Some people call their professors by their last names, preceded by "Professor" or "Doctor"; others by their first names. Being old-fashioned, I call all my professors "Professor \Lastname". This doesn't work so well in the lab, however.
In all my previous work terms, I always call my bosses by their first names, because that's how they introduce themselves. Even if my supervisors have PhD's (and some did), it's just weird to use the supervisors' last names/titles when everyone else uses the first names. (Using titles also gets kind of weird when your boss's boss doesn't have a PhD.)
This term, well, I'm actually at school. So, I call the PI "Professor". However, everyone else calls him by his first name. It's gotten to the point where, if I refer to the PI as "Professor", people will take more time to process the name than if I just say the professor's first name. Also, it's a bit inconsistent to call the PI "Professor" when I am perfectly fine with calling postdocs by their first names rather than "Doctor".
So now I've taken to calling my PI "Professor \Lastname" if I am talking to him and by his first name otherwise. It's inconsistent, dammit. I'd rather just call him "Professor" all the time.
(Tangentially related: I always feel a bit awkward when professors refer to each other by their first names in front of students. E.g. "Go talk to Mary, she does alot of this in her research" rather than "Go talk to Professor Smith...").
Monday, June 15, 2009
Professorial Nomenclature
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3 comments:
See:
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1153
Unfortunately (or fortunately) for me, I'm an undergrad so I don't have a choice. It's always Professor for me.
I generally preferred "Hey, you!" or "Hey, cranky old man!" to my last PI's face, and his last name to his back (because too many people go by his first). He was a rather unique case, though.
The new PI goes by her first name only. (Lucky me! Much more pronounceable.)
As an undergrad, though, I generally stuck with "Dr. Lastname". A little quicker to say, and a little less formal.
A fellow undergrad (who's working in the same lab as I am this term) actually calls the PI "Hey, you" because she felt that "Professor" was too formal but didn't quite dare call him by his first name. Not sure how that works, but it somehow does.
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