success and I was actually

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able to develop the skills I needed in

this new research direction, particularly

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in bioinformatics, which ultimately helped

me in my career move out of academia.

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So it was absolutely the

right move with hindsight.

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Another aspect of why I was having such

a difficult time accepting the change

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in direction of my research was that

I had invested so much time in getting

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things to work in the lab already.

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And I was finally making some progress.

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It was not good progress,

but it was some progress.

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I don't have much to add to this point

because I actually did most of the

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analysis in the journal entry itself.

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And ultimately I was actually able to

separate the emotions from the logic.

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Well done me.

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I think I did well in that journal

entry to come to that realization.

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Now in this journal entry, I said

that I felt like I was being bullied.

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And a question that I have to ask

myself now is, was it actually bullying?

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I think this might be another example

of how past negative experiences

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can really affect your perception

of things in the present day.

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In this case, I think there was an

emotional trigger here that brought

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the past into the present for me.

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In general, when this kind of thing

happens, the emotional response

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can sometimes be disproportionate

to the actual situation at hand.

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In my case, I was bullied quite a

lot when I was a kid, a little bit

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at school, but mostly by family.

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And this has very much stayed with me,

anyone who's ever been bullied before.

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I hope you understand the scars

it can leave you with sometimes

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can take a long time to heal.

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Sometimes they never do.

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In my case, when I encountered that

feeling of anxiety when faced with

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confrontation again, in this case,

trying to argue with my boss about the

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change of direction in my research, I

think my subconscious immediately went

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back to being that bullied kid again.

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Thinking about it now, When I was a

kid and I was getting some support

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for being bullied, when people were

trying to make me feel better about it.

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The message I was getting was that it

was my fault for being bullied because

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I didn't stand up for myself enough.

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It was my fault for being too

sensitive and it was my fault for

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attracting too much attention.

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The problem was about me not being

tough enough or being able to

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stand up for myself or whatever.

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So the support I was getting for

bullying was really just kind

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of blaming me for being bullied

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It's interesting to see that

that is the exact same message.

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I was saying about myself in this journal

entry in the journal entry I said i'll

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quote it I've basically been bullied

into it not through any fault of my

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boss But through my own inability to

stand up for myself and argue That's a

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really interesting connection to make

between my childhood bullying and my

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perception of being bullied as a postdoc.

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I had assumed that there was a link

between the actual bullying I experienced

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as a kid and re experiencing that as a

postdoc via the emotional trigger of the

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confrontation, but I was not expecting to

see a link between the very bad support

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I received for being bullied as a kid.

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And the negative thoughts I have

about myself in this journal entry.

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It's almost like the support I received

for bullying was actually more damaging to

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my self esteem than the actual bullying.

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That's really interesting.

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So on reflection, I think my boss was

just making a smart decision about the

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direction of the research and I wasn't

actually being bullied here, but it

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was just my Her inner child taking over

and writing that journal entry for me.

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So there you have it It felt really

good to go through that journal entry

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again It was very interesting for me

to make those connections between my

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experiences in my childhood to my PhD to

my postdoc and to some extent to today.

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There's something very satisfying

about joining those dots together

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and making those connections.

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In my own mental health journey I've

learned that some of the steps you

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can take towards breaking away from

the past are to develop self awareness

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and to reframe and reinterpret the

past with an alternative narrative.

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I feel like I've done some

of that in this episode.

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In the next episode we

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As things are winding down for Christmas,

I have an end of year reflection.

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As you've probably gathered by

now, I'm generally not too pleased

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with my performance so far in 2012

and I also end up revisiting that

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question of work life balance.

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Until then, thank you

so much for joining me.

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I hope that's been valuable

for you in some way.

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Until the next episode,

please be kind to yourself.

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Brute about it, brute until the day,

one day I will clown the words to say.

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Thanks again for listening

to a Postdocs Journal.

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I've been your host Simit Patel.

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If you've enjoyed this episode and you'd

like to help support the podcast, please

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share it with others who you think

might find it helpful and interesting.

319

You could also leave a review over

at Podchaser or on Apple Podcasts.

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If you can relate to anything in

this episode, or if you have your

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own take on this journal entry,

I would love to hear from you.

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Please feel free to reach out to me

on LinkedIn, Instagram, or Blue Sky.

323

Links to all my social

media are in the show notes.

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Thanks again.