The Care and Feeding of Your PI: A tip for grad students and postdocs

GMP has a hilarious LOL/sob post up over at Academic Jungle in which she laments becoming PI Pushover.

Although I promised myself I would never do that to myself — let the student graduate before all his/her obligations to the group have been fulfilled (the papers we have agreed on are written up and submitted), it turns out I am as much of a pushover as the next faculty, if not more.
…
I let the temp postdoc graduate at the end of 2010 because we figured a couple of months would not mean much, and graduating in 2010 (sooner) looks better on his CV than 2011 (later)…. in the 3 months he’s been here after the PhD…only just gave me a pathetic draft — unworthy of a second-year grad student, let alone someone experienced in writing papers — of what’s supposed to be the crown jewel paper from his thesis, which clearly demonstrates he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about it any more.

Of course, the academic blogsphere is entirely made up of hardworking trainees with distant, out of touch PIs (on the one hand) and PIs who are highly engaged mentors cursed with lazy-ass trainees (on t’ other).
So the comments are lining up accordingly, just like they will do with this post after I publish it.
But here’s the thing Dear Hardworking Trainee….GMP is right.

When DM schwag jumps the shark

Discuss

[ source ]

Update on the NIAAA/NIDA Merger

All the furor over the dismantling of NCRR to establish some new NIH IC to focus on translational whoopdedoo has backgrounded the merger of NIDA and NIAAA into a new Institute on Substance Abuse/Addiction (currently unnamed).

There’s a note in the Federal Register that the National Advisory Councils of NIDA and NIAAA will hold their first joint meeting on April 11, 2011. No mention of what will be on the agenda but the timing suggests that this is not the usual Council meeting for deciding grant funding for the current round, presumably those will still be held individually in May or June as scheduled. There’s less than two weeks to go on this so..

Information will also available on the Institute’s/Center’s home pages: http:///www.silk.nih.gov/silk/niaaa1/about/roster.htm, and http://www.nida.nih.gov/nidahome.html where an agenda and any additional information for the meeting will be posted when available.

Those links are not very useful, so NIDA and NIAAA may be better for monitoring.

And, here’s the Agenda on the NIAAA site after all. Looks like respective Portfolio analysis is on the docket.