Special Snowflakes Behaving Badly

The PI of the cow project had to call in a lot of favors to get enough supervisors to cover 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for nearly seven weeks (a total of 40 days when the calving phase ends on Monday when the last blood draw is done on the last calf). Three of them are vet school students. I don't know them and my shifts never overlapped with theirs. But as soon as the project started, I began to hear whispers about them.

The gossip started with the PI herself. It was the first week of the calving period, and the schedule was a bit sketchy. We had one birth one morning and she asked me to stay for a few extra hours--she had to run home and shower before going back to the vet school to teach her class (I ended up being at the barn for 9 hours that day). I stopped and looked at her, and said, Jean, you teach vet students. Vet students! What’s wrong with showing up in barn clothes to teach? So you work with animals. If I were a vet student, I’d sure be pleased to know that my instructors had hands-on experience with real cows, not idealized spherical cows. Oh my, she said, they would get extremely upset if I went into class smelling like the barn. They would accuse me of disrespecting them, of not taking their education seriously.

She was completely serious. And I was speechless. At the time, I thought that maybe she was being overly sensitive. Maybe she was projecting her own desire to appear as professional as possible onto the situation. Which was perfectly fine.

Then a few days later, I began to hear the student helpers talking about the vet student supervisors. Apparently the vet students never showed up alone but always in groups of three or more. They promptly shoved all the undergraduate student helpers out of the way. They never explained anything. They were rude and demanding. Half of them didn’t want to get in the pens, and when they did, they tiptoed around the piles of poop. In short, they were special snowflakes acting badly.

At first I took this with a grain of salt. Some of the undergrad helpers were quite inexperienced and that might color their interpretation. But I kept hearing the same stories over and over from many different student helpers.

Then, completely unprompted and in a completely different context (we were discussing my upcoming decision about which vet school to attend), two different professors made similar comments to me about how many of the OSU vet school students acted like entitled snots. One in fact said that he hoped I would accept OSU’s offer of admission so that I could “shake things up a bit”.

I have been mulling this over for weeks. I am by no means perfect but I regularly marvel at all the amazing things I have learned in the past few weeks, not just here in blog posts but to my professors and others. This is an extremely complicated project. I have been physically and mentally challenged throughout. But I get up every morning excited to learn more.

I always thank my student helpers. I go out of my way to involve them. When I ask them to muck pens at 2am, I get in the pens with them, shovel in hand. I take the time to explain what the project objectives are, and how it was designed to obtain specific data to address those objectives. I never drew blood from a calf without letting everyone present feel the vein. I give anatomy lessons and show the students how much variation there is in the size and placement of the jugular veins. Heck, I even taught two students who had no prior cow experience how to draw blood from the calves, letting them get samples while I held the calf. Both of them were perfect on their first attempts! That was a way for me to thank them for showing up on a regular basis during my pre-dawn shift. All this sounds really warm and fuzzy but of course I have ulterior motives. I believe that by teaching others, you solidify your own knowledge and learn new things in the process. One component of science is communication. Not just telling peers about your results, a formalized process that is important for credibility as well as verification, but also telling others who are not knowledgeable about your particular type of science what you are doing and why it is important. It’s like moving cows and moving around cows. It’s two sides of the same coin.

I think the second shoe finally dropped for me with respect to the vet school students when one of them sent out an email the other day asking to switch days with someone, and I replied to her, not to the entire group, with a very brief comment about how I hoped the cow would calve and we’d not have to worry about this anymore. Her quick reply was incredibly patronizing and rude.

The special snowflakes have failed to grasp at least two life lessons. First, there is no reason to act like an entitled shit. Getting into vet school is certainly hard but the bar isn’t set THAT high. Magical super powers are not required. And second, those professors and students that you are treating so poorly represent introductions for jobs, reference letters, sources of useful information, maybe even friendships. To be so self-centered at precisely the time in your career when you need to be cultivating those relationships is just stupid, naïve and stupid. That so many of them behave this way worries me a little bit. Is it something in the water? One or two ringleaders with bad attitudes? It's not my job nor in my own interests to fix whatever has gone off the rails at the vet school, but I'm now hyperalert to my own thoughts and actions. No doubt people say many things about me, but I don't ever want them to say that I am a special snowflake behaving badly.

(I was informed from a reasonably reliable source that the vet students who were reluctant to get in the pens probably only had interests in small animal medicine. Vet school training requires that you work with many different species, however. They probably showed up hoping to see a calf being born, preferably from a shit-free vantage point outside the pen.)