Foreign postdoc in Korea got assigned a weekend deadline by a master’s student. Professor backed the student. Is this just how Korean academia works for foreigners?
Some context before I get into it: I’m a foreign postdoc at a Korean university. My professor is Korean. The master’s student involved is Korean. I am not. I don’t think that’s irrelevant to this story.
I co-supervise a master’s student, let’s call her H, on an animal experiment. I designed the entire thing from scratch. 5 groups, 25 mice, 7-day protocol, daily swabbing, the works. I also wrote a detailed planning document that listed every dataset she could expect from the experiment, what each one measures, and what graph type to use for each. 12 datasets. All laid out. I gave this to her weeks ago.
This Saturday at 4pm, H emails me. She says she’s been thinking about the in vivo experiment and wants to understand what data she can get from it. She attaches a figure from someone else’s published paper as a visual example and asks me to compile a “figure set” like that from published literature in PPT form. And can I have it ready by Monday 1pm?
I replied the same day, on a weekend, pointing her to the planning document I already made. Section 10 has exactly what she asked for, graph types included.
She replied two hours later saying the document is hard to understand and she still wants the PPT with example figures pulled from papers. So: go find papers, extract figures, build a PowerPoint. By Monday. On a weekend she decided this was urgent.
I emailed my professor to check if he had instructed her to get this from me, since compiling a literature-based figure PPT felt like thesis preparation work that belongs to the student, not the supervisor.
He replied saying two things. One, that in his lab co-authors are expected to help produce data related to experiments they assist with. Two, that at Friday’s group meeting he told H to “consult with” me when preparing the figure set.
“Consult with” turned into “make it for me by Monday 1pm.”
His conclusion was that H probably wasn’t pushing work onto me, and that helping with the data would be good of me as a senior postdoc. So I’m making the PPT.
Here’s my honest take on what’s actually happening, and I want people to tell me if I’m wrong:
In my experience, Korean PIs cannot afford to lose their Korean students. These students don’t just do research, they handle admin work, company projects, lab management, basically everything that keeps the lab running. The PI has a long-term investment in keeping them happy. A foreign postdoc, on the other hand, is on a fixed contract, has no such leverage, and when push comes to shove, hierarchy only seems to apply when it benefits the Korean members of the lab. When a foreign researcher is involved, suddenly seniority doesn’t matter and we’re all just here to help.
I want to be fair and ask: was I wrong to escalate to my professor instead of just telling H directly that this wasn’t my job? Should I have handled it differently? Is this actually a normal expectation for someone running an experiment, to also compile thesis prep materials for the student?
Or is what I experienced just a very common story for foreign researchers in Korean academia that nobody talks about openly?
My contract ends in November. I’m already looking. But I’d still like to know if I’m reading this situation correctly.