Scramble Competition

I’m not sure if I ever mentioned this, but with my (rather large) cohort my adviser doubled the size of his lab. A decent proportion of my cohort consists of lab-mates, people joining the program in my adviser’s lab. I’m not sure how or why this happened, if Paul was looking to drastically expand the number of students he advises, or if more students accepted the offer of admission than he expected. Regardless, the lab is now twice the size that it was last year.

For the most part, this is neither a particularly good or bad thing. We all have more lab-mates with which to engage, but Paul’s time is more limited for each of us than it was before. The size of the lab hasn’t affected me so much as the people that joined—for the most part they’re great. Except for one person: Brandy. Brandy may very well be my polar opposite: extroverted, melodramatic, immature, and insecure. She runs hot and cold—one day she’ll be the happiest, sunniest person around, expounding on how much she loves life and loves the program and loves her classes and loves her friends, and the next she’ll be depressed and moping about how everyone she hangs out with is an asshole, she doesn’t think she belongs in grad school, she’s so busy, she won’t ever find a guy that loves her, she isn’t smart enough to be here, etc. It grates on me.

She’s a nice person, and can be funny, but she tries too hard, and her immaturity tends shine through. Another cohort mate and I were discussing this the other day, and decided that she’ll probably be a great person to hang out with… in five or six years. None of this would matter too much, were it not for one little problem: for some reason the grad program decided Brandy and I needed to be best friends.

We share an adviser, which means we share a lab, and lab-mates, and lab meetings. We also have very similar interests, which led my adviser to decide that we should take all the same classes. And we share an office. I can’t get away from her. Other people in the program have remarked on how she and I are “joined at the hip” and “do everything together.” There are running jokes in the department about limited funding and resources and that Paul will only be able to support and advise one of us, leading the other to drop out.

Um, no. We have the same classes, lab, and office. I literally cannot prevent us from going places together, but outside of campus we have no interaction. It shouldn’t bother me, but for some reason feeling as if the other people in the program always associate us with one another is bothersome.

It has been a little better this semester, since we’re TA’ing different classes (thank goodness), but the issues remain. I was thinking of asking to switch offices, but I really like our other office mate, and I don’t really want to cause any dissonance between Brandy and I. I don’t necessarily dislike her. I just don’t want to spend time with her.

Recently I’ve been working on research plans to do a pilot study in Remote Location this summer and fall. Brandy had only ever expressed interest in working on local, unrelated projects, until one day during lab meeting I brought up my most recent ideas.

“I want to do research in Remote Location, too!” she chimed in.

An older grad student in the lab, and one of my advocates/potential collaborators on this project asked her, “What would you be testing?”

“Well, I don’t know. How can you expect me to have questions if I’ve never been there? It would just be awesome, right? A summer in Remote Location? We could have a big summer lab research party and do fun research together! HeeHee!”

*sigh*