Bureaucracy!

When dealing with any large organization, it is necessary to navigate the bureaucracy. Over time, there are more and more layers of people to enforce more and more detailed rules. In my experience at National Lab and at ProdigalU, bureaucracy mostly slows down the honest folks who are trying to get things done, while the people who wish to cheat/steal/not follow the rules just figure out how to get around each new layer as it appears.

I am feeling frustrated by the new levels generated at ProdigalU to ensure rule and policy compliance. I feel like more and more of my time is spent navigating bureaucracy, which is even less rewarding than service.

Getting the most out of conference travel

I think attending conferences is really important for students at all levels. I can only afford to send my grad students (though I have sent undergrads to local meetings), but I make a strong effort to send every student who has something they can present to one meeting per year. In practice, this means pretty much all of them, every year. I think this is so important to their development, that this is a priority for me. We also apply for any travel support that is available to facilitate this.

This last conference I attended with some of my students, I noticed that some of them were not really making the most of the (professional) opportunity. Then I remembered that when I was a student (a shy, introverted, not really self-confident student), I spent most conferences hanging out with people I already knew from my undergrad or PhD universities, which was fun, but not really the point. No one ever suggested ways I could get more out of meetings, which would have helped newbie Prodigal a lot. So I decided to start explaining to my students what they should be doing to make the most of a conference (especially since in lean years, we scrape by so I can send them).

Prodigal's rules for conference success:

1.  The stated point of a conference is to exchange ideas. So you need to:

Get your work out there! This of course means that it is important to present your work well in a good presentation (THAT DOESN'T GO OVER TIME!) or as a well thought out poster. It means you need to be at your poster for at least half of the poster session. But most importantly, it means you must discuss your work with other people, even outside of your talk/poster.

Attend talks/posters on things that interest you that might not be directly relevant ot your project. This is a great way to get new ideas, and to learn about a new direction/new area. Most speakers will be distilling one or more papers into the allotted speaking time. The good ones will get you up to speed on the key points during their talks, which can save hours of laboring over papers and references. I find that attending talks on topics I am interested in is the best way to spark my creativity with my own work.

Talk to people in your field to hear about negative results. Negative results are usually thrown in to another paper (as an add-on to positive results), so it could be years before anyone knows that a particular line of research is unlikely to be fruitful. People will talk about negative results in person when discussing their research, though. The publication bias towards positive results means that many labs try the same thing that leads nowhere until someone puts it into the literature that the method doesn't work and stops new entrants to the field from trying it. You can avoid that by talking to other people so you don't invest loads of time in something unlikely to be successful. You should do the same for others, by the way, to help save them time too. 


2. The actual point of a conference is networking. So there are three things you need to do:

Look over the program and "stalk" people who you'd like to meet.  By "stalk", I don't mean actually stalk! Just find out when they will be presenting and attend the session. You can ask a question/introduce yourself at a break. This is your chance to meet people in your field! As a student, it works best with younger, less established scientists, but there are well-established folks who enjoy meeting students. There are also well-established folks who decidedly don't, but that is good information to find out too.

Make sure you meet new people! This may seem obvious, but it is not. It is easiest to do at mixers/coffee breaks, where people are feeling social, or at poster sessions, where there is a natural way to approach people (at posters) and a natural topic (the research). You can also have your existing friends/mentors introduce you to new people. The people you meet at conferences are your peers. They will be reviewing your manuscripts and proposals, inviting people to various events, and possibly telling you about professional opportunities. They will also tell you the real story about their research (the stuff you can't/don't put into papers). You need to get your name out there. Being talented is not enough if no one but you and your advisor know it. You should also follow up with the ones that you clicked best with after the conference via email.

Refresh connections with people you've met before. Ways to do this: attend their talks/posters, contact them and set up a meeting, arrange to bump into them at a coffee break, track them down at conference social events. Even if you meet someone face to face once a year, it is enough to make them a professional contact after a few meetings. It also gives you someone outside your university to hang out with who can introduce you to new people (see previous). 

Point 2 on networking (and its importance) came as a surprise to some of my less experienced students. Early on, many of them still believe that science is a strict meritocracy, and are shocked that networking is so important to success. It is best for them to learn this early, so they can start figuring out networking strategies that work for them.

After my students return from a conference, I like to have them give a group meeting on what they saw, with an emphasis on things that will help our projects, things they thought were the most interesting, and people they think we should pay attention to.

Parenting older children

Another rant about work-life balance. When people talk about trying to balance parenthood and career, I find that they almost always refer to the baby stage. Yes, parental leave is really important when you have a newborn. Yes, sleep deprivation is a major issue when your kids don't sleep though the night. Yes, adequate access to daycare is a major problem. But parenting doesn't end when the children reach school age, and yet the challenges of raising older children while excelling in a a challenging career are not often discussed.

There was this article in The Atlantic back in 2012 by Anne-Marie Slaughter in which she discusses her decision to quit a high powered job to spend more time with her family. At the time, the article kicked off lots of discussion, mostly about whether women could "have it all" and not so much about the child raising parts.

The truth is, kids remain a huge time sink up until they move out of the house. Until the kids reach at least 11 or 12, someone has to be home with them in the mornings before school starts (not so much a problem for our family, since school starts pretty early) and after school (which ends in the middle of the afternoon). We are lucky to have quality after school programs for the Prodigal Kids, but not everyone is so fortunate. Even so, someone still has to do drop off and pick up on time every day. This makes work-related travel very difficult for the home parent, especially if there is more than one kid in more than one place. It also makes things like late meetings/late classes a problem at a time when the workplace is lot less sympathetic then it was for the baby stage.

It is true that older kids require less physical labor and are more self-sufficient, but they still don't buy food (or anything else!) for themselves, meal plan, cook, or do their laundry (at least ours don't--I know some people have their kids start helping out with the laundry at 10 or so). As they age, they need more stuff, and that stuff needs to be in the right place at the right time. Scheduling becomes another thing to do. The schools don't help, because sometimes they need a photo for tomorrow (which sucks for us, since we don't usually print ours), or a last minute school supply, or a trip to the library when the weekend is already full.

Worse, the problems they have now are more difficult to solve. It used to be they were hungry, thirsty, wet, or tired. As a parent, there was something we could do to help them. Now they have social circles to navigate (or not) and schoolwork to master (or not). They make decisions on their own that have long term consequences, and have to deal with the fallout. As a parent, we can offer advice, but they must do the work. It is really hard to watch your child struggle with a frenemy or have difficulty learning something, or be completely unable to organize themselves. And it isn't like power struggles go away--instead of fighting about wearing proper clothing with a toddler, now we are fighting about finishing homework with a tween.

I love my kids, and I am happy with the life choices I made. But I have to say that it really annoys me when people (especially men who have stay at home wives to deal with all of this) assume that because my kids are no longer babies, I can behave as if I don't have kids at home anymore, and that not doing so makes me lazy/uncommitted/less serious/not a real scientist.