THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF ENGINEERING

Cooperation and Competition Between Two Thesis Students

Author(s): Anila Jahangiri and Caroline Whitbeck

You are a doctorate student working in Professor ChunMun's group. Your thesis is project A which is closely related to project B, the thesis project of another doctorate student in the group, Garbanzo.

You have completed the experimental section of your project and are ready to move on to the computer modelling section of project A. During a meeting with your PhD thesis advisory committee, one of the other committee members after observing your experimental data results suggests that you perform protocol X to confirm your results. Protocol X that he has suggested you to perform is actually the main objective of Garbanzo's project B. Dr. ChunMun is present in the meeting but he does not tell you or the other members that another student has been working on that project for more than a year but with no results. You are vaguely familiar with project B but are not aware that protocol X is a part of project B.

Garbanzo is the superuser of the Unix workstation which hosts the computer models belonging to both projects A and B. These programs have been written by another postdoc working in ChunMun's group and do not belong to Garbanzo. You have not had a chance to work with either of the models of project A or B. When you meet Garbanzo and tell him you would need the computer models related to protocol X transferred to your folder, he hesitates to do so and is very unhelpful. You are very surprised at his unhelpful behavior. He then asks why you trying to move into somebody else's territory. Only then do you learn that protocol X is one of his doctoral thesis objectives. You apologize and tell him that you had not known his thesis objectives.

What can and should you do at this point?

• Return to Research Ethics Module Supporting Pages

• Key Issues in Research With Children

• Working Relationships in the Lab

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