As a young biology student, Margot Wohl is excited to spend a summer in the field, but her colleague expects her to do all the work.

Margot Wohl hails from Bel Air, Maryland but found her spirit city is Philadelphia when she moved their to study biology at the University of Pennsylvania. Now she is pursuing a PhD in neuroscience at UC San Diego where she confirms daily that the sun sets in the West and then retreats to her science cave for the night. Her research centers on how brain cells and the molecules they exchange give rise to aggressive behaviors in fruit flies. She enjoys all experiences that make her feel as though she is not on the planet Earth. In her free time she can be found playing tennis, doting on her cat to which she has allergies and taking pictures of insects she finds [hashtag insectagrams]. Also, Margot produces a podcast called Salk Talk for which she weaves together character vignettes of up and coming scientists.

This story originally aired on July 7, 2017.

Story Transcript

So it was my sophomore year of college.  It was the summer, and I was about to embark on my first real foray into science.  I was really excited and I had no idea what to expect.  In fact, I wasn’t sure how I really got there.  I've always really felt more like an observer for everything, although this kind of manifested itself in my childhood pastimes, which were really just watching things.  So watching wildlife, stargazing, just, like, looking at things.  And this really made it into how I also felt like I just was always observing my own life, that I didn’t really have agency and control over it. 

But I found myself about to do some fieldwork in upstate New York in Millbrook, which was a small town of about fourteen hundred people, and it was home to the abandoned Bennett School for Girls, where rich East Coasters would take their daughters to learn about domestic science.  But I felt really fortunate that I lived in a time where I could learn about hard science and where I had really strong female role models that had done really amazing things even though they were in male-dominated fields, like my grandmother, who started her own architecture practice, and my mother, who was an eye surgeon and she started her own medical practice.  Yet even with these role models, I really didn’t feel like I was going to be one of those women who was really strong and was able to kind of set their own path. 

But back to the science of what I was doing, my first time out in the field, I was studying Lyme disease.  I was working for a professor at my university and we were going out -- we had this idea.  So Lyme disease, I don't know if you know much about it, but it’s a bacteria-borne disease but often it’s carried through ticks.  So they'll feed on some hosts, maybe like mice or deer, that have the bacteria, then they fall off of those, come and find us, bite us and give us this wonderful bacteria that, if you don’t really catch right away, can lead to some pretty debilitating effects. 

So the idea of this science project was what if we go in and we immunize the mice and then they're not able to give the bacteria to the ticks and then the ticks won’t give it to us?  So I thought, Wow, this is a really great idea.  This is really cool. 

And the way that we would do this is we would go out in the evening around sunset and we’d set the traps.  We’d put these little balls of oatmeal spiked with dead bacteria in it and in the morning we would come.  The mice would come in through the evening and they would eat the oatmeal, and then we would check the traps.  Of course, we had all our controls.  The non-spiked oatmeal, all that sort of stuff. 

It was really fun because when we’d go in the morning and you open the trap, you would not know what you were going to find.  It was like Christmas every morning, except I’m Jewish, and also, instead of wearing pajamas, I was wearing this, like, huge Tyvek suit that I had to tuck into my socks and my gloves. Pretty suffocating. 

So we’d open the traps and sometimes there’d be chipmunks and, other times, there’d be flying squirrels, and then sometimes there’d be mice.  Like that’s what we’re studying.  That’s great.  All this is to say that I was having a really good time and I really felt in my element outside collecting samples, collecting data.  I thought, Maybe this is for me, this science thing.  Like, I could do this. 

And this was a really small-scale operation so there was me and a post-doc, or I should say a post-doc and I.  The boss, the professor from the university, came up and he trained us for a couple of days.  Then he was like, “All right, I’m out.  I’m going to Russia for six weeks.  You're not going to be able to contact me.” 

I was pretty naïve and I had no idea, no forethought to say like, “Hey, why don’t we write up a contract?”  Or like, “Who do I even talk to if something isn’t quite right?”  I didn’t know that these were the kind of things that you really want to ask when you’re about to be left alone in upstate New York without a boss. 

The boss did not get to meet the third addition to our team, who was hired by a colleague.  I’m just going to call him Biff.  Not his real name.  Back to the Future, anyone?  Yeah, it’s very foreboding.  It’s very foreshadowing.  And my boss never got to meet this guy because he was in Russia.  I can only assume he was, like, slamming back some vodka, wrestling some bears. 

But Biff came in and, first day, we go out into the field.  We’re going to train Biff on how to deal with these mice.  So we go to look in the trap, get the first mouse, and I say, “Okay, you're just gonna go, you're gonna take them by the tail.  You put it on your thigh and then hold it by the scruff.  It’s really, like, not that terrifying.”  And the guy, he goes in for the mouse and he's so scared that he's kind of shaking.  And he just flings the mouse as far as he can fling it, and it’s like, “I’m home free,” scurrying away. 

I’m like, “Oh, wow.  This guy is terrified of mice.”

So we go to the second trap and I’m like, “Hey, just take some deep breaths.  It’s gonna be okay.”  So the second mouse he goes in and he just squeezes it really hard and drops it.  This is weird like backwards fight-or-flight kind of response going on. 

So this first day left me really perplexed.  Why was this guy, why was he hired?  Who is this guy?  How did he get here?  Were his resumes mixed up?  Was this like a favor for a friend?  I have no idea how this guy got here.  But eventually he gets over this fear.

However, there are like other glaring issues with this employee.  For instance, he will knock over the vials.  He's very careless and he doesn’t really seem to care at all about the research, which I, at the time, and still do, I care about the research a lot. 

So I took on a lot of his responsibilities.  So I would collect the ticks for him or I would enter his data because he couldn’t align columns on the spreadsheet.  I just wanted to make sure that it all went well because it’s science and it’s important.  I didn’t really mind that that much.  I was like a go-getter and that didn’t really bother me that much. 

Working extra with the vermin outside was not the big deal.  It was the vermin inside that really was getting to me.  This meaning I’m referring to the fact that we all lived in a house together, the three of us, with a shared kitchen and bathroom in this isolated house, kind of middle of nowhere. 

And this guy Biff, he either recently or was still maybe living with his parents.  He was in his mid-thirties.  He liked to remind me of how his mom did all of his dishes for him, did all of his laundry, all of his cleaning, and that that was kind of how he thought women should be. 

I had never experienced sexism this blatant.  So at first I was like this is almost comical, in a way.  And you know what I can do is I can just ignore this and be like, “This is almost so ridiculous, it’s funny. And I should just totally ignore it.”  That works for a while but I have to say that, over time, I was really starting to get bothered by it and it was starting to bring up feelings of… kind of made me feel small and made me feel powerless. 

I didn’t talk back to him, so I didn’t say like, “Hey, this is making me feel really uncomfortable,” or like, “Hey, this isn’t cool.  This is not something you can do.”  I didn’t feel as though confrontation was something that I was comfortable with, and I didn’t really feel like I had a voice. 

I won’t say that… this sounds like a bummer, and the whole summer wasn’t a bummer.  There were other things to take my mind off of this negative presence.  So I got tons of reading done.  It was very lonely.  So lots of, like, singular activities were done.  Lots of reading.  I definitely kept this local Blockbuster in business.  It’s like around the time Blockbusters were going down and I was keeping this one, singlehandedly, alive watching all the Criterion Collection movies. 

Also, I got to eat my lunches in front of this beautiful, beautiful, decaying, abandoned school for girls.  I would just always try to hype myself up, get over my fear of asbestos and trespassing to go in there, which I never got over. 

But like all things that you try to put away and ignore, at some point, my time with Biff, it came to a boil, basically.  My anger really came to the surface. 

It was just one day, it was a particularly hot day.  We were really sweaty after collecting the mice and we come home and his dishes are in the sink.  I decide to speak up about it and I say like, “Hey, Biff, could you please do your dishes?  I really don’t want to, like, do them and I would really like it if you could do that so I could cook in the kitchen.” 

He responds to me very quickly and he says, “You're so lazy.  You don’t do any work.” 

At that point, I'd just been doing all of his work and so this flood of anger rushes through me, which is something I’m not used to feeling.  I don't know how you guys experience anger, but for me, anger is a very foreign feeling. 

So I was like, “What is this feeling?”  It was so visceral and yet I couldn’t say anything and I couldn’t do anything.  I think, like, I imagined punching him, but I knew that that was something I wasn’t capable of.  So instead, tears started streaming down my face.  I turned around and I walked to my car and I just drove. 

I was probably listening to some really moody music, like some Radiohead or something.  I stop in a parking lot maybe fifteen minutes up the road, empty parking lot, and I just scream as loud as I can.  No one can hear you when you're in the middle of nowhere.  If a tree falls, if a lady screams in a parking lot…

Did I really scream?  I don't know. 

I turn back and I go back to the house and I don’t say anything about it.  I take the anger and I put it in a ball and I kind of stuff it away somewhere inside where it can be latent and where it feels most comfortable for me. 

I say, “You know what?  The summer is going to come to an end.  The ticks, they will feed.  They will become engorged.  They will fall off, find their new host.  This summer will come to an end.” 

In fact, that did happen.  My boss came back about two weeks before the end of the summer, and I think the post-doc said something about, “Hey, this guy, he's really not good at his job.”  My boss called the colleague, fired this guy, and so I had two weeks of peace.  But I never did say anything about, “Hey, this guy actually was making me feel really uncomfortable,” because I didn’t really think it would matter.  I didn’t think that I mattered that much in this scenario, this undergraduate, young researcher, that I really had a voice in this. 

I get back to my university and so I say to my boss, “Okay, where’s that stipend you said you would pay me?”  And he says, “Well, actually, I think there's this technicality where if you want to do your senior thesis research in my lab I actually can’t pay you money.” 

So I say, “Well, then I won’t do my research in your lab for senior year, but you did say that you would pay me for this summer.”  And he said no.  At the time, I didn’t understand that I had some resources at my… that I could have gone to see and done something about it, but I didn’t know.  And I didn’t know that I had a voice and that I could really take control of this situation. 

So I did what I did with Biff and I turned around and I left.  I didn’t come back to the lab.  I could have seen this as a sign that science is not a good place for me, but I like to think that it was these people that were abusing their power and there were just a few bad eggs of people who weren’t really treating me with respect. 

I didn’t find my voice that summer.  I didn’t have the courage to speak up.  I kind of like lumbered through my twenties trying to build up my courage, build up my voice, get some more confidence.  There were other people that I would face along the way that would try to discourage me from science, say like, “You're not smart enough.”  “There's this quality about you that isn’t good for science.”  I didn’t always speak up to them, but one thing that I do feel like I did, the one way that I really feel like I did stand up for myself is that I didn’t quit.  I didn’t quit science. 

Now, I’m a fourth-year PhD student in neuroscience at UC San Diego, and I’m still working towards finding my worth, finding my voice.  But I do have the confidence that, at some point, I can, too, be like my grandmother and mother and that is, I could be a nasty woman. 

So thank you.