There's a overworked scientist at the bottom somewhere
this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2025
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The underpaid lab assistant who quietly fixed all the others problems caused by the misuse of lab equipment.
Yall got lab assistants? I definitely didn’t have access to any
Nah, lead scientist spent like 5 hours total helping the grad student on the paper's research. They probably spent more time getting the funding to begin with.
I love papers like this tho, one was my first citation, no-one else wanted to present it.
Twice I got my face plastered on the flyers of a conference because none of the other speakers looked Mexican enough. I still don't know if I should have been offended.
Stuff like this is pretty context dependent, and vibes based. Did it feel like this happened because people recognised that you belonged to a marginalised group, and were earnestly making an attempt to subvert systemic oppression you may face as a researcher by raising you up? Or did it feel like you were being instrumentalised, boiled down to a 2D representation of who you are in order to further the aims of that conference and/or research group?
you belonged to a marginalised group
Oh, shit. I left out hugely important context. This happened in Mexico so it's probably neither of those.
You say that like it can't be both
Can confirm. My first poster was still the majority my analysis (and pre-existing data from the lab), but to get it accepted we needed the internal knowledge of how a proposal gets written and for that a graduate was needed.
Funny enough I got into grad school before I even presented the poster, so I was able to just do the rest of the work once I had a little bit of know how, plus a tiny stipend from my new dept!