The greatest compliment of my academic life occured today.

Today I met with a visiting professor from a nearby school/hospital system (as many are). This person was part of the study that my least favorite professor first-authored... I've mentioned it before. The one that duplicated my idea but with a different drug target. Needless to say, I entered our meeting with skepticism.

Turns out, this person is pretty neat. We talked about how nobody really knows how my project and all others like it actually work, and that there is a lot of hand-waving and speculation with no actual, legit, hard data to back up the reasoning in a direct manner.

Aside: in science, all evidence must be direct - A causes B, not A causes C and B probably happens or A most likely causes B or A1 causes B1, so A2 probably causes B2. 

At any rate, I pulled a bunch of papers out of my head, throwing down some relevant general concepts, as I usually do. Ok, the authorship wasn't totally correct since I said they were all author A and only one of the three I was thinking was actually written by A. But I contributed to the discussion, took some charge and asked about both basic science as well as long-term human use consequences of the visiting professor's work. We did not have time to talk about my data, and I still had things coming out of my head when the bossman showed up to take the visiting professor to the next meeting. But... know what the visiting professor said when I was leaving?

Something along the lines of "you're a great grad student and I'd love to have a grad student that thinks like you do." There might have been something in there about how the bossman should be proud of me, but I was so caught offguard (holy fuck, a compliment! people don't compliment each other in science/academia! wtf!) that I was utterly unable to listen to anything else that happened.

HELLO, WORLD. For perspective, I consider a meeting with the bossman to be "excellent" when I don't want to run out in tears.

Lets put that in a larger font so I can come back to it later. I should have recorded it. Having a bad day? Play. Still having a bad day? Play again.

"you're a great grad student and I'd love to have a grad student that thinks like you do"

 Small step for grad students everywhere, large leap for K-kind.