u/ExpensiveCandidate37

Last week at work I noticed I kept looking at the hairline of a guy at work. He doesn't seem to care about his hairline as he wears his hair gelled up and you can see his scalp through the office lights. I've often thought about asking him if he ever thought about hairloss, but obviously it's not something you can just bring up in conversation. There's a another guy at work who has a nw-1, literally looks like the guy hasn't finished evolving from when our ancient ancestors had hair on their faces, hairline so immaculate it makes me want to cry. Then my boss is bald like a bean bag, been bald since he was 15 apparently, just woke up one day and he was bald.

But the hairline for me is one of the first things I look at when I see a man, or maybe it's just a fixation of mine.

Without going into too much detail (as I don't want to be identified 💀) I'm a post doc, and I've been one now for about 4 years. There are 3 PhD students in the lab, and two of them are really struggling to produce data. It happens, sometimes projects just don't work, biology is a cruel mistress I get it, but they do try their best. One of them works from 9 in the morning to 9 at night, and is in my opinion one of the most diligent hard working students I've ever come across. She takes her work super serious, and is really passionate about it, despite the difficulties she has. Another student, who I like also, works as hard but has a project that is progressing quite well, and will probably be one of the only projects which will be published in a journal which my boss would be happy with. The problem is that all of the small resources we have ( I.e. me, a research assistant, and an engineer) are tasked with doing small (but necessary) experiments to get the paper to the point where it can be at least sent for review. My boss has huge passion for the working project and it's clear that this is what takes up his mental energy. My time is currently balanced between trying to do what I'm told to do by my boss, and whatever other ever dwindling time I have trying to trouble shoot with the other students. I come weekends to help her, I took part of her functional studies to try to get her to finish and focus on correcting her blots for figures for the article. But it is becoming too much for me to do my own work, and work for two other students at the same time.

My boss does meet and discuss with all of his students, but it is clear to me where his priorities are, and it's just a bit sad. I guess I understand the reasons why this is happening, i just feel bad about it. I spoke to my boss about this, but he gave me the answer I expected : I give equal time and passion to all my students. But that's just not true.

I am of the ever increasing believe that succeeding in science is being in the right place at the right time.