Prof-like Substance

The grad student totem pole

2010-09-02T08:56:00.002-04:00

There are certain things about grad school that you kinda forget about once you move on. It's been roughly 6 years since left my grad lab and a lot has happened since then. With the new grad students filtering in around now, I was reminded of one absolute: new students get what's left.

For whatever reason, there is always a known ranking of resources in a grad office. A best desk space, best chair, best coffee cup, best whatever, and every other similar item fits into the hierarchy. Grad student B has the third best chair, for instance. At times of personnel flux, the perturbation sets off a wave of resource shuffle.

Senior grad students get first choice and will scarf up anything that is higher in the ranking than they already have. The next in line than devour their refuse and so the grad student food chain re-arranges itself with the n00bs getting the scraps.

This, of course, is unbeknownst to the noob, because they are just happy to be starting something new and everything takes some adjusting to. Research, all the reading, the other students, a new place, new surroundings. While they find their bearings they don't notice that their chair has one arm duct taped on and their mouse only scrolls in one direction. The other students, of course, assure them that the chair is the most comfortable one and the loose arm staves off carpel-tunnel. Besides, who ever scrolls up in a document or webpage? All the good stuff is down!

Before long, the noob realizes the deal and starts counting down to the next resource shuffle.

Opening a new shop

2010-08-02T10:00:00.002-04:00

To borrow a phrase from one of the most narcissistic public displays in recent memory, I'm taking my talents to Scientopia. My new blog, called The Spandrel Shop*, is part of roughly 25 either new or moved blogs that have assembled in this new collective.

In the wake of the blogger shuffle that been going, a group of us have been working to put together a community of bloggers that approach science from a number of different angles. From that start point and largely on the back of Mark Chu-Carroll's technical chops, Scientopia has come into being.

So why are you still reading this? Go over and check it out!

*h/t to CPP for helping with the name.

Substantial transition

2010-07-30T08:49:00.003-04:00

And just when you thought all the moving around and updating your links was done...

I wanted to write today and let people know that this blog will be moving on Monday and hopefully my readers will come along as well. It's a bit odd for me because this spot has been 'home' since the start, so I have mixed emotions about moving to a new place and letting this space go dormant. I'll be leaving it up on the off chance that I don't fit in the new neighborhood or the movers break all my shit on the way over, but my posting activity will relocate for the foreseeable future.

I wouldn't be moving, however, if it wasn't for something really exciting. I'll be posting a link on Monday, but my guess is that come Monday you'll know where to find me...

My application to Nature Network... or blogs?

2010-07-29T08:31:00.003-04:00

As has been covered ad nauseam, with all the flux at ScienceBlogs recently there has been a lot of movement of voices to new places. One of the consequences of that is a number of open blog spots at ScienceBlogs, and some people see this as a great time to try and join the SB collective. I guess one has to pick a good time to move up in the world.

In other news, it would appear that things are not so happy inside the garden walls of Nature Blogs, either. Perhaps this is the perfect time for me to apply there?

In that spirit, I would like to use this as my application to Nature Network... er, Nature Blogs (it seems unclear even to their bloggers). I even already made the banner!

I would make a good NN blogger for a number of reasons.

First, I don't care about knowing information like how many hits I get for which posts or who my audience is. I mean, why would that be helpful? And who needs a blogroll?

Second, I like talking to only a select group of other bloggers and to avoid engaging anyone else at any time, using barriers to said engagement when possible. It keeps the riff raff out, ya know, like we've been doing for centuries.

Third, I have an iphone. `Nuff said, amiright?

Fourth, I am totally cool with a non-functional front page that does nothing to promote my blog in any way and is completely impossible to navigate.

Finally, I am totes in love with LOL cats and like to fill entire comment threads with their hilariosity.

If that isn't enough to make my application get rubber stamped, there's a case of watercress on it's way to London as we speak.

Don't forget the staff

2010-07-28T08:51:00.001-04:00

The employee structure in academic institutions tends to be an odd mix. Odd in that there are essentially three components, all with very different goals. The most familiar is likely the faculty, who are there to teach and do research in varying proportions. There is also the administration, which I would define as former academics who have taken an administrative, rather than research-oriented career trajectory. Finally, the staff are there to make sure everything gets done.

The relationships between these groups can range form outright adversarial to synergistic (administration buzzword!) and I think it is most common to hear about the interactions that go badly. It's true that we tend to write more about the frustrations we face than the small victories thought the day. But at the end of the day there are those outside of our peer group we have to place our trust in to do the tasks we are not equipped to do.

From my perspective, and especially as I was first learning* how this place works, having a couple of dependable staff members in my college who just get things done has been one of the most important and useful things I could ask for. Their jobs are critical to my success and their willingness to go out of their way to be helpful has made my life infinitely easier as a result.

I think most people reading probably know or work with at least one person like this and all I would ask is that you not take them for granted and recognize their efforts in any way you can. It is easy to lose sight of the difference helpful staff can make when you get used to it, but as someone who has faced their share of clock-punchers, I will always find the time to thank someone for doing their job well.

*This process continues, but I'm less stupid these days.

Name that blog

2010-07-26T10:44:00.002-04:00

It is a time of flux in the science bloggoshpere and here will be no different. There are blogs and bloggers moving all over the place (several to Labspaces, including Dr. Becca's new blog and Biochem Belle's new location) and more likely to move soon in the wake of the ScienceBlogs meltdown. With the biggest tree in the forest significantly reduced, the light is allowing for new growth of smaller networks. I knew I should have paid more attention in Ecology class.

I've got some things planned for the next week or so to shake things up here as well. The first order of business is changing the name of the blog. I have a few things kicking around in my head, but I've gotten lots of great ideas on a variety of topics from you readers, so I'm throwing the opportunity to name the blog out there for anyone who would like to give it a shot.

One factor that may make a difference is that I would like to move this blog in the direction of adding more content related to evolution. I'm not sold on including that in the name, but I'm leaning that way.

Ideas?

Slaves to a walnut-sized sack

2010-07-23T12:43:00.002-04:00

The difference between having a kid in diapers and one not in diapers is pretty big. Diapers are a pain in the ass (sometimes literally) and generate a lot of garbage, but there is also a certain amount of freedom that accompanies wrapping your kid in an absorbent layer. Often they will let you know when that layer is pushing its capacity, but the urgency in dealing with the situation is usually not ridiculous.

Once potty trained, everything changes. I should say that I couldn't be happier to be free of diapers and the associated paraphernalia that comes with having to extricate one's offspring from a saturated layer of human waste. However, now the dreaded cry of "PEE PEE!!!!" (or worse) has taken on a new threat level. In the car, this means find the nearest bathroom, even if you would previously never have considered using that particular facility. I have spent more time in public restrooms in the last few months than the previous two years, and I can tell you that not all are created equal. Generally the Wee One is pretty good about holding it together, but that doesn't mean that I'm not taking a mental inventory of every available bathroom in my vicinity at all times, in case.

The same principal is true for bedtime as well. Too much liquid before bed and we end up with the situation we had this morning at 5:00am. Imagine not waking up to an alarm with familiar music, but instead to the crackly screams of "PEE PEE COMING!!!" through the monitor a room away. Never prior have I needed the ability to transition from REM sleep to a full sprint in a second's time quite like the past few months.

I'm sure this will improve soon, but for the moment it's hard not to feel like a hostage to another person's bladder.

Job data in ecology and evolution fields

2010-07-21T10:05:00.005-04:00

There tends to be a lot of hearsay and rumors in the academic job market and much of what gets spread around is based on N=1, as in, a friend of mine was on a search committee and told me....

For this reason a paper that just came out in the Israel Journal of Ecology & Evolution might be of interest. Marshall et al. used a survey-based approach via the EvolDir and ECOLOG-L listserves to obtain data from individuals recently hired into TT positions. Their disclaimers are as follows:

We recognize several limitations of data gathered from online, anonymous, voluntary surveys. We were explicit in our instructions that participants only take the survey if they had been offered their first tenure-track job or equivalent position within the last four years and that they answer the questions as they applied at time of hire, but we are fully aware that confusion with regard to either of these instructions could inflate the numbers. Additionally, we cannot account for the bias of surveying principally from subscribers to EvolDir and ECOLOG-L email directories, as subscribers as these directories tend to be geared towards research rather than teaching issues. Persons employed at institutions requiring heavy teaching loads and lighter research requirements may have been less likely to participate. Therefore, the surveyed faculty may not represent a true cross section of successful first-time academics.

What they ended up with was a data set of 181 participants from countries all over the world. They asked pretty basic questions, including number of years as a postdoc, number of pubs (total & 1st author) at hire, etc. On the publication front, they found that:

...first-time hires had, on average, two first-author publications in journals with impact factors between 2 and 10... and one first or co-authorship paper in a higher impact journal like Science, Nature, PLoS Biology, or Trends in Ecology and Evolution...

For many of the categories, the variance was high. For instance the average age of hire for people at PhD-granting institutions was 33.1 +/- 4.1 and the average time spent as a postdoc was 3.08 +/- 2.15. The average number of pubs for that same group was 12.75, but with a whopping SD of +/- 7.63.

Most of the data are pretty much summed up in the first paragraph of the discussion, where the authors state:

Although significant variation exists in all categories and within all categorical groups, the qualitative message of this study is that prospective ecologists and evolutionary biologists are required to dedicate significant resources to publishing high quality papers,
applying for grants, and teaching courses if they want a reasonable chance of eventually landing a permanent position at a college or university. This will not come as a surprise to most, but what is striking are the qualification of the average successful candidate regardless of level of institution, region of the world, or gender. The successful candidate will most likely be in their early 30s, will have spent several years as a postdoc, taught multiple courses, received several grants, and will have published more than ten articles, with the majority of these articles appearing in high impact journals (Table 1, Table 2). These statistics suggest that all students considering careers in ecology or evolutionary biology should expect a highly competitive market that most likely will require substantial time investment.

I found it interesting that they found some different trends, based on gender and between the US and Europe / UK.

On average, successful applicants from the UK and Europe were younger at age of hire, spent more time as postdocs, had more publications, and received more large grants than individuals from the US (Table 1, Table 2). This could possibly be accounted for in part by the fact that many European Ph.D.s take only 3 years to complete rather than the typical 4–6 years in the US. Female applicants from doctoral institutions in the US generally had lower averages than males in these same categories, but this pattern did not exist in comparisons between genders within the UK category. However, it should be strongly noted that these differences between genders for doctoral institutions in the US are qualitative and not statistically significant.

The Marshal et al. paper was also followed by two responses, one by Roy Turkington, a faculty member in the Botnay Department at the University of British Columbia, and the second by Douglas W. Morris, who is a faculty member at Lakehead University. The Turkington article focused on a resent faculty search at UBC, where two positions were available. Dr. Turkington breaks down the candidate pool for those searches and reports much the same story as the Marshall et al. article. The Morris paper, entitled "Life History and Multi-level Selection in Academe" is at least worth a read for such gems as:

Euphemisms called “labs” coexist in structured universal aggregations where they compete with one another for scarce resources. Labs cooperate to produce copious numbers of zygotes, most of which disperse synchronously each year. The strongest find their way into the protective brood pouches of crusty adults who shed soft-shelled offspring at regular intervals (slowly developing zygotes die by the incompletely understood process of academic apoptosis). Juveniles develop a hard external carapace by intermittently joining and extracting themselves from other labs. The hardened but vulnerable sub-adults then join a common pool where they compete for space and position on rapidly eroding substrate in the universal aggregation. Many become dormant and fail to contribute to the gene (meme) pool. Some return to the lab as brood-rearing helpers. Few survive the rampant competition and frenzied cannibalism in the pool. Not all of the survivors are safe on the fragile substrate. A second apoptosis-like event eliminates the weak and meek. Only the most persistent or aggressive remain.

All in all, it's worth a read, even if you are not in the fields included. Data from early TT faculty don't often surface easily, and despite the inherent biases of the study, there is something tangible here to look at. It may not be what many are looking to hear right now, but it's data.

Panel call

2010-07-21T09:09:00.002-04:00

I've been trying to get invited for a review panel at NSF for some time now. The biggest problem has been that the proposals I have been submitting tend to land in a broad set of programs, often making me ineligible to serve on the panels related to my proposals. To make matters worse, my proposals often get co-reviewed between two different panels, doubling the number of panels I can not sit on. This actually scuttled my participation last round.

This round is different, however, because the two collaborative proposals I was intending to submit did not end up going in for a few reasons, meaning only one proposal went in to NSF this round. Before I read that again and start to feel sick, there is a silver lining.

I've been invited to serve on a review panel in this round for a program that I intend to submit a proposal to in January. Although I know it's going to be a decent amount of work and I'll have to juggle it with teaching, I couldn't be more excited. I've met the program officer in charge of the program and think the whole experience will be really positive for me. I'm hoping to also find an excuse to talk to the POs of the other programs I regularly submit to while I'm in DC.

Who knows whether meeting the people in charge will help, but it certainly can't hurt. And the opportunity to see the review proses from the inside has me pretty pumped. Whatever insight I can get from the visit will certainly help me craft the January proposal.

Meltdown

2010-07-20T09:45:00.001-04:00

Interesting times to be a science blogger. I have been blogging here for nearly 2 years and when I first started typing blather that got posted here, it wasn't long before I started reading Scienceblog.com. You couldn't not read some of the blogs on that site and still have an idea what was going on in this corner of the bloggosphere. I first started reading Drugmonkey, then Isis and through them got to know many more blogs on SB that I now regularly read.

SB was a bit of a gateway for me to the science blogging community as a whole and facilitated my getting familiar with the people out there doing similar things - whether through blog comments, linked posts or even the regular blog warz. From that perspective, I will add my voice to the many that are disappointed with how Seed Media Group (SMG) has basically blown up a really good thing through sheer ineptitude.

At this point the demise of the site as a whole appears only a matter of time. Bora's departure appears to be the shot across the bow that signals the end to a great community. Even PZ is gearing up for an exit, and he pulls in nearly half the SB traffic (according to Bora's post). All the while there is no response from SMG, either publicly, or apparently privately either (according to PZ's post). Why should anyone else stay when the powers that be don't appear to care one way or another? It's a fucking shame, but I guess there will be one blogger to hold down the fort.

The silver lining here is that this meltdown has caused a shake up in the science bloggosphere that may be unprecedented and it will be very interesting to see the lay of the land in another 1 - 3 months. Will it be better? I don't know, but it will be different. Perhaps the move away from a corporate entity will change the community in a good way and reinvest energy into communities. Perhaps other blog networks will decide now is the time to expand in a big way. Whatever happens, there will be a monumental shift in our meta community as SB bloggers find new homes and bloggers from the larger community migrate to networks that pop up, but in the long run I think it will be for the better.

For now, however, R.I.P. ScienceBlogs.

Now PalMD is leaving and Zuska is as well. PZ is on strike and the talent drain continues, unacknowledged.

Dude, Fuck. Sigh.

Time to reassess

2010-07-19T09:21:00.002-04:00

The summer is officially more than halfway over and the specter of the academic year is looming. For the last 3 weeks I have essentially been out of the office, between traveling and a 'vacation' that turned into "let's do every home improvement project we've been putting off for the last year all in less than a week". The break from my desk has been good, however, even if has not been a time of relaxation.

The break also provides an opportunity to sit back and look things over now that I've had some distance. Grants have been submitted, so that deadline is no longer an issue for a little while. An enormous amount of data has come back as well, and suddenly we have a much more comprehensive dataset than we had originally thought we would. These data and others have been gathering for a while and now that the lab is back from traveling, we will finally be able to sink our teeth in and churn out the papers from them.

We also have two new members joining the lab within the next 6 weeks and one graduating, so there will be a time of change to deal with as we incorporate the new people into the mix and figure out where they best fit and what new they can bring to the work we are doing. It also means saying goodbye to the lab's first student, which will be a landmark event in itself.

Inescapably, it's also time to assess our financial situation. The conference season was excellent for the students and myself, but dude, we spent money like a drunken bachelor in Vegas for the first time. There were flights, there was accommodation and there was food (some which I still know the identity of). I don't regret it, but we took a good hit to the account. This week it will be time to look over everything and figure out what we can and can not do in the next 6 - 12 months without outside funding. I'm hoping the answer isn't terrifying, but at least we have a sea of data to wade through.

Finally, I have been thinking a lot about this blog and where to go next. I have figured a few things out and have some changes planned. Stay tuned.

If professor big shot can't land funding, am I screwed?

2010-07-16T08:10:00.003-04:00

One of the recent conferences I was at was a bit sobering - not for the data or for all the cool shit people are doing, but for the fact that several really big names in my field are all having funding issues. These are people who have averaged at least 2 or 3 CNS papers a year for the last 5 or so years and beyond. These are people who have set the pace for the field for years. These are the people who give talks that everyone discusses afterwards at the break.

Holy shit.

One individual who is at a prestigious UK uni has been without funding for two rounds now, and they are making him move to a smaller office! Talk about tough love. I would be in a broom closet with two other people right now if those rules were applied to n00bs at my uni.

But the reality remains. These giants in the field are getting the $$. Granted, many of those I talked to were not from North America, so it may be a reflection of the economic realities of certain countries, but it's still a scary prospect. My hope is that funding agencies are making the move towards putting their dollars into the younger crowd, but if they are not willing to fund the people who are still VERY active and have a long history of innovation, it makes me concerned about the chances of my proposals.

We will see, I suppose.

Geek tattoos

2010-07-12T11:26:00.002-04:00

For a long while I have been thinking about getting another tattoo. I've been waffling on what to get for the past two years or so, based mainly on the fact that I have juggled three ideas without one completely grabbing me. It took me quite a while to decision on my first one, but I ended up happy with it, probably because I really thought it through. If something doesn't grab me I'm not going to get it stuck into my skin.

But based on some recent thinking, I may have a new idea. I am strongly considering one of Ernst Haeckel's radiolarian drawings from his book on the group.

This is appealing to me, not only because Haeckel was an incredible artist and an important player in the history of biology*, but because radiolarians are a really interesting group that very little is known about. Exploring the odd-balls of the world has always had more draw for me than studying the effect of one amino acid in one protein in humice. They also actively engage in dozens of different symbioses, which I find particularly interesting.

This brings up some questions for my readers, however, because I'm curious. Perhaps I'll get inspired from someone else's vison for themselves.

1) If you were forced to get a tattoo tomorrow, what would it be and why?

2) Where would you get it and why?

*Yes, I also know that he was a proponent of scientific racism and had some political views that would raise eyebrows in today's context. However, the good he did in promoting science has lasted far longer than his pseudo-Lamarckian ideas of human evolution.

Home agin, home again, jigidy jig

2010-07-09T13:37:00.002-04:00

Whew, long couple of weeks. Feels like about a month. A lot happened while I was away, both at home and in the bloggosphere, both with lasting implications and neither of which I am prepared to get into now.

Got back late last night and got a few hours of sleep before getting up for a full day at work today in order to get a grant submitted today. That looks like it's on track and now I am waiting for the final approval from the grants office, so I have a few minutes of downtime. This whole month (real, not just perceived) has been crazy, and I know I'm not the only one feeling it.

I'm happy to be home though. As I dragged my ass out of bed with some pretty massive ~~jet-punch-in-the-nose~~ jet-lag this morning, I wasn't sure what kind of reaction I was going to get from the Wee One. Previously when I have been gone for a week or more, I've gotten the cold shoulder routine for a few days. But not today. No, I got a big hug and some father daughter time first thing this morning, then it was all daddy-do-it all morning. I have to say, that made it a lot easier to get going this morning.

I need a break though. Despite the fact that we got a ton of cool data back last night and are suddenly sitting on the material for a couple of manuscripts, they are going to have to wait. I'm taking most of next week off to relax, get shit done around the house and spend time with my family. I have just a couple of weeks before I leave again for two separate trips in August and then the semester will no doubt attack like a bear fresh out of hibernation. I have papers to submit and data to analyze, but I also feel like if I don't take a small break now I'm going to pay for it in a big way in a month or two. Sometimes it's good to let things wait for just a little while.

Blog meme (take 2): Who are you, what are you doing and why do you keep looking at me!!??!

2010-07-05T01:46:00.002-04:00

It has basically been a year since this meme went around, including here, and DrugMonkey is reviving it (see additional links at DM). Since I'm traveling and writing a couple of grants in my "spare" time, I thought it might be a good opportunity to post something and get some feedback. In addition, there has been quite a lot of change in the readership since a year ago, so this might be particularly interesting to get a feel for who is here these days. In any case, Ed Yong (Not Exactly Rocket Science) asked the following round about two years ago:

1) Tell me about you. Who are you? Do you have a background in science? If so, what draws you here as opposed to meatier, more academic fare? And if not, what brought you here and why have you stayed? Let loose with those comments.

2) Tell someone else about this blog and in particular, try and choose someone who's not a scientist but who you think might be interested in the type of stuff found in this blog. Ever had family members or groups of friends who've been giving you strange, pitying looks when you try to wax scientific on them? Send 'em here and let's see what they say.

So, who are you (in as general terms as you like) and why are you spending what little time we all have reading this blog? If you generally read but don't comment, what would encourage you to join in the discussion more?

Bathroom humor

2010-07-02T03:52:00.001-04:00

I've done a decent amount of traveling in my life - certainly less than many, but I've hit some odd places. One thing it is easy to take for granted is the different styles and ways society has come up with to drop a deuce. There is far more variety than one might expect and you get to see a few prominent versions as you travel around.

The hole-in-floor model is just a bad idea. I've spent an unfortunate evening after some bad calamari in Greece with one of these models, and the results were not good. Why anyone would decide that balance should be a critical feature of using the bathroom, I will never understand.

I'm also not a fan of the bidet. I'm sure if you're used to it everything works out fine, but seriously, I'm good without a cold stream of water on my ass in the morning.

However, never have I seen the toilet take to the heights it is here in Japan. Call me old fashion, but if I'm in the bathroom I'm not looking for a conversation, so why does the toilet talk? These fucking things have more buttons than my home entertainment system. This morning I accidentally got a frontal bidet (don't hit the pink button!) and I'm not looking to repeat that situation any time soon. When did the toilet become the most technologically advanced item in a hotel room. There is no wireless internet here, the TV is the size of the Apple II and the shower is plugged into the sink, but I can have a conversation with my toilet? I don't think I like where this is going.

Increasing your academic visibility

2010-06-29T13:05:00.002-04:00

One of the key things every new PI has to do when you start a new lab is to get the word out. You gotta let people know where you are and what you are working on, which is why doing the conference ~~circus~~ circuit is really important early on. But, there is a lot more one can do and I'm really starting to see the benefit of one major thing.

When I first got to Employment University, my department asked me to take on the seminar series. At the time it was a bit hodgepoged and disjunct so I think they expected me to invite a couple of people here and there and call it a day. I had, however, been in charge of a seminar series as a grad student, so the task wasn't particularly daunting and I quickly realized I could use it to my advantage.

I sent out a request within the department for suggested speakers, and as per expectation I only got a few. That gave me freedom to pretty much ask anyone I wanted to see give a talk. I made a list of all the heavy hitters in my field within my geographic "sphere of invitation" and started working through it. I knew I was going to do the seminar series for at least two years, so I was able to spread these talks out so it wasn't blatantly obvious what I was doing.

In the process of hosting some big name folks to the department I have had the opportunity to not only increase interest in my filed within my department, but also get on the radar of some key people from other institutions. This is paying dividends both at conferences when I get the opportunity to catch up with these people and meet friends of theirs, but also because people tend to return the favor and invite you for a seminar at their institution.

More recognition + more invited talks + more interesting (for me) talks in my department = win. It can be a pain in the ass sometimes, but coordinating the seminar series can have huge up side if you use it to your advantage.

Big meeting, small meeting

2010-06-28T11:26:00.000-04:00

As a scientist, I can wear a lot of hats depending on how I want to sell the work I am doing. Like most labs, I can self identify with my study subjects, the phenomenon that we work on, the tools we use or how we approach our questions. That leaves me a pretty broad spectrum of conferences to go to, some of which I have been attending for years and others which I have only recently started to go to. I have my "must attend" list, but I try and mix it up with the other conferences I attend to both expand my exposure and to see what some of the other meetings are like.

One thing that is rapidly becoming a law for me is "Over 4 parallel sessions = far less time spent attending talks". It doesn't seem to matter what the conference is or how many people I know there, I just can't get excited about a meeting with a shit-ton of parallel sessions. Rather than seeing it as a smorgasbord of tasty science, it feels like a firehouse of information that I would rather not put my face in front of. Maybe I'm just getting lazy in my old age, but running through the maze of rooms to switch between several of the 15 parallel sessions during an afternoon just doesn't do it for me these days. And how do the organizers know to pick the two talks I really want to see and schedule them simultaneously?

I go to big meetings sometimes for a change and it's a good way to catch up with people I haven't seen in a while, but I find that I spend less time in the talks and more time chatting with people during the day. I'm not sure why that is, but big meetings get to be less about the presentations and more about socializing.

Travelers remorse

2010-06-27T12:46:00.003-04:00

Part of the job is traveling. Whether it is for conferences or field work or collaboration, there is little way to avoid it. In general, this is something I really enjoy. Through my work I have traveled to numerous places I wouldn't have gotten to another way. As enjoyable as it is, however, there is a cost.

Even on a good day, leaving my family at home adds strain to their lives and forces an accommodation of a single-parent household. It's not devastating, but it is an imposed weight that I am very aware of. To make matters worse, there is a history of bad things happening at home while I travel, and this trip is no different. Both my wife and daughter are quite sick, resulting in a double admit to the ER at 4:30 this morning. Both are doing better now and I am hoping that we have hit the point where it can't get much worse, but it's early in the trip and I will be switching continents in a few days.

I don't know that there is much point to this post other than continuing the discussion on balancing work / life demands. Whereas the travel part of the job can be a lot of fun for those of us doing the traveling, every decision to go away carries with it an implicit demand that one's partner will pick up the slack at home. Sometimes that's a lot to ask.

Hellz Yeah

2010-06-24T06:43:00.001-04:00

Why did it take so long to get internet on planes? Thank you whoever solved this issue.

That is all.

Unfriendly departments

2010-06-22T22:48:00.002-04:00

I have had the good fortune during most of my career to either be in departments that are generally very friendly or ones where battles between the different egos were kept between said egos and were not projected onto the trainees of each lab. This has been a good thing. However, in one of my training stops I landed in a fragmented department that was odd from an outsider's perspective.

Several core groups co-existed within the department, and while there was never any open hostility between them, the different groups just didn't interact. Within groups = lots of great interaction; between groups = as if each group was their own continent when the world was believed to be flat.

I am an outgoing person who likes to get to know the people I see every day. I can't help it. A silent elevator ride with the person who works in the next lab over drives me nuts. Especially when we likely have much in common.

So what's a guy to do to break through these barriers of stupidity? Borrow shit.

That's right, start asking for stuff. Doesn't matter if you need it or not. After about 4 months of lab-to-lab silence I decided that I was going to march into the other labs and start asking for the lab equivalent of a cup of sugar. Who cares that I had a pound of sugar on my bench, no one minds giving out a bit of sugar and the real mission wasn't to get reagents anyway. No, it was ninja ice breaking with the added benefit of the return visit to replenish the sugar once ours "came in".

It's easy to put on blinders when you work a lot in a lab. Maybe you have all the friends that you need either in your group or outside the work environment, but nothing bad has ever become of a sincere effort to get to know those around you and my efforts ended up paying off when I actually did need to borrow something.

Give it a try and tell me I'm wrong.

Actual conversation: Time warp

2010-06-22T06:30:00.000-04:00

PLS: I think we should get everyone together on Wednesday to look through talks for the conference. That way there will be time to fix stuff before we go.

Grad Student: Well... we're leaving at 6:20am the next day.

PLS: We're leaving Friday.

GS: No, Thursday. We spending Thursday night at that collecting site you had us book.

PLS:

GS: I can go get the itinerary.

PLS: Are you shitting me?

GS:

PLS: Dude! Fuck. Sigh.

Can I get a Land's End catalog, STAT?

2010-06-21T11:19:00.000-04:00

I think I need to start buying pleated Land's End khakis and wrinkle-free dress shirts. It may be the only way that I can start to look professorial enough to stop people from assuming I'm a student.

In only the latest example, I was asked to give a 5 minute ~~dog and pony show~~ research explanation to a political candidate for some district somethingorother. She brought along a contingent of people, including two interns who appeared to think their job of making sure the schedule was adhered to was a life or death posting, and toured the lab. I talked about what we do, including how our science is both good for the state from a job and application perspective. She took this all in as I described the cool equipment we use and how state infrastructure is blah blah blah. A few questions were asked, suggesting the candidate had at least listened. And then... "So, are you a student here?"

I'm not sure why this flusters me every time, I should be used to it. All I could work out of my suddenly-frozen brain was, "Uh, no I'm the PI in the lab." Of course, this meant nothing to them, and the Dean had to pipe in "Principal Investigator" in the awkward seconds of blank stares following the communication logjam. Being a politician, the candidate quickly managed a backtracking two-step, claiming to be impressed by someone with my youthful appearance being in such a position and all I could do was make an awkward joke about growing up wanting to be a Magnum PI and having to settle for this instead. They laughed politely, an intern glanced at their watch while writing something down and I changed the subject.

I need a better way to deal with this question. At the age of 33, until the ravages of the job and parenthood prematurely age me, I think I'm going to be dealing with this question for a bit unless I start wearing the professor uniform. Unfortunately, pleats are my mortal enemy.

I do have the advantage of age being the single factor keeping me from fitting the prof mold in people's mind, so I am sure that many readers have had to deal with this for far longer than I. Perhaps there are effective strategies to head this shit off?

What exactly is a teaching moment in the bloggosphere?

2010-06-19T09:23:00.002-04:00

GeekMommyProf started a blog about a month ago, which burst onto the scene in a hurry. Most blogs (including this one) toil in obscurity for a while, eventually gain some steam and get enough readers coming back to get talked about a bit here and there. In the process of earning your blog chops, you make mistakes and write some stupid shit, but no really notices because, again, there are like 6 people who read it. But GMP started off with an uncharacteristically large readership for an independent blog when she hit the ground running and so when she made a mistake people noticed.

At her one month mark, she has written a post in which she suggests that the response from Isis and others to one of her early posts has left her a bit disillusioned with blogging. Specifically, she would prefer if disagreements over content were handled more discretely, rather than on a big stage. GMP suggests that her mistake was an opportunity for a "teaching moment", whereby anyone who read what she wrote and found it offensive could have contacted her by email to explain their position and she would have rewritten the post.

Fair enough, no one likes to be de-panted in front of a large audience, nor does anyone appreciate hordes of angry commenters (weel, maybe some people do). But, if your intent as a blogger is to reach a broad audience, even if mainly for the interaction between your writing and that of the commenters, occasionally you are going to step in shit. This is the nature of the beast and it is a good idea to know this going in, or at least come to this realization rather quickly once people start to read what you write. The internet is a big place and even if you have a regular group of readers who you are comfortable with, there is nothing keeping the world from reading what you write and interpreting it based on their own experiences, not your's.

If a reader gets offended by something you write, it is in your best interest to have them contact you off-blog, but not theirs, and probably not the reader's. As much as it sucks to be called out, what is important to remember is that just because something doesn't look like a teaching moment in your shoes doesn't mean that others aren't learning something. Less than 10% of people that read most blogs take the time to comment even on a good day, IME. Hell, there are many blogs that I read that I rarely comment on, but that doesn't mean I'm not interested in the the discussion or learning something from it. Even (especially?) a feisty discussion about topics that people are passionate about gives both those watching and those participating a window into the different experiences and backgrounds that the combatants come from and how that colors their views. You can agree or disagree, but the point is it makes people think about the fact that their own view is not necessarily right or the only view out there. Don't underestimate how important this is.

So, despite the contention of many that the "civil bloggosphere" is their preferred pasture in which to graze, I would argue that far more is learned in places where the discussion roams to where some get uncomfortable. Sometimes as bloggers we make mistakes in our writing and sometimes we have to defend or apologize. But a combination of a thick skin and a willingness to learn from even the heated discussions that occur will end up serving most bloggers and readers very well.

Blogger Rec Letters

2010-06-17T08:28:00.002-04:00

Many of us are writing grants this time of year because both NIH and NSF have deadlines around now, as do several foundations. Friend of the blog, Professor in Training, finds herself applying to an agency that requires recommendation letters. Not only is this annoying, but it means annoying your colleagues to do something they thought they were done with after you got a job.

But in the comments section of PiT's post, Dr. No volunteered to write a letter for PiT that she could send along and I think this is a brilliant idea. So, to keep PiT from having to bother her colleagues, I offer this letter:

Dear Important Granting Agency For Stuff I Know Nothing About,

I am writing this letter in support of the proposal entitled "Cool Shit I Want To Do" being proposed by Professor in Training. Frankly, I know nothing about the science being proposed, but PiT really loves your agency and wants to work with you. She does really cool shit in the lab, so this proposal is a natural extension of that effort. Plus, I hear she has agreed to hold off on any major surgeries to repair both old and new injuries for the duration of the proposed funding period, ensuring that she will mostly be in one piece for this work and probably won't run off with any hot doctors. An additional benefit of funding this proposal would be lighting a small candle of hope for a broad audience of us junior PIs who are starting to wonder if agencies actually give out money to anyone in their first couple of years. Finally, because PiT has a super cool accent, you will be able to read her proposal in the accent of your choice, kinda like changing the voice on your GPS to find the least condescending version of "recalculating". I know the proposal is hot shit, but with all of the reasons I have listed above, I can't imagine there is any reason not to double the budget and just send the money.

Sincerely,
PLS

The balance

2010-06-15T08:36:00.003-04:00

There has been quite the discussion recently about work / life balance and how it relates to gender issues. Things started with Isis' commentary on a ScienceCareers piece on balancing the chores with work, that was aimed specifically at women. After a bit of a scuffle, mostly on Isis's blog, Jim Austin had this to say at ScienceCareers. Despite the "special announcement" (which ends with the dismissive Thanks for your attention. You may go back to whatever you were doing.), I'm not sure Jim ever really heard Isis and Zuska's complaint that the implicit assumption in ALL of the ScienceCareer articles aimed at work / life balance was that the target audience was women and only women.

Based on the discussion, ScientistMother called out the men, and specifically Drug Monkey, to write more about how they deal with the balance between work and life. I think that's a fair thing to ask, because by not addressing this it appears is if it isn't a problem for us and I can assure you, at least in my case, that is not true.

Most of you will know that I am married and have a daughter who is just over two. While I am not in a two body academic relationship, my wife works close enough to where I do that we own one car. I mention this because it is critical to how our lives are scheduled. Basically, our hours are daycare's hours. We drop the Wee One off at 7:30 when it opens and we pick her up at the end of the day (though not when daycare closes), usually between 4:30 and 5:00. Those are my weekday in office hours, whether I like it or not because I have no other option to get home.

At first I found this difficult because I was used to working later in the day, but now I actually appreciate the restriction. Why? Because it means that no matter what I go home with my family and we play, eat dinner and have bath/bed time with our daughter together. I can go back to the office afterwards if I want, though more often than not I work in the evenings from home. But during the week we don't see the Wee One for that long each day and this schedule means that I see her all the time she is not in daycare. It means I have to be a bit more organized and that I have to get everything I can done during the day, but it also means that I spend more time with my daughter and, importantly, that the parenting burden is not skewed. For the same reasons, I try hard not to work much on weekends, but when I have to, I pick one day to get things done and spend the other day with my family or just with my daughter if my wife has to work.

As far as chores go, we have essentially reached a balance where the overall work is split evenly without both of us doing every task equally. I do more of the cooking and dish washing, whereas my wife does more laundry and yard work. We both clean the house when it needs it, which usually either happens in concentrated bursts or in fragmented pieces (just the bathroom gets done, or just the kitchen gets cleaned) during the Wee One's naps or after dinner. We take turns giving the Wee One a bath and putting her to bed. For the most part it works.

The tough part is travel. At the moment I travel more for work than my wife and that places an enormous burden on her during those times to single parent while I am away. For some reason, when I travel is also the time when random catastrophe strikes the household, making my time away that much more difficult on my family. There have even been times when my travel and changes around the house have caused anxiety in the Wee One, which was a bit scary. Travel times are stressful times and I've tried to make careful decisions about travel to get the most out of the time I am away. Sometimes it means missing a relevant meeting. It is what it is.

Kids are a lot of work. Relationships are a lot of work. Work is a lot of work. Everyone finds their balance and what makes the most sense in their relationship to get 26 hours worth of stuff done in 24 hours. There is no one right way to make it happen but allowing home duties fluctuate between us depending on each other's work burden at the time allows us to manage.

Can junior PIs make decent mentors?

2010-06-13T13:34:00.003-04:00

Following from a discussion on last weeks' post about the new NSF is borked forum, the comments moved towards the topic of junior PIs and whether they should be postdoc mentors. The start of the discussion was sparked by Dr. Girlfriend, who made the comment:

I honestly do not believe the average new PI has the experience to qualify as a suitable postdoc mentor.

I took issue with this being an unsuitably broad statement to make and then we were off on a tangent of no return. So, I thought it might make for an interesting broader discussion. Do you, dear readers, believe that a pre-tenure faculty member can make a good postdoc mentor?

As full disclosure, I obviously have a horse in this race and may or may not be currently in this role. But certainly my comments can be interpreted from the position of someone who feels they can be an effective mentor at this stage of their career.

Most importantly, however, I think it is key to recognize that effective mentorship does not only mean one-on-one activities. As I stated in the previous thread:

We are also making the assumption here that the lab PI is the only person to whom a postdoc can go for guidance, and IME, that is also far from true. As a postdoc I consulted several PIs, both at my home institution and elsewhere, on a variety of different issues from applications, to funding and taking a position. I'm not sure how that would change based on the experience of the primary PI.

It is ridiculous to impose a requirement of tenure on anyone who wants to mentor a postdoc (as Dr. Girlfriend seems to want to do), because every mentor is going to have strengths and weaknesses. A postdoc and supervisor need to be able to recognize these 'holes' and find other mentors to compensate for weaknesses of the PI. This is no different from the situation where a postdoc wants to go into an 'alternative' career and must find mentors that will be able to guide them through that process.

As I have stated before, mentoring is about facilitating the transition from trainee to whatever career, for your peeps. If I am mentoring someone who wants to go into industry, I'm going to make sure they find someone in that field to talk to. Why is that any different when it comes to being a faculty member? Why can't junior PIs encourage their postdocs to solicit other information on being a faculty member from people at different stages of their careers? All of us do this all the time and it wouldn't make any sense to not suggest that to our trainees.

So, I guess I'm confused or maybe just used to ensuring that I have a broad base of mentorship and that my trainees do as well. Perhaps I just didn't realize that I need to be a Swiss Army knife of mentorship, when I probably see myself, at best, as a spork.

Good golly! The System done been broke!

2010-06-11T13:35:00.002-04:00

Funding for science is tight right now. No one knows that more than I and the stack of rejected grant proposals I have on my desk. For a lot of people the shifting climate sucks and for new people it can be be painful to get one's foot in the door. But, is this in itself proof positive that The System is broken? Aureliano Buendia* thinks so.

This morning I was sent a link to a new forum for discussing the "problems" with NSF and what can be done to fix it. Specifically, the creator of the forum states its purpose as discussing "What problems have you had with NSF? What creative solutions have you come up with to these problems? The forum is designed to address such issues. Let's bring out our best ideas, and hope that NSF pays attention."

In one of the inaugural forum posts Aureliano Buendia wonders whether going to the "Canadian system" is really what NSF should migrate towards - Smaller grants ($30 - $50K/year direct for 5 years) with a high rate of funding (~50%). Perhaps this would work for some researchers but I think if you ask your Canadian colleagues whether this is an ideal system you might come away thinking that it is not quite Nirvana on Earth. For a whole host of reasons being stuck with a $30K / year (normal first time grant) lab budget for 5 years (because you can only have one NSERC grant at a time) stifles research progress during a critical time for lab growth. Don't get me wrong, there is some tremendous work being done in Canada, but if you can't apply to other agencies to support your work there is no hope of hiring a postdoc in the first 5 years of the lab unless you attract someone with their own funding. Zoinks, Scoob.

With his cat-like reflexes to perturbations in the interwebs, Drug Monkey has already weighed in on the forum and brings up a good point.

In addition I would encourage everyone to consider closely an issue that comes up over and over again in the NIH-focused discussion. We are all subject to a certain myopia*. The first symptom is that we interpret changes in our personal success rate (if we are relatively senior) or a lack of personal success as being unambiguous evidence that TheSystemIsBroken!. The second symptom is promotion of "solutions" that benefit our own personal career, laboratory, research programme, etc. At the expense of others of course ("Do it to Julia, not me, Julia!")

To me, there appears to be a lot of concern over the size of many grants these days and a lot o'"back in the day, we did science for A NICKLE! And we liked it!" goin' on over at the new forum, but I encourage my readers to go take a look and weigh in if you think you have something to offer. I will be curious to see how the comments develop and whether the consensus opinion is that a small grant mechanism would be a good thing or whether people feel this is just a public foot stomping by an aging scientist having trouble getting funds.

*I have no idea if this person is real or a Pseud.

Survivor gifts

2010-06-10T08:10:00.002-04:00

In my experience, there is a sort of tradition in science that a supervisor gives a gift to a trainee leaving the lab. I think it's a nice gesture and I know I appreciated it when I left the various stops in my academic life. Of course, now being on the supervisor side of things, I've got to be the one coming up with the gift ideas.

I bring this up because I have a student graduating by the end of the summer and since my summer is a vortex of deadlines and travel it occurred to me that I should consider what I would get as a gift now rather than picking something up at the local convenience store 10 minutes before the defense. I mean, every likes fudgesicles, but they may not make the best going away gift.

The fall back for almost every supervisor is books. We all like books and there is an essentially endless number from which to choose, but unless you know what the person leaving is moving on to, picking the books that will be useful to them in the future is not all that easy. Plus, at the rate people move in most academic fields, you might as well be giving someone lead bricks.

Surely there are more innovative ideas out there.

My daughter and the ShamWOW

2010-06-08T08:55:00.004-04:00

Having kids is sometimes like living with "carnies" - every day is different and you never know what you're going to get when you wake up in the morning. The good days are really good and the bad days really suck. I'm not one of those parents who will tell everyone I know that having a child is the best thing I've ever done with my life. It is very fulfilling and I love the Wee One in indescribable ways, but having a kid is a crazy roller coaster ride that might actually go off the tracks at any point. If nothing else, it gives you a tremendous amount of retrospective respect for your own parents.

One of the best things about having a child, however, is the funny and crazy shit they do. They constantly challenge your perceptions about what you think they should be/care about/do/enjoy/get scared by, and they change so quickly that you are always on your toes. The Wee One is now 2 years and 3 months old (27 months for all of you crazy parents who insist on doing everything in months. After a year it's time to get over it people) and I am constantly amazed by what she understands or says. Last week on the way home in the care she started yelling "I want Lady Gaga!", and my wife and I looked at each other and said "who?" I think the Wee One has been reading Isis' blog.

But I digress.

Recently I was in a Dollar Store to pick up some trinkets for a kid's party and saw that they had a display of ShamWOWs, the highly absorbent towels. I'm not much of one for infomertials, but I had some use for such a towel to dry dishes, so I picked one up by the register. I brought the thing home and as soon as the Wee One found it she thought it was the Best Thing Ever! She's drawn to the damn thing like a moth to a light and anytime she sees it she grabs it and either wants to play with it (apparently it makes a hilarious tail if held behind the back), wants to clean something with it or decides it is her new blanket. Of course, I'm imagining her going to sleep with it and waking up all dehydrated, but that wouldn't probably happen, right? Right?

But she doesn't care that it's a $1 piece of fabric with unusual absorbing properties - it's soft, flexible and brightly colored. What more does a kid need? I can tell her "Honey, that's just a towel, can you put it back on the stove", and she'll say "No daddy, it's a tail!" I guess the point of this random and rambling anecdote, other than the fact that my tolerance for writing about science is being devoured by grants, is that we often make assumptions about what is desirable to others without taking into account how they see things. If you pay attention, sometimes you find out that there can be many interpretations of what you see as a single thing. And sometimes a dish towel is a tail if it makes a kid squeal with laughter.

Repost: The Impotence of bad writing.

2010-06-07T10:08:00.002-04:00

Things are a little crazy now that I'm back in the office, but I just received something to review that made me essentially want to write this post over again, so here it is from May 11, 2009.

There have to be a hundred posts out there about how important it is to write well in science, but here's 101. I can't tell you how many students I had as a TA tell me they didn't care about writing because they wanted to be a scientist and how many more were shocked and appalled when I took off points from an assignment for atrocious grammar or spelling. I wasn't crazy about it, but I have my limits that were constantly pushed by the students. Ironically, I'm a horrible speller. However, I know this and make sure to spell-check everything I am writing that might be seen by others. I consider myself a decent writer who is always looking for ways to improve and most often I do that through reading and noticing when someone really gets their point across effectively. I look at how they have structured their point or argument and keep it in the back of my head. What did they say that convinced me and how did they get there? If you can lead the reader along so that they reach your conclusion about a sentence before you spell it out, you've done a good job.

When it comes to manuscripts, I always remark on grammar and spelling though I don't take the time to mark up everything as that is not necessarily the job of the reviewer. The gray area is when it comes to grants. In theory we are supposed to be evaluating the science (and broader impacts in the case of NSF) and not necessarily the ability of the writer to actually write, but they are inseparable. Maybe I get hung up on the writing a bit too much, but I find nothing more distracting than a poorly written grant. I have on my desk a proposal for a project including 6 PIs with a budget in excess of a million dollars and I had to put it down after reading the first two pages because the writing just sucks and it was pissing me off. Is that how you want a reviewer reading through your grant? No. Angry reviewers are bad and if they are angry because your writing is the equivalent of nails on a chalk board how likely are they to think your science is kick ass? Like it or not, your writing is a direct reflection of you as an academic and as much as I try to see through the grammatical train-wreck and missing words in the back of my head I am thinking that if this proposal wasn't worth your time to edit and clarify, why is it worth my time to read and thoughtfully respond to.

So, dear readers, repeat after me - "Both verbal and written communication are essential facets of science and should be skills that are constantly honed, just like the techniques you use in the lab or field (or PLS will send you back the charred and shredded remains of your crappy grant)."

Conference stratigery

2010-06-04T14:47:00.000-04:00

What does an early-career scientist have to do at conferences besides give a good talk? In my mind, it may even be more important to make a friend. Yeah, sounds stupid but hear me out.

Whenever I go to a science gathering (workshop, conference, etc.) I always make it a mission to get to know at least two people in my field more senior than me, who did not know me personally before. Maybe this sounds ridiculous to decide consciously, but it is really easy to just hang out with the people you already know at meetings. Rather than taking the comfortable route, I ensure that I seek out people so that they can put a face to a name they may have seen in the literature, and numerous good things have resulted from making this effort. I've twice been invited for departmental seminars, started a collaboration, been given useful data as well as feedback on my grant proposals that people had reviewed, all based on conversations that happened or started at a meeting.

Does it sometimes mean that I get stuck in awkward conversations or some painful social interactions? Yup. But I consider it a huge waste if I leave a meeting without having gotten at least a couple of senior people to remember my name and in many little ways this pays off. I'll take an edge I can get right now.

The mark some places leave

2010-06-03T10:05:00.001-04:00

Busy week, my friends. This week kicks off the summer travel schedule for me, which is going to be taking me out of town a lot. I am back in postdoc city for a workshop that has been non-stop since I got here. It's been almost two years since I've been here and not much has changed - a few shops and restaurants have closed or been reinvented, but nothing compared with the changes that I have gone through. In some ways it is centering to be back and in others disorienting.

It's odd being back as a visitor in a place where so much happened in my life when I lived here. I've met up with many friends, both academic and otherwise, who I haven't seen since leaving. This morning I walked by the hospital where my daughter was born. Tomorrow I will be spending some time in the lab of my postdoc advisor in between running a few local errands to pick some items up to bring home. I didn't expect it to feel quite like it has turned out being back, but I'm not sure what I expected.

I do miss this place. I miss the city, the people, hell, I miss this country where I lived for so long. But such is the nature of the transient academic life, where multiple stops all over the world is not unusual for many of us. I know when I mentioned before that postdocs should embrace the opportunity to travel and live in new places, some got a little bent out of shape over the idea. To each their own, I suppose, but I know that my experience and my life were enriched by being here and this place will always be one I consider a home.

HBHM (5 of 5): I wish I had Zuska's balls

2010-05-28T08:38:00.002-04:00

I have learned a lot from the community of bloggers whom I interact with, but what has been the most important education for me, bar none, has come from the feminist posts of women bloggers reminding me how privlidged I have it. I should say that I have always considered myself supportive of diversity in science and have gone out of my way to find ways to foster it whenever I have had the opportunity. But in my effort to do what I thought was important for helping underrepresented groups in science, I was missing something right in front of me.

Being a white guy is pretty easy, especially in science. Pretty much everything is geared for our success, since the people making the rules for so long were other white dudes. When I have mentioned this to people IRL, about 50% of the time the person responds with something like, "but what about all the special programs for women and minorities? Where are the special programs for white doods?" Almost everyone will be familiar with this response, as it is one of several Standard Stock Responses to Diversity Issues and it is easy to get tired of saying "you mean the rest of science?".

In my mind, supporting diversity programs and recruiting initiatives was one of the more effective ways to bring others into the fold. But what was staring me in the face, even though I was looking straight through it, was that my inability to put myself in the shoes of the people I was trying to recruit made success far more difficult than I appreciated. Assuming that others have similar motivations, constraints and goals as I did as a trainee is a lazy and ill-conceived way to approach recruiting anyone, but particularly people from backgrounds very different from my own. It seems very simple when I write it out, but success in broadening diversity in science is far more dependent on changing the way we do things than on changing others to fit the way things are done. It took me a while to get that, but this change in mindset has had a major impact on how I see and think about my field of science, where I would like to see it head in the next 5, 10, 20 years and what I can do to push things in that direction.

So, where does Zuska come into all this? Because her blog has been a really important resource in my continued effort stop thinking like a white dude.

I will reluctantly admit that when I first came across Zuska's blog it didn't grab me. For a while I would go check it out now and again to see what she was ranting about but I didn't think about the posts or how they applied to me. Yes, I can admit to being an idiot, it happens. But then a series of posts (the exact topic, unfortunately, is escaping me) between a few different bloggers (including Isis and DrugMonkey) brought me back to Zuska ready to think about what she writes.

I have been reading Zuska's blog for a number of months just trying to get my appreciation of the feminist viewpoint up to speed and I am amazed by Zuska's strength. Blogging for me has almost always been a fun experience with positive interactions and I'm not sure if I would continue with it if I had to put up with the trolls and asshats she deals with constantly. The comments alone on a post like this epic thread make me not only weep for my gender, but might just make me walk away from blogging in frustration. But despite all of it Zuska carries on, and like my ironically tongue-in-cheek title suggests, I think that takes a lot of courage.

I for one am thankful she does and would like to take this opportunity to say so. Thanks for bringing numerous important issues up and providing insightful posts about them; for being the person who lets others know it is not just them; for delivering your message in the face attacking stupidity and ignorance; and for allowing someone like me to learn in the wings and make important realizations while thinking about your writing.

Stay angry Zuska and thanks for having a huge set of ovaries.

HBHM (4 of 5): Getting pushed

2010-05-27T08:10:00.002-04:00

In a lot of ways, this is an extension of yesterday's post, though an important one.

Many of us are self-motivated. This ability to push oneself even in the absence of an immediate boss figure looming is probably a factor in drawing people to academia. "Academic Freedom" (in both its good and bad connotations) is supposed to allow faculty to do their work without people getting in the way. Whether this happens in reality can be debated, but I would argue that most PIs have a day-to-day freedom that many professionals don't. Because of that, the ability to push oneself is important to long-term success.

As the new member of the department I hit the ground running. I was filling the lab with stuff, writing grants training students, etc. I didn't need anyone to tell me that this stuff had to happen, I wanted it done more than anyone else. I worked like hell to get a functioning lab together and had shit up and running in a couple of months. We produced our first bits of data in less than 6 weeks from me opening the door to an empty room. It was good.

I haven't stopped working with that same intensity, but how many times have I looked around at all of the stuff I have to do while holding some form of rejection (grant, paper, request for an autographed picture of Alan Thicke, whathaveyou) and said to myself "Fuck. This."? More than you might think. I am not saying that I'm going to walk away one day and fulfill my life-long desire to become a trapeze artist, only that maintaining a decent level of motivation in the face of consistent rejection is not an easy thing.

But it is critical.

Everyone's experience will differ depending on who is around them, but my experience has been that the people in my department are quick to say "you're doing all the right things. Don't worry, something will come through!", which is nice... Maybe too nice at times. The reality, at least for me, is that I don't want to be too comfortable with how I am doing until I get some money in the door and papers out the door. I'm working on that, but it doesn't hurt to have people around to say "Dude, sack the fuck up. No one cares that Reviewer 3 was an know-nothing blowhard. Fix it, submit again." Just as effective is seeing others going through just as (or more) difficult a time and still getting up every time they are knocked down.

A tolerance for being told "no" is important, but the drive to keep knocking until someone says "yes" is the only way to get things moving. When you are balancing things at home, teaching, travel, trainees, and keeping your research going, it is incredibly easy to say "I'll just submit one proposal this round instead of two." Honestly, most people in my department either would be fine with me doing that or not know or care one way or another, but I know I need to submit the two (or three in the case of this July) and so do the many people I have met through blogging who I never would have met in another way.

Directly or indirectly, the people who I interact with through blogging keep me motivated when I want to let up a bit. This has been really important for me, particularly in the last 6 months and is the second biggest way in which blogging has helped me. Tune in tomorrow for what has, to me at least, been the most surprising and important effect of blogging.

HBHM (3 of 5): Connecting the dots

2010-05-26T08:30:00.000-04:00

Departments can vary enormously in their make-up and stratification. When you first get hired into a department this isn't something that most people think about, but it can become an issue for you before you know it. I was the first hire into my department in a couple of years and it will be another year from now before we hire the next person (I will have been here 3 years when they start). This is actually not a bad spread between hires, in some places the gaps are much larger, and conversely, there are those that hire multiple people in a year.

I recognized fairly early on that the pool of "new" people who I could go to with questions about getting started as a new PI was very small. Particularly since I was coming in from a different country and wasn't already in step with funding agencies here, my transition wasn't as smooth as it could have been. Although my department is very supportive in a lot of ways, I don't really have a strong cohort here who are reaching the same milestones when I am.

My way of dealing with this was to write everything down in the hopes that those coming a year or two later might benefit from a non-revisionist history of the stuff I went through. It's all well and good to say "Oh, yeah. I remember going through that, it'll get better." but leaving a written archive of when I actually went through something and my at the time reaction to it made a lot of sense to me, both to remember what it was like and to hopefully benefit others.

What I did not expect, in my naivety about blogging and this community, was that thousands of others had a similar thought. And not only were there numerous examples of other blogs written by people in my situation, but there are 10x that number of readers who struggle through the same situations. Suddenly my cohort was huge. Suddenly I had access to an enormous range of perspectives and advice. I felt like I looked under my chair and found the Poll The Audience lifeline from Who Wants to be a Millionaire, and without having to tolerate Regis.

And so the dynamic of this blog has changed for me as I make more connections and find a network where I once saw a chaotic arrangement of dots. And for every helpful conversation that occurs in a comment section there is another happening by email or IRL - each one drawing upon the collective experience of many great people. Whether it is things that come up in my family life, teaching or research there are others who are walking the same path as I am, have tread down this path recently or at least remember what it was like and have some great advice that makes me consider new things.

I do hope that post-docs and grad students who read this blog find the snippets of advice that will be useful for them or at least get a sense of what they will be facing if they make the jump to PI. I'm not sure there's any way to be completely prepared for what lies ahead, but at least some heads up will have you more ready. For me, however, this forum has become more of a sounding board / support group ("Hi, my name is PLS and I... am a... a junior PI) / muse for me to kick around ideas. It has made a lot of the stages of early PI life a lot easier to handle knowing that I'm not the only one facing certain challenges and hearing the advice of others. In turn I have tried to provide advice, for better or for worse, where I think I can add to the conversation.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go sing "The Circle of Life" at the top of my lungs.

HBHM (2 of 5): Work like a butterfly, focus like a goldfish

2010-05-24T12:06:00.004-04:00

One of my earliest childhood memories is spending time at the Children's Hospital taking these funky tests. I didn't really know why I was there or why people kept asking me what seemed like odd questions, but I answered them the best I could. After that, I never went back and nothing really changed for me, so it was just a blip on the childhood radar - nothing of particular note.

What I didn't know then, and later found out, was that the whole purpose of the trip was to figure out if I had ADD. And this was in the early 80's, before it was popular! Turns out the doctors thought I did and my parents didn't want to put me on meds, so that was that and I don't really remember it coming up again. I guess I did well enough in school where no urgent action seemed to be needed.

I also remember very vividly a time in high school when I was writing a term paper and one of my friends gave me a ritalin from his prescription assuring me that it would help me get the work done. Did it ever. Suddenly I had the ability to block everything else out and work on just one thing. It was odd. It was a bit scary. But man, did I write. It also back-fired when I eventually did get distracted and proceeded to play Sega's NHL 95 until about 5am. Win some, lose some.

I don't know a whole lot about ADD or ADHD and how it should be dealt with the best, but I do know that uninterrupted focus is rare in my life. My PhD advisor (especially) and my postdoc advisor both have the ability to zone in on something and Get Shit Done in remarkably efficient ways. I don't. Apparently I hide it fairly well (not intentionally) because to my knowledge, no one else really seems to notice; nor would they unless they watched me work and that would just be creepy. It's not like this has derailed me or anything, my gerbil-like attention span is something I am used to. I just work very differently and had a hard time using "Dr. Focus, PI" as a model. In a lot of ways it can be a good thing in this job, where my day is often sliced in a zillion pieces of time doing different things. It is also probably a reason why we have so many projects going on in the lab right now or why I needed to be juggling several projects all the time as a student and postdoc. However, if I work on one thing for 2 hours straight it either means I am under huge deadline pressure or plague and pestilence are coming shortly, followed by a bunch of guys on horses.

Since my one experience, I haven't tried any other drugs to treat ADD. Who knows, maybe it would help, but I've found other ways to deal with my scatteredness. And since I only found out somewhat recently that I was "dealing" with anything, I guess I've just done what works for me. Typically I take a lot of breaks when I am working on something and spend 5-10 minutes doing something else. It's not particularly efficient, but it means I get the most out of the time I am spending working. Pre-blogging, a lot of my breaks were spent reading about sports, catching up on news or doing some of the random little things that everyone has to do in a day. Then, for some reason, I started a blog.

Blogging, for me, has become a productive way to reign in my inability to focus for long periods of time and turn my breaks into something more valuable than reading another opinion on the pre-season moves in the AFC-East. Whether you believe it or not, many of the posts I regularly write don't take longer than a few minutes to compose. If you are one who pays close attention to spelling and grammar, my time spent per post likely doesn't surprise you, but people often assume that this stuff takes longer than it actually does.

So, instead of broadening the scope of my NFL knowledge*, I have allocated my "non-work" time to writing about inane snippets of academic life and interacting with others doing the same. What I never anticipated, however, was how useful this would become for my development as a researcher, teacher and person. But more on that over the next couple of days.

*The Jets still suck, though.

How blogging helps me (1 of 5)

2010-05-24T08:23:00.003-04:00

I'm going to try something a little different this week and actually do something organized, rather than just toss out anything that happens to be on my mind. I often get comments, here or IRL, to the effect of "how do you have time to blog?" or "Do you feel like blogging is a waste of time when you have so many other things going on?" Obviously, my answer is no, I don't think it is a waste of time, but over the next few days I would like to articulate that a little more clearly in a series of four posts, entitled:

Work like a butterfly, focus like a goldfish.

Connecting the dots.

Getting pushed.

I wish I had Zuska's balls.

Unlike the majority of stuff I write, these posts are all ones I've been thinking about for a while and this is a way (albeit possibly an odd way) to bring them all together into something bordering on coherent. This may or may not work, but at least it'll get these out of my head, where they have been clamoring and making a racket.

I have been blogging here for basically a year and a half and as things here continue to evolve for me, so do me interactions within this medium. There is much I never anticipated when I started doing this and probably about as much that I thought would come out of it that never did. However you look at it, blogging has changed the way I think and provided new opportunities and challenges. I'll see what I can do this week to put words around why and how this has happened for me.

And if this series turns into a fiery train wreck, you can all bask in the virtual warmth.

The third circle of hell

2010-05-21T08:47:00.002-04:00

I think if Dante were alive today his third circle of hell would be an endless graduation ceremony. There would be speaker after speaker trotted up to deliver an endless monologue of crappy metaphors for life. It would be conducted outside in the blazing heat and everyone would be wearing black polyester from head to toe.

Boy, do I love graduation.

For the students this is a big deal. I get that. When I was graduating from university it was a big deal to me too. And although I was massively hung over, sitting in the rain and listening to an interminably bad speech, it was still a good day. I got to make sarcastic comments the whole time (a la Mystery Science Theater 3000) and got to spend one last day with a lot of friends together before we dispersed.

As a grad student I was gone. By the time graduation rolled around I was already doing a postdoc in a different location and wasn't interested in going back to have someone place a hood on my head. Thanks, but send the diploma. The graduation novelty wears off pretty quickly.

These days I am "encouraged" to go to graduation at least once a year! We normally get a pass on the smaller winter graduation, but for the spring one we are actively "reminded" to be there. Last year I was traveling over the graduation weekend, but this year I didn't arrange my schedule well and I will be here to attend my first professorial graduation. Yay....

I understand how bad it would look if none of the faculty showed up and I will begrudgingly take my place in the procession, but I can't say I am looking forward to it. There will be students graduating who took my class (although a couple who expected to won't be, unfortunately), which will add some familiarity to the proceedings, but the undergrads who have worked in my lab and whom I have gotten to know better, still have more time here. To make thing more exciting, the President has added another half hour to the schedule this year. Thanks big guy!

I may have to employ some academic version of slipping a comic book into a text book. I wonder if the graduation handout will be thick enough to disguise a couple of articles I need to read. Will people wonder why I am so intent on examining the schedule of events and the list of graduates? Can I figure out how to put movies on my Iphone and arrange my goofy hat to hide the earpiece?

There has to be some way to make the graduation ceremony tolerable.

Is professional commenting worth the risk?

2010-05-20T09:25:00.003-04:00

Journal articles are the basis for the advancement of science and the discussion of novel data and analyses as they are published is one feature that unites all fields. Between journal clubs, informal discussions, conferences, emails, phone calls, Morse code, etc., we all engage in debate over our results and those of others. But other than in the memories of those involved, these discussions are largely "off the record" and invisible to anyone new entering a particular field.

To foster this type of discussion in a more open and accessible format, some journals have added the option to comment on published papers online. Notably, the BMC and PLoS journals were at the forefront of this movement and Nature has recently enabled this as well. There are others, but you get the point - some high profile papers are available for individuals to comment on and for everyone else to see what those people said.

In an ideal world, this is a great option. It allows for the compilation of people's reaction to certain studies in a publicly accessible way. It brings the water cooler to the source and can provide insight to those who are new to the field. Which papers have which potential flaws? Who are the major players in the debate on this work? It could all be right there.

In practice, how does this work? Well, if you've looked through these journals you will probably note that there are not many comments. An occasional paper will spark some debate, but the mechanism is widely underutilized and the community has not really embraced it. Why?

Well, one reason might be the concern about the repercussions of publicly attacking (even nicely) someone's work. Maybe one of the authors doesn't appreciate the "debate" and consciously or unconsciously holds that against you as a reviewer of your paper/proposal/tenure review package down the road. Maybe it's not even an author on the paper, but someone who reads your comment but will never be known to you. Is the benefit of public debate to the community more important than possible repercussions to your personal work?

I bring this up because I came across a paper just the other day that has what I believe to be fundamental flaws in its approach. The paper's conclusions are interesting, but inherently problematic based on the author's assumptions stemming from their apparent lack of familiarity of the pertinent literature. Knowing that the results might get picked up upon, but the assumptions underlying those results might not be obvious to those interested in the final outcome, I considered commenting on the paper. Thus, I asked some colleagues whether it was important to point this out and the reaction ranged from "This is important for science" to "You would be stupid to risk it".

I know there are plenty of studies on people's interest in public literature commenting (I'm just too lazy to look them up right now), but doesn't it just come down to risk? If there is any perception that one's comments could have negative consequences for one's research, what is the motivation to participate? Do science martyrs get tenure?

This is basically the same debate that goes on in the blogosphere between those who prefer to blog under a pseudonym and those who think that any comment or blog without a "real" name associated with it isn't worth a damn. PLoS, for instance, makes it very clear that all comments must be obviously attributable to an identifiable individual (although they with keep your email address secret, because no one can find that out).

I wonder how commenting would be affected by allowing pseudonyms to comment on professional journal articles. Would early career scientists feel emboldened to engage in public "on the record" debate? Would it empower those who refuse to open themselves to any additional risk to their livelihood? Would the debate improve or devolve into a hotbed of uncivil behavior?

Making craptastic lemonade

2010-05-19T12:12:00.003-04:00

A while ago I talked a bit about getting some key data done for free. Well, that didn't turn out so well. We did eventually get the data, but they were about a week late for our grant deadline and it turned out that the Data Producers left out one really essential step that meant we got data of far less use than we had anticipated given the instructions we sent. But again, free.

So after an initial scan of those data and a limited amount of time playing with them, I put them on the back-burner for a while because of teaching and other commitments. Then we got a new toy and all of a sudden these data can be manipulated in a very different way.

It turns out that, while not entirely useful for the question we had in mind, the data are incredibly useful for providing some proof of concept stuff for a proposal that is in the works. I never would have done it this way given the choice, but with a little thought and an enormous amount of CPU time, we may actually be making lemonade out of crap. Mmmmmm.

Really, NIH? Seriously?

2010-05-18T08:46:00.005-04:00

If you're reading this blog, chances are you are likely aware of the NIH. It happens to be the biggest single funding source for biomedical research in the U.S. and has a 2010 budget of nearly $31 Billion. If you do biomed science in the U.S., NIH is kinda a big deal.

NIH walks around town.

For those of us who do more "basic" science (meaning stuff that doesn't directly cure cancer), sending a proposal to the NIH is something people talk about, but rarely do. Afterall, I'm not interested in what my work can do for people because little of what I do is directly relevant to the NIH mission. At the same time, I would be stupid to ignore a potential funding source and so, at the behest of some colleagues, I've been poking around to figure out if I can identify a mechanism for NIH support. My plan all along had been to try and get an NSF grant or two under the belt and then see what I could do about sending something to NIH, but plans have changed. If often read the NIH-related posts at DrugMonkey, but more out of passing interest that a need to learn.

So, over the last few days I have waded waist deep into the NIH swamp and holy shit is it murky. First off, the good news. NIH RePORTER is pretty fucking awesome. Having the direct link between the funded grant and the resulting publications is tremendously useful. On top of that, NIH provides the roster of its study sections! This allows an applicant to not only find a relevant section, but also see whether there is anyone on that section who might be sympathetic to their application. Maybe that helps and maybe it doesn't, but it's an interesting bit of transparency that you don't find in many other places.

BUT, as a new investigator with no NIH experience, trying to find the right program to apply to is a serious rabbit hole. First, wade through all the institutes and centers. Think you've found one that'll work? Might want to check again, because there are random programs stuck all over the place that might be relevant to the work you are proposing. I found a relevant program in the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, and I can assure you the closest I come to dental work is my annual visit to the tooth scraper. To make the process much more fun, none of the institute websites are set up the same (compare this to this). Don't impose website standards on MY institute, we do it the best way! It's like journals and their damn citation formatting.

Alright, so you found a program. You read to apply? Well, check which institutes take which grants as "unsolicited requests", because if you want to apply for an R21 (which some think you should not), R15 or R03, for instance, you can only send it in to certain institutes unless it is a response to a specific RFA. Is there any rhyme or reason to which take unsolicited proposals and which don't? Maybe, but I can't figure it out.

But here the best part! Even though you have to apply through an institute and a program within that institute, it is the study section that ranks your grant. Is there a study section for each program? Of course not! The study sections are decoupled from the institutes and programs. Therefore, even if you send in a proposal to a certain program, it may go to the study section to get ranked and then another program (possibly in another institute) may pick it up. So, do you target the institute, the study section or both? Can you make sure your proposal makes it to the right study section? How that works in terms of unsolicited proposals or specific RFAs, I have no clue.

Maybe the system is perfect and my complaints are based on my naive misunderstanding of how all this works. Since I didn't grow up in an NIH lab and have never worked on an NIH project, trying to learn the system from scratch has been a bit crazy. I'm sure I have misinterpreted some things here as well and I welcome corrections because I'm trying to work this all out. I may not be the sharpest tack around, but the labyrinth of NIH seems ridiculously and unnecessarily complicated from the perspective of an outsider. But maybe that's the point.

One year left

2010-05-13T08:44:00.002-04:00

A recent check of lab finances brought home an important point. At the pace we are going, the lab has about a year left of operating funds. This comes on the heels of getting another proposal declined this week. I have two others pending, but her are the facts:

1) There are two more NSF deadlines before we run out of gas.

2) Counting an additional opportunity I will apply for, that means I can realistically submit 7 more federal proposals on projects we have on-going that will catch us before we hit the ground.

3) Based on a conversation with Major Data Producing Center, recent problems may mean they can't deliver critical data before the July deadline, which would effectively sink one proposal and severely wound another.

Seven proposals sounds like a lot until you realize that I have already put in more than twice that number with nothing to show for it. If I don't have new data for two in the July round, I'm down to 5. One can argue that the later proposals are, by definition, better and more likely to be funded than the earlier ones and, while true, is hardly assurance of actually getting funding in this climate. I had a very productive talk with my PO after getting the results back, but he also let me know that NSf's Bio directorate is funding in the single digits across the board. Although the numbers they release look better, they also count each PI on a collaborative proposal as "successful", inflating those figures.

When I was negotiating the terms of my position I figured that planning for three years of lab support and equipment was sufficient buffer to get things going and bring in funding, but if I knew someone negotiating a job right now I would tell them to ask for 5 and settle for 4 if they have to. As has been repeatedly brought up by others, it is critical to have the resources to get enough data to get funded and it may take longer than you think.

We have until the January deadline to collect enough data to move our proposals into the "high priority" category. That's the moral of the story.

aaahhhhhh

2010-05-07T11:26:00.002-04:00

Exams graded.

Not at work, even though there's shit that needs to get done.

Preparing to brew my first batch of beer in months.

That is all.

Grading Philosophy

2010-05-06T08:24:00.003-04:00

Does the final grade for a student depend entirely on the numbers, or is there a certain element of whether or not they learned the material intrinsic in the final analysis? This was a discussion I had with a colleague of mine the other day when talking about our classes, and her argument made a lot of sense to me. Her point was that if the students did not do well on a particular exam, but demonstrated knowledge of that exam's material on the cumulative final, she would use the "grade" on the final section to replace the exam grade. She did not tell the students this (to avoid a lack of effort on the midterms), but put it into practice.

It is certainly easier to hold up the numbers and say that a student earned an 'X' grade based on their performance, but I've been thinking whether or not a strict adherence to the numbers actually has any value in actually rewarding the students for learning. This is particularly relevant to me as I sit in front of my class taking their final this morning, because their second exam was a blood bath with an average of 45%. But, about 25% of the final is on the same material, which should give me an idea about what they learned from that portion of the class. Opportunity or dangerous precedent?

Obviously, this type of policy would favor the students in the class who, to this point, are not doing all that well. Is it fair to give them the opportunity to boost their grade when others have done so by performing when they had to? Honestly, I don't know. Like with just about everything relating to teaching, I'm figuring this out as I go. If our objective, however, is for the students to learn the material during the course then it stands to reason that they should be rewarded for 'getting it' even if it doesn't click until the end.

Bittersweet

2010-05-05T12:24:00.002-04:00

We just acquired equipment that will make some of the key research functions we were doing tremendously more simple than they were previously. One the one hand, Yay for make our lives so much easier! On the other, how many fucking hours did we waste doing it the old way?!?!??!

Of course every technological advance results in something like this and until the new thing comes along the old one was the best way to do it, but still.....

The biggest arguments for the smallest stakes

2010-05-04T08:13:00.003-04:00

This week I am working on revising a small paper that was driven by collaborative research and mainly the work of an undergrad. It's a decent paper but nothing too exciting, and as such, we sent it to a small specialty journal. There are stories that belong in these journals and getting it out and published in some form is always better than letting it languish on a desk.

When we got the reviews back it was a classic case of Reviewer 3 syndrome (the video for which, unfortunately, appears to have been taken down). Reviewers 1 & 2 had a few minor and helpful comments, but thought the paper was fine. Reviewer 3, OTOH, went apoplectic on the thing. R3 left dozens of comments throughout the manuscript, most of which with garden variety Devil's advocate shit that can not be answered and isn't the focus of the paper. On two occassion R3 pointed out one sentence and stated "This point would make the basis of a better, more scientific paper." More scientific? WTF?

I started thinking about the times I have had this happen to me, when one reviewer 1) clearly has too much time on their hands, 2) gets themselves worked up over minor issues to the point that they think the world will end if your minor paper in a tiny journal were to be published, and 3) it's clear by the end that they went through the thing a couple of extra times just looking for anything to shit on. I came to realization that this has only happened in the small journals I have sent papers to*. Interesting.

My experience in terms of publishing in a variety of journals is pretty broad, from the little mags to big ones, and the more I thought about it the more this pattern emerged to me. I have certainly gotten bad reviews from big journals, but in those cases the message is usually "I don't like this for these big reasons", end of story. With the small journals I have on several occasions had to write lengthy responses to a mountain of minutiae, including a vicious attack on writing style. Not whether it is written in a "science" way, but just the writing style I use that the reviewer somehow found offensive to their very core ideals. Where does this mindset come from?

Is it the reviewers that will review for these journals? Maybe, but I review for some of them and have never had the urge (or time) to analyze a manuscript in this manner. Is it the editors of smaller journals having a full time job on top of editing? Possibly. Is it the level of work that gets sent to these journals? I don't know what the reasoning, but getting things published in smaller journals seems to take far more of my effort than the stories that are better suited for larger journals, making it far less appealing to get undergraduate-driven research published.

*Fully acknowledging that this can and does happen in some proportion in all journals.

A step in the right direction

2010-05-03T08:51:00.002-04:00

When I got my mail on Friday there was a letter from our research office. I had submitted a proposal for a small internal competition a while back to cover a grad student summer salary and a trip this summer and seeing the letter I knew that the decision was contained within. With the trail of proposals currently lying dead in my wake I immediately assumed that I was going to add this one to the pile, but was pleasantly surprised to find out that the proposal has been funded.

This is the same competition I applied for last year with too much data and too promising a project. So, this year I changed my approach and used a different project and was more explicit about how this money would help obtain funding in the future. Obviously, that made a difference and now I can spend the start-up money I had earmarked for the student and trip on other things.

It's a small victory, but a good first step.

Workload planning

2010-04-30T08:43:00.004-04:00

It's that time of year again, when we have to commit to our workload for next year. I thought I had everything worked out - teaching a small upper level (mostly grad) class in the fall and a not quite as small upper level undergrad class in the spring (same one I just finished). This seems reasonable and made some sense. My fall class is somewhat experiemntal, although it will be substantially re-worked from the last time I offered it with the idea of eventually turning into a new permanent course. All good, right?

But this morning, a new option miraculously appeared before me. One of my senior colleagues teaches a broadly defined course, which has a section that overlaps with my spring course to some degree. Given our backgrounds, I would be more qualified to teach that portion (about 4 weeks) of the class than she. Based on this, the offer was extended - Would I rather teach my fall course or be teaching free in the fall and teach my spring course, plus contribute to her spring course?

It would mean getting nothing else done for the first four weeks of the spring semester, but TEACHING FREE IN THE FALL!!!!!! Granted, my fall course is not a huge commitment, but it IS a teaching commitment (of which even a small one is not that small). Now I am left to ponder whether I just write off the start of spring semester and have my fall freedom or if I maintain a baseline of teaching time suck throughout the school year. I can't help but think the former would be so much nicer...

What is an MSc degree?

2010-04-28T09:54:00.001-04:00

An MSc degree is a funny thing, because it means very different things to different people. There are as many different philosophies about what skills should be learned during an MSc as there are advisors overseeing students in these positions. Yesterday I had a conversation with a senior colleague (SC) about a student that SC is supervising and how SC would never take on another MSc student again because they have to be handed a project and can't take a long view. This struck me as odd, because I have never seen an MSc student as a PhDlite, but after talking with SC for a while it was clear they did.

For me, I see an MSc as an intro to science. I don't mean that in a condescending way or to imply that a BSc (including undergrad research) doesn't give you a feel for science, but an MSc degree is the first time many students have some ownership of a project and need to plan things. At the same time, I don't generally give an MSc student the kind of leeway to figure out what they want to do, as a PhD student might get.

Part of my reasoning is based on time (you can't spend a year of an MSc degree kicking the tires of various projects) and the other part is that it is very hard for a student at that level to see both the forest and the trees. A masters project needs to be tight enough to fit in the time frame, yet contribute to the broader picture and I don't think it is fair for us to assume that students fresh out of undergrad can identify a project of that nature and execute it in 2 years. There is also the issue of funding. A PhD student can pursue a couple of topics, and thus stray a bit more from the projects the lab has funding for, but an MSc student needs to keep their focus on the project at hand, which is often one that moves the lab forward along the lines of on-going projects.

In the end, I think an MSc degree should provide students with a solid background in critical thinking, science as a process and give them ideas as to what the next step is. For many, that will be getting employment related to their field with an increased appreciation for, and ability to perform, the science behind their job. For others it may be that they want to go on and tackle a PhD, but the MSc degree put them in a place to know what questions they want to ask and how to get at them. From that perspective, I don't see the MSc as a truncated PhD or a consolation prize, but a unique degree in it's own right that can be extremely helpful for those students.

Another one of my SCs uses the thesis of MSc students as the basis of manuscripts, but modifies them for submission themselves rather than have the student do it. The paragraph above is also the reason I do not write my student's manuscripts for them. Yes, I will edit them and work them through the process, but the students are responsible for the initial draft and all revisions, based on feedback. Writing is a critical skill for students to learn and if they want to continue in science I want them to know what the submission process is like. Obviously, if a student finishes up and decides not to pursue a publication, I will do it myself, but I have only once seen this happen over my time in academia.

In any case, I would be curious to hear how others see the MSc degree.

Last one

2010-04-27T08:17:00.002-04:00

Today is my last lecture. Better yet, it's a short lecture because I have to pass around the class evaluation. It's been a long semester and I'm really happy this class is over... at least I'll be really happy when I catch up on all the sleep I need. I have, however, managed to submit four grants this semester, generated some good data and get my MSc student in a position to graduate this summer while recruiting another student to start in September. I've planned and booked four summer trips, served on two defense committees and three comprehensive exams, written a manuscript and revised two others, given two invited seminars and run our departmental seminar series. Oh, and co-convened a local conference for over 100 people.

This was the craziest semester I've endured, but the teaching was the hardest part for me and the one area where I felt I could never get ahead. Preparing two 1h15m lectures from scratch a week, sometimes on subjects that were a bit of a reach for me, was feeding a hungry beast that was never satisfied. Every time I got one lecture done I had to either give that one or start on the next. There were far too many slides put together between 11pm and 1am, only to be revised when I got up at 5:30am. When all is said and done however, I think it can be broken into a few categories.

What went well: Overall, I think I got across what I wanted to and kept the students interested to a decent degree. I made up some new labs, which worked but need some tweaking for the future. I managed to find my groove for lecturing and now that I have a course worth of slides to work from, I think the next time I offer the class will be much better.

What went less well: I thought I was going to be able to coast by using the materials given to me by the prof who formerly taught the course, but that was a giant fail. There was just no way I could lecture the same way they did and I had to throw everything out and start anew. I also realized how much the labs needs modification and there are a few things that need to be better organized to make the concepts more clear to the students.

What we will never speak of again: The few lectures in the beginning when I tried to force myself into teaching from the other persons slides. The second test that the students bombed to an epic degree. The in class texting, which I gave up on dealing with halfway through the semester.

Obviously, this experience means I will do a number of things differently next year. Hardly surprising. I'm glad I got through it, but most of all I am ready for the summer.

It gets easier....

2010-04-23T08:18:00.002-04:00

I just caught myself about to do what has been bothering the shit out of me for the past couple of years. Our friend Hermitage is having some trouble with a paper at the moment. When I read her post, my knee-jerk reaction was to say "I know it sucks now, but it gets easier", but when has that ever made anybody feel any better? I have been hearing that non-stop for a couple of years, whether the context is having a new baby, grant writing, starting a lab, teaching, dealing with new administration, whatever. It's an easy thing to say, but just as easy a cop out for giving real advice. If I cared about what this will feel like in 3 years, I would ask you about that but I'm getting kicked in the stones right now. If it didn't get easier, no one in their right mind would actually do this shit (including having kids).

I'm guilty of saying this too, but I vow right here that I will resist the urge to relay this useless bit of advice from now on.

Oops

2010-04-22T12:56:00.003-04:00

Of all the ways I could be reminded that I am giving a seminar tomorrow in another department, receiving the announcement of my talk through the college listserve is probably not the best. I guess it's time to start putting that together then.

Open position, to be filled ASAP

2010-04-20T08:44:00.002-04:00

Due to a recent retirement, the Department of Science at Employment University is looking to fill a vacancy that puts the department in violation of the Universal Unwritten Academic Rules (UUAR). In order to avoid risking sanctions for non-compliance (of Article 57-8.4), this position must be filled immediately:

Job Title: Seminar Napper

Requirements: Must be a >50 year old white male who likes to sit in the front row of auditoria, enjoys napping and can smoothly transition from REM sleep to clapping. Must be short enough to fit in our department's main theater chairs without too much head bobbing and should not snore too loudly (occasional transgressions will be overlooked).

Preferred skills: Candidates whose responsibilities for teaching and research are either light or languishing from a lack of activity, are strongly encouraged to apply to increase the number of seminars attended in this capacity per week. Candidates who ask the same question relating to their own work at every seminar, regardless of topic, will also stand out to the committee.

Compensation: Free coffee, tea and snacks for every seminar attended. On occasion, a cheese plate may provide additional attendance incentive.

Applicants should provide three letters of reference that will attest to their utter inability to remain conscious for an hour at a time in a darkened room. Evidence of this, including video or personal seminar notes that scrawl off the page after two lines, should be included in the application package. Interviews will be conducted during the upcoming departmental seminar.

Please forward application packets to:PLS, Department of Science, Employment University

Lessons in Frustration

2010-04-19T10:24:00.002-04:00

I recently gave my second test of the year. The students did not do well. Even the students who did well on the first one posted only mediocre scores. It was a blood bath.

Part of this is undoubtedly my fault, but I went out of my way to avoid any subjects that were not discussed at length in class. I was not out to trick them or ask things that are only in the book, I kept it lecture-based and right from my slides that I provide them. While clearly I need to be better at getting some of these concepts across to them, there has to be some level at which I can feel like I have done all I can. I mean, they are the ones who are supposed to be learning, right?

As a case in point, I had a question on the exam worth 10 points (the exam was out of 90 points and only two questions were worth this much) that asked the to explain a method and how it works. I had covered this method in class the same week they performed in lab. As a follow-up, I discussed it again in the context of their results during the class after the lab. Based on all of that coverage, I figured it was fair game to ask about and have it worth so many points.

Virtually no one in the class got better than half credit on that question. WTF? They did it with their own hands! They walked through the whole procedure and the answers I got could have been the same answers they would have provided before I introduced it to them. To make matters worse, they were incredulous that I would ask a question about something they did in lab (and class, mind you). The class material and lab is planned out to be in concert and all of them felt that the lab was helpful for their understanding when I asked about in the mid-semester evaluation. But... they shouldn't need to incorporate the class concepts with the lab exercises?

I'm now struggling with how to go forward. I'm not going to hold their hand here. I will do m best to provide them with organized lecture material to help them understand the concepts I want to stress, but how much is on me?

Honestly, I don't think these students have any idea how to study (At least two have told me this), which leaves me feeling like I'm teaching in a foreign language sometimes. By the time I see these students, they are in their last year or two. If they don't know how to study it doesn't really matter what I tell them.

Fire Away!

2010-04-14T08:06:00.002-04:00

A little while back I decided that I had the funds to recruit a postdoc and that I should do so. My first inclination was to talk to a few PhD students I knew who were finishing up soon and whose experience would translate well to the work we are doing, without being completely overlapping. After some discussion with a couple soon-to-be graduates things fell into place with one of them, who will be starting this summer.

In preparation for the new hire, I thought it would be a good idea to sniff around my institution to see what is required for hiring a postdoc and I wasn't surprised at what I found out.

The good news:

Postdocs are a recognized category of employee. Health care benefits (the same I get) are required when hiring a postdoc and there is vacation, sick and maternity* time for these employees. A 30 day warning of a layoff due to funds drying up is also required.

The bad news:

1) Despite there being a category of employment for postdocs, they have no advocate. Like most institutions, both grad students and faculty are unionized here, but postdocs get squeezed between the cracks. Their "advocate" is, by default, someone whose primary job it is to advocate for the grad students.

2) The only things required to hire a postdoc are a willing body and some state and federal tax forms. NO CONTRACT IS REQUIRED. That means I can just bring someone in, have them fill out a few forms and lock them in a lab with no indication of expectations or guidelines on which to fall back on in case of a grievance. That's the kicker, right? When things go well maybe it's easy to not have any sort of record of expectation and no one cares, but what if things go poorly? What if something in my personal life goes down the toilet and I start getting all crazy and start firing people? Everyone has heard that story, no? Without a contract of any kind there is nothing to which a postdoc can go back to and say "I have upheld my end of the bargain!" There is no recourse, which takes us to Bad News #3.

3) Postdocs come in on a 12 month "probationary period", which is code for "can be fired arbitrarily". I asked our head of HR directly what it would take for me to fire a postdoc and the answer was "call me and I will either come over and facilitate that conversation or do it for you." In the first year postdocs have no protection and after that "it just takes a little longer" if one wanted to fire someone without documenting cause. Now, there are certainly times when the termination of employment would be justified and with the appropriate documentation that is just how things go. But what I described above is for if I wanted to walk into the lab one day and tell someone to clean out their desk.

Having at several institutions during my career, this doesn't surprise me a bit. But as a postdoc there are ways to protect yourself to some degree. Almost any PI with some sense will write out a contract because it protects both of you, but in reality the PI isn't the one who needs the protection. For that reason, postdocs should ask to have a contract written up at the start of employment. It should outline not only the performance expectations of the PI, but also what the postdoc can expect from the PI. No one tells you how important a signed document like that can be when you start a new position fresh off your Thesis Experience. Whereas you hope to never need to use it, you need to request it if your PI does not bring one to the table on day one.

Admittedly, I never signed a contract as a postdoc. I had an offer letter, but nothing beyond that. I had no idea that I should request one and hindsight is 20/20. I was fortunate to never need that contract and my supervisor was really good about communication, but that doesn't mean things couldn't have gone differently.

More important than the contract, however, is something that postdocs can't do anything about on their own and that is getting a person or office in place to handle all things postdoc related from the postdoc's side of things. Some larger R1s have this type of thing, but the vast majority of institutions only pay lip service to it. It requires the demand from PIs to get the wheels turning, and one might guess that PIs might be less than motivated to put a structure in place that takes away some of their power to make personnel decisions.

As a PI, it's easy to say that a postdoc office isn't worth your effort because you treat all the postdocs in your lab well. However, I think it's critical that we recognize the fact that a big part of the disgruntle factor of postdocs is the very fact that they can be dropped like a sack of potatoes. If you do treat postdocs in your lab well, then there is nothing to lose from pushing for greater university recognition in the form of dedicated postdoc advocates and it may turn out that they can facilitate some things (visa issues, a sense of community, etc.) that either you currently have to, or can't, deal with. As with most things, there's a high cost up-front, but they pay-off will be worth it.

I'll let you know how it goes here.

* I don't know how well this policy works in conjunction with granting agencies yet, but I am trying to find out.

The joys of home ownership

2010-04-13T08:18:00.002-04:00

We have really enjoyed owning our home, but you have to take care of somethings when you have a home that you previously did not. House renos aren't the only thing you can now be a part of!

We have a skunk under our shed. It's been there for at least a year and he's digging the bejesus out of our lawn looking for grubs. I want thins thing out from under our shed. Now. But trapping a skunk is not something I've done before. I can see trapping it pretty easily, but then what? I see the scene playing out like this (especially the end), with me in the part of Steven because my wife is too smart to be the one outside.

As exciting as that looks, I would like to get rid of this thing without spending my afternoon in a tomato bath in a kiddie pool in the yard. I've tried blocking the entrances to the shed, but the thing digs another. Short of getting night vision goggles and closing the shed up once the skunk goes out for the night, I don't think that will work. People have suggest moth balls, but I'm not spreading toxic chemicals under my shed and letting them bake in the hot sun. I know that special skunk traps exist, but there's got to be a solution for under $150.

Anyone dealt with this and have suggestions (what NOT to do is also welcome).

The admissions dance

2010-04-09T08:42:00.002-04:00

My department doesn't have a rotation program where students are admitted strictly based on their application packets and then spend time working in different labs to figure out where they want to do their degree. There are pros and cons to that system, but it wouldn't work in my department for a variety of reasons. Instead, we do a mixture of our own recruiting and interviewing potential students who apply to the department, but we only accept students who are matched with a particular lab when they come into the program. Everywhere I have worked has been like this, and honestly, I like it that way.

One major drawback however, is the dance one has to do with the candidates. I typically interview 4 students and rank three. One of the factors that has to go into that ranking, however, is whether I think the student will come if accepted. This is critical because once you extend a letter of acceptance through the grad school, the ball is in the student's court. In an ideal case the student will accept and you can then quickly decline the others on the list. More often than not, however, the accepted student takes some time to decide. During that time I am left stringing the other students along, not wanting to tell them that they are not my first choice while hoping not to lose them right away to other labs. If my first choice declines I need to have a pool to go back to, which is why timing is critical and why the pool can quickly dry up if the accepted student delays too long.

I can try to impress upon the accepted student that a timely response is helpful, but I can't demand a response until the official university deadline. Of course, this deadline corresponds with the deadline of several other schools in the area and if the candidate waits until then to decline, I'm pretty much screwed. In this case I would probably be left with a decision between an applicant who did not get in anywhere else or not taking a student at all. Although it is possible to find students who turn out to be excellent in the lab after a mediocre undergraduate experience, the odds are stacked.

In the mean time, the music plays on...

Thesis committees

2010-04-07T10:05:00.002-04:00

It's an innocent enough question - "Would you be willing to serve on my thesis committee?" - and an easy thing to say "Yes." to. At the time you commit yourself there is generally no work to be done in response to an affirmative answer and generally the students who ask this are those whose work you are interested in, on some level. Sure, it'll be great to help this student along and provide advice on their work as it is coming together!

On top of the desire to help the student, there is an unspoken understanding between PIs that service on one of their student's committees means that they will return this favor down the road. Depending on the project, finding committee members for some students can be a pain in the ass, so having this "debt" in your pocket is not a bad thing.

Before you know it, you've said yes to three or four people, without much thought for the consequences of this action. Then comes the end of the semester or summer and everyone thinks "OMG, I have to propose/qualify/graduate before the end/start of the semester! We need meetings! Here's 45 pages to read by next week, and can you have comments back to me?"

I have a busy travel schedule lining up for this summer where I will be gone for 4-24 day chunks, several times. It ain't pretty, but between conferences and collaborations, it is what it is. My colleagues have similar schedules, so getting three to five of us together at the same time is damn near impossible. This means that on the rare instances that several people on related thesis committees are around, those days are booked solid with committee-related activities.

The moral of the story is to remember that on the flip side of agreeing to be part of a thesis committee is a solid time commitment down the road, likely to be scheduled at a very inconvenient time. I am learning this the hard way.

Intra-office sub-desk napping

2010-04-06T12:02:00.001-04:00

Yes or no? Discuss...

Actual conversation: neighborhood edition

2010-04-05T08:43:00.002-04:00

Elderly Neighbor: Nice to see you home on the weekend, seems like it's been a while.

PLS: Well, yeah. I had a lot to do at work over the last little while.

EN: You know, my husband used to work extra hours on the weekend when we were younger. He always wanted to bring in the extra money.

PLS: Um, yeah.

EN: I don't know how much they pay you for those weekends, but it aint worth it.

PLS: I don't get paid extra for weekends...

EN: WHAT? You should tell them you're not working one more weekend unless they pay you for it.

PLS:

EN: What in the hell would you work for free for.

PLS: It's complicated.

EN: Doesn't sound like it to me.

PLS: sigh.

Tough decisions

2010-04-01T14:00:00.000-04:00

Well, I think it's time to make the official announcement on the blog.

After all of the discussions how good postdoc life is and how teaching is sucking the life out of me I have decided to bail on this job and take a postdoc position in another country that I've always wanted to live in. My department and Dean are understandably upset and it took some time to make sure that all of my trainees can find PIs to work with so that they can finish their degrees, but sometimes you just have to do what's right for yourself.

I don't know where this will lead or how many postdoc positions I can string together over the next few years, but it'll be an interesting ride. I'll let you know how it goes...

How day care will be the death of me

2010-03-31T12:07:00.004-04:00

Day care is a necessary evil if you have a two income family. Unless you have relatives close by who are willing to entertain your child while the two parents are at work, chances are you have to rely on day care. It can be expensive and a huge hassle, but there are not a lot of options.

There are good things about day care, such as your child getting to play with their peers for much of the day. This can lead to learning a lot of things they would otherwise not be confronted with at home. Children at day care also have to get used to being with non-parents for much of the day, which one could argue helps them when their parents need to leave them with someone to get something done or to go out for a night. A lot of day cares also go to great lengths to take what is understood about how children learn and incorporate that into daily activities. All of these are good things.

But daycare has another effect on your life. Before we sent the Wee One to daycare she almost never got sick.

The Wee One, before day care.

We had the normal run of one or two colds a winter as a household, but nothing major. But day care changed all that. Day care is apparently where every cold and flu goes to party. It's like the runny nose equivalent of Burning Man and we have our very own vector from that source. It's like living with the monkey from "Outbreak".

The Wee One in day care. This is actually the look we get every afternoon when we arrive to take her home.

This winter the family has been a revolving door for colds. Every time one sweeps through and leaves us for dead, there is another one at the door. I'm pretty sure I have been healthy for a grand total of 8 days since November and my wife has been hit harder by each cold than I have. Day care is probably taking a year off of our lives, and we're not even getting to play with play dough! The thing I am most excited about this spring is the chance that the time between colds will lengthen as the days do.

Brought to you by the number 8

2010-03-29T12:01:00.003-04:00

We recently went to a Sesame Street musical with the Wee One, through which she sat about 50% terrified and 50% amazed. Every few minutes she would tear her eyes away from the stage long enough to say "Too loud!" to either my wife or I. Despite this, she hasn't stopped talking about it and we foolishly bought the soundtrack, which is now the soundtrack of every drive. That, or "My record please." for the whole drive. Where she picked up that a CD is a "record", I have no idea. But I digress.

For the last couple of weeks it seems like I always have one of the songs in my head. Diabolically, many of the songs are set to the tune of older recognizable songs so they lodge in the brain crevasses that much more easily. On more than one occasion I have found myself humming an Elmo or Big Bird vocal.

On this background, recently many of the random things in my life have been mentally framed in the context of Sesame Street. Yesterday I was looking at the syllabus for my class and realized that even though I had somehow calculated last week that I had 14 lectures left (In my defense, I was only about 20% "there" mentally at the start of last week), I really only have 8! How did that manifest in my brain? With a combination of a white 8 on a changing patterned background and "8! 8 lectures, ah, ah, ah".

Is there professional help to extricate furry monsters of this sort from one's head?

Caring about teh students

2010-03-25T08:50:00.003-04:00

Last week, when I was embroiled in a too much work, too little sleep haze, Dr. Girlfriend left the following comment on my post about the students in my class not knowing their lab partner's name.

Wow! That is crazy. It is stories like this that make me question the whole teaching thing.

These are supposed to be adults who are taking classes out of choice.

Surely they need some sort of name to use cell-phones and emails? How can they expect to pass if they are not communicating with lab partner outside of class?

A professor is supposed to be a resource, not a nanny. If a student cannot be proactive in their own learning they do not belong at university.

You care too much. And I am never going to make it as an assistant professor if I am expected to pass a certain percentage, regardless of inadequate performance.

Honestly, I wanted to bring this back up because it is something that I have struggled with as a new teacher - the balance between investment in the student/class and my time and sanity. This comes in several flavors, one of which was touched on by the above comment. In this specific case the question is how much student apathy do you compensate for with you're own time and work and in reality, I don't know the answer. To this point I have done what I needed to do in order to ensure that the lectures and labs I teach can involve everyone, regardless of whether they do something right. I know that's cryptic, but when there is a project that builds from one week to the next, I feel like it is my responsibility to ensure that if students screw something up in Week 1, I have a back-up in Week 2 that allows them to continue on with the exercise. To me, that's inherent with planning the exercise in the first place because the likelihood of all students completing an exercise completely correctly the first time they do it is next to nil, no matter how straight-forward. Do you "punish" those who can't follow instructions by forcing them to watch from the sidelines in Week 2? I don't think that helps them learn the concepts, which is why I am there in the first place.

I think the same goes for class. It sucks when you spend hours building a lecture when you have a hundred other things that need to get done and 20 slides in you have two kids blatantly texting three rows back. Part of me wonders why I am bothering working as hard as I do to try and make the class interesting to them when I could just stand up there and talk straight through the figures from the book. I'm not trying to be Robin Williams in the Dead Poet's Society, but I do care about engaging the students in the material. Maybe it's stupid of me to want that at this early stage since no one gets a cookie for teaching at the expense of research, but I also don't know how to turn off that part of my brain that forces me to take pride in whatever product I put out. I have had teachers who just didn't care, for whatever reason, and I can't be that guy. But finding the balance that gets you to "good enough" is tough and it's a moving target.

Although I don't believe that the students need to be coddled, one of the hardest things I have found in the teaching game is finding the right investment balance. Too much and I can't get other essential functions done and stay up-right and married, to little and I can't live with the job I am doing in my role as "The Guy Responsible For Helping The Students Learn This Shit". Some days I get it right and some days I am way off, but it is part of the job. It may not be what we are trained to do or what we want to do, but I can't knowingly* teach poorly any more than I can knowingly leave out data that calls my conclusions into question. I don't know where that leaves me, but I guess I will find out.

*I might suck as a teacher and not know it, which is a different problem.

Up for air

2010-03-24T08:57:00.003-04:00

I took yesterday off. Completely off. It was the first day (day, not weekday) this month that I've taken off and it was a beautiful thing. Of course it hasn't helped my day-of-the-week-vertigo that has me constantly looking at my schedule to remember whether it's a Tuesday or Friday, but it was really nice to relax and not do work. It led to the expenditure of way too much money at Lowes, but what can one do?

It is Spring Break in the land of Employment University and I'm finally able to catch up on all of the shit that has been piling up while I have been focused on feeding the ravenous Lecture Beast and coordinating grant submissions. It comes at a good time, with my desk threatening to buckle under the weight of paper. There is much to do during the break from undergraduentia, but the reduced pace means that I can spend a bit of time on research. This is a good week to take a deep breath and think "Only 14 more lectures.Only 14 more lectures.Only 14 more lectures.Only 14 more lectures.Only 14 more lectures.Only 14 more lectures.Only 14 more lectures.Only 14 more lectures.Only 14 more lectures."

We have some exciting data, I have a student writing up a MSc thesis and prepping their data for publication and we're staring down what will likely be a busy conference season. It seems like a long way off, but it'll be here by the time I can look up again.

You stay classy "conservatives"

2010-03-21T08:51:00.003-04:00

Sometimes I wonder if the people who are adamantly against big changes like health care reform are just the same ignorant and scared morons who have been against social change for decades. It's nice when you get a resounding "yes!" to questions like these. I'm not saying that I am 100% in favor of what the health care reform bill has been turned into as it has worked its way through our broken political system, but it seems clear that the majority of people who are against it have no idea what they are opposing. With yesterday's behavior of the anti-health care demonstrators, one has to wonder how many of them even understand anything but fear of change.

The home stretch and collaboration win

2010-03-19T08:14:00.002-04:00

For any number of reasons, this March has been the toughest month I've had in this job. It just seems as though everything of importance has been co-scheduled with some of the biggest time sucks known. It happens and I've just had to keep my head down, get shit done and let some things go for now. After early next week things will be much much better.

One thing that has been an incredible positive, however, has been an ongoing collaboration that was started back when I traveled to Europe late last year. A conversation started over coffee that has grown over time and has evolved into a multinational opportunity to combine the expertise of a few labs to delve into a question that none of the labs could have done on their own. It's been an exciting process and the grant proposal that has resulted from the collaboration is something to behold.

But, it's not just the combination of ideas that has me so excited. I've had my share of collaborations in the past and they are always a little risky because it's nearly impossible to figure out ahead of time whether or not you will work well with another person(s) when you're up against a deadline or when something goes wrong. People can do plenty of talking, but you have to know that they will send you some needed text when you are three days from a grant deadline or that they will do the analysis that they said they would so you can include new data.

With this collaboration (so far) everything has played out better than I could have hoped. The main foreign PI has done everything I asked and more, including sending data and text when I've needed it, coordinated and facilitated some work with other labs and consistently provided helpful feedback on things. It's been good. Now we'll see if we can secure the funds to formalize this relationship and keep the ball rolling.

Hello, my name is....

2010-03-16T15:06:00.004-04:00

Last week I had the students in my class do some work in the lab that formed the basis for the next two labs. When I looked at the results they got I realized that I was going to have to re-do much of the final step so that the actually would have something to work with this week.

However, I needed some details from each group in order to help me create the right conditions for the re-do. I emailed the whole class to send me the information I needed and their partner's name so I wasn't doubling up on information unnecessarily. Only 20% of them got back to me, which is not entirely surprising, but what was shocking is that only half of those who responded knew their lab partner's name.

Last week was the ninth lab of the semester. NINTH. That means I have several students who have worked with a classmate for hours on end of this semester and have never learned their name. And I only had 20% respond to me! WTF? Maybe I'm just getting old enough where I like to the names of the people I work with, I don't know. Now get offa my lawn.

Drawn and quartered

2010-03-14T09:46:00.002-04:00

March has not been the best month...

The importance of buying local

2010-03-10T15:45:00.002-05:00

When I first started assembling my lab, the sales people from several big companies swooped in with their offers. One of my first blog posts was about that. It was an odd experience. But in the end I did the majority of my purchasing through a local distributor because he had a wider selection than any one company and he took the time to work with me rather than just throw fliers at me. And not only is he the sales and delivery guy, but he's sleeping with the company owner - his wife. I can also call him personally at any time to ask him a question about a product or have him send me a quote. I'm a personal attention whore like that.

But never has the customer service been more useful than this semester. On at least two occasions I have had to talk to him and ask for a product for me teaching lab, because I'm woefully under-prepared for yet another lab. On a day's notice he has sent me products critical for the lab with no PO, no payment and nothing other than my word that I will fill out the paperwork and get them paid. Now obviously I'm not going to run off with my $80 worth of supplies and disappear, but try calling Sigma and getting anything from them without some sort of documenting paperwork. Maybe large accounts can do that kind of shit, but I'm not in that position. It's nice to have that kind of resource if you need it.

Midterm Evaluation

2010-03-09T11:31:00.002-05:00

I decided that I needed to get a feel for how my students think the class is going so I had them fill out a brief questionnaire and asked them to be as honest as possible. Here are the questions and general responses.

1. Please comment of the pace, presentation and amount of material covered in lectures.
For the most part the students thought things were good here. A few think I go a bit too fast, and that is probably true, but I need to find ways to slow down where I don't just stand there while they finish writing shit down from the slides (which do not contain a ton of text). The slides were generally well liked and the fact that I post them online has been appreciated.

2. Have you found that the lab has helped you to understand classroom concepts?
The lab was universally seen as a good extension of the class material and no one had anything bad to say about it. It helps that I have a kick ass TA.

3. What is one concept from the lecture you still find difficult to understand?
Students mostly complained about some of the nitty gritty details, but sorry folks, all of the fun stuff I tell you is to give you a break from the nitty gritty shit you have to learn. One student complained that some things were hard to understand in class until they went back and studied. What are your other profs doing where you find this unusual?

4. What about the lectures do you find most helpful or useful?
Again, they like the slides and diagrams and that they can access them after class.

5. What would you do to improve the class?
If there was anything here it had to do with being more explicit about WHAT THEY NEED TO KNOW FOR THE EXAM. I love this complaint because I tell them in class the format of the test and what I expect them to know. Somehow, if I don't hand them the questions ahead of time I am trying to trick them.

Overall, I don't see anything that makes me concerned, which is good. The main message is to slow down a bit and hover over some of the concepts they find challenging, which I don't think will be a problem. Also some wanted more interaction, which made me laugh because I often toss out questions into the void and it appears that they consider them rhetorical.

My favorite comment was that one student appreciated me trying to make them laugh at the early hour of 9:30. Dude, I've been up for four fucking hours already, which I don't find funny. But, alas, I do remember that schedule.

Anyway, overall I am pleased with the response.

Dirty Oil Man

2010-03-09T07:54:00.002-05:00

Dear Oil company Sales Rep,

I don't blame you for being a little curt on the phone when I called to cancel our contract because we bought a new natural gas furnace. I'm sure losing an account in this economy and when you are hawking oil kinda sucks. The fact that you tried to rush us another delivery even though our oil tank was scheduled for removal was kinda a dick move, but whatever. It's nothing personal, we just want something more efficient and you couldn't offer it. There's also the issue of the tax rebates, but I digress.

While I can forgive you for being grumpy, I can also ask you to please go fuck a light socket for sending my family an envelope full of random pamphlets, all strongly suggesting that the switch to natural gas will soon lead to our deaths from either carbon monoxide or from our house blowing up. Your dirty scare mongering of the worst degree only further sold me on our switch and convinced me that your company sucks ass. I hope you have to sleep at night smelling those shitty fumes that we had in our house before we upgraded.

Sincerely,
PLS

p.s. The new furnace is awesome.

Happy Birthday Wee One

2010-03-08T08:34:00.003-05:00

Artist's rendition of 2 years ago

2 years goes by quickly.

15 Female Scientists Who Changed the World

2010-03-05T09:21:00.002-05:00

Since I am slammed today, you should go check out someone who is actually putting up interesting posts, like 15 Female Scientists Who Changed the World at The Medical Small Business Blog.

What I learned from the first test

2010-03-03T10:49:00.002-05:00

I'm almost done grading the first test I gave to my class and I'm feeling pretty good about it. Looking through the results has certainly given me some good insight into the class and what they are getting from the lectures. Points I can take away:

Almost all of the students were distributed in a decent way across the grade spectrum, suggesting I got the difficulty pretty close to right.

I was surprised to see what concepts or bits of information were universally understood and remembered, verses those which were not.

I did, however, have a good feel for which questions were lobs and which were fastballs.

Despite several hints that certain topics would be on the exam, not all of the students bothered to study those topics.

Some students who appear to be barely paying attention did much better than I expected.

Some who seem to really be paying attention did much worse.

Overall, the students are remembering most of the main concepts I am trying to get across. This feels like a small victory for me and some reinforcement that I'm on the right track in teaching them.

Now, after a brief break on the lecture front, I need to start my lecture for tomorrow.
Dude. Fuck. Sigh.

Testing. Testing.

2010-03-02T09:46:00.001-05:00

It's been a long time since I had to take a test for a class, but I'm kinda reliving that experience today watching my students hover over the sheets of paper I have prepared for them this morning. I don't think the test is hard, but we'll see how they do. This is the first test I've ever given so it's tough for me to judge ahead of time. I'll be really curious to find out what they retained versus what was lost on them. I tried to limit my questions to the main topics we covered in class but who knows if what I thought were the main subjects are the same as what they thought they were. I certainly spelled it out, or at least felt I did.

In a lot of ways this feels like a test for me as well. Did I get the concepts across? Did I ask questions that will let them display what they know (or at least will remember for the moment and probably forget shortly)? We're 20 minutes in and no looks of panic or frustration yet. No questions and plenty of writing. Hopefully this will go smoothly.

Sometimes I forget

2010-02-28T09:12:00.007-05:00

There are times when writing a blog of this size seems like an open conversation between myself and the couple of dozen people who comment. I have no problem with that, but sometimes I forget that it's possible to toss out a post that you think is relatively innocuous and prompt a response you weren't expecting. Certainly that was the case when I touched off a lively debate about the merits of postdocing not too long ago, by suggesting ways I had seen people have very productive and fun postdocs. Clearly part of the response was my fault because, as Dr. Becca correctly pointed out, one could read the post as "if you don't do what I say and you're in a shitty postdoc, it's your fault". That is really the last thing I meant to put out there, but when you write a post in 5 minutes between other obligations, sometimes it's not well thought out and comes across to others in a way you never meant. Sometimes I forget that mentioning the words "postdoc" and "fun" in the same sentence in the science blog community can be like wearig meat pants at the pound.

PLS prepares to post on the subject of a happy postdoc experience

There are many postdocs out there who are in exploitive situations, where they are being milked like data cows by supervisors who care little for what happens to their carcass after they are done as a "trainee". To me, that type of "supervising" is unconscionable, but it doesn't mean it's not rampant. But, the point of my original post was to provide points to consider when choosing a postdoc that might aid in ending up in, at the very least, a tolerable position during what I view as an important career stage. Sometimes I forget "drive-by commenters" are almost always the ones who post the most emotional response about a topic because they pluck a single post out of the whole, cherry pick a few phrases they disagree with and launch into tirade.

Artist's rendition of a drive-by commenter.

Hey, that's fine. It reminds me to read through what I'm writing a little more critically rather than just hitting the post button after I finish typing. The flip side of course, is that simply calling someone else's points "propaganda for the system" based on your own reality is not exactly productive. To claim that another person is trying to falsely generalize based on their experience and then project your own experience to a group of people is a pretty basic flaw in logic.

Whatever you do, don't look it in the eye!

What I think is important here, however, is to bear in mind the fact that many of us want the same thing - to find ways to improve the postdoc experience. PiT already beat me to the punch with a good post on ways in which individuals can help make changes for themselves or other postdocs, so I won't belabor those points. Suffice to say that complaining without doing anything will be dismissed by others as empty blathering. If you're passionate about making a change to the life of postdocs, then do more than writing myopic internet content. To look at the real stats behind postdoc salaries, for instance, and claim that this is not your problem is to blame shift in a very convenient way. I'm not saying that postdocs have control over their salary (unless they chose a position based only on that), but in many cases PIs also have very little control. Not every lab is a biomedical factory running on multiple NIH grants.

If that doesn't appeal to you then at the very least, as a PI, break the cycle. Those who vociferously complain about how horrible being a postdoc is, only to turn around and treat their trainees the same way, either have learned nothing or have consciously embraced the exact thing which they fought against. Many of the PIs who blog are very aware of the training responsibility we have to the next generation of postodcs, whether you decide to call that "nauseating altruism" or not. Every trainee has their own goals and one of the PI's responsibilities is to do what they can to place that trainee in the best position to succeed. In the real world even a good PI will not be able to do this 100% of the time and even successful trainees will no reach their goals 100% of the time. Does that mean that all PI's are just out for themselves and to find more trainee wood to throw on the fire of science? If you think that is the case, why are you aiming to be a PI? If you are an unhappy postdoc, will you treat the people in your lab better or will you see it as a rite of passage that they suffer? The fact of the matter is that improving the postdoc experience takes commitment IRL, not just virtual opinions.

[Update Biochem Belle just added a post about types of postdocs that readers may find useful.]

Data paralysis

2010-02-26T16:47:00.003-05:00

I just got data. Not just any data, but a motherload of data. The amount of data that makes you look at it and think "Did I really order this or did they send the wrong thing" like if 400 pairs of socks showed up at your door after a night of drunken online binge shopping.

I'm fucking giddy about it all, but on the other hand, I have no idea where to start. Like a contestant in the biggest burger eating contest, I can't even pick this up, let alone find a place to sink my teeth in. This is not something someone should get at 4:30 on a Friday afternoon. It just isn't.

A breath of fresh air

2010-02-25T18:40:00.003-05:00

I'll be honest, I haven't posted a lot this week because this has been a tough week. For a lot of reasons, blogging has just fallen off the map in ways it normally doesn't. Today in particular, I hit a wall where by about 2:00 I wasn't useful to anything. I tried to edit a paper and ended up staring at it, with nothing to add. Part of the problem is just working too many hours and the other is not seeing a light at the end of the tunnel.

By 4:00 I was fried and called it a day. My wife was able to get off at 4:00 and we went to pick up th Wee One. Emotionally and physically burnt, we stopped at day care and it changed my day. Today was one of those rare times when everything fell in to line and the Wee One was in a great mood when I wasn't and it changed everything for me. Parenthood is a difficult journey, but there are times when you forget all of the tough times and there's a shining moment where you think to yourself, "this is why we do this".

Today was one of those days. The Wee One was happy on the car ride home and we had all sort of fun playing when we got home. Not much would have changed my mood tonight, but she did it in a way that is hard to explain. Now, sitting at home, the week doesn't feel as bad and I'm less concerned with the next two months. At least for an evening, I can forget work and focus on my daughter. Her smile melts me.

Alert your relatives, exams coming!

2010-02-25T14:13:00.003-05:00

With my class exam drawing neigh, suddenly attendance issues and all other matters are cropping up. My class is pretty small and I already have 20% of the students as possible no-shows for the exam. Sports, deaths, illnesses... everyone has some reason that they may not on Tuesday, be able to get to the same classroom they have been getting to every Tuesday prior.

I will readily admit that creating all of the lectures and class exercises is tapping my will to live at the moment, but this kind of stuff is really testing me. I'm barely keeping everything together dealing with what and how to teach these kids and now there's rescheduling, possible make-up exams, medical notes, etc., etc. I'm not in any way saying that people can't have legit excuses for missing class, just that the amount of extra work for students that do can be huge. And, the oft stated tenet that there is a close association between major illness and exams is certainly ringing true.

At this point I can only hope that I don't end up getting really sick, because I don't know how much further I can fall behind on some critical things in my research and home life right now.

So how DO we mentor people for "alternative" careers?

2010-02-22T20:47:00.000-05:00

There are several uncomfortable realities one must face as a grad student or postdoc in academia, and one of the biggest are that there are not enough TT jobs for everyone that wants one. In fact, there are far less. This reality means that many people who start off in the direction of a TT faculty position will end up in another career to use their skills. These are often referred to as "alternative" careers, based on the bias that every trainee wants to end up just like their mentors. In reality, much like the number of "pre-med" students at a university, a lot of people either decide they want to do something else or have that decision made for them along the way.

As is often pointed out, however, the mentors in academic science are almost exclusively people have taken the TT direction. If you want advice on navigating the road to this type of job, most of us will have no shortage of pointers. On the other hand, if you asked me the best way to go into science editing for a major journal after a PhD, I'm afraid I don't know the answer. So, as mentors, how do we adequately prepare our students and postdocs for appealing careers outside of the ones we inhabit?

I'll confess now that I don't have all the answers here. In fact, if you read often you'll know that I almost never have all the answers, merely opinions based on my observations. But I did pose this question to some early-career colleagues, who re-affirmed what I was thinking and added a number of good points. I would be interested to hear what readers in both the mentoring and trainee positions have found helpful.

The first point that was brought up is the overlap between what people need to accomplish to be considered excellent candidates for either a TT job or many other science careers. The ability to communicate orally and in writing, a record of good science (publications and/or grants) and critical thinking.

Another point that was made was the importance of communication with the public. While we probably don't stress this enough in science, generally speaking, the ability to explain science to the general public in writing or in a succinct oral synopsis is exceedingly important in jobs like industry, journalism, public policy, etc.

Networking. As a trainee who is considering or committed to a career outside the tenure track, it is essential to make the contacts that will help you get there. If your PI can help make those connections, great. If not, it's important to find a way to develop them yourself.

As a PI, I think it is important for us to not only be open to trainees pursuing non-TT options, but also to be able to steer them in the right direction to get the advice they will need to succeed. As long as (and here can be the sticking point) their career trajectory does not directly conflict with the production of good science in the lab and the completion of their degree.

As for how that works, I can only tell you what I have tried and happily hear what others have found works.
- Having trainees thinking of non-TT careers invite a person of interest for a departmental seminar.
- Putting funds towards conference or workshop attendance of interest to the trainee that will help with both their current project and future goals.
- Opening a dialog between a trainee and someone already established in their field of interest.

Monday through Friday

2010-02-21T09:46:00.003-05:00

I came in early today (Sunday) to get some work done in order to spend the afternoon with my family. There's a stack of stuff on my desk and Tuesday's lecture is only in my head. I work in a new building, which has had some issues with the times it is locked - seemingly random and often not on weekends. This weekend it was locked, so I swiped my card to get access. Nothing. I tried all 5 card readers around the building. Nada.

Pissed off that I couldn't get into my office, I called security and was told that my building was not on "the list" to be open this weekend. I explained my situation and after a few "yeah, buts", the officer begrudgingly sent a security officer to let me in. I picked a spot of the building that was least windlashed and waited.

While waiting, I saw a grad student from another department approach the building from another side. I thought about telling the grad student about the card reader issues, but they were far enough away that I would have had to yell and this was not a student I knew at all. I figured they would get to the door, realize the issue and approach the door I was at. In a classic "Midvale School for the Gifted" moment, the student walked up to the one set of doors that has no card swipe, opened one and walked in. Feeling like a dumbass for making the leap of logic that all of the doors would be locked, especially the ones without the card readers, I stood in the cold wondering whether to go inside or wait for the security officer outside.

I decided on going in and calling the security office to keep the officer from coming down but he had already arrived and met me not a minute later. I explained how I got in and he let me know that the building is locked to everyone on the weekends because they don't expect that we work overtime. "You work Monday through Friday" he explained.

Oh, officer, wouldn't that be nice? There wasn't much point in explaining the hours I actually work, but I'm going to have to make sure that it's clear there needs to be a way for those with card access to the building to get in "after hours".

What to expect in the first year

2010-02-18T11:46:00.005-05:00

Obviously, there has been some discussion around these parts about becoming new TT faculty and how prepared people actually are. With that in mind, I thought I would provide a Top Ten list of things that I wasn't as prepared for as I thought I was when I arrived in my job.

10. Walking into an empty room and knowing you have to turn it into a functioning lab in relatively short order is a bit overwhelming. In a lot of ways, it is a fun challenge, but remembering EVERYTHING takes some serious work. It helps if you walk around your postdoc lab and list everything you see, right down to the tube racks and brushed in t he sink. Ordering things will consume you for the first couple of months.

9. Balancing finishing up postdoc projects with launching a new research program can be difficult. It's easy to drop your past and concentrate on the new stuff, but getting those last few pubs out the door helps mask the productivity gap of setting up a new lab. Also, doing this sooner than later means you will have to spend less time searching through old files trying to remember things that were fresh 6 months earlier.

8. Meetings take more of your time than you can imagine. Even from the very early stages it is worth picking a day or two during the week and removing them from your schedule so that nothing breaks up that day or days. It doesn't seem like it right away, but after a few months you'll be asking yourself "why I can't I get anything done during the week?" and the answer will be because you don't have any blocks of time longer than two hours. I know the idea of it seems ridiculous, but it happens.

7. Trainees are enormous time-sinks in the first 6 months. You may or may not have grad students or a technician starting in your first year, but whenever they do show up it is surprising how much of your time becomes dedicated to making sure they do things you want them done and keeping them on the right track. This gets better as more people join the lab, but one needs to be careful of the game of "lab technique telephone" which can occur if you have trainees teaching trainees.

6. Politics. Some places will be worse than others, but figuring out where people stand and being sucked into numerous discussions on how your university runs is also a massive time suck in the beginning. Steer clear of as much of this as possible, but you can't dodge everything unless you start wearing a Teflon suit to work. Then people might give you a wide berth.

5. Everyone wants a piece of you. While you still have that new faculty smell, everyone wants their pound of flesh. You'll be asked to give seminars in the relevant departments or nearby universities and maybe even some guest lectures in classes. You'll be asked to attend different events by administrators so they can show off their new hire and the university will try and "orientation" the shit out of you with events and training sessions. Other faculty will want to blab on for days about "how things are here", etc, etc.

4. Nothing in research works in a new lab. At least, this has been my experience. Everything will be slightly different than the environments where you learned the techniques. The machines will be different (even if they are the same models), the water will be different, the tilt of the Earth, whatever. It takes time to trouble shoot everything in the new digs and the routine protocols you once performed will have to be tweaked.

3. Where once you had one or two grants to apply to per year, now you're chasing the world. As a postdoc there are a couple of grants that one can directly apply for. Maybe your PI asked you to help with other grants as well. As a new PI with your own ideas to fund and in need of money, you'll start applying for far more than you thought. I sent in 7 grant applications in my first year. That's a lot of writing, a lot of adjustments and a lot of rejections only to start over again. You don't carry that kind of load as a postdoc.

2. Making a name for yourself takes a lot of exposure. As a new PI, it's important to get the word out quickly that you've started your own show and you're moving forward with new ideas. In addition to letting people at your university know who you are, you need to do the same at the international level. Publications from you new lab are not going to come out for at least a year or two, so you have to get out to meetings and work the conferences. You have to network for yourself now, so start booking flights.

1. You're the boss. You now control your fate in a way you previously have not. Your ideas are under the bright light, your writing has to fund the lab, your personnel decisions will make or break you and your blood, sweat and tears will determine everything in the next 5-7 years. You'll have some support, but ultimately it all comes down to you. Your trainees depend on your success as much as you on theirs and their jobs and careers are in your hands. Somehow this reality didn't really sink in for a bit, despite postdocing with a pre-tenure prof who was very open about the ups and downs of things and I'm not sure it can be fully realized until you're in the position. One can be aware of it, but living it is different.

I'm sure others will weigh in with things I've left off the list, and this is in no way comprehensive, but all of it combines to make for a pretty crazy transition from being a trainee in a lab to calling the shots. It's easy to look over this list and think, yup, I know all that. The problem is that it's the cumulative effect (not necessarily additive, btw) that makes being pushed into the deep end so jarring.

From the commentariat

2010-02-17T08:59:00.001-05:00

Last week I posted my thoughts on ways in which people might actually make their postdoc a fun and rewarding experience. I know, what a jerk, right? Several commenters came by to rant about how all postdocs are horrible and exploitive and I learned that I have been exalted to "privileged" status because both my wife and I were willing to move for that phase of our lives and we actually enjoyed our time in Postdoc City. Oh, the humanity!

Then came a comment from Girlpostdoc. I started to respond before realizing that her comment had absolutely nothing to do with my post. It helps when commenters stop to read the post before flying off the handle, but I thought we should discuss the comment anyway in it's own thread and we can try and stay on topic here.

Let's take it point by point.

This advice is truly superficial and frankly misleading. Something happens to people when they get TT jobs, it's like a switch goes off in their head and they all of sudden have to become part of the clique. In doing so, they forget where they came from or what they witnessed.

Didn't you notice we all have the same rings?

Believe it or not, I really did have a good postdoc (all 4 years) and was in a multi-lab research group that included a couple of dozen postdocs who, if they were having a horrible time, never let on to me or anyone I knew. It's not a unicorn, there are people who enjoy working together and I still regularly chat with most of the cohort I had significant overlap with. I even collaborate with a couple of them and the labs I left.

The advice I provided were suggestions based on numerous observations of people who found really fun and productive postdocs. Unless by "misleading" you mean "not leading to a miserable situation", then guilty as charged. My advise was based specifically on "where [I] came from or what [I] witnessed"

More germane to this discussion is what TT faculty "learn" that gives current postdocs the impression that some of them "forget where they came from or what they witnessed". Hold that thought.

You, like many others have bought into a mythology that pervades not only science but the arts. The myth in the arts is that in order to produce a great work of art, one needs to suffer. Come on. There are plenty of cases where that is completely false.

The same mythology is now being built up in the sciences by people like you. If you want the priviledge of being a "scientist", you need to be accept poverty and expect to be bullied.

Postdoc pay isn't great, but I'm pretty sure that "suffering" is taking it a bit far. A little perspective here is encouraged. If you look at the median US household income you might decide that ~$40K is not too bad. One can make the argument that $40K is not commensurate with experience, but there are financial realities of grants that one needs to consider here. I know that postdocs don't care what they cost their supervisor, but that has a very real impact on salary.

Salary is only part of the equation. Say a postdoc is making $40K. At my institution, if we are putting in a grant with a postdoc we have to include money to cover family insurance unless we have a postdoc committed who is single. Family benefits = 61% of salary, or in our hypothetical case, $24K for the year. Add to that the indirect costs to the grant, which in most places is around 50% and it looks like this 40K (salary) + 24K (benis) = 64K x 1.5 = $96K per year. That might not be a big deal if a lab has a few NIH R01s, but for an NSF funded lab, that's a big fucking deal. Go to the NSF stats page, pick your favorite program and look at the median payout per year. It's around $150K and that includes indirect costs. So, as a postdoc, you eat 2/3 of a median annual budget. At $50K a year, the cost to a grant jumps to $120K. So, for those of you who ask, "why can't I get another $10K? for my labor?" realize that it's not that your PI is trying to screw you, it's that she's trying to run a lab off grant funding and a postdoc already costs 2/3 the total, before grad students, supplies and travel. If you want to get paid to sit in an empty room, maybe you can get that extra $10K. Just food for thought.

After 6 years, I have earned the RIGHT to be considered scientist. I don't know what you people in cell and molecular biology do during your degrees, but in Ecology and Evolution, as PhD students, we came up with the questions, designed the experiments, wrote scripts to analyze our data, and yes of course wrote the manuscripts. We even wrote grants to get money to do the research. All of these things are what scientists do. Thus, I am a fucking scientist.

I don't expect to have both money and independence immediately. But fuck if I don't get my independence in a postdoc then pay me the big bucks and I'll do whatever the fuck I'm told to do. But I won't be paid a secretarial salary just so I can have the priviledge of being a fucking monkey. That's just bullshit.

Now we're heading into Wackyland. I completely agree that anyone who does the above is a scientist and I have no idea where I said anything to the contrary. Girlpostdoc, you are a scientist. Of that I have no doubt. That said, it's time to reign things in here a bit Entitletor. One thing that needs to be clear is that no one cares what you think you are entitled to when it comes to jobs, resources or respect. This only gets worse once you are faculty, so it's a good idea to get used to it now.

The second mistake you make is assuming that it is still training. It is not. As a postdoc, I am collaborating with my supervisor. I am training and teaching him, as much as he is training and teaching me. I come with expertise and the postdoc is a chance to exchange our expertise. Making the mental switch from student to collaborator is crucial. I believe that is what defines a successful postdoc.

Welcome to crazy island, population 1. First off, if someone could point to where my post would have spurred this response, I would love to know. But since we're here, let's get something straight: A postdoc is still training, but it is completely different from the training a grad student receives. If it's not, you're in the wrong lab.

There absolutely should be an exchange of ideas and expertise between postdoc and mentor. When I look for a postdoc, I look for someone who has skills I don't. I don't need another me, I need someone who adds a new dimension to the work we're doing. I want someone who can bring in new ideas and take the research in new directions. At the same time, I have a mentoring responsibility to help the postdoc get to where they want to go. If that is a TT faculty position, I will do what I can to prepare them for that. I've been through the transition and TRAINING the postdoc to make that jump is part of the job.

I think it's telling that all of the talk about "I knew how to be a PI right out of grad school" comes from current postdocs, whereas almost all faculty bloggers will admit that the transition was overwhelming, more difficult than they expected and that they learned a lot in their postdoc that helped them. If you think this is a skewed sample, go find the newest faculty member in your department and ask them whether they found their postdoc valuable in becoming faculty. I would bet they will either tell you their postdoc sucked and they learned a lot about being independent and how to succeed on their own or that they got great mentoring that helped them anticipate some of the craziness that ensues in the first year.

Because, frankly, all of the talk by postdocs about how they don't need the extra training to be faculty sounds a whole lot like a bunch of one legged people discussing how to win an ass kicking competition.

The Poor Guinea Pigs

2010-02-16T14:43:00.003-05:00

I am not a great teacher. That's true on the same level that it was when I first got my driver's license and was not a great driver. In fact, I had far more driving practice than I have teaching practice, so there shouldn't be much surprise that I'm still more worried about crashing my class into a ditch than am I able to fly down the teaching highway while simultaneously drinking coffee and soothing a toddler in the backseat. I have no doubt that teaching experience will allow me to be at least a good teacher, but I'm struggling right now.

I've taken courses on teaching and TAed more than I care to remember, but teaching an entire class by oneself is not the same thing. I'm struggling to find ways to engage the students and wearing myself down trying to identify all of the content I want them to learn while not overwhelming the topic - simultaneously over and under thinking every lecture, only to turn around and start the process again right after class. It's exhausting and it makes it even more painful when I feel like I'm staring out at the most bored people in the universe at that given time or get through a lecture super early. As much as I dislike crossing campus in the throng between classes, making the quiet walk back across campus alone because I ran out of material 20 minutes early is far worse.

I guess the good news is that I care about the experience of the students, but I can't help feeling sorry for this first class they have given me to experiment with. There's no such thing as a class simulator, so learning with breathing and paying bodies is the only way to get better. There have been a few lectures where I really felt like I nailed it, but so far I've walked out of more trying to make a mental list of all the things I need to do better for that topic next year. For better or for worse, it's a long semester and I hope I'll be a better teacher at the other end.

In defence of the postdoc

2010-02-12T10:13:00.002-05:00

Over the past month or so there has been a lot of talk about postdocs, whether it's why people do them, the purpose of them or why some think they suck. In my field there is pretty much no getting around doing a postdoc if you want to do the whole TT thing, and frankly, I think that's a good thing. No matter how much you think you know about research and being a PI by the end of your PhD, the time as a postdoc is valuable in learning how much you really don't know. On top of that, being a postdoc should be one of the most exciting research times of your career.

The biggest complaints I hear about postdocing are 1) Money, 2) moving around and 3) lack of independence.

Money. This may be unpopular, but if you are in this business to get rich you might as well leave now. Yeah, PDFs typically make $35K - $50K, depending on the field and that isn't a ton of money given the training they have had to that point, but get over it. You're being paid to do research, and in most cases, have no other distractions. Assuming you have picked a research topic you enjoy, this is a pretty good deal. Personally, I would seriously consider the pay cut to be doing just research at this stage.

Moving around. Yup, the academic lifestyle can be somewhat nomadic and that can put a strain of relationships and make for difficult logistics. Because of that, a lot of people try and limit their geographic search, sometimes unreasonably. Personally, I would (and did) take the opposite approach and look for a postdoc in a completely unfamiliar place where you might never chose to settle. Why? Because a postdoc can be a lot more than just a job experience. I have numerous friends who are doing postdocs all over the world and the happiest of them are the ones that chose a place totally different from what they were used to. Maybe this wouldn't work in all fields, but there are plenty of excellent labs in other countries and you would be amazed how helpful international experience can be for collaborations. Not to mention that being in an unfamiliar place encourages one to go out and explore. Getting out of the lab for fun can be a good thing.

Lack of independence. Now I know that lots of people get into situations where they feel taken advantage of or where they are stuck doing projects they don't care about. That is why it is critical to do your homework ahead of time and know enough about the supervisor whose lab you are joining to determine if you can work with them and get the mentoring you need. Don't just take a position in any lab doing something remotely close to what you like. Talk to other trainees in the lab! Talk to former trainees. Is the lab a good place to develop as a scientist? That information can be FAR more important than the project. Put yourself in a place to succeed.

Obviously, this isn't a fool proof way to a happy postdoc, but give yourself the best shot you can. Expand you research horizons with something different from your PhD and do it in a fun place, both socially and scientifically. A postdoc can be one of the best times of your career.

Playing tricks on my class

2010-02-11T08:24:00.002-05:00

I've been thinking about trying something with my class and I would be curious to hear whether any of you have done something like it. Our class has a website where I post all materials for the students to download at their convenience. The lectures go up there after each class and any readings do as well. The one thing that the website doesn't allow me to do is find out how many times each document has been downloaded.

When it comes to class readings I'm fairly sure that half the class doesn't even download what I've asked them to read, let alone actually read it. I was trying to figure out ways to encourage them at least look the material over, as it would make my job in class a lot easier. Not much came to mind, but I did realize that I could reward the ones that do the reading by placing immediate incentives in the readings. The first thing I thought of was including a page at the end of a document I have asked them to read, which asks them to contact me by email to receive an extra point on the upcoming exam. In the grand scheme of things, one percentage point on the exam means little, but no one who reads that will hesitate to send me an email.

I know that is hardly a fool proof way to get an idea whether any of them are keeping up on the reading, but it might provide some incentive for a few, and if I point it out after the fact, perhaps more will at least look at what I post. Besides holding them to the readings on tests or making quizes to do the same, are there other good ways to "encourage" keeping up on class material? Should I even care, as long as they show up, stay awake and don't fail the tests?

I wonder....

2010-02-09T08:43:00.002-05:00

....If undergrads ever think about their profs making lectures, and if they did, would my students picture me drinking a beer and listening to this turned up to 11?

'Cause that's how it's done.

NFL final wrap up

2010-02-08T08:29:00.002-05:00

Well, well, well. I have to say that Super Bowl was much better than I had thought it would be. In a lot of ways it reminded me of the Pats/Rams SB in 2001, right down to the game icing interception for a TD. As an NFL fan, it was great to see the Saints win and take home their first championship. As a Pats fan, it was wonderful to see the Colts get thwarted in their effort to win a second title in four years. Just a win all around.

The SciBlogs NFL challenge was about as close as the game (until the last few minutes) last night. I chose a playoff format that I thought would discourage a tie going into the Super Bowl, but that is exactly what we had. Both DGT and Nat had 4 points going into the big game, but because I had our contestants pick the winner three weeks ago, they had to chose between teams that they had projected to be in the Super Bowl. Nat had forecasted a Chargers v. Saints SB and DGT had chosen a Colts v. Dallas. Each player had one SB entrant correct. Weeks before the actual game, DGT chose the Colts to win, but Nat picked the Chargers who had already been eliminated.

That set up the following scenario: DGT wins outright if the Colts win the Super Bowl. If the Colts lose, we go to the tie breaker. The tie breaker was the final scroe under Price is Right rules (closest without going over) I would apologize now to all my foreign readers who haven't seen the Price is Right, but they all stopped reading after seeing the title, so I think I'm in the clear. Anyway, both Nat and DGT were asked to pick a tiebreaker number on Saturday. Nat took 56, knowing both teams had prolific offenses. DGT took a page out of the Price is Right strategy book and bet on 1. Yes, 1. With that strategy, any score below 56 meant a DGT win and anything above meant Nat wins.

Well, if you watched the game, you now that the Saints won with a score of 31-17, for a total score of 48!

So, it is my pleasure to announce that the winner of this year's NFL SciBlog Challenge, in double overtime, is Damn Good Technician. The final Lombardi trophy of the year is below. Congrats DGT!

Just one more? It's wafer thin.

2010-02-06T12:48:00.002-05:00

Lately I've really been wondering whether I'm taking a good approach to getting grant funding. The big question for me right now is how many projects is too many? It's one thing to be submitting a lot of grants and something entirely different to be submitting a lot of grants for different projects.

I have somewhat unusual training which has put me in a position to propose some work that others might not have the expertise or colleagues to make work. Now, obviously, I have yet to convince funding agencies that I can pull any of this off either, so there's a bit of a caveat here. But, the work I do and have done, combined with a reputation for being easy to work with, has turned into a lot of different projects.

I have one project that is entirely mine and I am the solo PI on the proposal. In addition to that, I have two other projects that I am the lead investigator on, but each has a co-PI. On top of that, on a recent trip abroad, a dinner conversation has developed into yet another proposal. It is in the works, but I will again be taking the lead on the project because I pulled together the people to make it feasible. That's four projects and I have another colleague trying to convince me to join another one that would be submitted in July.

Let's assume for a second that I can produce enough preliminary data to support all of these different projects, I'm starting to feel really stretched both mentally and from a resource standpoint. Granted, I am not doing all of the heavy lifting on all of the projects, but each one is different, with it's own issues and advantages.

The advantage to this approach is that inevitably there will be ones that won't get funded and I can cover my bases by having lots of irons in the fire. At the same time, how much is too much? Advancing several projects slowly is probably worse for me in the short term than advancing one or two more rapidly, but of course the situation is more complicated than that and certain lab resources are only available to me because I have my hands in a couple different things.

I don't know where the line is or how gray that line is and I'm sure there are no hard and fast rules here. I also know that if all of these projects were, by some miracle, to be funded this year (I can wait while you stop laughing) I might actually be more screwed than I am now. I won't worry too much about that last issue, but it bears keeping in mind. In any case, it's possible I'm stunting my own growth here by growing horizontally when I should be growing vertically. Hopefully I realize whether that is true before too long.

Cooking for a busy family

2010-02-05T08:55:00.002-05:00

I often hear two-career family people complain about their dinner options and what to feed their kids. There's always the rush home and the routine of trying to get kids fed, washed and in bed at a reasonable time. We have that problem, particularly because the Wee One goes to bed early (~7:00) and we only have one car, which often doesn't leave work until after 5:00.

But my wife and I also really like to cook and are not fans of packaged foods, for us or the Wee One. We have found that the most important small appliance in the house for our weekday cooking needs is the crock pot. If you don't have one and you find yourself turning to boxes in the freezer during the week, go out and buy a crock pot right now. The words will still be here when you get back. I'm serious, go.

Why is the crock pot an incredible thing? Because you can toss a few ingredients in it after the kid(s) go to bed. At that point you can either turn it on low o/n, leave it off for the day and turn it back on when you get home or you can put the whole thing in the fridge o/n and turn it on when you go to work. We tend to prefer the latter, but while you're figuring out how much liquid to put in, it might be a good idea to be home while it's cooking.

There is a misconception that crock pots are for cocktail weenies, Swedish meatballs or that undefinable cheese disaster that Aunt Helen brings to every family gathering, but that's crap. Dishes we regularly make in our crock pot include hoisin chicken, several curries, beef stew, pulled pork and the best damn spaghetti sauce around. If you are at all a fan of slow cooked food, you have no excuse to lack a crock pot.

Normally I cook by The Force, so I'm going to have to estimate the following recipes, but you can't really screw this up.

Hoisin Chicken
1 whole chicken (placed upside-down in the pot)
enough chicken stock to cover 1/3 of the chicken
3 tablespoons of hoisin sauce
Basil to taste (teaspoonish unless you like basil a lot, which I do)
cilantro to taste (teaspoonish)
4 crushed garlic cloves
Cover the chicken with the sauce by rolling it a few times
Put it on low for the day and come home to something tasty. Add Rice and a vegetable and you have dinner in 20 minutes.

Beef Stew
About a pound of stew beef cut in chunks
two chopped potatoes
three chopped carrots
4 crushed garlic cloves
1 cup of red wine (for the stew, two for the chef)
2 tablespoons of balsamic vinegar
Rosemary to taste
Basil to taste
4 bay leaves
Pepper to taste
Salt to taste (don't overdo this one, more can be added later)
Stir and turn on low for the day. This is an all in one meal so it'll be ready when you walk in the door.

Both dishes take about 15 minutes to get into the pot, so I don't want to hear how you don't have time to make a meal. The crock pot does the rest for you, so let it do it's job while you do yours and make your life easier in the evenings.

Why do I blog: Because DM told me to.

2010-02-04T13:17:00.004-05:00

No DrugMonkey didn't tell me to blog, but I thought I would add my voice to the ~~brawl~~ discussion about the differences in blogging styles, which I won't rehash when one can find all the links in one post. DrDrA has done the same and I think the perspective from a couple of us "solo" bloggers is important here.

The questions posed by Nature Network's Steffi Suhr are as follow:

* What made you start blogging?
* Is a sense of community an important part of blogging for you, or do you prefer blogging 'solo'?
* Are there blogs you never look at? If yes, why (be nice and don't name names)?
* Who are you blogging for/who are you talking to?
* Do you think you may be getting people exposed to some science through your blog who otherwise wouldn't be?
* Do you think any non-blogger cares about any of the above things?

So, my quick answers are these

* What made you start blogging?
I've talked about this in the past and my reasons have changed over the lifespan of this blog. My ~~problem~~ blogging started with a family blog that for various reasons lost it's purpose. Having been introduced to blogging I started a new one about being a new faculty member, oblivious to the fact that many others were doing the same. Seriously. As I started to poke around a bit and linked up with others, my focus changed from just trying to be informative to those planning on starting a TT position to more of a give and take. Plenty of times I have asked questions of my readership and gotten helpful responses and for various reasons there are things that I ask here that I don't go to my colleagues for. So, while I started as an altruistic semi-narcissist, now I blog more for the exchange of ideas. Maybe that just leaves me with semi-narcissist, I don't know. In the end, it's the most productive way I've found to take a break from the demands of the job during the day. Others read news or sports or FaceBook, I do this.

* Is a sense of community an important part of blogging for you, or do you prefer blogging 'solo'?
As others have pointed out, these aren't mutually exclusive. I do blog solo, but am anything but, in practice. Between regular commenters and interactions with other bloggers, this is a community and it is important to me. Whether I would prefer that my particular circle be formally recognizable to others, probably not.

* Are there blogs you never look at? If yes, why (be nice and don't name names)?
Again, oddly worded, but of course. Assuming that we are only talking about blogs relevant to me and that I am aware of, two things most limit the scope of my reading; 1)time, and 2)content. I only have so much time to devote to this activity, so I can't possibly keep up on all of the relevant blogs. However, there are those I read regularly that are well outside my field because I like the writing. I read to be informed or entertained, and if you're not doing that I can only hang on so long and I rarely go back to a blog after I've decided I'm not interested. I think everyone has a mental anti-blogroll.

* Who are you blogging for/who are you talking to?
Based on comments and domain names from hits, I'm mostly talking to other academics, who are mostly in the sciences. Certainly that's not the complete audience, but how many people outside of the science or academic scope are going to care about the majority of what I write about?

* Do you think you may be getting people exposed to some science through your blog who otherwise wouldn't be?
I think the best I can hope for in this regard is that I expose people in other fields to some of the researchy stuff I sometimes discuss. My field is small and if I write about something that makes a reader at least file it away in their brain, I'm happy with that.

* Do you think any non-blogger cares about any of the above things?
I would estimate that maybe 5% of my readers have blogs of their own. I think people at NN might see this too if they could look up the hits to their posts, but alas...
[update] I realize now that I didn't get what this question was asking the first time around. If I understand it now, I think it's asking whether non-bloggers care about all of this discussion about blogging. In that case, I would say that some probably care, but more those thinking about starting a blog than the average reader, who is probably quite bored by all this yak.

Painful budget cuts

2010-02-03T08:19:00.003-05:00

Better than finding $20 in an old coat

2010-02-01T10:26:00.002-05:00

Yesterday I was going through old folders on my computer and pretending to organize things when I found something I couldn't place. I organize my "papers" folder by each manuscript and there was a subfolder that I couldn't match with anything I had published. I opened it up and found a manuscript I had been working on back at Postdoc U, which had gotten lost in the shuffle of getting a job offer, writing grants, moving and starting a new lab. Now, almost two years later it was just sitting there unloved in almost complete form. It's got figures, a reference section and even a title page. It appears that the discussion just needs to be shored up a bit and I can slap a stamp on it.

Now, for those of you wonder what the fuck is wrong with me that I could lose an almost complete manuscript for a couple of years, it's a minor piece that will end up as a note in a specialty journal. It's not like I'm sitting on a glamor pub here. I had thrown it together as an afterthought when I was a postdoc, then life ensued and within three days of one another I had a new baby and a job offer. Things got a little busy and there wasn't a whole lotta sleep happening. When I did regain an awareness of my surroundings I started working on a grant proposal to start a totally novel research program and I had to negotiate the terms of my job. Chaotic times.

I contacted Postdoc Advisor and let him know about it. His first reaction was "If you need the solo pub, take me off the paper and include my grant in the acknowledgements". As much as I appreciated that sentiment and his offer, I am not completely cool with removing the name of the person who provided all of the resources for the project. Maybe it won't count towards tenure, but I don't see that as a valid reason for removing him. Afterall, it was entirely done in his lab, so it shouldn't count as something I've accomplished here. We've bounced a few things back and forth yesterday afternoon and I can probably finish it this weekend and get it out the door.

Nice surprise during a week I could use it.

Week 2, getting a handle on shit

2010-02-01T08:36:00.002-05:00

I will freely admit that my first week of teaching was a bit of a train wreck. Overall, everything worked out, but I was a mess. I was finishing slides the morning that I was using them and just generally doing everything at the last minute. Not the best way to put together a coherent lecture and I should have been better prepared. Easy to say in hindsight.

This week I think will be much smoother. My lectures for the week are almost completely done (Tuesday's slides are already on the web for the students to download) and I really spent a lot of time on the organization of how the material is presented. Last week I depended largely on the slides from the person who previously taught the class, but learned the hard way that we don't think or lecture in a similar way. I thought I could use the old slides as a good guide for content and pace, but that doesn't turn out to be the case.

This week I rearranged everything to fit the way I think about the topic for the week, which should help tremendously. On top of that, I've added a number of things that I think will be of interest to the students and found places to stop and ask them questions so that the class is more interactive.I actually saw a glimmer of interest on Thursday when I included a story applying what we were talking about. There were even questions! And not "Um, could you go back a slide?" but questions to learn more about the topic.

I mentioned in an email to a friend on Friday how it is funny that until now the teaching aspect of the job were always something that was going to happen some day and suddenly "some day" is today, and it's true. To me, teaching was that thing I was going to be forced to do at some point in order to do the job I love. It terrified me - not in the sense that I was scared to do the teaching or thought that I couldn't in any way, but more because it was an unknown entity. How much time would it take? Would I be able to keep the students interested? Would they learn anything?

Week two and I feel like I'm getting into the swing of it a bit. I've loaded up my schedule on Tuesdays and Thursdays with everything related to teaching or meetings so that I have two days of hell and three weekdays that are mostly open. I think that was a really good strategy that is already working for me. Now that I have a better handle on the lectures I can get back to the stack of other things I have to deal with, without working all night and seeing my family in drive-by fashion.

Notes from an advisor's desk

2010-01-29T09:03:00.002-05:00

My undergraduate advising duties have picked up quite a bit over the last few months. I've had a bunch of meetings with students in their second through forth year and every meeting is different. I didn't expect that a group of people all going through the same (or similar) training would have such completely different experiences, but perhaps that's a simplistic view.

In about five minutes I can tell whether the student is just there for affirmation that they are on the right track or if they came because they don't know how to get to the end game. Initially I was surprised how many students are in the latter category (the major requirements and spelled out in multiple places, with worksheets to help students schedule their classes), but then I remember that most of the students I see are younger than 20 and are choosing their own path for really the first time. In high school their schedule is predetermined for them, for the most part, but now they are free to follow guidelines or not, with no consequences to those choices until after the fact. From my position now it seems crazy that students can't stay on track to meet the major requirements in 4 years, but I was a wide-eyed student once too and many don't know exactly what they want to do from day 1.

In my capacity as an advisor I try and get to know what they want to do post-university, and within reason, put them on a path to succeed. But I have been surprised at my reaction to the various students who walk in my office. In most cases the meeting is straight-forward and I give them a plan for a year or two of classes. In about 40 minutes I can work them through what they need to do and we can agree on a course of action. What intrigues me, however, are the students at the extremes of my reaction spectrum. Some walk in and I find a pretty limited desire to help them. I'm not saying I don't work with them, but something about our interaction keeps me focused more on how to get them done with the major rather than tailoring it to their specific interests. In other cases I have gone out my way to come up with a ideal schedule for students, including finding lab work for a student who didn't even know that option existed. I only recently realized that there was a bell curve to my advisee interactions and I haven't been able to pin down what the factors are that influence it, because it is not related to GPA, the engagement of the student, or other potentially obvious factors and I'm meeting them all for the first time. Some students are just more helpable than others and I guess sometimes I'm just a sucker for a good story.

Inviting Chaos

2010-01-27T08:53:00.002-05:00

No, this is not an overt attempt to get Prof. Chaos to let us know how things are going in her world of babies and tenure decisions (as far as you know...), but the continuation of an on-going saga for me. Back when I first started the lab and the blog I posted (here and here) about my quest to have some old data sent to me by a PI who never published them and no longer was in a position to complete the work. My initial contact with Frustrating Potential Collaborator was positive, but without warning FPC fell off the map. I tried to re-initiate contact. Oh, I tried. To no avail.

Late last year a friend of FPC told me that FPC was now interested in talking to me about the data gathering dust. At the time I blew that off because I had already duplicated some of the work and didn't feel like another round of get-screwed-by-the-old-gaurd. But we got some data back recently that just screams to be compared to the data gathering dust that we haven't already duplicated, so I had to chose between contacting FPC again or blowing many thousands of dollars and lots of time for the same results. I thought I should try the "easier" route first.

Well, so far so good. I had an email conversation last night with FPC and they have agreed to release the data to me. It's not clear how much they have (it appears to be far more than I had originally suspected), but so far we have the green light. BUT, twice already I have asked about what would be expected when it comes to authorship and involvement in the final product and twice those questions have been ignored. FPC is now retired and appears not to care what we do with the data, but there were students involved in those projects who have gone on to other things and who might like to see those data published. None of the people in question are still in academia, so tracking them down is difficult.

As excited as I am to get the data and start to work with them, there are alarm bells going off in my head that there may be far more strings attached to the data than I can see right now. But if FPC gives us the okay to go forward, what is my responsibility to FPC's former students from more than a decade ago? I will try and pin FPC down in terms of getting their consent, but if that doesn't happen does it blow up the whole thing? I'm not particularly comfortable with going forward without the consent of the other potential authors. I'll have to see how this plays out of FPC's end. I know that one student has been contacted, but I'm not sure about the others. The last thing I want is a bunch of interesting data that are stuck in limbo, but the possibility of getting a bunch of people who have been out of the game for a while involved in the writing or editing makes my head hurt even more.

Best case scenario is that the data are given to us with a list of a couple of people who should be included on the resulting papers, but who want nothing to do with the process. But best case scenario is usually as likely as riding to work on a unicorn.

Not exactly what I thought

2010-01-26T11:58:00.002-05:00

I'm not sure what I was expecting, but my first day of class went differently than I had imagined. I got there early to set my computer up and of course found a closed cabinet that held the AV hook-up. Before warming up for my interpretive dance that was my back-up in case the slides didn't work, I checked with the desk at the nearby computer lab. Yes, they had a key. Yes, they would open it. As the Guy With the Key went to unlock the cabinet, he pulled the handle to reveal that it was unlocked and that I am a dumbass. Luckily, I am used to that.

The classroom is set up in the most awkward arrangement possible, with the closest desk only feet from the screen and the computer not even close (thanks for the 3 foot cord!). The result is that any hope of using "presenter tools" to see what is coming up next is completely lost. Yet another drawback to modifying someone else's slides for a lecture.

For some reason, the students waited outside and almost all came in at once about 3 minutes prior to the class's start. All but one of them completely ignored me standing two feet from the door and telling them to pick up a syllabus. They grabbed the paper but regarded me in the same way that most walk by someone asking for change on the NY subway.

That trend continued into the lecture, where questions for them to answer were greeted with a zombie-movie-just-before-someone-gets-attacked kinda quiet. If I hadn't forced them to introduce themselves part way through the class I would have been wondering whether I had the statistically-impossible fortune to preside over a class of people entirely mute. I tried to toss a couple of off-hand jokes out there - nothing. I asked questions - nothing. If there were crickets in the room it would have been a full blown cliche. I really had to pin them down to get any response. I'm thinking of releasing a slightly shaken ferret into the class on Thursday.

Other than that, it was fine. I kept it fairly brief, talked about what I expect of them and what they can expect of the class. I introduced myself and the subject and they were out of there 30 minutes early. Three showed up late, but only one was really late. I only had one person obviously texting in class and I'll try and find a way to address that.

They seem like a decent group, hopefully I just need them to warm up a little.

Pricelessish

2010-01-25T13:24:00.000-05:00

Having to do most of your Tuesday lecture on Monday morning: likely to be typical.

Being a little nervous about getting the first class right to set the semester off: not surprising.

Having the car not start on Monday morning: my life.

I guess I should be glad that it's not tomorrow before class, but seriously. I just blew more than half my day waiting for a tow truck and going to the dealer only to have them tell me they can't find anything wrong with it. Why don't we start with the fact that the engine sounds like I filled it with buck shot instead of gas once we finally did get it to start. The car is less than a year and a half old and never given us any hint of a problem. This morning it's dead in the driveway?

Now I have to finish my lecture, make sure the syllabus is coherent and probably find some time to visit the room I am teaching in, which is clear across campus, all in less than half the time I had planned. Shit just never gets boring around here. Why do I feel like we're in for some projectile vomiting tomorrow morning as we're dropping the Wee One off? Nothing like teaching the first class covered in vomit.