Xavier Jordan discovers the party side of science at his first scientific conference.
Xavier Jordan is a University of Illinois graduate in chemistry and molecular and cellular biology. He is currently applying for microbiology research positions in Chicago. He's been telling stories for a long time and is glad to be part of the scene again.
This story originally aired on December 13, 2019 in an episode titled “A Scientist is Born.”
Story Transcript
I am standing at room 314 in a hotel. I’m trying to knock but I can’t. Why are you doing this? Fuck! Why? Why? Why? You're not a party guy. This is stupid and arbitrary. You're not trying-to-be-friends-with-strangers-in-the-dark kind of guy. You're a talk-with-two-cool-people-at-a-booth kind of guy.
But you're 20, you look 16, today was a really shitty presentation and drinks are required, so I knock.
Lucy, the girl who invited me answers and I’m caught off guard because earlier that day she was in a pantsuit doing a year’s worth of XRD assays presenting them in about 20 minutes. Now, she is super tipsy. She has one of those tight dresses with like stylish missing pieces from it. She's trying to make conversation. I ask her about her research and she stops me and says, “I am not thinking about that right now. You tell me what I’m doing. You were there, right?” Kind of implying I wasn’t listening to her presentation that day, because I wasn’t.
You see, earlier that day, I wasn’t paying attention to her or anyone. Me, my boss, Dr. Burn, and seven other undergrads from U of I drove three hours to U of C, University of Chicago for a microbiology symposium and we were presenting our research.
It was a big deal. And I don’t say that to brag. I say that because I was fucking terrified. This is my first time doing anything in a research capacity and presenting it. It’s one thing to talk about your work in front of your friends or family at a lunch but it’s another thing to present all of your research for the last year to 400 people who have dedicated their lives to something that you've only scratched the surface of.
Shit! Fuck! Fuck! This is so stupid and arbitrary.
And money? Money? My boss gets money if I do well. Who would trust this? Me. This. For money for you? Come on. I remember being frantic in my laptop just going through the PowerPoints, going through potential answers for potential questions not looking at anyone. And I see water dropping on my laptop.
I look up and there's no one there. I feel my hair only to realize that the water is coming from my forehead. I am sweating. I do not sweat like this. I sweat after exercise or from my eyes after watching Toy Story 1 through 4. I do not sweat. This is stupid and arbitrary. You're going to fuck it up. You're nervous. Breathe. Just breathe. Just picture yourself six hours from now when it’s all over. That will make you feel better. Just picture it.
And there I am, six hours from then, with Lucy. She leaves to tend to her guests. She's trying to predict where graduate vomit is going to go before it does. And she's got a lot of ground to cover because this room is huge. It’s super fancy, super clean. No carpets. It’s got like a mini-bar and a hot tub and ottomans and sconces. It’s like just rich Ivy League research money. And my room, the same hotel, had a microwave so I’m not salty about it. I like hot pockets.
I couldn’t throw a party that crazy anyway, and it was crazy. Like protégés in line to get their tenure we’re taking their tenth shot of Everclear. There were people who should not have been doing keg stands who were doing many keg stands. There was Kim Lee this tiny, adorable, unsuspecting Chinese woman who had literally won an award for research service that day who had been chugging out of a beer bong for like a while, like a Viking. It was crazy.
Me, I was slightly trashed enough to talk to some geniuses I didn’t know. I remember staring into a circle of people and I recognize a face from the blurred faces earlier that date. Name, name. Jean? Greg? Greg, great. Okay. Name, conversation. I hear them talking about taxonomizing viruses. You've worked in that field before so I can say something, so I enter. I ask, “Oh, yeah, okay. Have any of you worked with ICTV before?”
“Oh, yeah. I have too, yeah.”
“Do you agree with their sub-family assignments or...” Am I bullshitting? Honestly, I don't even know at this point.
But I’m in a circle. I’m not lonely at the party anymore. That’s a huge relief.
So it’s me, Tony, some other young scientist and Greg. Greg is the most important person in this circle and the most important person in the story. He would be ecstatic to hear that. He is a blonde, blue, tall charlatan who could charm an ox. That’s something he would say when he was drunk. He's weird.
I’m sorry that my impression of him sounds like mandarin from Ironman 3, just if any of you have seen it, I’m bad at impressions so he doesn’t sound like this. But he said stuff like, “You're looking as sharp as a tack today.” Or, “I’m not drunk. You could make me drive into a canal and I'd be fine.” Fucking Greg.
We soldier on, though. At this point in the conversation it’s just me, Tony, Greg. They ask about work. I tell them I love it. I love my boss. I love my work. We’re going to save the world. And then we talk about Greg’s job and his mood tightens up a little bit.
He's talking about how he used to scan and comb through people’s life’s work to pick 2% out of them to fund and to leave the other 98% in financial purgatory, letting time kill them in their sleep. Fucking Greg.
So we ask him why. Why do you do this worthless job? Why do you do it? He takes a second to answer. And, as anyone would do, he grabs a wine bottle off this oak wood table, says, goes, “Bitch got to have his money,” which is out of character, and he threw the bottle on the ground and it scattered.
Me and Tony back away immediately. We lock eyes trying to see who knows Greg more so that they can take care of Greg for the rest of the night when we both realize in that eye contact that neither of us know him at all.
Lucy immediately comes over and says, “You have to go,” and she starts pushing him out. So she's pushing Greg out. Me and Tony take Greg over our shoulder and we start to leave. I can see people in the room glancing at us with half pity and half shame in their eyes. I just don’t want them to recognize me tomorrow because after today’s presentation, I mean, I've had enough embarrassment for one weekend.
Because the symposium did not go well. I remember being backstage frantic, trying to quell my anxiety and the sweat and the breath. But then the emcee calls us up. Symposiums have those. They have emcees. And it’s all of us, eight people going up.
I know the words front-to-back. “This serum will help make this bacteria nonvirulent, safe in future mice models. It clearly, this figure clearly shows that its structures are similar to microfilament isoforms.”
In other words, it’s renewable, it’s reproducible and it forms muscles out of thin air, what we’re working with. That’s going to save the world. That’s amazing, right? Wrong.
Wrong. Because I’m looking in the audience and everyone is looking away. No one cares. What is happening?
Okay. This is safe place. I have this nightmare that my porn browser pops up on the projector instead of my PowerPoint. I shit you not. I do a double take. No porn. No problem. Why is everyone acting like I took a shit on stage? Fuck! This is stupid. Why are you here? This is stupid and arbitrary.
We finish all Q&As. We go through the discussions and the diagrams and the procedures. We get off stage and nothing changed. What happened?
And the worst part is that we have to do this tomorrow again. This is a weekend thing and I already know that they're going to react poorly again. Fuck! But you can’t change the past. Just calm down. You're going to go to this dope party. You're going to have a great time. You're going to get some rest. And you're going to do better tomorrow.
None of that happened. It’s me and Tony at a booth talking about Star Wars: Clone Wars. Greg is also there. Greg is there. His head is trying to hold itself up. He's texting his boss that he loves him and he still wants to work for him and that he could maybe use a raise because bitch got to have his money.
I get a text that the Uber has arrived. We’re taking Greg home. Me and Tony get in the car and Greg is not getting in the car. He's not bending his body. Me and Tony get up. We try to help him. And the moment we like grab his neck he shoots up and his legs go above his head, the back of his head slams on the pavement.
Me and Tony freak out. We try to pick him up but he gets up fine, like he didn’t just slam his head on the pavement. And then his knees buckle and he falls down hard this time.
The symposium didn’t go much better. As soon as we were done, I immediately went up to my boss, Dr. Burn who’s a wise Mr. Miyagi. He's great. And I ask him like, “What happened? Everything was great. The Q&A, the diagrams. Everyone else seemed to be talking good. What happened?”
Dr. Burn stops me and he says, “Oh, yeah, yeah. That’s right. You haven't done this before, right?”
I say, “No, this is my first time.”
And he says, “Let me ask you a question. Can you tell me what Stanford is doing at all? Can you tell me any of the projects they're working on?” And I couldn’t, in fact. I could not. I couldn’t tell you what anyone was doing. And that whole day I wasn’t paying attention.
And then Dr. Burn tells me to look around and it clicks. I’m here presenting and I’m not paying attention to anyone. Everyone here is doing the same thing as me, so most of everyone doesn’t care about anyone here.
So I ask Dr. Burn, “Why are we doing this? Why are we running in circles? Are we here to validate ourselves? What are we doing?”
And Dr. Burn stops me again. He tells me to look around a little bit more. He points out about 10 or 20 people, and they're different. They're a little fancier, a little happier. They're in groups of two or three. Those are the investors. Those are the people that matter.
He tells me, “Those are the people that I’m training you to talk to. Those are the people that pay us to do what we want to do. And I think they liked what you had to say.” I didn’t believe him.
Day two of the symposium. It’s just another day and we have to present again. I’m a little less nervous this time and a little more fuck it. I present, we finish, we pack up and, on my way out, I see the most beautiful like three-piece, black and gray Valentino suit. And who in it but fucking Greg.
He is looking fine and next to him is his boss, so we can’t talk about the night before. We can’t talk about him slamming his head on the pavement or me and Tony having to take him to the ER, me and Tony having to wait in the ER and then him coming out with six stitches in the back of his head and him saying, the first several words he had said to us that night, “So, who wants breakfast?” Fucking Greg.
We didn’t say anything because his boss is right there.
So I met his boss, Nathan Clark. The name I recognize from Dr. Burn the day before. And that’s when the lesson sort of clicked. It subsided my fear of these loud and complicated rooms. I don’t think they're stupid or arbitrary anymore. They're here so that we can connect and, more importantly, so that we can create and save that part, because Greg made a play date between our bosses. Maybe he was interested in our work or the fact that I saved his life. Nathan Clark and Dr. Burn go to lunch and, just like that, Nathan Clark funds our research for three unimpeded years.
Time to plan, time to work, time to save the world because of these loud, complicated, stupid, arbitrary rooms that I was so afraid of. And because Greg cannot handle his gin. Thank you.