The postdoc--I think I'm starting to feel comfortable in this new position.
At first, I was fine...feeling okay... because the work was manageable and the stress from the end my PhD had vanished. I was in a new country, where everything seemed new--the language, the bureaucracy, the hours that the grocery stores were open. Work was not my main concern.
Then the stagiaire (undergraduate trainee) arrived. And suddenly all of these bad feelings were summoned up...about my past experiences as a stagiaire, my feelings of inadequacy as a scientific mentor, that I'm not taken seriously at work, that I will never be taken seriously. [In more reflective moments, I wonder if I am the one who doesn't take ME seriously. I'm sure other people would be happy to take me seriously, especially the ones who are paying me.]
So I had some bad feelings and then some resentful feelings toward Cédric, who handles these things with more ease and doesn't doubt his authority. I told him how I wanted my student to have a good experience in the lab. A good experience to me is one in which you learn new techniques but you also learn how to design the experiments. It's a mix of thinking and doing. Hands on and brain on? I was concerned that my student wouldn't have as good of an experience as the other stagiaires, because I am new in the lab. I arrived 6 weeks ago with one job-- to do a single experiment that lasts all summer long but requires very little daily effort. But I am also supposed to explore other research areas and create some other projects. Other areas that are entirely unknown to me and therefore difficult to explain to an incoming student.
And on top of that, there was the language barrier, which had weighed on me, because I felt that I couldn't explain this amorphous project to this student in some sort of shining detail.
I stubborn insist on using French with everyone at work, even though I lack the capacity to express myself as a full adult, often resorting to hand gestures and noises [I've quickly incorporated the French sputter, used for saying "who knows"].
I would try to explain the scientific principles and predicted outcomes for our study in my French, but I knew it always sounded more impressive when Cédric re-explained it in his French. And then, over the week, something happened that I hadn't expected. The student started mentioning that he would like to try writing his final report in English, instead of French. Now he seems to be seriously considering it. Of course, I'm sure he sees that he is working with a native English speaker, who can help him write a better report by editing his grammar. But I also wonder if I may have inspired him a little bit. As this native English speaker, who is doing science in French, and despite all of her mispronunciations, misconjugations and outright gabbly-gook, this woman is trying. Trying her damnest. And that's some kind of mentoring, right?
