CONFLICTED IDEALIST

@chsandstorm 

real time updates from a lonely wolf! lol 

A few things I learned from this so far. 

1. My attempts to reach out to both the academic community and general community has failed. 

2. Researchers are selfish and no one wants to share their data

3. Joyce is working 3 sides—1 for Channavy and our center, 1 for Austin and whatever she sees in him and 1 for herself. Normally I would support working for yourself, but when you have to walk over other people’s good intentions to get what you want, then you’re a problem to this world and should be eliminated. 

4. People will never give you what you want, unless you give them what they want…and still they won’t give you want you want either. 

5. Brown University…You know what else is brown? Bullsh*t. And that’s how I pretty much feel about this school and everything they claim to be right now. 

6. Other than that, work is going great for just 1 week so far. 

P.S. Tried reaching out to the Department of Health for their data, seriously people what more do I have to do? Knock on your doors and kiss your feet for you to give me freaking data? 

After getting this job, I presented a proposal to the program and got shot down. Feeling desperate and still wanting to pursue the Hep B project, I reach out to Channavy who refers me to Joyce via email. But rather than giving me a concrete answer on how I can get involved, Joyce CC’s me to Austin, who then calls me over spring break out of nowhere. We can conclude now that Joyce is a bubbly farce with something like 3 faces. Face 1: Useless. Face 2: Bubbly. Face 3: Selfish/Competitive. 

Behold the condescenders. Seriously, Brown undergrads who get into the 8 year med school program right out of high school are like their own breed. It appears Joyce is working under Austin and twisting a “service project” to benefit the both of them in the form of a publishable journal article. He asks me for my feedback on a survey and asks for a survey I had been working on. Dick. Then he ignores me for 2 more weeks, despite promising to let me know when he was going to have a meeting. 

Yesterday Channavy sent a blast email (think Tina vs. Charleen) to him and all his Brown affiliates, I attempt to clarify if Joyce was actually working with Austin closely or not. Channavy still believes she is not. A few hours later, I see her at the library with Joyce (based on my facial recognition features from my brain’s intake of Facebook public information). They meet with a group of people that I can 99.99% infer are part of the Hep B team meeting that Austin was supposed to invite me to. Of course, he has never seen my face unless he has a facial recognition feature too…

I send him an email on the spot asking about the meeting he mentioned not too long ago. I get a response more than 24 hours after the meeting ended. He doesn’t even answer my question about the meeting, but just tells me I can hitch a ride with them (who’s them?) tomorrow for the screening. Talk about last minute. 

Of course, this is all happening within the span of a few days so in efforts to contain my anxiety and excitement about the potential project at the tip of my fingers, I wait for Austin’s reply. And wait. Waiting…still waiting. *Jeopardy Theme Tune* It’s now 2 weeks. 

Part of Lynn’s email does not make any sense to me. Actually the entire thing makes no sense because she pretty much addresses nothing of my concern. I never implied that I wanted to do funded research. I’d do this for FREE if I had to do it to graduate. My impression was that she’s already running this free clinic, what’s the big deal for me to grab some existing data and just write a freaking paper on it? 

And then there’s the bit about Austin and his med student buddies. From what I do know about him, I could already tell that he was not part of a “great bunch, ” but rather a self-indulgent dandy queen rich boy who got into med school because of his teenage brain managed to score > 2200 on the SATs. Given that he never took the MCAT, and it’s been 4 years since his teenage brain made him eligible to diagnose people, it’s no wonder my preconceptions pretty much came true. 

It’s been 2 weeks and I go and meet my community organizer person, Channavy. We had a 2.5 hour conversation and I got a job offer out of it. We talked briefly about Mr. Austin and his notorious demeanor, most recently being very demanding towards Channavy’s team for translation services. Channavy mentions that she has another Brown undergrad, Joyce, acting as the liaison to Austin and that Joyce is handling it very cautiously…seemingly uninvolved at this point.

This isn’t the most interesting series of events…but I think it’s worth jotting down. I’ll label this as a rant of sorts. 

So this whole process of developing my thesis has been a major pain in the ass. I’m talking sitting on a pillow with nails sticking out. Yes, my program fluffs it all up (hence the pillow analogy) with promises that everyone in the Brown and RI community is very helpful and will answer all and any questions or redirect you to the right people. This has not been true. Most of the time I’m being redirected to coarse and self-seeking academic mercenaries (I don’t know how this relates to nails). 

Throughout this whole saga, I’ve encountered nothing but mind games, passive aggressive jabs, and a whole other level of over-glamourization of what it means to be an Ivy League student. Let’s start from the beginning. 

A few weeks ago, I was given the impression by my academic advisor and members in my cohort that our thesis project is required to be a publishable academic journal type paper, with empirical data and analysis and some meaningful oomph to the public health field. I decided to pursue hepatitis B and API’s as a potential topic and sought out help from 3 clinicians, 3 professors, and 1 community organizer person. 

Out of the 3 clinicians, 1 Dr. Taylor got back to me. The other two ignored my requests. Dr. Taylor has to be the most hapless professional I’ve ever seen. Her intro video makes her look so disheveled, however smart she may be. She told me she was busy but to check back to her in a few weeks, how about I reach out to this med student Austin and this undergrad Julio to see how I can get involved in this screening initiative. 

Of course, I know a potential project when I see one and I immediately pounced at this chance to make this supposed “service project” (reminds me of VCH) into a more thesis-type research project. I reach out to Austin and CC Dr. Taylor. Dr. Taylor responds to my ideas: