I have been thinking about this topic quite a bit this week and have been unable to come up with a story. Events that personally involve me do not seem to have much of an impact on my overall outlook. I guess, in this respect, I am simply stubborn; however, I have had many experiences that have demotivated me in academia and it took both thinking about this topic and a very recent event to contextualize it.
The event:
A new graduate student gave a 45 minute presentation that I thought was interesting. Although, for full disclosure, it was much too technical for a general audience. The presentation ended and the first question was relevant and helpful, then the second question focused on a single slide which showed a scatter plot with three linear regression lines drawn through it. The linear regression lines looked slightly strange as all three passed through the same point. For the next 10 minutes the conversation focused around whether or not the linear regression was correct or not with professors stating, in absolutes, one way or another. To me the plot looked fine, it was only strange if you didn’t consider that 90% of the data was lumped up in a very small region. While this makes the use of a scatter plot and linear regression a bad one, it certainly does not make the regression incorrect. The icing on the cake was the plot was made using Origin and linear regression is virtually impossible to screw up with this program. The time for comments was then up and everyone left.
The issue:
My problem with this is it came down to an extremely pointless debate between professors. It had nothing to do with the student, and it was not useful or helpful for anyone involved. I cannot imagine how the student felt after effectively being ignored after his presentation ended. As this is neither an infrequent occurrence nor a localized issue it really disappoints me that my field does this. I am undecided if this makes me want to become an academic and fix these issues or avoid such an environment altogether.
The fix:
An overly pessimistic view of academia would be to say that scientist have large ego’s and like to argue. I have no idea what percentage of scientist really fall into this category, but they are defiantly out there. So one defense of this behavior is that a student will encounter it eventually and needs to be able to handle it. This is a great point, but as seen it is far easier to continue making this point than getting back on a helpful topic. In addition, the questions and discussion might have focused on these because they did not understand the presented material. Either way, next time this occurs I am going to interrupt the argument and try to get the conversation back on track. It will be interesting when this occurs.