I find myself leaning back in the chair, a position that does not suggest much enthusiasm for continuing to participate in this exam. I press my lips together. I know my eyes are shooting fire, but I can’t stop them. Just at the moment I feel that I’m losing control over my own body, Mark speaks up, for the first time during the exam.
“It is enough now,” he says with a firm voice.
He must have read my thoughts, or at least felt that I am boiling of anger. His interference was necessary to keep the peace. Thank God. Or thank Mark.
Prof. Gilton looks surprised as Mark, being my first supervisor is not supposed to interfere with the process. He was keen on drilling me for a bit longer. I have never previously had any contact with Prof. Gilton and, rumours of alcoholism aside, I have heard only kind things about him. But during the last hour or two I have come to fear him. There is a long silence in the room as if Prof. Gilton is thinking about whether to accept Marks’ interference or not.
“Really, it’s enough,” Mark repeats.
“I agree,” James says after a while. Throughout the second half of the exam he watched me with pity, perhaps knowing that the last remnants of my confidence, after a year in Edinburgh, were being pummelled. The questions and pressure from Prof. Gilton destroyed me. He had zoned in on reaction mechanism like a vicious cat pawing a baby mouse. At first I tried to answer but that elicited only rueful shakes of the head. I had hoped we would move on to questions that I actually studied for, but we didn’t… only reaction mechanisms. Is that what I came to Edinburgh for? Did I dodge the world of real work to devote my life to science only to discover that I am too stupid for a PhD? This whole PhD thing feels like one big misprint in my life story…
“Okay, then we stop here,” Prof. Gilton finally says.
He starts to pile up my first year report and the sheets he used to draw chemical formulas and reaction mechanisms.
Prof. Gilton speaks sternly: “As explained before, you can leave the room now, and we will discuss how you did in your exam. Mark will fetch you from the lab when we are finished.”
With shaking hands I pack my stuff together and drag myself wearily out of the room which I was so keen to leave. After closing the door behind me, I am not sure what to do. I am panicking. They told me I had to go back to the lab, but all I want is to push over the statue of Joseph Black and leave this department behind me forever. In his humiliating way, Prof. Gilton had given me a message: I wasn’t worth a PhD.
Exhausted, worried and angry I am sitting in my office chair, closely observing the all-too-familiar items on my desk. I am looking around the office to see what I should take home when they tell me I have failed. This is the moment they decide if I can continue my PhD or would have to leave now with the consolation prize of an MPhil instead. As I already have an MSc, the repatriation bonus might as well be a paperclip. Will they really make me fail? They kind of have to. What am I going to do with my life? Who still wants me? Maybe I could become a freezer stockist at Farmfoods, or work in a call centre – if I could explain that I didn’t get kicked out for disciplinary measures… This is all just so embarrassing…
“How was it?” Lucy asks
“Humiliating,” I say fully aware that everyone else in the room is listening to us.
“Really? But Mark complimented your report!”
“You think he read it?”
“Nooo…”
“It was horrible,” I say. “James asked me about the biology part of my project. It was nice, I could pretty much answer all his questions. But then Prof. Gilton started drilling me on chemistry. He asked me the same questions over and over again. He wanted me to explain how electrons jump in the substrate during enzyme catalysis and how different amino acids in the protein help to catalyse the reaction. I don’t know these things off by heart. I never learned the basics. But he asked me hundreds of questions of the same type. He didn’t ask anything else, just that, for God knows how long. Mark finally interrupted him.”
“They do that sometimes, it is just to make you work harder on the theory for your final defence,” Hanna says.
I turn my chair to face Hanna.
“Really?”
I don’t remember hearing about anyone having such an experience. Was it all just a threat?
“Yes, both Erico and Quinn had very difficult first year exams.” Hanna looks at Quinn, who is occupied with a football gambling game on one of the computers. “Isn’t it, Quinn?” she pushes him for an answer.
“I was grilled, and it wasn’t fun. I don’t think I could answer any question they asked me,” Quinn says. You are such a dick not telling me beforehand.
I feel my worry yield a little and I get some hope – hope that I might be allowed to stay in this nightmare job. It’s not Stockholm Syndrome that keeps us here, at least not yet – it’s the feeling that escaping this nightmare without a PhD could lead to a life-long nightmare.
“Why did you not tell me beforehand?” I ask.
“What’s the point of knowing it? If they want to give you a hard time they will do it anyway. They always find something you don’t know. Petra from the Johnson group was asked to sum up all the wave-lengths of the different colours. Do you know them?”
“I learned it at school, but don’t know it anymore.”
“Exactly, so there’s no point.”
Quinn directs himself to the screen again, moving some football figures from left to right.
“Did you pass at least?” Lucy asks.
She is worried to lose her best, and maybe only, Edinburgh friend.
“I don’t know yet. They are discussing it.”
“You will pass,” Lucy says.
“You’re just saying that to console me, because you feel sorry for me.”
Lucy makes no attempt to persuade me otherwise, which is a little dispiriting.
“True,” she says after a while. “And quite honestly there is an egoistic side to you passing as well. You still need to enlighten me about the nasogenital correlation theory.”
“I didn’t think for a sec that you wanted to tap my scientific know-how…”
“What theory?” says Erico, who just entered.
“Lucy wants to know if there is a positive correlation between nose and genital size, and believes I am in a position to find out.”
“No way! You are not dating Marius from the bagpipe dude group, are you?” Hanna asks in a shrill voice.
“I wouldn’t call it dating. I just kissed him in the pub last week.”
“How do you kiss someone with such a large nose?” Quinn asks.
“It’s not that large.”
“It is!” Erico, Hanna, Lucy and Quinn say in unison.
“Otherwise we would not instantly know it is him,” Hanna adds.
“Anyway, Ka. Maybe I could be in your control group…” says Erico.
“Sure. Just pull your pants down, stand in front of the autoclave and Lucy will measure it.”
I will miss sexual banter. That is what I will lose when I fail, the chance to make and hear cheap jokes.
I turn my chair around and gaze at a scientific paper with empty eyes, the sort of thing I will not be finishing…
Mark finally enters and tells me to come with him. He has a neutral expression on his face, which is uncommon for Mark who normally looks either happy or very annoyed. I can’t tell what it means and I don’t dare ask. A new wave of panic overtakes me. I feel my eyes getting watery, but manage to collect myself before we re-enter the exam room. It is a gloomy room. The large evergreen fir tree in front of the only window and the relentless rainfall is blocking light. There are two squirrels playing cat and mouse in the tree, undeterred by the rain, slightly lightening up the scene. Prof. Gilton has filled the room with a fresh layer of cigar smell. He and James are talking to each other but they fall silent as soon as Mark and I sit down. After what Hanna and Quinn said, rationally I know there might still be hope, but I feel a strange cocktail of fear and other
emotions. The silence is longer than necessary. Do they get off on every second they leave me clueless? All of a sudden I feel the nerves leaving my body, making space for a feeling of being in some sort of silly soap opera. It is just an act, nothing more… How much it would have helped me to have this feeling during my exam… Thanks Quinn!
Prof. Gilton finally breaks the silence. “Congratulations, you passed.”
They all look at me, waiting for my reaction. How much I would like to ask him why on Earth he kept on asking me the same questions over and over again. Or why did they want to make me feel so stupid and useless and scared? But instead I simply nod.
“Your first year report is very good, your biology knowledge is good as well, but as you want to graduate as a PhD in chemistry you really need to work on that,” he adds.
It doesn’t matter anymore what they say. All that matters to me is that I passed. That there is still a chance that one day I will be a professor and I might do something more gratifying with my life than stock Farmfoods shelves. They fill in some admin forms which we all have to sign. Prof. Gilton finishes writing first and looks up at me. “I am convinced you can publish some good work together with Mark,” he says. I would stand a far better chance of doing so without Mark – everybody knows that. Don’t they?
“Pub tonight?” Lucy asks while we are outside smoking.
“I might have to collect some data for your theory first.”
I press the send button – a message to Marius.
“Good plan.”
“I’ll give you a ring later. If it is really shit we can still go for a drink.”
Marius has replied by the time we are back upstairs. “He is coming for dinner but he intends to bring candles…” I say to Lucy.
“Oh no!”
Leave the candles at home or wherever you store them and just come over, I reply
“What are you cooking for him?”
“I will buy some bread rolls. We just need the data point, right? It should not become too cosy for him and he should definitely not get the impression I can cook.”
I pass Sainsbury’s on my way home and buy a couple of dry-looking bread rolls, butter and cheese, a pack of Marlboro and two bottles of wine for the evening. A few hours later I am sitting on the window sill writing Lucy a one-word text message: Positive.
I knew it! Call? She replies.
I can’t. He is still here… sleeping. You get the next data point!
Was it that bad?
No, was awesome. I don’t want you to miss out on the experience.
Hahaha one is enough. His nose is large enough to be foolproof. Talk tomorrow.
I pour myself a glass of wine, smoke a cigarette and think about what happened today… the memory of the exam. Besides just having proved Lucy’s nasogenital correlation theory, will I ever get the confidence back that I could be a good scientist?
The memory of that exam will plague me like toothache for the rest of my PhD.
© Springer International Publishing AG 2017
Karin BodewitsYou Must Be Very Intelligent10.1007/978-3-319-59321-0_25
Chapter 25
Karin Bodewits1
(1)Munich, Germany
Karin Bodewits
Email: [email protected]
“How was Christmas?” I ask Lucy, shoving my large backpack to the wall.
“Quiet. Bit boring actually.”
I flop onto the single uncomfortable sofa in the living room she shares with her flatmate, feeling similarly unexcited about Christmas – just glad it’s all over.
We had both been home for a week, and had agreed to fly back to Edinburgh to celebrate New Year’s Eve together. I landed ninety minutes ago and went straight from the airport to her flat to help prepare our New Year’s Eve dinner party.
It wasn’t supposed to be a party; Lucy and I had presumed it would be just the two of us. But some PhD peers learned about our plans and asked to join us. PhDs tend to be something of a lost tribe at big “real world” occasions. For some, flying home over Christmas is simply unaffordable. For others, like Lucy and me, spending more than a few days in the family home, in the small villages we grew up, is unimaginable. What are we to do in a place where we might know each and every person but are now socially bound to none? It’s good to be back home though – occasionally. I enjoy standing in front of the skylight in the room that once upon a time had been my bedroom, and thinking back to childhood. My parents’ house is part of the last row in the village and looks out over long stretches of flat fields. In winter you can see all the way to the tree line of the next village, but in summer fast-growing sweet corn blocks the view. As children we didn’t have many rules to obey, but as soon the corn had been seeded, the fields were forbidden terrain. Especially as the corn grew higher, it became more and more difficult and sometimes impossible to resist the temptation of running through, even going cross-country and hopefully reaching the sand-mining lake two miles North-West. We would creep across the thin wooden plank over the ditch which separated our garden from the field, and then sneak between the green stalks so my mum wouldn’t see us. After our adventures we denied all charges and were always rumbled by the smell and pieces of corncob in our clothes.
The anchor of childhood nostalgia is fun for a few days. It’s replenishing and great for perspective on where you’re at now but, afterwards, miles of flat fields are quite breathtakingly dull. The village is located twenty miles from the city where I studied, so unless you are a super-fit cycling fanatic or determined not to drink, the city’s social life might as well be a thousand miles away. Lucy grew up in a similar setting. Most of her and my friends have moved away, often living all over the world. Randomly settling in any old corner of the globe is a thoroughly modern habit, especially in the natural sciences; it’s romantic and exciting on the one hand, but bond-breaking and often lonely on the other.
“Same here, Christmas was a bit boring,” I confirm.
“The thing is,” says Lucy. “My brother brought a girlfriend home. She seems nice enough but we don’t share any common language. She speaks Korean and Swedish.”
“Your parents speak Swedish?”
“Nope, only my brother.”
“I wish I couldn’t understand the moron my sister is dating. I dislike that guy so much it hurts. He is devoid of human empathy and looks like a troll. I kept hoping she would do the classic Christmas breakup thing, but she didn’t.”
My heartfelt disdain makes Lucy smile.
“So, just a language problem with your new sister-in-law?” I ask, with the suspicion that there is something more personal afoot.
“No, that wasn’t the worst. Having – for the first time – a potential daughter-in-law visiting turned my mum into an ecstatic freak. She was super-nervous and over-excited like a tot with a new doll. I didn’t recognise my own mum. It was surreal. And even worse; the whole family has been joking about me staying single for the rest of my life. Otherwise why did I never bring a boyfriend home?”
I knew Lucy faced this pressure from her family. After all, she was going to finish her PhD soon and wasn’t getting any younger, in her mother’s words – and in Edinburgh Vlad was on hand to drive the point home. Her mum and aunties had retired, her cousins were all married and seemed to produce babies like tennis ball machines; everyone desperately wanted her mother to become part of the granny club. I guess Lucy is supposed to pop a kid and fulfill the commonplace desire of sixty-plus women yearning for that new role and purpose in life.
“Just ignore those stupid comments,” I say, helping Lucy pull two small tables together to host our guests.
“I tried, but on Boxing Day I subscribed to a dating site.”
She is clearly awaiting a reaction.
“You did WHAT?! Why on earth would you subscribe to A DATING SITE?! You can pick any guy you want! They are all begging to go out with you! Men cannot resist you!”
“Most guys I meet and who propose dating me are from t
he Chemistry Department. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed but they are all freaking weird.”
“A few of them are quite hot.”
“Hm. I want to see how I get on outside of academia, maybe I want to be out of academia, rescued from academia, I don’t know.”
“So did you find someone to date? Of course you did – hundreds, no problem…”
“I am chatting with this guy called Luke. Works for the Bank of Scotland.”
“A banker!? You might as well take Louis back,” I say, referring to a good-looking chap from the Chemistry Department she dated briefly before Christmas.
He had asked Lucy to go on a date. As Christmas was approaching and Lucy did not want to disappoint her mum another year, he was in luck; Lucy was feeling duty-bound and joined him for dinner.
“This is Louis,” she had said in front of KB House when they returned to campus after a stroll over the wonderfully quiet and romantic hill behind the university, offering a lovely view over Edinburgh’s north side and towards the Pentland Hills in the west.
“Hi, I’m Karin,” I said, shaking a weak and clammy hand.
“Hi, I’ve heard a lot about you,”
His voice was as feeble as his handshake, and as sexy. OMG what is she doing with him? He is so NOT manly…
“Oh, did you? Did Lucy tell you I’m not a big fan of Italians?”
Louis looked surprised, not really knowing what to say.
“I know you are Italian and it’s not your fault, but as a kid I almost choked on a pizza. I can’t do anything about it but since then I can’t stand Italian men.”
Lucy rolled her eyes. Without words, she was saying: “I know what you’re saying: he is not right for me.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Louis, again in a tone so soft I wanted to roughen his vocal chords with a gallon of whisky.
He isn’t sure if I am making this up, which is just plain thick, and it eggs me on, of course. “Don’t worry, it’s getting better as time passes. I think in a few years I really will be fine, might even go to Venice, though I’ve heard it’s a pigeon paradise with nothing romantic about it.”
You Must Be Very Intelligent Page 23