High school student scooped by PhD student in the same lab When I was in high school, I spent one of my summers working in a lab.  The professor had a small lab, so I was given my own project, and made enough progress on it to publish a paper.

While I was working there, one of the PhD students started taking a keen interest in my work, and she kept wanting to discuss the problem, asking about details of my methodology, etc.  She even started replicating my work and literally rewriting my code to produce the same graphs that I was getting.  She was not originally assigned to the project, but I was happy to discuss the problem with her, because I enjoyed my project and wanted to talk about it with as many people as possible.

At the end of the summer she asked me to send her the slides from the talk I gave at group meeting.  A few months later my supervisor told my brother that she presented my work at a conference without mentioning my name.  (He never told me directly, probably because he thought I'd be sad.)

Anyway, my dad (who is a professor) was very mad about this, and told me I should write a draft of the journal paper myself so the professor would feel obligated to give me first authorship instead of that PhD student.  A few months later I sent him the draft, and he didn't give me first authorship, but did give me coauthorship on three different papers, one of which was only marginally related to what I did.  I got into my top choice of college (and graduate school), but this was one of the more traumatic experiences I had as a teenager, and ever since this incident I've sworn off academia as a career option.

Do you think I should have done anything differently, and what would you have done in this situation?
The situation that you describe sounds like extremely unusual and improper behavior on the part of the professor.  The graduate student is part of the problem, but the real responsibility lies with the professor who committed two major instances of misconduct:


Allowing the graduate student to co-opt your work without giving you credit.
"Giving" you authorship on a paper that you did not participate in.


Whether or not you should have been first author is not necessarily clear---one would have to know a lot more about the final form of the work to judge for certain.

As for your actions, I think that the primary actions that you took (raising the issue with the professor, then walking away from the situation when the problem was not addressed) were appropriate.  I think that you should probably feel uncomfortable about the paper that has your name on it when you don't feel you deserve authorship.  You can get that fixed by the publisher, if it makes you uncomfortable enough.

I think that you are making a mistake, however, in allowing this experience to sour you on academia.  Unethical people who will take advantage of you can be found in every profession, and in academia at least there are clear rules on what the ethics are supposed to be.  You won't necessarily find that in the business world, where it is often considered ethical to exploit people for money (see: fiduciary duty to stockholders).