Page 115 - The Love Hypothesis

Olive: You must know that you fail more people than anyone
else. And your criticism is needlessly harsh. As in, immediately-

drop-out-of-grad-school-and-never-look-back harsh. You must
know how grads perceive you.

Adam: I don’t.

Olive: Antagonistic. And unapproachable.
And that was sugarcoating it. You’re a dick, Olive meant. Except that I
know you can not be, and I can’t figure out why you’re so different with me.

I’m absolutely nothing to you, so it doesn’t make any sense that you’d have
a personality transplant every time you’re in my presence.

The three dots at the bottom of the screen bounced for ten seconds,
twenty, thirty. A whole minute. Olive reread her last text and wondered if

this was it—if she’d finally gone too far. Maybe he was going to remind her
that being insulted over text at 9:00 p.m. on a Friday night was not part of
their fake-dating agreement.

Then a blue bubble appeared, filling up her entire screen.

Adam: I’m doing my job, Olive. Which is not to deliver feedback
in a pleasant way or to make the department grads feel good

about themselves. My job is to form rigorous researchers who

won’t publish useless or harmful crap that will set back our field.
Academia is cluttered with terrible science and mediocre

scientists. I couldn’t care less about how your friends perceive me,
as long as their work is up to standard. If they want to drop out

when told that it ’s not, then so be it. Not everyone has what it

takes to be a scientist, and those who don’t should be weeded
out.
She stared at her phone, hating how unfeeling and callous he sounded.
The problem was—Olive understood exactly where Greg was coming from,
because she’d been in similar situations. Perhaps not with Adam, but her

overall experience in STEM academia had been punctuated by self-doubt,
anxiety, and a sense of inferiority. She’d barely slept the two weeks before

her qualifying exams, often wondered if her fear of public speaking was