The Prodigal Academic

Updating my CV

2011-08-25T10:31:00.000-07:00

I am updating my CV now in preparation for a bunch of proposals I am writing for September and October. I am new to the TT, but have more experience than the typical new prof in my field. I have a hybrid-type CV from my years at National Lab that has a long professional experience section describing what I did at each position held in my career (the norm for National Lab) and still includes experiences from PhD U.

Although I am a relative TT noob, I am not eligible for most New Investigator programs due to the time since my PhD. So it feels really weird to me to still have my TA experience and grad school awards on my CV. But it seems most of my peers at the Assistant Professor level in my field keep this stuff on (at least from looking at CVs posted online). I feel like I am a little in no-man's land.

I am thinking of cutting down the professional experience suggestion to the basics, and letting my papers/presentations/patents speak for the work I did. That seems to be more typical for an academic CV. However, I also see people who have more extensive experience descriptions like is common for researchers outside academia, so that makes me reluctant to hit the delete key. I also think I am going to remove TA details and awards and service from before I finished my PhD, but maybe this is stupid if everyone else is keeping this stuff on theirs. What would you do? Any advice?

Wimminz in Academia Q&A, now with 100% Fewer Babies Round 2

2011-08-21T17:25:00.000-07:00

It is that time again--Mein Hermitage has sent out an interesting and 100% baby free set of questions for her panelists to answer. I don't know how useful my responses are, but thanks again to Hermie for organizing this!

1. It seems to me that often women don't have as strong professional networks as men - the kind that gets built over shared interests (sports or drinking). People seem to gravitate towards others like them. What specific advice do you have for establishing and maintaining network with men as well as other women?

For me, this hasn't been a major problem. I have many interests that are coded male (like sports, sci-fi, and gaming), so I have happily played fantasy sports, gone to cult sci-fi TV show night, and lost sleep to various games (MMOs and others) with my group mates and colleagues. I am not a really big drinker, but I do enjoy a good beer or wine, so I am not averse to hanging out in a bar (especially now that I am not going to reek like an ashtray!). I find that I don't know that many scientists who want to get stinking drunk (though plenty like to drink), and no one cares if I nurse one drink all night or spend the evening drinking Cokes.

I am not a great networker, but the things that work for me are to be myself, try to spend time talking with people in relaxing settings, and use the "friends of friends" effect to maximum advantage (since I am not really a social butterfly). Attending a lot of meeting also helps, since you can reconnect with people at coffee breaks and other social events.

2. Early on, what was your "Oh @!#$%" moment and how did you recover?

When I was a young grad student, I accidentally crossed some wires and trashed a very expensive piece of equipment that was crucial for my project. This was particularly upsetting, since it played into stereotypes about women's competence in building and fixing things. It made me wonder if I was cut out for this work at all at the time.

What I did in response is 1) find out how to fix the problem (it turns out we could fix it on site, with a somewhat scary procedure that I set up and ran), 2) set up a protocol in my work so I couldn't make the same mistake in the future and 3) trust that everyone makes mistakes, and this wasn't a fatal flaw in me as a scientist (probably the hardest part). For years afterwards, I would get upset in thinking about what a stupid thing that was for me to do, and about how I had ruined my advisor's trust in me (which was only true in my mind).

I admit that I felt slightly empowered later on when a male colleague with a similar level of experience made the same mistake, and I was able to step him through the repair.

3. How do you deal with female health issues (heavy periods and period pain that lasts for a week, heavy migraines that strike suddenly, etc.), when you are in a predominantly male environment?

I guess I just don't give many details about health issues that come up, be they female related or not. If I don't feel well/need to take frequent breaks at work/need some time off, I just take it. I arrange breaks around my teaching schedule now. When I was at National Lab, and needed to call in for sick time or otherwise account for my time, I just said I was feeling under the weather and explained what I needed (time off, breaks every X hours, working form home certain days, etc). Most of the time, it was granted with no further information required (though once I needed a doctor's note).

I dealt with my pregnancy and nursing issues in the same way. I had to pump in my office (luckily, I had one office mate at National Lab). I arranged with him to be alone in the office at the specific times I needed and put a "Do Not Disturb" sign on the door. It probably helped that he had kids himself, but I trust my colleagues to behave like adults, and only give out personal information on a need to know basis.

4. How do you balance "assertiveness" and "bitchiness" - in the sense that it's harder as a female (than a male) to "get away with" being protective of your time, stating your opinion, and so forth?

This is a hard one for me, and it something that I still struggle with at times. I don't know that it is any easier for men on the TT to protect their time. Certainly, my male colleagues all seem to have similar trouble learning to say no to service tasks. In some ways, it seems like a personality thing, although I am well aware that both men and women are socialized to expect women to put their needs below the needs of their group.

I do find that assertiveness on my part is misinterpreted at times in a more negative light. Sometimes, I find it better to have these conversations face to face, where body language can help soften a negative response (though personally that is the most difficult for me). Email is the worst, since there is no tone or nuance at all, and words are always interpreted through the lens of the reader.

With students, I found there was a learning curve. There are classroom management techniques that I just can't do, because I come off as a bitch where an older male colleague comes off as "in charge". I find that simply being aware of this is the first step, since I am finding things that work for my personality that don't alienate my students.

Failed PhD Projects

2011-08-16T07:24:00.000-07:00

FSP started an interesting discussion at her Scientopia blog on "pity PhDs". She is responding to a question from a PhD student about to start their 3rd year on a nonworking project. Now, given that this student still has 3-4 years left (or would in my field anyway), recognizing a potential failed project means they have plenty of time to regroup. My own project was only marginally successful at best, but that doesn't have to be a fatal flaw in getting a job, even in academia.

As I said in my comment, I would hire a postdoc with few (or one) publication who came highly recommended. I would be more likely to do so if I knew the recommender (and could guess at the likelihood of being snowed). I would not hire a postdoc with NO publications.

Students who plan a career in research KNOW that publications are key. As a PI, I want to know that someone can finish what they started, can write at least a little, and has gone through the process of converting lab work to manuscript. I do understand that not all projects are successful (which is why they call it research), but that is no excuse for having no publications in 5-6 years of grad school, especially if you plan on an academic postdoc.

My own PhD project was only marginally successful, leading to one publication that I submitted after I started my postdoc. However, like FSP's reader, I saw the writing on the wall. In my third year of grad school, I took on a side project that eventually led to 3 publications. Sometimes, things don't go the way you hope. I think this is actually a GOOD thing for a student, because it helps you learn troubleshooting and triaging skills. Unfortunately, even the very best advisor might not notice that a project has a fatal flaw until it is too late for an individual student. Anyone can fall in love with an idea or some lovely preliminary data and be unable or unwilling to respond quickly to a flawed research direction.

The thing is that no one cares about your career as much as you do. You need to be proactive, even as a student. If you think your project will not produce in time for you take have publications, YOU need to find a side project or two that will. For your side project, you can't pick something else risky and flashy--this is something that has to produce something quickly for you. You also need to go over everything you have done for your main project and see if any of it can be put together for publication. If you are funded by a particular grant, you (and your PI) are on the hook for that project. But most advisors won't care if you do something else on the side, especially if it doesn't require many resources. If one of my students came to me with some really interesting data, I would encourage them to keep working on it and help them get what they need to be successful (as long as whatever they were supposed to be doing continued to get done).

If all else fails, and you do end up with a pity PhD, I can say that the people I knew at PhD U who got pity PhDs are all working in industry quite successfully right now.

No longer the departmental noob

2011-08-11T17:36:00.000-07:00

I am no longer the most junior member of our department! Now that I am in the "older, wiser" crowd, I see why the information I received was so spotty and random. I tend to tell the new prof all the things I learned the hard way or wished I knew earlier. I am sure I am leaving out tons of useful stuff other people originally told me when I arrived, but don't remember how useful it was because it doesn't stick out in my memory. I bet all the people who helped me out did the same thing.

It is kind of fun to see how far I have come since starting out in comparison!

July is science scandal month

2011-07-25T10:24:00.000-07:00

This month, the C&E News obtained detailed reports (summary here) on the Sezen/Sames data fabrication scandal. For those not following the details, Bengu Sezen (PhD awarded in 2005) was found guilty of 21 counts of research misconduct after it turns out that most of her results were fabricated. Her advisor, Dalibor Sames, ended up retracting 6 publications after the allegations came out and were proven true and spent lots of time and money on fake research. The details are really quite astonishing:

By the time Sezen received a Ph.D. degree in chemistry in 2005, under the supervision of Sames, her fraudulent activity had reached a crescendo, according to the reports. Specifically, the reports detail how Sezen logged into NMR spectrometry equipment under the name of at least one former Sames group member, then merged NMR data and used correction fluid to create fake spectra showing her desired reaction products.

The documents paint a picture of Sezen as a master of deception, a woman very much at ease with manipulating colleagues and supervisors alike to hide her fraudulent activity; a practiced liar who would defend the integrity of her research results in the face of all evidence to the contrary. Columbia has moved to revoke her Ph.D.

Worse, the reports document the toll on other young scientists who worked with Sezen: “Members of the [redacted] expended considerable time attempting to reproduce Respondent’s results. The Committee found that the wasted time and effort, and the onus of not being able to reproduce the work, had a severe negative impact on the graduate careers of three (3) of those students, two of whom [redacted] were asked to leave the [redacted] and one of whom decided to leave after her second year.”

Now at first, this seems like one of my worst nightmares--a very clever PhD student spends lots of time falsifying data leading to withdrawn papers, ruined research, and a damaged reputation. But the reports paint an even more troubling picture, with Sames ignoring warning signs as early as 2002 that something was wrong with the data. As irritating as it is that people wasted time trying to replicate false results, this is how science works, and is what lead to the discovery of the fraud.

What I find truly disturbing is that at least three students left the Sames group after being unable to replicate the results. Three students! Even if Sezen was the reincarnation of Marie Curie, shouldn't Sames have been worried that not one, not two, but three people IN HIS OWN LAB could not reproduce Sezen's work? This is on top of outside groups having problems. I have been guilty myself of falling in love with my own data, but surely doubts would creep in after the second failure--I could understand thinking that maybe one person was just not cut out for the work, but three?!? Also, did no one else in the department wonder that attrition was so high in the Sames group (although maybe that is not so unusual for the Columbia Chemistry department, which is in some ways even more upsetting)? In this particular scandal no one comes off particularly well, except for the unnamed members of the Sames group caught in the crossfire of this incident.

The other major science scandal news this month is that Marc Hauser (of the faked monkey research) has resigned his position at Harvard. I also find this situation troubling, since Hauser is apparently abandoning his group now that his research has been discredited and moving on to bigger and better things (for him, at least). Like the Elizabeth Goodwin case, this is yet another example of how fraud can pay for dishonest academics: boost your career with goosed results, then move on to something else (lucrative) when caught, leaving your trainees behind to pay the price. Surely research fraud should have a stronger penalty than leaving academia for industry? And again I ask what will happen to Hauser's students?

Getting scooped

2011-07-18T10:06:00.001-07:00

Well, it happened (sort of). Another group recently published the results of an experiment we are trying to do in a prominent journal for our field. Now at first, I was upset about it, given that this experiment is the core of one of my student's PhDs. It is really easy to see this work in print, and get all freaked out.

Taking a second look, I found that Namnezia is totally right about scientific scooping (in my decidedly not crystallography/single answer field). Our experiment is similar in broad outline to what has been published, but the details vary in some very significant ways. Yes, we may be second, but at least we have had our thinking validated! First of all, this is an interesting scientific problem--at least one other good group is working on solving it. Second, our original intuition has been confirmed, demonstrating that our GENERAL approach will definitely work (which wasn't at all guaranteed). I am also hoping that a little competition will be motivating, but on that one, you never know.

Now, I would certainly have been happier to be the first to demonstrate this concept, but the sky isn't falling, this didn't wreck my tenure chances, my student will still get nice publications, and all our hard work to date isn't wasted. In some ways this is new to me (much of my prior work was on REALLY niche systems or in systems with a relatively high barrier to entry). I am actually pretty happy to have more scientific playmates now, so to speak. But everything is a mixed blessing, so working in a more populated area of science means things like this are going to happen.

Our approach has a different set of advantages and disadvantages than the one already published, so I still think our project will produce some interesting new science. Fortunately, being first doesn't really matter all that much in the grand scheme of things.

Women in Science (Now with fewer babies!)

2011-07-11T13:47:00.000-07:00

GMP's post today reminded me that I should send you off to Hermitage's blog, where she is organizing an even bigger and better panel of female scientists to answer your questions about anything EXCEPT for babies. Go ahead and post your questions. She will pick 4 questions to be distributed to the panelists, who will answer them 4 weeks later.

Last year's questions were an interesting mix. My answers are here. This year's panel is larger, and covers a wider range of experiences from postdoc to senior scientist. Here's your chance to find out anything you want to know about women in science but were afraid to ask in real life.

Submitting the publication

2011-06-30T10:52:00.001-07:00

Not much to say lately--life has been very busy. We are about to send out my lab's first solo publication (i.e. just me and my student as authors). This is the first really significant piece of science to come out of my lab, and is something I have dreamed of since I first started thinking of getting back into academia. All my writing energy has been going there, and now it is just about time for the payoff (hopefully the first of many). Woo hoo!

Giving talks and practice

2011-06-20T03:42:00.001-07:00

I am sure this sounds really stupid now, but before I switched to an academic position, I never really thought about how much better I would be at speaking in public after doing a semester's worth of lectures to 150+ three times a week. While teaching a class is definitely not the same thing as giving a talk, I find that I am much more at ease in front of crowds (large and otherwise) after spending so much time in front of a lecture hall. There is a confidence in the familiarity of being in front of a crowd that I never had before.

That's not to say that I don't get nervous before giving a talk--I definitely do. My PhD advisor said he still gets nervous even after a lifetime in science. I find that some nerves give my talks an energy and an edge that I like. But I don't feel paralyzed or intimidated in the same way that I used to, especially at high stakes talks. It would have taken me many years to get to this point if I had stayed at National Lab, and that is yet another originally unanticipated benefit to switching to the TT.

More on conferences: networking

2011-06-15T13:43:00.000-07:00

Over the years, I have taught myself to overcome my introvert tendencies and talk to new people at conferences (which is the one of the most important reasons to go). I've become somewhat of a decent networker, and have met many people I later worked with later on.

My real weakness these days is in the follow-up. In my head, I know it is important to follow up with the people I met in order to capitalize on the connections I made at the meeting. But once I am home, away from the thrill of the moment, I find it easy to procrastinate and indulge my introvert tendencies. It is easy when someone has asked for a reprint or preprint, but much harder when there is no compelling reason to contact someone. This is definitely something I need to work on, since each step in my career has only strengthened my understanding of how important networking is to any human endeavor.

In honor of the summer conference season

2011-06-07T02:49:00.000-07:00

I will admit that it is really tempting to use this blog as a venting space, especially for the little things that grate that non-academics wouldn't understand and I can't complain about to colleagues. In order to balance out some of the negativity, here are 5 advantages I've found from personal experience to attending conferences as woman in a male dominated field:

1. No bathroom lines. Bonus: During short coffee breaks, there is sometimes a line for the men's room, so you get to enjoy that little role-reversal.

2. When you present, people remember you more easily, as in "I enjoyed your talk--you were the woman who presented this morning. Can I ask you a few questions?"

3. If you present at a small conference while hugely pregnant, people will remember you for many years, even with only minor interactions at the meeting.

4. You are easier to find in the crowd, so it is easier to run into old friends and colleagues at coffee breaks without necessarily prearranging things.

5. Vendors in the exposition will sometimes break out the good swag and/or give you multiple valuable samples (but getting hit on by the vendors is otherwise annoying).

Taking students to conferences

2011-06-02T06:34:00.000-07:00

This summer is the first time my students will be giving talks at conferences. Last year, they gave several poster presentations, and they give talks a few times a year in multi-professor group meetings for practice. As a student, I didn't have a lot of opportunities to attend conferences, so I feel strongly about giving the opportunity to my own students. I have discovered that the process is seriously stressful and not just on the students!

It is really hard to watch my students talk sometimes--I am sitting there thinking "don't say THAT!" and "remember to say this". I think I am more nervous for them sometimes than they are. It feels like watching my kids running off to do stuff independently! And just like kids, I have to let them go or they will never grow into independent scientists.

It is also hard to let my students (who of course, deserve this opportunity for their hard work) go and be the first to talk about the exciting new results from our lab. As a new PI coming from outside academia, the invited talks don't fall from the sky like rain, so we are all doing contributed talks. This year, we have some awesome results that are about to be submitted. I am just a little bummed that I won't get to talk about them this summer. Both because I find it exciting to be the first to present new results, and also because I feel (given that I have many, many more years of experience giving conference talks) that I would likely do a better job presenting the new data. This is just one more thing I am giving up in the transition from bench scientist to PI.

That's not to say that my students aren't doing a good job--they are! I was so proud to see the practice talks this week, since they have grown and matured so much since joining my group. The data is exciting, the slides look great and the presentation is clear. I just never appreciated before how hard it can be to watch.

I'm famous--yay?

2011-05-27T11:22:00.001-07:00

Several people have pointed out that I (and my commenters) are quoted in Senator Colburn's "report" on waste in government sponsored research. Given that the quoted text from the blog is taken so completely out of context gives me great confidence in my interpretation that much of the report consists of actual facts taken out of context so as to distort their original meaning. Prodigal Spouse thought my annoyed reaction (to the out of context quotation part anyway) was pretty funny, reminding me that the blessing and curse of blogging means that once the words are out in the world, they take on a life of their own. This is always a good lesson to remember! In fact, one of today's top traffic sources to the blog is a Google search on some of the quoted text from the report. (For those looking for the quoted post, it is here).

Having flipped through the report, it mostly consists of mocking different research projects as wastes of money. Given that most of the great industrial basic research labs are gone, the National Science Foundation (NSF) is the last major funder of basic research in many fields in the US. It makes me very sad to see all this ink spilled on attacking the NSF, considering that the entire annual NSF budget is a rounding error on what the US spends annually in Iraq and Afghanistan for results much less likely to be relevant to US taxpayers. I totally agree with Dr. O here--if Senator Colburn has a problem with how NSF funds are being spent, he should have requested hearings or reports from the program managers at NSF, or called on eminent scientists in the field to determine why these projects were funded. It is pretty easy to pick apart many basic research projects based on just the title or abstract (which focus on the work to be done, not on where the work fits in the big picture of the field). It is much harder to predict which projects will be the ones that lead to key breakthroughs ahead of time, which is why they call it research.

Designing lab-based courses

2011-05-25T04:03:00.001-07:00

As part of my teaching assignment last year, I supervised a lab class that was known to be in need of serious improvement. Last year, I ran it as is to get a feel for the issues, and this year (which means this summer, since I also teach a lecture course in the Fall) I am redesigning the course now that I've seen the problems with it. Now that I am teaching a full load, I've decided to front-load this one, and spend a lot of time on it now, pulling back on it after the course is set up with (hopefully) only minor fixes in the future (like redoing sections of the lab manual or grading rubric, which is easy vs selecting and testing new labs, which is hard).

Rather than wade through education journals, my strategy is to ask some friends what their departments do, and also use Google to see examples of labs run at other schools. I found it hard to decide if students could actually do the labs discussed in the education journals, and went with a more battle-tested approach. The labs are still a bit cookbookish, I think, but this is a low level class where the students need to learn lab safety and technique as much as seeing concepts from their lecture classes demonstrated in a hands on way. I am also incorporating more writing into the course (see writing rant here), since I think technical writing is an important skill too. I've also been thinking about why we run these labs in the first place, so I am focusing on labs that highlight concepts that I've seen students struggle to master in lecture courses.

I have to say that this is turning out way better than I thought. I am only picking new labs that sound fun to me--if I took this class now, I would LOVE it. We are doing labs with a higher fail rate where the trade-off is a more interesting experiment. Just doing the supervising of a lab course is most of the bad things about teaching (the whining, the problems, the paperwork) without the good things. At least now I get to have some fun!

Announcing the alternate science career information aggregation page

2011-05-18T06:04:00.000-07:00

As promised, this is a page devoted to linking possibly useful information for scientists looking outside academia. I hope some of you looking for non-academic career information will find it useful. This is by no means a complete list, so if you know of other useful sites, let me know, and I will add them in!

Permalink available on the Prodigal Homepage.

Blog posts about non-academic careers:

"Alternate" careers describing actual science jobs (Prodigal Academic)
CVs vs. resumes (Biophemera)
Recasting your skills for outside academic (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
List of non-academic career options (Bitesize Bio)
The value of internships (Just Another Electron Pusher)
Transferable skills (Just Another Electron Pusher)
Postdoc at a National Lab (Prodigal Academic)
Staff scientist at a National Lab (Prodigal Academic)
So you want to be a ... series (The Black Hole)

CV vs resume:

Example of a CV turned into a resume
Differences between a CV and a resume
Resume advice

Possibly interesting career guidance:

The versatile PhD
Science careers
Nature Jobs
Alternative Science Careers
Just Another Electron Pusher (a blog about careers outside academia)
Materials Research Society Career Connections
American Physical Society Careers in Physics
Chemical and Engineering News Career and Employment
AVS Career Services

Interesting non-academic science online discussion:

Leaving academe forum (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
Science careers forum (Science)

Access to research courses for credit

2011-05-15T09:34:00.000-07:00

I've been having an ongoing discussion with a colleague about access to research opportunities for undergraduates. The top undergrads have their pick--REU programs at lots of different universities and labs, research for credit at Prodigal U, research for pay anywhere (easiest at Prodigal U, though). Undergrads with weak track records (ie low GPA) have a much harder time. Our department has a GPA cutoff of 3.0 to enroll in our research for credit course. Students with a lower GPA can find someone to pay them, but that can be more of a challenge when competing with much stronger students.

Thus far, I have had really great undergrads in my lab. As a TT prof, I pretty much only take top students who are enthusiastic about joining the lab, since I don't have the time or resources to waste on reluctant or completely non-productive students. I don't expect publication-quality work from an undergrad (though it sure is nice when it happens!), but I do expect them not to waste my supplies and samples doing pointless or incorrectly implemented experiments after a reasonable amount of training.

My colleague feels strongly that students who want an opportunity to do research should be allowed to do so. This colleague says we should encourage those interested in science, and doesn't want to be a gatekeeper. (I should note that this person does NOT and never has supervised the research course for credit).

I tend to agree with Prodigal Department's policy--a weaker student is unlikely to get much out of an independent research experience if they can't learn concepts in a more structured class. I know that there are some professors who would take "free" labor in the lab, regardless of prior track record, so I am sure that opening up the research course to all comers probably would not be a capacity issue. I know that as a research supervisor, I would be unlikely to give a meaty project to a weak student.

I don't think it is good to set up a student in a situation where they cannot (or are unlikely to) succeed. I don't think just anyone can do research--in order to get anything out of it, students need prior preparation. A whole summer of repeating cookbook experiments or washing glassware might help out a labor crunch in the lab, but won't do much to develop an undergrad scientist (or give them a taste of real research). This is something better left for a paid lab worker, not an undergrad research experience for credit. Having some sort of entry standard in a for-credit experience protects both the student and the professor, in my opinion.

More on non-academic jobs

2011-05-06T03:21:00.000-07:00

I've been blogging now for a year (which I find hard to believe). I've found blogging to be both more fun and more work than I thought before I started. I have even more respect for FSP, who manages to be a successful full professor, a parent, and make high quality posts 5 days a week!

In terms of reader interests, my most popular posts have been about:

1. "Alternate" careers
2. How search committees work
3. TT interviewing

The thing that boggles my mind is the the first post on this list (on careers other than academia) has more hits than the rest of my top 5 posts combined. It sometimes gets more daily hits 8 months after I wrote it than new posts. I wonder what this really says about the availability of information about career options to young scientists? Most of information out there seems descriptive of career sectors, not actual jobs people do, and this still seems to be true (especially at university-run career workshops). This is something I just don't understand--I mean TT positions have ALWAYS been the minority option for graduating PhDs, even in the good old days of the fist GI bill and the Space Race. Surely every university has alumni doing interesting things with their degrees that they can call to participate in these things!

When I was a grad student, I knew a fair bit about the area of industry my advisor used to work in before becoming a professor, but not much about any other field. Even knowing that much seems to have been unusual for a PhD student in science. I suppose career information at the grad level is no worse than career information at the undergrad level (when I knew NOTHING about the jobs I could get with my degree), but it feels like there should be more information around in the age of the Internet.

In deciding to go back to academia, I read a lot of blogs about what it was like starting out in academia to get a feel for my decision. I don't really see many blogs out there by recent grads starting out their industry positions (or even many blogs by industrial scientists of the non-pharma persuasion, though there are a few good engineering blogs around). To be honest, I highly doubt I would have blogged about my National Lab position--I certainly would have worried about getting caught, and there are pretty much no protections for staff if their supervisors choose to block an employee for pretty much any reason other than outright discrimination. I imagine this is true for most people in non-academic positions, and I suspect contributes to the vast information asymmetry between the availability of information about academic other careers. One can also make the case that the work culture in academia is more uniform than the work culture in other sectors, so it is easier to come up with general tips.

Either way, I am thinking about setting up a page like Dr. Becca's TT job advice aggregator for non-academic jobs. My own students are getting more interested in planning their next step as they progress, so this has been more on my mind.

Sometimes, it's the small things

2011-05-03T07:55:00.000-07:00

After much badgering from Prodigal spouse, I recently traded in my beater bike for a newer, nicer one, and boy does this make my commute better!

I am the sort of person who is reluctant to "waste" money on something new, when I already have something that gets the job done. But sometimes, it makes sense to trade in the old and barely functional for something better. I ride my bike every day the weather permits. Moving from rickety, noisy and hard to use to quiet, comfortable, and fully functional is a joy (and safer to boot). I may still be really snowed under at work and home, but for half an hour each direction, I am enjoying life.

Sneaking in at the end of the month (#scimom)

2011-04-29T09:04:00.000-07:00

I am a scientist and I am a parent. Even more, I am a parent of more than one child, and I don't even have tenure yet! As a student, the received wisdom was that parenthood is incompatible with professorship (unless you are the absentee parent sort). People who wish to attempt otherwise should ONLY do it post-tenure, and of course more than one child shows you like commitment. The path of my life ended up violating all of this received wisdom, and yet I am satisfied and still here.

Being a parent and a scientist has been a great combo for me. My kids have a wonder about them that touches all aspects of my life. In parenting them, I have learned to be patient in explaining things, to expect off-the-wall questions, and to enjoy the awesomeness of our world. I think this has made me a better teacher in my classes.

In my career, being a parent forces me to be more efficient. I can't surf for hours a day, because I can't work between 5 and 8 or 9 pm every evening, so I need to make my work time count. At National Lab, I became much more productive after the arrival of Little Prodigal#1. Even more, having this enforced time away from my work helps me return to it with fresh eyes after the kids are asleep.

Yes, it can be hard to balance kids, work, marriage, and personal time, but how many things in life that are worthwhile are also easy?

Thanks to Gerty-Z for her post on this topic pointing me to the #scimom project started by David Wescott.

Publishing negative results

2011-04-27T09:34:00.000-07:00

Recently, I found my way over to the All Results Journal (now available in Biology, Nanotechnology, Physics, and Chemistry flavors, though issues are only available for Chemistry and Biology). In their first editorial, the editors of All. Res. J. Chem. explain that:

We are pleased to introduce you to The All Results Journals: Chem (All Res. J. Chem.). A very particular journal, as it publishes fully indexed chemical articles and reviews that challenge current models, tenets and dogmas. This journal represents the first open access source for chemical research concerning negative results and will be a valuable resource for researchers all over the world, including those who are already experts and those entering the field.

The All Results Journals: Chem immediate goal is to provide scientists with responsible and balanced information in order to avoid unproductive synthetic routes, improve experimental designs and economical decisions. Many journals skew towards only publishing “positive” data; that is, data that successfully proves a hypothesis. The All Results Journals: Chem is the home for negative or “secondary” data: experimental documentation of hypotheses that turn out not to be true, or other experiments that do not lead to an advance of a specific hypothesis but are nevertheless a true rendering of that experiment. For example, if a researcher sets up an organic reaction and a variety of molecules do not react in exactly those conditions, it would be very useful for other researchers to know this (to avoid time and wasting money).

The journal editors are apparently targeting three types of difficult to publish data: experiments that fail, experiments that are incomplete or inconclusive, and experiments that disagree with current mainstream scientific understanding. I am not sure I really see a value here, though maybe I am just getting old and crotchety.

Experiments that fail. When I was a student, I thought publishing failed experiments would be a very valuable resource. With more scientific experience, I realize that many groups will wonder whether it was the experiment or the execution that failed, especially for negative (or inconclusive) results that go against scientific intuition or prior experience on related systems. Publishing this sort of failed experiment MAY help, but may not.

Experiments that are incomplete or inconclusive. Personally, I don't think incomplete or inconclusive experiments really should be published. Yes, there is lots of data languishing in notebooks, but that is at least in part due to lack of motivation and/or time to write the (probably minor impact) results up. Incomplete experiments can be misleading, and inconclusive experiments either need rethinking, better design, better instrumentation, or more data. Both of these situations are likely caused by funding running out or someone who was working on the problem leaving the lab. This leads straight back into lack of time/motivation to write.

Experiments that disagree with current mainstream scientific understanding. I am not sure we need a new journal for this. Shouldn't current journals be eager to publish results that conflict with current understanding (and therefore advance science)? I know that truly new, truly innovative stuff sometimes has a hard time getting published, but still extraordinary claims should require extraordinary evidence, shouldn't they?

I totally agree that the literature is biased towards positive results. But many negative results are currently available (and more and more frequently searchable) in Masters and PhD theses. It will be a real shame when dissertations become introductory and concluding chapters wrapped around published papers (as is happening more and more). So maybe we do need something new? With the barrier to Web publication low, I certainly admire the editors for giving it a try!

Now the All Results journals may end up being an excellent resource for scientists moving into new areas or pushing the edges, but I have my doubts. The cynic in me thinks that it will mostly be a CV-padding tool for future academics.

Following your bliss vs. getting paid

2011-04-20T17:35:00.000-07:00

In a comment, Xombi asked about research you care about vs. putting food on the table. GMP recently also had a post on this topic. As GMP said in her comments, Dr. Sneetch pretty much summed up this issue in a comment--it is a lucky few that can spend most of their time on following their own interests. Everyone else has to spend most of their time on what funding agencies think is important.

Most of the time, I can find interesting aspects to fundable research that I enjoy. This is what keeps the job fun. One thing to keep in mind is that startup funds can seem like freedom to follow your research bliss. I think this is a big mistake. You need to use your startup funds to get evidence that your lab works on RELEVANT and interesting research. The data you generate is the preliminary data for your proposals, and has to show that you are fundable! My strategy was to select target funding agencies/program officers, and shape my starting research to show what I can do in their areas of interest. I picked areas that I am interested in, of course, but fundability has to be a bigger concern than personal interest if I want to keep my lab going.

In a National Lab setting, I found that I could carve out some time to work on my own research interests, especially before I became a PI. As a postdoc, you should have minimal responsibilities in supervision and proposal writing (although if you want to get hired, you need to be somewhat involved in this so you can see how things work). If you work efficiently, you can get your own work done, and then work on side projects. No one will really care if you use National Lab resources as long as it leads to papers/patents/funding. My side projects as a postdoc became the core of proposals (both mine and my PIs--you do need to show your sponsor that you add value after all!).

I don't think that fundable work is in opposition to good work. It is possible to do good, important work that is of interest to funding agencies, and I think this is what most researchers try to do. There is some room to shape the scope of the work after the project is funded, but of course the goals of the program officers need to be kept in mind if you ever want to be renewed/funded by the same agency again! But this shouldn't impact the quality of the science in the end. Just the excitement of the PI.

More on recruiting: grades and research

2011-04-12T23:02:00.000-07:00

Recruiting season is winding down, and I have been thinking about GMP's post on the topic from a week or so ago. As I said in my comment, I find prior research experience to be the most important consideration for me. Students with no exposure to research have no real idea what it is like, and can therefore easily not understand what they are getting into in grad school. Also, sometimes people just have really bad hands in the lab, and would be better served with a less hands on group than mine.

In my experience, grades are actually a poor predictor of success (once above a certain minimum threshold of competence). I need to know my students can pass our grad level courses required for their program, and grades are a good predictor for this. I've found that many students with high GPAs are not necessarily good at research. Some of them are profoundly disturbed that there may not be a "correct" answer to their research problem (happened to a friend of mine). Others are good at schoolwork, but not so good at applying that knowledge to the real world. Some are brilliant at everything including research, and these are the ones I want! High GPA does make it easier to get fellowships, so I am happy to attract 4.0 students, of course, but I don't accept students on GPA alone, nor do I use GPA as a filter. My best students right now were closer to 3.0 then 4.0 as undergrads.

I do look for a GPA trending up with time if the GPA is on the low end of our admitted pool. This is often a sign that a student has put it together in terms of figuring out how to work/learn/understand some key concept that eluded them the first time around, but may disqualify them from "better" programs. I don't consider students with a significantly downward trending GPA unless they are super excited about my research and have kick ass research experience and letters. I don't look at GRE scores that much either, other than to make sure they are adequate. I prefer students with good verbal scores, since writing is a big part of what we do, and this is harder to probe in a meeting.

Safety in the lab

2011-04-04T07:51:00.000-07:00

We had our first safety inspection, and had only minor violations (yay!). I am a big fan of surprise inspections, since I am much more worried that someone else's stupidity will hurt me than that I/my lab is in violation of the rules. I share lab space with another group, and the difference in attitudes towards safety has created more friction than anything else. I sometime envy my theoretician colleagues who don't need to worry about these issues.

Safety has always been an important lab issue for me, even though neither National Labs nor academia really seem to take it very seriously. In my own labs, I emphasize the importance of reading MSDSs, not working alone, using proper protection, and labeling everything (which are the absolute minimum required to maintain a safe workplace). Having witnessed a number of potentially horrific lab accidents (my worst four: HF spill to the hand, vacuum line explosion, 600 V across the chest while standing on a ladder, CO gas inhalation), I am ready and willing to pull students from the lab if they are a danger to themselves and others.

As a professor, I am ultimately responsible for anything that happens in my lab. This makes me nervous at times, since my students are trained adults who make their own decisions (even if they are dangerous ones). I would be really upset if something happened in my lab, of course, but I would also be really upset if my lab were not in compliance with University rules and I was fined. I try to get my group to make good safety decisions. We have a lab safety officer who checks for rules compliance periodically. We discuss any new safety issues at least once a month in group meeting. I have augmented the standard (inadequate in my opinion) University safety training with additional material on my own. I tell my students to keep in mind that they hold the safety of anyone walking in the lab in their hands. I don't let undergrads work in the lab alone (they have no keys). I also talk about each of the lab accidents I witnessed to emphasize the importance of personal responsibility in maintaining safety.

When the HF accident occurred, there was no calcium gluconate available in the lab, even though anyone working with HF should have it. The medics had no idea what to do, and the accident victim was shuttled around local hospitals until someone finally took responsibility for treatment because none of the ERs knew what to do for HF exposure. Fortunately, the exposed student immediately ran for a sink and jammed their hand under the flowing water until the medics arrived. Luckily, there were "only" surface burns going down the arm (in the direction of the rinse water), because it could have been much worse. When the vacuum line blew, everyone in the vicinity had safety glasses on. Even though there were cuts to the face, no one got glass in the eye. When the high voltage incident and CO inhalation occurred, the accident victims were not working alone--someone heard the noise/saw the accident and was able to help right away. I think adding a personal touch helps make lab accidents real, but I do wish I didn't have so many personal experiences.

The ultimate lab-killer: repair costs

2011-03-29T07:40:00.000-07:00

Inspired by an unfortunate colleague, I am contemplating repairs and how to pay for them. One of the problems associated with our current project-centered approach to funding lab research is in repair costs. It is often not-cost effective (or practical) for an individual group to have the money to pay maintenance contracts. The really expensive equipment is often found in a user facility with user fees that theoretically cover maintenance, even if there are individual groups that would be capable of and willing to run the equipment alone due to this reason. Simple maintenance is actually not that terrible--most of the parts can be covered out the the budget for supplies. The problem comes in when there is an accident or major equipment failure in the lab. There are mechanisms for funding new equipment--wouldn't it be nice if some repair money came along with the instrument grant that was designed to be saved for a rainy day?

Repairs are CERTAINLY cheaper than buying a new machine (most of the time). However, in our project-based funding model, there is no way to really save up for a rainy day, when that rainy day is $15k or more in one shot with no advance notice. We had the same problem at National Lab, and mostly solved it in the the same ways people do at Universities--borrow from the department, borrow from other PIs who are unexpectedly flush, or go in the red (if possible), and pay it out of the supply budget from several projects in the next fiscal year.

At National Lab, it was actually fairly common to "carry over" money by helping out a fellow PI in the final year of your project, and having that PI pay for your salaries or supplies in a future year to pay back the debt (thus moving the money "forward" in time). This was especially common when a postdoc leaves in the last year of a project towards the end of the fiscal year, so there aren't many cost sinks in the ending project to soak up the extra cash (which gets pulled back if unspent in the final year).

Sometimes, I think it might be better to fund research programs and not projects. Then, it might be possible to have a lab savings account where extra cash can be saved for future repairs. That opens up a whole other can of worms (like how to avoid it being even less meritocratic/more "old boy" than the current system is a big one), but it might be better in terms of reducing waste in research spending, since less money would be spent on hoarding supplies that end up useless or on useless equipment just to spend down the budget instead of losing the money.

Research money is so tight these days, with labs unable to support existing personnel, let alone save something on the side for repair costs. It just seems so penny-wise and pound-foolish to keep ignoring this reality. It is in fact, something that keeps me up at night--that my really expensive workhorse instrument will break, effectively shutting my group down until I can scrape up the money to fix it.

My new course prep strategy: limit prep time

2011-03-25T11:03:00.000-07:00

This semester, I am teaching a grad level course on a topic with overlaps in my research specialty that I have taught before. I have an insane amount of work to do right now, including lots and lots of writing. To help out on time management, I have decided to limit my course prep time to 90 minutes or less for an hour long class.

So far, this seems to be making my course run much better, actually. I selected the papers I am covering last time, so I just need to refamiliarize myself with the details rather than start out digesting new material. I am finding that my course feels less stiff and rehearsed, since I am spending more time on how to convey the content, and less time obsessing over slides and lectures. The students are responding well, and I feel like I am doing a better job this semester of imparting the key ideas. I would never do this with material I didn't know this well, but I am also having a lot more fun, since I feel less constrained in class to stick to a preprepped lecture if the class seems more interested in something else on topic. Who knew that too much time prepping can be as bad as not enough?

Have we come a long way, baby?

2011-03-23T12:32:00.000-07:00

The NYT had an article up a few days ago about the progress towards equality of female faculty at MIT. As cackleofrad points out, DrDrA has an amazing response over at her blog.

I don't really have much to add, other than to say 1) I am really tired of women's career issues automatically defaulting to family issues and 2) it is really annoying when the NYT takes a story (in this case, progress in advancing female faculty at MIT) and doesn't point out that this is specific to MIT only. In fact, reading the article quickly, it is possible to come away with the idea that MIT's changes are far more universal than they really are. I am glad things are working out so well for women at MIT. Now that we have our example case, where is the discussion of what things are like everywhere (or even ANYWHERE) else?

I would LOVE to have institutional help for childcare during business-related travel (for a nice discussion of the importance of travel in academic, see GMP's post here). It would warm my heart to know that parents everywhere (outside academia too) had access to paid parental leave. It would be awesome if men were invited to speak about work-life balance.

One thing I did like about the article is the mention of this:

But the primary issue in the report is the perception that correcting bias means lowering standards for women. In fact, administrators say they have increased the number of women by broadening their searches.

This is something that I and others have been advocating to increase diversity of all kinds in science. I am happy to see acknowledgement that this strategy works without changing the yardstick. Amazing scientists who happen to be from underrepresented groups are out there--the trick is in getting them to apply.

The importance of writing

2011-03-17T11:57:00.000-07:00

Why is it that no one ever clearly articulates to young scientists that being able to write clearly and quickly is a key skill? I spend probably half of my time now writing (sometimes more!) and I have never been more grateful for a liberal arts background that included lots of writing (scientific and otherwise).

Of course, like anything else, you only get better with practice. My own first drafts tend to be full of long, difficult to parse sentences that need to be shortened and simplified in subsequent revisions. After years of experience, I know this about myself and can set up my workflow to accomodate. I am trying to get my students to write more so they can figure out their own writing habits BEFORE they have major time pressure on their writing. I am surprised by how much resistance there is to simply getting words on the page. All of them would much, much rather set up Powerpoint summaries than write things up more formally, and don't see why they should change this.

The agony and the ecstacy of traveling

2011-03-07T06:38:00.000-08:00

Now that I actually have some results from my new lab to talk about, I have been planning more academic and conference travel. I have a love/hate relationship to traveling. I always come back bursting with research ideas and excited about my work, but as an introvert, I find it HUGELY draining to network and socialize with strangers. The work piles up while I am gone, but I also find out about the things that no one publishes (like all the things that didn't work in a recent publication). It is both really fun and really exhausting to talk science all day long. I actually find small meetings much less initimidating than large ones, even though they can sometimes be cliquish. Now that I am starting up my own lab, I am attending meetings that are new to me, and I don't know many people there. This is a blessing and a curse, because I can't hide out with friends and colleagues.

I was talking to a grad student recently (not one of mine), and I mentioned that I needed to go out and spread the word. The student was really surprised, and said "Can't you just publish it and only go if you really want to?" I was like "No, I need to actually talk to other people who are potential collaborators and more importantly, get people to see how cool my stuff is so they have context when they review my proposals and they think of me when it comes time to invite speakers." I understand where that student was coming from, though, because I used to think the same way. It never occurred to me until I had to recommend seminar speakers myself that people make these lists out of who comes to mind when they are preparing the speaker list, not from looking at journal tables of content.

Happy TT moment!

2011-03-03T12:28:00.000-08:00

So I am completely buried in work now, and feeling kind of overwhelmed. Today, I had one of those moments that makes me remember why I wanted to make the move to academia! One of my students came to me a few days ago to tell me that a procedure we did lots of times in the past is no longer working. We tried a few things, but no luck--it wasn't a quick fix or a technique problem.

The student spent a little time looking up some more detailed background information, and then came to me with a plan. The student implemented the plan (which still didn't work), but made a crucial observation of the mode of failure. On the student's own initiative, they implemented a new improved plan which not only solves the problem, it gives us new insight into the process (and makes our soon to be written paper about it that much stronger!) On the first day of the failed process, my student came to me for a fix. Just a few days later, this same student was coming to me to discuss the science behind what we were seeing in the lab, and the implications for our future work. Amazing!

It is so awesome to see my inexperienced students becoming scientists. It is just awesome to see when it all suddenly clicks together for them.

Teaching on the TT

2011-02-28T07:19:00.000-08:00

Prof-like Substance had an interesting post on teaching while on the TT at a research university. I am late to the discussion, since life has been kicking my ass lately, but I left a lengthy comment there that I decided should be a post on its own.

My first time teaching a large undergrad course was pretty demoralizing. The second time through was much better, and not just because I did a better job with more experience. The first time through, I had to spend a lot of time on prep and course mechanics. The second time through, I spent a lot less total time on the course, and a lot more of the time I did spend on stuff I found more interesting (how to convey my enthusiasm for science, how to incorporate modern research into a course on fundamentals discovered a long time ago, finding relevant short demo videos, etc). My students really enjoyed the videos a lot, and I was really happy to discover that there were a core group of students who got really excited that this required course turned out to be somewhat interesting, and let that 5-10% or so give me energy to deal with the 90+% who don't care at all about the material.

I want to be a good teacher for myself, and to fulfill my obligations to my students. I do what I can in the time I can allot to it, just as I budget my time in the other aspects of my job. I agree that as a TT prof, I can’t afford to spend the time to become truly outstanding in the classroom. To be honest, I am not that interested in being truly outstanding, otherwise I would be at a different type of institution. Students who want a truly outstanding classroom experience don’t (or at least shouldn’t) come to research universities in the first place. My undergrad course has 200 students in it for me and one TA to work with. There is no way to have a meaningful interaction with that many people.

I do the best I can to inspire the students I have, and I cheer for the small victories (the student who switches majors to my subject after my course, the students who come looking for research opportunities, the students who I have great conversations with about the implications of the material we cover in class). I try to let the demoralizing parts and the “is this on the exam” kids roll off of me. Good luck–it is a hard thing to balance, and you are not alone in struggling with it.

Strategic publishing

2011-02-22T09:21:00.000-08:00

I am entering a phase in my career that I always dreaded on the outside looking in at the TT. This is the phase of strategic publishing. At this point in my career, I need to think about how, when, and where to publish in terms of the impact to my tenure file. So now, in addition to the science, the target audience for the work, and the impact factor of the target journal, I also need to think about the time to publication, my rate of publications (will there be big gaps? a feast or famine pattern?), and the possibility of someone either scooping us or publishing very similar experiments before we can (much more likely).

I was largely shielded from this reality at National Lab--we needed to have 2 papers a year, but that isn't too hard with appropriate levels of collaboration. Merit increases were definitely tied to having high impact publications, but since the timeframe was year to year, I just published when I was ready in the "best" journals that would publish the results.

I am finding this kind of depressing. I was always the type of researcher who mocked the "least publishable unit/slicing the salami" style of publication, but now I can really see the temptation. I can see the changes in my own work already--there is some data we have now that we are writing up as a communication. If I were still at National Lab, I would probably hold it back for some additional experiments, but I am too worried about other groups working in this area publishing first to let it go longer. It is too risky to me to hold on for more data, since we have a full story already. I really wish this weren't the case, but there it is.

I need to have a good publication year this year, and that is starting to trump other considerations. This is one of the realities of the TT that I knew was coming, but is still upsetting. I am still in a good place, after all, I have data that is good for publication in excellent speciality journals, but it is harder than I thought it would be to make the call.

Surviving the TT

2011-02-14T06:24:00.000-08:00

This exchange about a month with someone starting out on the TT at Dr. Becca's, continued at DrugMonkey got me thinking about how much difference a year makes. This truly inspired post by Prof-like Substance got me writing.

There are many things that are much easier the second time around (and yes, teaching tops that list). It is also easier to write talks, abstracts, and parts of papers/proposals now that I have some already worked material to draw from for background. Doing slides for talks takes half the time, since I have my cartoons done (for the most part), and can just tweak and update the data. I am much, much faster at reviewing stuff, since I have less time to do it in. I am much better about declining to review the truly crappy papers (now that I am better at spotting them from the abstract alone). This is more thanks having to grade students' written work, than to more experience with reviewing, since I did that too at National Lab.

There are also many things that are harder. I am teaching a full load now, and have more service obligations, so time management is an issue. I am finding it really hard to balance being a good mentor to my four students with all the other demands on my time. There is a HUGE difference between two students and four students. I know I need to take one more next year (especially if one of my proposals in a new area for me comes through), but I don't know where the time to mentor them will come from. Happily, my "senior" students are really strong, and can take on much of the nitty gritty training stuff, but that only buys so much time... I am freaking out about money, since I need more and it is hard to get. I worry about what happens when my "starter" grants run out, since it is even harder to compete with the full pool (rather than the newbies).

Things that ended up working better than expected:

1. Taking undergrads over the summer. Not only were they very productive in the lab, but they let my grad students get their feet wet with training and mentoring in a low stakes, controlled way.

2. The burn the ships strategy with my startup funds. We have all our essential equipment up and running, and I have enough money to cover (barely) operating with four students for next year. My students are looking quite productive lately, so it looks like sprinting will pay off in publications. I don't have much of a monetary safety net, so perhaps the jury is still out on whether this was good long term.

3. Serving on a review panel. This really, really helped my proposal writing, in ways I never expected. I always knew, but never really appreciated fully, how important clarity is in grant writing. Clarity beats everything else (except for good ideas).

Things that didn't work out as well as I'd have liked:

1. Taking undergraduates during the academic year. I am not sure that the effort we put in is worth the productivity we got back. It takes a lot of time to train and mentor someone, and students taking courses have a LOT more pulling on their time than summer students do. It is really hard for them to balance time in the lab vs. their academic work, especially since the academic work comes with deadlines, while the research does not.

2. Relying on collaborators to provide essential materials. Some of these collaborations had been ongoing for years, so it certainly wasn't malicious or deliberate. It is just that no one else cares as I do about making sure we have materials in a timely manner. A minor glitch in a collaborator's lab might lead to a 3-6 month delay for them. Not a big deal (or at least it wasn't when I was at National Lab, with lots of resources). In a limited resource situation (like when starting up a lab), this could have been fatal. My students sit idle, no work gets done, and that means no publications!

3. Being an accessible professor. Ate up a bunch of my time, didn't improve student outcomes OR my teaching evaluations. Next year, I will stick strictly to my scheduled office hours for helping students outside of class, and I will limit the time I spend on emails for the class.

More on interviewing: student vs. colleague

2011-02-09T03:51:00.000-08:00

In my last post on interviewing, I suggested that candidates should "act like a colleague, not like a student". There have been a couple of requests for clarifying what I meant, so here are some thoughts on the subject.

1. Address people by what they call themselves when they introduce themselves. Nothing says "student" to me like someone who calls me Dr. Academic after I introduce myself as Prodigal. My colleagues (and research group for that matter) call me Prodigal. My students call me Dr. Academic. If someone says "Hello, I am Dr. Pretentious", by all means call them Dr Pretentious. And definitely DON'T do the starstruck thing, even if you are meeting a personal hero or Nobel laureate.

2. When you talk about your research, own it. It is YOURS. Not your advisor's, not your program officer's, and not your university's. Also, don't refer to your advisor all the time. The interview is about you not her/him, and talking about him/her all the time will reinforce that you are a student/postdoc.

3. When you do talk about your advisor (and it will come up), don't act deferential. Be respectful, but it seems strange to me when interview candidates call their advisors "Dr. Advisor". Don't call your advisor "my boss" either.

4. When you meet with your potential colleagues one on one, and the topic turns to research, they want to have a discussion with you. Even if the person you are meeting with is a giant in your field, they do not want you to just accept their suggestions as the "word from on high". When a candidate does that instead of engaging in the conversation, it makes me feel like I am having a one on one with one of my own trainees, not discussing science with a colleague. Bonus points if you can offer something constructive about their own research!

5. When meeting with students and/or postdocs, remember that you are interviewing to be a faculty member. No matter how tempting it is to talk about stuff you got away with in grad school, or how annoying your advisor is, don't.

6. While "I don't know" is a perfectly valid response to a question (and certainly better than trying to fake it), another response is to try to think things through, or offer your thoughts about the topic (obviously, this isn't true of questions about factual things!). People who can pull this off definitely seem more scientifically mature.

I'm sure there are other things, but this is what comes to mind from my (admittedly) brief experience on the other side of the interview.

Reading the literature

2011-02-07T09:03:00.000-08:00

Since January, I have been making a stronger effort to keep up with the literature. Since joining the TT, I've had less and less time to just sit and think about research. One of the easiest things to do is to let reading new publications slide, since there are no deadlines and no immediate rewards. In the past, I've used emailed Table of Content, which I would skim over when they came in. I now find that email is way too easy to ignore these days, especially in the volumes I now receive.

I have three proposals in preparation right now, and I am starting to plan a fourth. I've noticed that it is harder for me to think of new and interesting projects lately, but not all the time. After attending a meeting, I am bursting with ideas. I just need that exposure to new ideas and new experiments to get my own creativity flowing. I know some people rely on their students and seminar attendance to keep themselves current, but that just hasn't been working for me. I clearly needed to make a change, and I think I found a solution (for now).

Using an RSS reader to read journals has been a revelation. It is much, much easier to skim through and click on what I want to look at in small time blocks, since I don't need to get through the whole contents in one sitting. Now that I am "caught up" in the feeds, I mostly see the ASAPs, which come in a few at a time instead of with a firehose of new stuff all at once. To anyone else who is struggling with this problem and hasn't tried RSS yet, I highly recommend it.

Quick tips for TT interviews

2011-01-27T06:51:00.001-08:00

It is interview season in my fields, and we have a few searches going on here at ProdigalU (and keeping me out of trouble). I know I've blathered on about interviews here, here, and here before, but more tips can't hurt, right? Here are a few things I've been noticing this time around:

You MUST be able to answer questions/think on your feet. If this is a weakness, practice! When you give a practice talk, ask your colleagues, friends, or labmates to grill you. Even the best prepared talk will not erase that "deer in the headlights" look.
You should be able to articulate the central problem(s) your lab will working on and how many people you need to do this.
Both your job talk AND your chalk talk need to be accessible to people outside your sub-field. Everyone gets a say on the candidates (even if only the committee votes).
Your research plans should look like they will last more than then next 3-5 years.
Be ready to answer questions about your competitor labs--who are they? What will be special/different/better about your lab or approach? What is your edge? Do not position yourself in competition with your advisor(s) if you can avoid it.
You should be able to articulate clearly why you need anything on your startup list (especially the really expensive stuff and/or stuff you could potentially share) AND talk about the research significance of the resulting data.
You don't need to propose formal collaborations, nor do you need to know what everyone in the department is doing before you arrive. However, if after meeting with someone one-on-one, you see a new overlap possibility, it is a great idea to mention it in your chalk talk! We had someone do this to nice effect.
Try to behave like a colleague (but not an arrogant ass). If you feel and act like a student or postdoc, the faculty will respond to you like one. If you feel and act like a colleague, the faculty will see you as one.
Be nice to the students! We listen to them.

Good luck to all those on the TT job hunt this year!

Quickie Mendeley review update

2011-01-22T07:12:00.001-08:00

For anyone following my Mendeley experiences, I just updated to the latest version, and the integration with MS Word is much, much nicer. There is now a hotkey to use (instead of just the toolbar), you can search in a toolbar that pops up within Word, and it is even easier to add multiple citations at once. I am revising a paper this week, and I am much happier with this new version.

Choosing a journal when writing a paper

2011-01-20T07:22:00.000-08:00

We are about to start writing a manuscript in an area that represents a change in direction from all of my prior work. My usual journals are not really a good fit for this work, so I am thinking hard about where to send it. Even in the age of Google Scholar and Web of Science, I think journal selection is important (especially for those who are TT and earlier in their careers).

At National Lab, where bean counting was becoming more and more important, the impact factor trumped all. All raises and promotions had to be justified to non-scientists and/or former researchers in a wide array of fields. To make things easy, they would rank papers by impact factor, regardless of field. This is hugely distorting, since a great specialty journal in physics can have a smaller impact factor than a decent specialty journal in biomedical research (just due to the number of researchers in the sub-field). To get ahead, many people would find the journal with the highest impact factor that would publish the research.

My preferred style is to find a journal where my target audience is likely to read it. So if I am doing physics-type measurements on a protein, I would prefer to put it in a physics-type journal (where others might pick up on it and find it useful) rather than a protein-type journal where most readers could care less about this physics-type measurement, even if the impact factor is lower. Even though my bean-counting impact might be lower, I am counting on the actual impact being higher. What is the point of a high-impact publication if no one reads it? That said, when DrugMonkeyasked people about their citation practices, many commenters said they prefer to cite papers from higher impact journals, so clearly impact factor must be balanced with target audience.

This type of selection is much easier when I am intimately familiar with the sub-field. In that case, I know well which journals I read and cite, and can select accordingly. In this particular case, I don't have any knowledgeable colleagues or collaborators I can talk to, but that is generally my first stop in deciding where. How do you all pick where to submit your work (especially work in a new area for you)?

The kerfuffle about UC Davis

2011-01-17T08:04:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking a lot lately about the public shaming of a pregnant vet student at UC Davis, the response of the administration, other academic scientists, and related situations. First of all, I really appreciate the extensive coverage by Dr. Isis on this issue. This is something she was able to do because of her track record in issues of women and science, and her approachability such that fellow vet students at UC Davis felt comfortable in mailing her.

I am totally horrified and yet (unfortunately) unsurprised that a professor decided to treat a student's personal and academic lives as something to be commented on by her fellow students. I have a really hard time believing that Dr. Feldman would have conducted a poll to deal with how to evaluate a student who got hit by a car. I also find it hard to believe that something like this (an extended absence from class due to outside issues) has never happened to him before, given that it has already happened to me twice!

To be honest, though, I am more upset by the comments from current students. It is depressing beyond words to see the sexism (conscious or unconscious) displayed by many of the student commenters. I get that some students felt defensive when they saw their University being talked about in an unflattering way. But seriously, if UC Davis didn't want this to be news, Dr. Feldman should not have polled his class. In the age of the Internet, there is NO WAY this would have stayed a secret forever.

It is really frustrating to see the number of young scientists defending the status quo. How can this possibly ever have been appropriate? Why should students get to 1) know the personal situation of a fellow students and 2) get to comment on it? Does anyone really think that if the pregnant vet student had been a male student in a car accident that Dr. Feldman would have polled the class on what to do? Anyone who has EVER entertained the notion that for real equality, we just need to wait for the racists, sexists, and homophobes to die is seriously delusional, and this is just the latest evidence.

Tenure clocks, stopped and otherwise

2011-01-11T03:56:00.000-08:00

FSP has a really interesting discussion of tenure clocks and women in science over the last two days. Basically, she is responding to yet another call for allowing women to stop their tenure clock if/when they have kids on the TT, this time from a NYT article discussing recommendations released last year by researchers at Berkeley.

On day one, FSP notes:

What North American universities do not yet have this policy?

Can anyone name names? Can we make a list? I think there should be a list, easily accessible by an internet search, of universities that donot provide for tenure clock-stoppage for the birth or adoption of a child. Does such a list exist? If not, let's start one here.

As I would have expected not a single commenter listed a university where stopping the clock was not an option. As many commenters noted, there is a huge difference between what is technically "available" and what is culturally acceptable. I think that tenure clock stoppage is easy for universities to offer to look "family friendly" and not effective in retaining more women for a few reasons.

1. It's the culture, not the policies! Putting lipstick on the women-unfriendly academic culture pig won't change the pig. If people (not just women, although that might be more noticeable due to their relative underrepresentation) are leaving the TT because their daily lives are unpleasant, a stopped clock means nothing.

2. Many women in science don't want kids, so this policy has no impact on them and why they leave the TT.

3. No paid parental leave means tenure policies have little chance to help parents who can't afford to go without pay. And not just without pay--workers out on FMLA have to continue to pay their share of health insurance costs, and sometimes their employers' share too. Real (paid!) parental leave is far more helpful and "family friendly" (and also more costly to implement than tenure clock stoppage).

4. Many people are not convinced (and possibly rightly so, considering the comments here, here, and here) that their stopped tenure clock will not count against them.

As I've said before, I think many of the "pipeline" problems for underrepresented groups in science are symptomatic of professional work culture in the US in general. Discussing things like tenure clocks is easier than trying to change an ingrained academic culture where work is given priority over nearly everything else in life. I am lucky to work in a truly family friendly department, but that is local culture. I certainly am well aware that many people are not nearly so lucky.

Long delayed Mendeley review

2011-01-05T09:40:00.000-08:00

Way back in August, I started playing around with Mendeley after getting annoyed with Endnote. I said that I would write up a review after I had been using it a while, and I think I have enough experience with it to compare it to Endnote.

There are many things I really like about Mendeley. I really like reading papers in it, since I can save notes about the paper that I can search and share if so desired. Searching inside pdf files also works very well, and it is much, much easier for me to use Mendeley than to try to remember which paper I was thinking of and then open it in Adobe Reader. I never really got into Endnote's pdf features--the pdf search and import features were buggy and irritating when first introduced, so I never got into the habit of using them.

The pdf import feature in Mendeley works very well for me. I was able to convert over most of my library directly from my pdf files. This also works well with my new literature review system. Now that I am trying to use RSS to keep up, it is very easy for me to download pdfs into a directory that Mendeley watches. I also use Web of Science for searches and download pdfs through there. This is a huge improvement from my old system of exporting Endnote data, then importing the reference, since bibliographic imports happen automagically. Correcting errors in imported files is really easy, and can be done manually or via Google Scholar search. I spent a bunch of time initially correcting entries, but now I don't really have to. There is a pretty decent time investment in importing hundreds of pdf files at once, especially if you want to be able to properly search by author (since the author names MUST be imported properly for this to work). I did not try importing my Endnote library, but that is another option.

There are a few downsides I've found to Mendeley. I find the cite while you write interface a little clunky. It is not unusably so, and it is really easy to find the paper I want to cite using Mendeley's search functions. I thought the same about Endnote's interface, so this wasn't a major downgrade for me. One minor quibble--it is not possible to do unrestricted edits in the bibliography generated by Mendeley. This is something I have only just started playing with, so I am not sure what exactly I did to cause Mendeley to complain about it.

One big issue I discovered is that Mendeley and Endnote DID NOT play well together in one document I was working with. The references got corrupted and I had to strip out all the references and redo it all using just Endnote (since that is what my collaborator uses), which was really annoying. This is hopefully just a minor glitch for me, but may become a problem when I am writing with collaborators who still use Endnote. I haven't had this problem in some of my own documents (updating old proposals, for example). I plan to avoid on using two reference management systems in the same document as much as possible, but be careful if you do!

Mendeley was very disappointing in one area, and that is in keeping a library synced between two computers. I used to use a laptop and a desktop, and I tried to use Mendeley to sync my library between them, but this caused me lots of grief. I had lots of duplicates in my library, and Mendeley sometimes lost track of where the pdf files were on my laptop. I have solved this problem for myself by switching to using one computer (a laptop with a dock), but this seems like a feature in Mendeley that needs a lot of work, but could be very useful.

I don't really use the online features of Mendeley much, but in theory, you can grab citations while surfing and also have access to pdfs through the Web interface. I am not sure how well this works, since I always download pdfs when I want to cite and/or read something, but this is something that might be useful to people who use Google Scholar for searching and/or don't always work on the computer where their pdf library resides.

In short, I am keeping Mendeley. That it is free is only icing on the cake!

UPDATE: Thoughts on the latest update here.

Prodigal Resolutions for 2011

2010-12-31T10:53:00.000-08:00

I can't believe it is time to think about 2011 already! I guess time flies when you are having fun, but the years have really started to fly now that I am crazy busy in both my work life and my home life. Here are 11 TT resolutions for 2011. I am writing these down (publically) as a way to keep myself on track:

1. Get those last 2 papers from National Lab out! There is no reason I shouldn't have done this already, but there always seems to be something else I need to do. That data isn't getting any fresher, and a paper is paper, right?

2. Set up one day a week as a writing day, and just write all day. I need to focus more on my writing, and I can't get much done without large time blocks.

3. Apply to at least 2 new (to me) funding agencies this year. Sounds easy, but it can take serious time to figure out who to contact, the proper style, and the paperwork of a new agency/foundation.

4. Reorganize my office so I can keep it organized. My current system is clearly not working, since I prefer to make piles rather than put things where they belong and can be easily found.

5. Do a better job on my budgeting/purchase tracking. I am doing the bare minimum required by my University now, but I think setting up a system would be very helpful for tracking what I am buying and when, so I can do a better job projecting my needs.

6. Do a better job networking outside my specialty. I tend to skip seminars that are very far from my field, and also to leave the speaker slots for those whose research is more directly related. I have been thinking this is a mistake, and I should be more proactive about meeting people doing interesting stuff outside my field. This year, I will try to meet with at least one speaker a month that I would normally pass on. I will also pay attention to and attend more seminars in related departments.

7. Spend more one on one time with my students. I feel like I have been slacking a but on this one lately, and it would help both me and them to do more formal meetings rather than relying so much on informal and/or joint meetings.

8. Publish more! We are really, really close to 4 papers, but I can't spend another year waiting for "almost". The data takes its own time sometimes, but I can still try to work some of my proposal intros into reviews. I need to send out suggestions for review topics and also make sure we are getting the most out of the data we do have.

9. Say no more often to students in my class. This year, I was Professor Accessible for my large undergrad class, and as warned by GMP, this didn't really change my student evaluation scores OR grade distribution any. Next year, I will still be available for extra help, but on MY schedule (so I don't have teaching things scheduled for everyday of the week), not as needed.

10. Say no more often to minor service tasks. They add up to quite a bit of time if you always say yes!

11. Do a better job keeping up with the literature. I just set up RSS feeds rather than using emailed Table of Contents. Since it is easier to pick and choose out of RSS, I am hoping I don't just let it all pile up so much. We'll see...

Happy New Year!

Holidays and Taking Vacation

2010-12-24T11:31:00.000-08:00

When I was at National Lab, December was one of my favorite times to work. The lab would start to empty out after the first week as people took their vacations. It was especially common for senior people to be gone, since many of them had reached their maximum banked paid time off, and had "use it or lose it" days that they wanted to use. I really liked being able to work uninterrupted, get access to popular equipment, and carry out sensitive experiments without worrying too much about noise and/or contamination due to others working in the same area.

As a PhD student, there were advisors who were infamous for their heartless vacation time policies (like 2 weeks a year, not during December or summer) to try to maximize research productivity at naturally slow times for other academic responsibilities. I would never have joined such a group, since I know I need my downtime. It also strikes me as monstrously unfair for professors to use academic flexibility for themselves and deny it completely to their group members.

My own advisor was pretty cool about time off, and I follow a similar policy--I tell my group that they can have a"reasonable" amount of time off, where reasonable is in the 3-4 weeks a year range at their discretion, as long as they are making good progress on their projects. I encourage them to stay on campus as much as possible during the summer or to take their summer time off as a large chunk at the beginning or end (popular with students who need to travel far to visit family) rather than taking lots of long weekends, but have no policy (or comment) about December other than don't work in the lab alone.

Personally, I think travel flexibility is one of the best perks of the academic life. I can work from anywhere, since a lot of what I do is reading and writing, so while I rarely take really long stretches completely off, I do like to be able to travel a lot more than I did as a junior Federal employee with limited paid time off. I like to be able to extend this (free) perk to my group members, and I think it makes for a happier and more productive group in the long term.

Happy holidays to my readers, whatever you celebrate!

Wimminz in Academia Q&A, now with 100% Fewer Babies Answered!

2010-12-15T18:57:00.000-08:00

Well, they always say better late than never, right? I promised to answer the questions posed by Mein Hermitage's Q&A sans babies, so here it goes:

1. How do you command the attention and respect of men in academic settings (e.g. classroom, conferences, faculty meetings)?

In my experience with colleagues, the most important thing is to be good at your job, be professional at all times, and don't lose your temper over the small stuff (even if it is really hard). Especially when you are starting out, you don't want to be known as "THAT woman, you know the one who is touchy and has no sense of humor". For everyone, and especially for visibly obvious members of underrepresented groups, it is your science that people will pay attention to. Without a strong base of good science/other work, no one will care what you think and that goes double for women.

In the classroom, it is REALLY important to establish yourself as in charge. When my large undergrad class gets too loud, I just stop speaking. If it continues for more than 30 seconds or so after that, I remind the class that they need to know the material on the exam whether we cover it in class or not. At that point, usually disruptive students will be shushed by their peers. If there are students who repeatedly question your authority publicly and disruptively, throw them out of the class. I've only had to do that once (when I was a TA), but it really works to establish who is in charge. This is the nuclear option--only use it as a last resort. Never, ever BS something if you don't know the answer. Your students will definitely respect you more if you say you don't know, but you will look it up and let them know next class (and then DO THAT!). in my experience, most students will respect you if you show up to class prepared, show an interest in their learning, respond to questions in some manner, and show some enthusiasm in the classroom.

2. How should women dealing with a two body problem handle assumptions that their career is secondary to their partner's?

I didn't have a two body problem in that my partner is not in research. We did have to make sure my partner could find work wherever I ended up, and I did give my partner veto power over our final location (after all, we both have to live there!). That said, I would ignore your peers' opinion on this. Your advisor will (hopefully) know your career is primary. When it came up interviews (and it almost always will, legal or not), I just said that my partner is not in academia and has lots of job flexibility and left it at that. At ProdigalU, I've seen searches with both male and female trailing partners, and in neither type of situation did the partner situation come up in post-interview discussions of the candidate.

3. What would you like to see from tenure-track and not-yet-tenured menfolk? How can they pitch in?

In my opinion, the most useful thing that concerned menfolk can do are to call out people who are acting like sexist asshats, even if no women are present. Letting the lab degenerate into a frat house party when they women are not around makes it clear that science is a boys club that women can sometimes visit. Speaking up about an inclusive environment is sometimes easier for men, because they are not going to be accused of "looking for sexism" or being "a humorless bitch" for saying something about nasty jokes or comments.

Another thing that men can do is to make sure they nominate/suggest kickass science women as well as kickass science men for awards and seminars. If only male speakers come to mind at first, think a little harder about women active in your field doing interesting science. It is a habit that will break with practice--I noticed the same thing in my own suggestions for speakers (they were overwhelmingly male) until I started thinking more deeply about some of the papers I'd recently read/talks I'd attended given by women doing great stuff.

Don't single people out because they are women. I want to be treated like any other scientist. I just don't want to be the only one thinking I belong in the room.

4. How do you deal with insinuations that you were only chosen for a position/award/etc because of affirmative action?

I ignore them. Most of the people who say these things are jealous or insecure. There is nothing you can say to change their minds, so don't bother.

I can say that although I have experienced individual acts of sexism, and faced discriminatory environments, most of the people I have met in my career are just people trying to get ahead and also be a decent human being. If you act like you are self-confident (even if you feel like an impostor), know your stuff, and work hard, that will take you a long way.

The chalk talk, non-bio edition

2010-12-14T10:16:00.000-08:00

Gerty-Z has a great post up about chalk talks in her field. In my field, we also do chalk talks, and it is absolutely crucial to do well there to get an offer. Like G-Z, I really enjoyed my chalk talks, since I went in well prepared and found it to be a fun scientific discussion. I came away with lots of good ideas for interesting research directions after most of my interviews. Unlike in G-Z's field, in my field, it is common to do "chalk talks" with powerpoint slides. That said, there are many important differences between a normal talk and a chalk talk.

Typically, the chalk talk will be restricted to faculty only, since you will be presenting your future research ideas and vision for your lab. Although it starts out like a normal talk, you should expect to be interrupted frequently. Although most of the faculty will have seen your job talk on the previous day, you can't assume everyone did (or that everyone remembers the key points). Any really important points from your job talk that are crucial to understanding your future research will have to be BRIEFLY reviewed (emphasis on the briefly). Your goal in the chalk talk is to describe what you envision doing as a researcher. You should describe the scientific problem and then explain your approach. You need to be really clear on the scientific problem, and also describe your approach.

Your audience will ask lots and lots of questions. Some will be really easy and some will challenge your science. You need to answer all of them to the best of your ability respectfully. DO NOT get defensive. Saying "I don't know" or some variant is better than trying to BS your way through something--there will probably be someone(s) who are also well-versed in the field. The department will be watching to see how you think on your feet, how well you have thought things through, and how you interact with your potential colleagues.

You need to be able to answer the following questions:

1. Where will I look for funding for this project (in general is OK--is it NSF/DoE/DoD fundable?)

2. What will happen if the project doesn't work? This is important--is there important science to write up along the way, or is the project only publishable if everything works as planned?

3. What are other groups doing in this area? Why is your approach unique/better?

4. If this is a continuation of prior work, will you be in direct competition with your mentor for funding? If so, why would agencies fund you and not your mentor?

5. What do you need to do the work equipment and space-wise, and how much will it cost (ballpark is OK)?

6. What are your initial staffing needs? Will you need a tech? How many students/postdocs will you look to get in the first 2 years when you are running on startup?

You should also be able to describe your target steady state group size, how quickly you can get started if you were to get an offer, and what mix of students/postdocs/techs are you looking for. Your research plans should include things that are short term, medium term, and long term. This is really important--you need to convince the department that you have a research agenda that is sustainable for 10+ years. If your proposed project is amazing, but it will be more or less complete when done, you need to know what will be next. You should plan on describing 3 projects, 2 in detail and 1 in outline due to time limitations, but be prepared with details on all 3 just in case. It is also a good idea to point out potential collaborations in the department and/or at the University if it is a natural extension of your proposed research.

They will probably also ask you what you want to and/or are prepared to teach in the department. This is not a deal breaker, but you should at least give it a little thought--you are applying to work at a University!

8 months of Prodigal Academic

2010-12-07T06:45:00.000-08:00

I really like this meme, kicked off by DrugMonkey and Proflike Substance from my blogroll! Here is the summary of my first 8 months blogging, written as the first sentence of each month (click the month names to see the whole post):

May: When I was preparing to make the switch back to academia, I started reading lots of academic blogs.

June: Fueled by a recent set of posts by geekmommyprof and DrDrA, Ihave been giving this issue some thought.

July: I have always had summer students, even in my first year as a postdoc at National Lab.

Aug: I am away this week and trying to limit my Internet access.

Sept: Inspired by Februa's awesome post on "alternative" careers for PhDs in the life sciences, I present my post on "alternate" careers in science that require a PhD that I am familiar with (through my own experience and through my grad school classmates).

Oct: I was doing my projected budget for this year, and boy am I freaking out.

Nov: When I first got to Prodigal U, I was a bit surprised by the number of formal reviews our grad students undergo.

Dec: There has been a lot of electronic ink spilled on this one, both positive and negative.

Cheerleaders for science

2010-12-01T07:00:00.000-08:00

There has been a lot of electronic ink spilled on this one, both positive and negative. I had strong negative feelings about Cheerleaders for Science, but I didn't really know how to put it in words until I read Candid Engineer's awesome post on the subject.

In addition to her awesome discussion about internalized -isms, I completely agree with her thoughts about not wanting to be represented by cheerleaders herself, or reminded that many people think that cheerleaders represent the ideal woman that many of us fall short from. And I hardly need another reminder in my life that women are valued for their attractiveness to men over any other attribute.

I also want to add that as a girl, I would have been horrified beyond belief by science cheerleaders. My thought process would have been "oh great, here is another place where I don't fit in." As a kid, I hated cheerleaders. I hated skirts, pink, glitter, and dancing. I already had issues with not wanting to "dress like a girl", play with barbies, or be bad at math. I LOVED science, but Cheerleaders for Science would have tainted my refuge from the world I already didn't fit properly in. Is it worth turning away non-stereotypical girls to attract the cheerleader types? Is the target audience for Cheerleaders for Science really little girls, given that the appearance that set all this off was at the National Science and Engineering Festival?

FWIW, my own child would probably love cheerleaders, but she already thinks science is cool even without all that. She mostly needs to NOT be discouraged, not to be enticed.

I was also completely disgusted by the discussion on the topic here. Although many of the commenters posted thoughtful remarks, there was an ugly thread hijack in the middle about former girlfriends' intimate habits. Like CPP mentions on his blog, I do not think this was a random occurrence.

Needy students

2010-11-26T07:02:00.000-08:00

I've tended to make myself pretty available to the students in my classes for extra help outside class. I really do want the students to learn, and it is also a good way to boost teaching evaluation scores without compromising grading standards. It seems to me that 5-10% of the students take 80-90% of my out of class time. I am beginning to wonder if I am doing some of these students a disservice by not forcing them to learn how to access resources other than their professors for help.

I really think that part of what students go to University for is to learn how to learn things quickly. I've noticed that many of my timesink students do not belong to study groups and tend to study and work alone almost all the time. It is very difficult to get a BS or BSE in my field without learning how to work in groups. There is no way I would have been able to get much out of my senior level labs and problem sets without working the material through with my classmates. I imagine other STEM fields are similar. In the job world, pretty much everyone works in teams, so they may as well learn how to now. So now I am starting to wonder if I am falling into the academic equivalent of a helicopter parent for some of my students.

Maybe next time, I should make myself more of a last resort than a first place to go for questions via email.

An annoying trend

2010-11-22T03:50:00.001-08:00

Maybe this is just me and my luck of the draw, but I am noticing an increasing number of manuscripts coming back to me for a second review. I try to be a good citizen and all, and accept as many reviews as I can, but if each review ends up being 2 for 1, I will have to take this into consideration.

When I first started reviewing, it was really rare for me to see something a second time before publication. Now it seems to be happening for about 1 in 3 manuscripts I review, and most of them are completely unnecessary. Now, I don't mind if I get something back after saying "publishable with major revisions" as long as the authors have actually done some of the revisions! The last three manuscripts I've gotten back for a re-review have been:

1) something I said needed minor revisions. Isn't this something the editor or assistant editor can make a call on?

2) something I rejected for publication. I don't reject things lightly--I had major issues with the science and many of them are still there. If there ever is a time for adding reviewer 3 or 4, this is it, rather than sending it back to me. I don't think that papers that are rejected should go back to the original reviewers. If the editor thinks there is something the reviewer missed, it is time for a new review.

3) something I said needed major revisions to be accepted, and sent along 2 pages of suggestions. Almost none of them were implemented, and most were completely ignored. In their response, the authors pretty much said "The reviewer is wrong." without any additional evidence or support for their position. Why bother sending this back to me?

I find this particular trend really annoying. It is almost like editors don't want to make a call on anything anymore (and I can say that never having done it myself :-).

I've also had the situation where I get a manuscript from a big name group, and it is terrible. I reject it with lots of comments, and it comes back polished up after implementing all of the reviewer comments. I really resent that Professor Big Name has too many people to properly oversee/mentor their trainees in how to write papers and is farming it out to reviewers. It makes me not want to do such a thorough job.

Interested in non-parenting issues facing women in science?

2010-11-17T05:15:00.000-08:00

TheHermitage is organizing a Q&A with women in science at various career stages. Go ahead and submit your questions, and she will pick 4 of them to forward on to her panelists, including yours truly. The only rule: no babies.

We all love babies, and some of us panelists have had a few, but most discussions of women in science end up as a discussion of kids/motherhood when these issues only affect a subset of women, and certainly aren't the only issues facing women that are worth discussing. Here's your chance to spark a discussion on ANYTHING else facing women in science today!

Cheating, professors, students, and "the system"

2010-11-15T12:46:00.001-08:00

There was this article at The Chronicle of Higher Ed on ghostwriting academic papers that has attracted lots of comments and some attention. I was really shocked by this. First, I knew about the existence of this stuff back when I was a student, and it has only gotten easier to make contact with potential ghostwriters over the Web since then. Second, why do people feel it is the professor's job to suss out cheaters like this?

Here is my take: too many people go to college these days because they need the validation of the degree, not because they are interested in learning anything. Because a college degree now is what a high school diploma was a generation or two ago (in terms of job requirements), there are plenty of motivated people who just want to get through their classes so they can get a decent job with some security. The system doesn't care if they have any particular knowledge, just if they have a degree. This encourages gaming the system, so it is only natural that some people make a living serving that niche.

I don't work too hard to catch cheaters myself. I follow all the security rules set up by my University, I don't put too much weight on things that are easy to fake (like online quizzes), and I give out old reference exams to level the playing field a bit so students don't feel like they need to buy copies of my old exams. Anything obvious I crack down on, since otherwise it can be very demoralizing for my hard working students, but I have too much to do to try to worry about all the ways a student can cheat on an exam.

That said, I don't collect my assigned problem sets, because I am not a jailer keeping my students from free time. The ones that want to learn do the assigned work and learn. The ones that don't, don't. I tell my students that they will get out of my course what they put into it, and I focus on the ones who are trying to learn, not the ones who are gaming the system. There will always be cheaters, and people will always try to game the system. Many of the rules designed to catch cheaters make life much more difficult for everyone.

I still believe that the cream will rise. I have a hard time thinking that someone who pays ringers to do all of their work for them will be able to pass an oral board exam in medicine, or stay on the job for very long as an engineer, or make it as a bench scientist, making their "fake" credential a very expensive gold star. If someone can learn the material without doing the assigned work, that means they have talent, and I wouldn't mind working with them if their "fake" degree gets them in the door. The bigger problem in my mind is the disconnect between the credential and the competence of the credential-holder. We see academics complain about this all the time when recruiting postdocs. It seems just as true in every other field. Buying papers is just a symptom.

Quick tips for proposal writers

2010-11-08T16:43:00.000-08:00

I am reviewing a bunch of proposals now for my panel. If you are writing a proposal PLEASE keep in mind that many of your reviewers will be reading 10+ proposals in a short period of time, not all of which are well within their expertise. I never appreciated how difficult it is to do a good and thorough job until I am doing it myself!

Prodigal's 10 quick tips:

1. Use figures. Really. It helps break up the text, illustrates your thoughts and plans, and can help someone vaguely familiar with a technique remember more about how it works. You don't need preliminary data as much as schematics and cartoons.

2. Use paragraphs! The wall'o'text is REALLY hard to read through and maintain concentration for 80+ pages!

3. Define your acronyms and abbreviations. Not everyone will remember the abbreviations you use in your daily work, especially after 8 hours on a panel.

4. Make sure you refer to others working in your field who have made significant advances, not just your group and your collaborators/friends. People on the panel WILL notice this one! Don't get lazy on lit review.

5. Make sure your proposed research is easy to find. In some of the proposals I am reading, it is difficult to figure out what has been done recently, what is background, and what will be done with the money over the course of the proposal.

6. Use headers! Go ahead and bold them. When I need to go back to look for something, I want it to be easy to find.

7. Don't blow off broader impacts/diversity statements. They WILL be read, remarked on, and used for funding decisions. The top proposals have both awesome science and well planned broader impacts, so just awesome science alone won't cut it.

8. If your proposal is a team proposal, clearly state what each team member will do. Don't just add names and not talk about their research contributions. Saying "Professor X will make calculations in support of the experiment" or "Professor Y will characterize the samples" are NOT research contributions!

9. If your proposal has both theory and experimental parts, talk about how the two parts will be integrated. Team proposals should be TEAMS, not 2 cool PIs working in parallel. If that is the case, you each should have written a separate proposal.

10. Be concise and as clear as possible. If you have to make a choice, though, pick clarity.

Annual reviews for students

2010-11-01T06:46:00.000-07:00

When I first got to Prodigal U, I was a bit surprised by the number of formal reviews our grad students undergo. At PhD U, we had a 2nd year oral exam (not on research, with a few profs assigned to a whole cohort by sub-specialty), a General Exam (on research with the student's committee), and our defense. Since a PhD take 5-6 years, this is one review every 2 years or so, and is not too uncommon a pattern in my field. Here at ProdigalU, our students have a presentation based review every year, and I find I like this system very much.

For the student, it means a closer relationship with the professors on the review committee (which is the set up on a student by student basis) who see them every year. On the committees I have sat on, we are able to provide specific project related feedback, which can be a huge help to them. It also means more oversight, in case an adviser (through ignorance or maliciousness) is not acting in a student's best interests in terms of their research and training. The process also insures that students get to give high stakes presentations of their research at least once a year, which is much more practice at giving talks than I had as a newbie grad student.

For the professors, it is really nice to see the annual progress made by various students in the department. I was amazed this year to see just how much difference a year has made in scientific maturity for some of the students I am reviewing. It is also a way to keep up with what is going on in my colleagues labs, and perhaps spark collaborations. In addition, advisers can get some feedback or advice from peers on how to handle situations with their trainees from people who are familiar with their work. Though I haven't used this yet, I can see that it is a great potential resource. The major downside is that a proper review takes an hour, and we all have to review our own students, plus other students in the department so it can eat up a lot of time.

I admit I was a bit dubious when I first heard of this system, but I have been won over by seeing how annual reviews work in practice. I think it is much better for our grad students than the system I experienced, even though it is a time sink for me at a point in my career where I am already overscheduled.

International collaborations

2010-10-28T03:34:00.000-07:00

I may be about to start one. It is with someone in another country very far away. We have minimal funding to do this, but we are both starting out on the TT (or local equivalent) and are interested in the science. We have met face to face before at meetings, and this person is a well known and well liked former group mate of one of my current colleagues.

Because of the distance (and lack of funds), we are starting out just sending materials back and forth. The cost of FedEx does add up, though, especially to Far Away. We are hoping to get some nice preliminary data we can then use to get joint funding, and have more actual interactions between the groups. I am not sure how this will work out in the end, since I have never done an international collaboration like this before. For all the talk about how much "smaller" or "flatter" the world is, I really don't see it. I mean Skype is free, but transportation is not. I have done coast to coast in the US, but international shipping rates and airfares are much, much higher (even for the same distance). In the past, I have seen my collaborators from the other coast at least once a year. Not sure how an electronic only collaboration will go.

Procrastinating with the NRC grad school data

2010-10-26T13:09:00.000-07:00

In my post about academia and pyramid schemes, Games With Words left a comment about grad schools and outcomes. He later discussed this over at his blog and associated comments, and lamented about lack of data and lack of knowledge of what exactly my field is. While I am not inclined to publicly pierce my pseudonymity (though I bet people can probably guess if they are really determined), thanks to the NRC, we can talk about data for my field (which has a strong industry demand for PhD and MS holders, and has a very low unemployment rate compared to the national average).

I, like him, was interested in data beyond anecdotes, since attrition rates, outcomes, and the "value" of a PhD from a non-Top 5 school seem to me to be very dependent on field. Looking in detail for my field (and with the caveat that there are definitely problems with the NRC dataset), I was very surprised by the data. Here is what I found (using the NRC S-ranking, and noting that academic plans means signed contract for postdoctoral fellowship or permanent academic job):

Top 10 schools: ~60% complete PhDs, ~20% with academic plans

Top 20 schools: ~50% complete PhDs, ~20% with academic plans

Bottom 10 schools: ~50% complete PhDs, ~20% with academic plans

Bottom 20 schools: ~50% complete PhDs, ~20% with academic plans

I will note that academic plans does not mean faculty positions (as implied by the Chronicle for Higher Ed flash tool, now pay to use)--the NRC definition is negotiating or signed a contract for an academic position including postdoctoral fellowships. In fact, I suspect most of these are postdocs. I think it would be really hard for schools to report on how many students have faculty positions for my field, given that a postdoc is more or less required, and most schools don't seem to follow up much after the initial placement (at least no one I know has been contacted as an alumni for that information). Still, the numbers are a lot smaller and a lot more consistent across the rankings than I would have expected, especially given the hysteria about overproduction of PhDs. I should also note that for a graduate of a US University, it isn't incredibly difficult to find a postdoctoral position in my field, though positions in top schools and/or top labs are very competitive.

The average number of PhDs graduated per year ranges from ~2 to ~30, with a mean of ~14. The net result is ~2500 PhDs produced per year (which is in line with the data from my field's society), of whom ~500 will go into academia (probably postdocs) immediately after their degree. This does not seem like a terrible oversupply of PhDs/postdocs even just considering those 500 per year, especially since anecdotally, some large percentage of them will not pursue faculty positions. Granted, not all of them can get positions at large research universities (which is what many people who want faculty positions profess to want), but I would guess that across academia at all levels, there are probably 200-300 faculty openings per year in my field. This is a much better match of supply with demand than I was expecting, even given my hand waving invocation of anecdata at the end.

UPDATE: Note, that I am NOT implying that getting a faculty job is easy, since I know it isn't. Nor I am implying that many openings don't have hundreds of applicants (I know we get that at ProdigalU). Just that supply of jobs across academia is probably a lot closer to demand than I would have guessed in the absence of data, especially if we lump all the different types of Universities together, which is obviously a gross simplification. I know that many of my research colleagues (me included!) would have gone to industry to do development rather than a community college to teach due to personal work preference.

Undergraduate researchers and time

2010-10-19T06:26:00.000-07:00

Although I've supervised many undergraduate researchers over the summer, both at ProdigalU last year and at National Lab before that, this semester is the first time I have a student doing research for credit during the academic year. My undergrad seems sharp, and has a good class schedule for research, but I don't see this person in lab much. The project has only been running for a month, and there was an initial report due, which required lots of background reading. I have to admit, though, that right now I am a bit underwhelmed by the commitment level of the student.

I realize that this particular student will require a whole lot more oversight than my summer students, especially since many of my summer students came in every day vs a few times a week due to their class schedules (and lack thereof). This is something I don't want to put on the grad student who is supervising the day-to-day lab stuff. So I clearly need to bring my undergrad in for a chat about expectations, but since the "official" time alloted for student research is only 10 hours per week (curse the credit system!), I am thinking hard about how to approach it.

Ideally, I want the student to be able to complete a (small) project during their time in the lab, which is what I have done in the past with my summer students. I just don't think it will happen with 10 hours a week. So, do I start using the student as a technician in support of my grad students rather than a "researcher"? Do I keep the student on the current project knowing that decent progress is unlikely with this time commitment? Do I change the project to something more amenable to 10 hour per week bites, even though I think it will be a worse overall experience for everyone involved (including the supervising grad student, who is getting a chance to mentor someone with supervision)? I do plan to explain all of this, and then make a decision based on the student response. Any other suggestions?

Diversity and hiring

2010-10-15T06:59:00.000-07:00

FCS had an awesome post a week or so ago at her place about diversity in hiring. She pointed out that due to legal issues (EEO requirements, fear of lawsuits) and appearance issues (no one wants to think they are a bigot), most (all?) job ads have boilerplate text on this issue:

But even more than that, I am intrigued by how statements of diversity are phrased. According to institutions that are Equal Opportunity (EEO) and/or Affirmative Action (AA) employers, federal law says they must at the very least include this:
FooBar is an Equal Opportunity / Affirmative Action Employer.
But some institutions go beyond this, and actually craft wording into their ad which makes me believe they mean it. For example, when they say something like, "We are committed to building a diverse organization, and strongly encourage people from minority groups, women, and people with disabilities to apply," I am far more likely to believe them. And when they even go beyond that and explain what steps they've done to build a more inclusive workplace, such as on site childcare, a fully accessible campus, etc., I am even more likely to believe them.

FCS then goes on to make some suggestions as to how to really signal an interest in diversity. You should read the whole post, and also the comments which added to the discussion (and stayed civil).

I had two additional thoughts on the subject that later became post-length. First, it is not good enough to just write nicer text to improve diversity in a department (and this goes for academia or industry). Lip service is lip service, no matter how poetic. So what is a department to do when they realize that everyone on the faculty is white and male, but the world contains people of all colors of the rainbow and more than one gender? I am the type of person who thinks it is never too late to change, and in this job market the key issue is in expand diversity in the applicant pool. There are lots and lots of qualified candidates of all races and genders. So how to get them interested in the position?

1. Advertise the position in targeted scientific publications or websites (for example, groups like the Society of Women Engineers, the National Organization for the Professional Advancement of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers, or the Society for Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science). There are many of these support/advocacy groups out there, and most will advertise jobs to their members. Taking the time/money to advertise with them sends a strong message that OldBoy U is really and truly interested in hiring someone different looking. It will also help broaden the applicant pool, since you have a much better chance of reaching qualified scientists from underrepresented groups.

2. Be inclusive at the interview (and this should be for EVERYONE). Don't have conversations at meals that the candidate can't possibly participate in! This is awkward for any candidate. It will particularly make the "otherness" stand out for someone who already will be the only one of their group in your department.

Diversity (or lack thereof) absolutely is noticeable to candidates! Quoting an earlier post of mine:

When I was interviewing for faculty positions, I noted the number of women and underrepresented minorities on the faculty and in the student body. Several departments had just one woman and no visible underrepresented minorities. This was hugely unattractive to me, especially after working in my diverse division at National Lab. My current department has almost 20% women and several underrepresented visible minorities on the faculty. This was an important secondary consideration (after research fit and startup package, and on par with location and salary). I definitely prefer to work in my department with many women at all ranks than to be alone or 1 of 2.

This is clearly a recruitment edge for my department. I do understand that by not wanting to be a pioneer, this just passes the burden to someone else, and I am grateful to the women who came before me for doing just that. But in this day and age, foresighted departments/workplaces/divisions should get to reap the benefit of their hard work to diversify in the past. The presence of women in positions of leadership in the department and at the university is an important signal...

I think that diversity recruiting can be a vicious or virtuous cycle, where groups that are all-male can have trouble recruiting female students due to the actual or feared lab culture, and groups that are more balanced are more attractive to women (as in the case for me when I was job searching). It would not surprise me if this were true for people from other underrepresented groups as well.

Giving exams

2010-10-12T16:03:00.001-07:00

Before I started on the TT, I had NO IDEA how labor intensive it is to give an exam in a large class. Writing a fair exam for the first time is difficult (which I expected), but I had some help from a colleague who previously taught this class so I could see about what level to aim at. The grading takes a while (especially grading 200 exams alone--yikes!). But what really gets me is all the overhead.

The first annoyance is having to have 4 versions to cut down on the temptation to cheat. THis is pretty annoying, even though it just involves scrambling the questions. Making up the multiple choice exam keys for the grading machine is pretty annoying as well.

On or shortly before exam day, I need to: count the printed exams to make sure the numbers are correct, check the exams for typos/printing errors, meet with the proctors to go over the ground rules, alternately help and turn away desperate students, make sure I have a seating map for the room so I can post a seating chart 15 minutes before the exam starts, make said chart, distribute the exams with the proctors, walk through the exam a few times to answer mostly inane questions (as in "How do I do this? Sorry I can't tell you."), collect the exam, count the exams to make sure we have them all, and then submit the multiple choice part for grading. I also get to listen to all kinds of excuses for not showing up, complaints about how hard the class is, and whines about how hard they worked even though their grade doesn't show it. I actually like the grading part, and it is fun to help out the conscientious students. I didn't know any of this on the day I found out I would be teaching 200 non-majors this subject.

I also had no idea how nervous I would be for my students!

Why I love my commute!

2010-10-08T07:30:00.000-07:00

So many times people bitch about their commutes, so today I thought I would praise mine. When we moved to Prodigal City, Prodigal Spouse and I decided to only look for houses so that we could either walk 15-20 minutes (or less) or take public transit. We ended up around 30-40 min away by transit, and right near a bike path. So now I commute by bike (also 30-40 minutes) most of the time, and take transit during bad weather.

Here's why I love my commute:
1. By bike, I get to do physical activity 1 to 1.5 hrs a day WITHOUT adding extra time to my schedule.
2. Either on the bike or on transit, I am alone with no Internet and don't use my phone, so I have some good time to think.
3. My commute is really cheap, and I get to live far enough away from Prodigal U that there are few drunken students.
4. On transit, I can actually read papers (if I am so inclined UNINTERRUPTED for 30 minutes!)

When I was a student, I had to live where I could afford it. When I was at National Lab, I picked a place I really wanted to live without thinking about what it would be like to commute there every day. After that experience (and having added kids), I decided to use pleasant commute as one of the main considerations in where to live, since I commute twice a day at least 5 days a week, and go out maybe once a month (post-kids). I have to say that the quality of my life is vastly improved living a bit out of the way with a good commute over living in a "better" location with a crappy commute.

Unanticipated benefits

2010-10-05T11:35:00.000-07:00

Quickie post while I wait for a draft to print! I've been writing lots of proposals, and trying to keep an eye on how my research program is developing. One of the unanticipated benefits of moving to ProdigalU is a recent new branch in my research that I am really excited about. We have some nice preliminary results from one of my summer students that I am looking to convert into a funded project. I never would have moved in this direction if I hadn't been here, but now that I am working on this problem, I see how it could potentially become a major part of my future research.

In hindsight, this is really obvious--of COURSE my research program would change to accommodate the local environment. When I was deciding what to do during my job search, I was in the fortunate position to have 3 offers in hand. I considered the local resources in terms of equipment more heavily than the research programs currently in place (though I had good research overlap and potential collaborators everywhere I was considering). I ended up picking ProdigalU, though I was offered a MUCH lower salary and a little less startup support, because I was much more excited by the other research going on here, both in my department and in other departments. At the time, I wondered if this was a dumb choice since it seemed stupid to turn down the money, but now I can truly say I have no regrets.

In some ways, this is like those late night student conversations about "what if I went to a different bar that night and never met my husband", but something about the TT application process made me think of my research program as a package in isolation and not something that would adapt to my new department and colleagues. I feel fortunate that I ended up in such a good place for me creatively without even considering that aspect.

Funding freakout

2010-10-03T10:49:00.000-07:00

I was doing my projected budget for this year, and boy am I freaking out. I decided to go for it with a "burn the ships" spending strategy on my startup, but the reality of seeing that nest egg dwindle is jarring.

Due to some unfortunate issues, I had to start preparing a material in my own lab that I used to get from a collaborator. I was always planning on doing this, but not for another year or two. The earlier spending on supplies and equipment severely depleted my emergency fund. I took on 4 students, which is at the upper limit of what I can support, and doesn't leave much leftover for emergencies.

Now, I knew all along that this strategy had risks and rewards. I have all of my equipment installed and running in my renovated lab. By this time next year, it looks like I will have 4 papers based on data exclusively from my new lab, which would not be happening without all the spending. This, on top of the 3 last papers from National Lab data, plus a potential mini-review stemming from all my proposal writing means my CV is definitely benefiting. The issue is converting this early success into more reliable funding. I had some success last year, but all with small grants or new investigator programs. We are in austerity mode, buying only essentials now. I had already planned on attending 2 meetings with significant travel, but other travel will have to be local (or paid for!) until I get more money.

This is why I am spending so much time writing now--3 proposals done for September, with another 2 white papers + 1 proposal to do by mid-November. The reality of my situation hit me hard last week now that I have 4 mouths to feed. I am freaking out!

Overlap in proposal writing

2010-09-30T06:25:00.000-07:00

I've got proposals on my mind (polishing #3 for Sept, then on to 3 more white papers by the first week in Nov). One thing I am wrestling with in my mind is on how much overlap is OK between proposals. I've been writing proposals for a while now, so I have a nice library of introductions, methods, and motivations I can copy and paste from, which really helps in the writing efficiency. I have no issues at all with this type of self-plagiarism. But I was talking to a colleague, and this person mentioned using the same project in two proposals. I was a bit taken aback--I never do this, considering it to be unethical to propose the same exact project to two agencies. It certainly was not allowed at National Lab, where we had to promise that our internally funded projects had no external funding (since part of the point of internal funding was to get preliminary data for external funding).

I can certainly understand the temptation. With funding rates so low, odds are that both projects won't be funded at the same time anyway. But this seems like crossing a line to me. If both projects were to be funded, my colleague would either be setting up trainees in direct competition with each other, or else using money earmarked for one thing for something else entirely. It is one thing to use some of a project's budget on interesting side avenues--after all if we knew the outcome already, it wouldn't be research. I've heard that in some fields, it is the norm to have most of the data already (not just preliminary stuff) before submitting proposals, but not in mine. Maybe this is how they do it? It is not like anyone really checks up to make sure that no double dipping is going on.

I do propose strongly related projects that emphasize different aspects of an overall theme, since this is the only sensible way to get enough money to do longterm projects and/or projects that require a lot of resources, especially at my career stage. I also want my students to have clearly delineated and separable projects so there are no issues when it comes to writing up their PhDs. But I try to avoid the temptation to allow the degree of overlap to get too large--if the NSF is paying for something it hardly seems right to charge the DOE for the same thing!

Am I hopelessly naive?

2 down, 1 to go

2010-09-26T10:43:00.000-07:00

Still grant writing like a crazy person. I've finished 2 of my targeted 3 for the month, and the last one is a 4-page white paper I already outlined and did the background lit search for. Phew!

At least I am not alone: GMP and PiT are slogging through grantwriting hell with me. It's times like these that I really appreciate the blogosphere--it's not like I can complain to my colleagues about all this and not sound like a total whiner.

Prodigal U does its part to help out TT wannabes

2010-09-20T08:27:00.000-07:00

We're hiring! My department at Prodigal U is searching for not one, but two TT positions (one is a failed search from last year, one is a retirement replacement)! This means a lot more work for me, though thankfully I am not on either committee this year.

In honor of TT job postings, I sum up my short list (ha ha) of academic job hunting advice:

1. Thoughts on the academic job market.
2. Looking for a TT job from outside academia.

3. How search committees go from 200+ applications to a short list.

4. Interviewing from the perspective of a TT applicant and from the perspective of the search committee.

5. Success! Negotiating the offer.

6. Outside academia: how I got a National Lab job, and other possible careers.

Just a quick re-post, since I am still drowning in work. Personal update: one Sept proposal is done, one was sent to my co-PI for comments, and I am starting the last one today (it is a short 4-pager). Three more for October, but one just requires minor revisions before resubmitting, and the other two are short white papers. One is now due the first week in Nov (not sure if I just want to be done or not), and one is already outlined.

How much is too much?

2010-09-17T06:49:00.000-07:00

I am in a proposal writing frenzy right now. I have 3 I intend to submit by the end of the month, and another 3 I am working on for October. One is a dramatic revamp of an older proposal, and one is pretty much a revise and resubmit, but that still leaves 4 fresh proposals to do. Granted there is some degree of overlap between them (for the introduction and methods, anyway), but I am feeling overwhelmed. Working on these is consuming a large fraction of my not already spoken for time, so I feel like I am neglecting my students a bit.

And now I have 4 more to integrate! This recruitment season, I added two more grad students (woot!), so now I have 4. I will also have 2 undergrads working in my lab this year for credit instead of cash. My success in recruiting, while exciting, is also stressing me out, since now I have to feed all of these mouths. In a way, I am feeling more freaked out and lost right now than in my first few months here. I feel like I am being drained of my ideas, but maybe that is the recent overwork period talking. I am also trying to find the line between too much overlap to be ethical, and too little overlap to be practical in my proposals. I am finding that making a research plan in theory is very different from the practically of getting it paid for!

After this fall, I do plan to take a proposing break, but I wonder how wise that is given the current funding climate.

Orienting new faculty

2010-09-15T17:03:00.001-07:00

In honor of all those new faculty currently drowning now that the school year has started, I've been thinking about new faculty orientation, and how inadequate it is. For Prodigal U's new faculty orientation, we were bombarded with information about teaching resources, University governance, research VPs given speeches, dealing with students, policies on cheating and the like. All of this is important, and I will admit that few would actually read the details if they weren't given in a required day of lectures.

But that doesn't get to what new faculty REALLY need to know (some of which can't or shouldn't be written). So I am making a list of things to tell the next newbie to join my department at Prodigal U. FWIW, I can't even imagine how overwhelming all of this would be if I didn't already have some clue about proposal writing, research planning, and budgeting from my years at National Lab!

1. The research/grants office (first--is there one?)

How does it work? At Prodigal U, each funding agency has an assigned person. That person knows (or is supposed to know) the ins and outs of the rules and regulations for applying. Some funding mechanisms require a filled out checklist to be submitted to this office with the Department chair's and/or Dean's signature on them. It is a good idea to check the office website for a list of these.

What can they provide? This depends on the person and the agency. The frequently applied for mechanisms have someone who can proof your proposal for obvious formatting or rules errors, make sure your budget isn't unrealistically out of line with what everyone else at Prodigal U is asking for, and in general look over things to make sure you aren't making a newbie mistake. Very valuable! Of course, this requires that you finish before the submission deadline, which won't happen too often if you are like me.

What is the deal with the office deadline so far before the submission deadline? For most things, this is just if you want your proposal reviewed. If you submit at the last minute, they just send it on without looking (if it is something they send) or you submit it without them seeing it.

Who are the useful people over there? Obviously can't be written, but I wish someone had told me this!

2. The admin office

Who is responsible for what in the office? In my department the admins all have different spheres they are in charge of. I was apparently expected to learn this by osmosis, since no one told me, and I often asked the wrong person for different information and/or services.

What is the procedure for getting funds reimbursed? Super important! Find out what you need receipts to have on them BEFORE spending big bucks out of pocket.

Who is responsible for the departmental website? Important, because you want your information up ASAP so you can start attracting students!

3. Teaching

How are exams scheduled? This is important--if you need a room for a big class, you need to know this ASAP so you can make sure you have one for your exams!

When do textbook orders need to be in? I found out by luck--a good thing for my students.

How long do you need to keep student work? If your department or U has a rule, best to find out BEFORE recycling those old exams. Also best to find out if you need to shred the exams before disposal (we do for student privacy).

4. Serving on students' supervising committees

How often/how much supervision? Unlike me, try to find out before you agree to do lots of this. You can say no!

What happens at PhD defenses? Go see one in your department before you are on an examining committee. Really--do it. You never know when you will be asked to join someone's committee for whatever reason. I've already been an examiner twice. The first time could have been highly embarrassing without seeing how the examinations usually go in my department.

What courses do students in your group need to take? This may be non-obvious! At Prodigal U, professors have much more latitude in selecting courses for their trainees at than at my PhD U. I was surprised when I was recruiting and students asked about it--you shouldn't be.

5. Misc stuff

Who can you ask budget questions? You need to know how much you should charge a budget for postdoc benefits. You need to know what the overhead tax is (at Prodigal U, it varies by funding source sometimes). You need to know how much to charge for a student. Is there a difference between residents and non-residents? Citizens and non-citizens? Find out who to ask.

Where are the good/fast/cheap places for coffee/lunch/beer? You need this info ASAP!

How do the projectors work in classrooms? At Prodigal U we have a standard system with a non-obvious user interface. A nice colleague offered to show me how it works before classes started. I had no idea I needed to know this.

A partial list of things I plan to tell my next new colleague so they aren't completely lost while learning the ropes of a new place. My department is full of nice, helpful people, so I didn't have too much trouble once I knew I needed to know this stuff. I asked a lot of questions, and got a lot of help. But it seems to me I had a better orientation to my postdoc at National Lab (in terms of the practicalities) than at Prodigal U, so I know it doesn't have to be this way!

True parent confession

2010-09-12T06:56:00.000-07:00

This weekend, I have a nasty head cold. I will admit what I suspect most parents feel at this time--I was wishing that the children fairy would come and take mine away for a day or two so I could nap on the couch, drink tea, and read trashy novels until I feel better.

Was I ever this clueless?

2010-09-08T07:51:00.000-07:00

I am the advisor for majors joining our department for the first time as part of my departmental service. I will follow this group for the next 3 years. These are college sophomores, supposedly "digital natives", and a TON of work to deal with.

I am setting up some ground rules given that I will be working with these students for 3 years (and yes, these are responses to things people have already tried since August):

1. Never, ever call me at home or on my cellphone, even if you somehow figure out the numbers.

2. No drop ins. Appointments MUST be scheduled in advance.

3. No phone calls. Email only for questions.

4. Email is greatly preferred to face to face appointments, but appointments will be granted upon request.

5. I will not talk to your parents unless you are having an extreme medical emergency.

So far, the rules are working pretty well. Most of my questions are of the hand holding sort (i.e. Am I taking the right classes? What classes are required for X?) Even after all of the ink spilled on how much better these "digital natives" are at electronic communications, many students still can't find the departmental website. Most of my student advisees are fairly independent, but at least 25% were unable to find the "Typical schedules", "Program requirements", and "Course listings" found right there on our Information for Majors page (linked from the home page). Some of it is certainly scars from helicopter parenting, and some of it is laziness. But the number of people who tell me "Thanks for the link--I didn't see it!" is shocking.

I am also very, very surprised by how the students address me. I expected all the "Miss Academic" after teaching last year (although it really pisses me off). I even expected some "Hey Prof!". I didn't expect undergrads to address me by my first name, nor did I expect then to give me an unsolicited nickname. As part of my advising duties, I am gently informing them of our university norm (which is to call professors Dr. Academic or Prof. Academic unless invited to use something else).

Although it is fun to help the clueful students figure out their science electives, and interesting to see how our major works, it is killing me to have to do all this extra work right when classes start and before the fall proposal deadlines!

"Alternate" careers

2010-09-03T06:33:00.001-07:00

Inspired by Februa's awesome post on "alternative" careers for PhDs in the life sciences, I present my post on "alternate" careers in science that require a PhD that I am familiar with (through my own experience and through my grad school classmates). Februa laments that no one ever discusses actual jobs that actual people do at informational seminars in grad school. So this is my list of some actual jobs. For reference, I am in a physical science field where at least 50% of incoming grad students have no plans for the TT, and probably 75%+ have no plans for the TT after grad school. Many of them have vague plans for "industry", which get firmed out (or not) based on their experiences in grad school. My advisor came from industry, so I knew more about it as a student than most PhDs I suspect.

Off the top of my head, I can think of 16 different types of non-academic science jobs I have friends doing with their PhDs.

1. Staff scientist at a National Lab (i.e. my former life). See posts here, here, and here. This type of position is very much like a professor at a research intensive university.

2. Research scientist in industry. Very, very hard to find now that most of the really big corporate labs have shut down. Companies that I know that still have them are in the semiconductor, chemical, pharmaceutical, computer, defense, consumer product, and materials industries though. In startup companies, it is not uncommon for people to be hired to do some research and some other stuff "on the side".

3. Translation engineer (called lots of different things at different companies): A cross-discipline team of scientists and engineers who take discoveries made by more basic researchers and bring them to pilot plants and/or production plants for use in actual products. This one sounds like a really fun job to me. A friend of mine has been doing it for 8+ years and loves it.

4. Application scientist/engineer: I am mostly familiar with this for scientific instrumentation companies. I know 3 or 4 people who do this, and really like it. They spend some fraction of their time supporting researchers (mostly troubleshooting and installing top end systems, but some figuring out how to get their instruments to do specific new tricks requested by customers) and some fraction of their time developing new methods on their instruments and/or improving the instrumentation for the next product iteration. A great job for someone who loves tinkering with equipment. Applications scientists/engineers are the people you talk to when you call a company for technical assistance.

5. Software developer or designer: We use a lot of instrumentation and computation in my research sub-field, so I know a few people who moved into this full time after completing their PhDs. One friend works for a general software development place after doing a computational dissertation on software optimization. Another works for a scientific instrumentation company on their analysis software.

6. Science writer: One of my former classmates is a freelance technical writer/science journalist. The journalism pay sucks, but he finds it more fun. The technical writing pays really, really well (and requires an advanced degree).

7. Program officer at a funding agency: I know 2 people doing this--one left National Lab to become an officer because he wanted to move away from doing research himself. The other started at Booz-Allen as a consultant supporting DARPA after her postdoc, and then liked it so much that she became a program manager herself. Both had extensive research experience prior to becoming a PO. Postdocs are DEFINITELY required for this type of position, and more experience is a big plus so that the POs are familiar with lots of different research environments (where their programs will be carried out).

8. Patent officer: You don't need a PhD for this (a MS is enough I think), but the pay is much better if you have one. You evaluate patents for the US patent office. Sounds really boring to me, but the pay and benefits are excellent.

9. Patent attorney: I know two well--one from my grad school and one from my postdoc. Both got hired by law firms, who then sent them to law school while they worked. A grueling schedule, but they have no law school debt. Again, not something I am really into, but they seem to like the excitement of seeing so much technology on the cutting edge.

10. Contract scientist: The US government hires lots of these. There were quite a few at National Lab. It is a pretty nice job--you get security and benefits from the company, and you get to change projects fairly often so you don't get bored. The most famous of these is SAIC.

11. Science/technology consulting: Booz-Allen is the one I am most familiar with, but there must be others. DARPA uses them to support their POs. My friend who worked there said it was a good job--interesting work, good pay, and interesting opportunities. She organized meetings for her PO (and not just program reviews--she also set up and ran mini-symposia with the leading researchers in the relevant field), went to tons of conferences to keep her PO abreast of new developments in his area, helped screen proposals, helped design calls for proposals, and basically provided technical expertise for her PO to draw on. Required a lot of travel, though.

12. Sales: Scientific equipment sales often requires a PhD. I know one person doing this, and he likes it, because he LOVES talking to people and meeting new people. Requires extensive knowledge of the techniques possible with the equipment to be sold. If you've ever seen a PI buying instrumentation (particularly the stuff worth $75k+), the sales people probably had PhDs so they can actually talk about the experiments with future customers.

13. Formulations scientist/engineer: many products (like medicines, food, coatings, and personal care products) are a mix of active and inactive ingredients. The formulations team designs the final formula to get the best activity profile for the active ingredients while also obtaining desirable color, feel, taste, texture, etc. They also aim for the best cost/most environmentally friendly/best processibility possible. Lots of physical science and characterization is involved (outside of the synthetic parts).

14. Quality control: In lots of industries, PhD level positions set up and modify the procedures that will be used for quality monitoring. A friend does this for a particular industry using the instrument we used as a workhorse in our PhD research. He selects the brand, type, and models for the instrumentation to be used worldwide by his company, establishes what tests will be done at what points in the manufacturing process, establishes the pass/fail criteria, and develops training protocols so that the same tests can be carried out of different facilities worldwide with the same results. To do this, he must keep up with the latest and greatest in technology changes (which is really fun), and occasionally gets patents and/or papers (depending on which departments he is working with).

15. Defense contract work: The big ones hire scientists and engineers with lots of different backgrounds to make sure they can develop their huge programs from start to finish. I only know two people who do this type of work. One is a designer who works on a tiny piece of a huge project (think designing the landing gear on a new plane). The other specializes in coatings, and helps decide what coatings will be used for various products and how they will put the coating on the final object.

16. Entrepreneur: I know a guy who licensed IP from his PhD research on very favorable terms from his University. He set up a small company selling a niche scientific products for research labs that is now doing quite well. Requires access to some capital, and massive risk tolerance (so I would never have done this), but he seems happy. Before starting his company, he worked for a year as a PhD-level sales person in a company selling related products to learn more about how it all worked.

UPDATED: Fixed grammatical and spelling errors that annoyed me.

PIs, students, and academic misconduct

2010-08-31T08:23:00.000-07:00

With the Marc Hauser misconduct situation making waves all over the blogosphere, and even at the NYT, academic fraud has been on my mind. Yesterday, DM reminded us about the collateral damage academic misconduct leaves in its wake, namely the careers of the blameless trainees. In a Science update on the 2006 case of Elizabeth Goodwin, who was a biologist at the University of Wisconsin (UW), Madison when she falsified data and was turned in by her students. Goodwin's punishment, in which she

...has agreed not to participate in federally funded research for 3 years and will pay $50,000 to the Department of Health and Human Services, according to the Justice Department press release.

Seems minor compared to what happened to her students. In doing the right and proper thing and blowing the whistle on their cheating and lying PI, the six students lost pretty much everything:

But the outcome for several students, who were told they had to essentially start over, was unenviable. One, Chantal Ly, had gone through 7 years of graduate school and was told that much of her work was not useable and that she had to start a new project for her Ph.D. (The reason wasn't necessarily because of falsified data but rather, Ly and the others thought, because Goodwin stuck by results that were questionable.) Along with two of the others, she quit graduate school. Allen moved to a school in Colorado. Just two students chose to stay at UW.

Ethics aside (where it seems obvious that turning in a cheater is the right thing to do), whistleblowing is really important in that it ends the cheating behavior ASAP, and stops the literature from being polluted with additional incorrect and falsified results. As noted in this 2006 article in Science, even retracted papers endure and pick up citations. I've noticed in my class last year that students will summarize and cite retracted papers in their coursework, unaware that the information contained is incorrect. From the outcomes in the Goodwin case, it seems that scientists expect trainees who become aware of misconduct to take one for the team, and give up their careers in favor of the benefit to science as a whole. This sucks. How can giving up on your desired career compare to 3 years of giving up Federal support and a $50k fine?

Whistleblowing is immensely risky as a student--there is such an imbalance of power, that the tendency is to assume sour grapes on the part of the student and not that the "proven" PI is cheating (maybe because outright fraud is so rare?). The case much be really, really strong for students to go forward. The easiest (and most self-serving) outcome is to switch groups as soon as possible for the student, before any taint or investigation occurs. Goodwin's students were really brave and really strong to go ahead and turn her in.

On the other hand, maintaining the meaning and value of a PhD degree is important as well. Clearly Goodwin's students can't just get degrees for time served, given that their mentor screwed them over and prevented them from actually doing scholarship. That said, the six students had enough scientific training to notice the inconsistencies and collect enough data to prove a case to the point that Goodwin did not contest the charges. That should count for something, right?

Marc Hauser was also turned in by trainees. He gets a year off from Harvard, and they get?

Paper managing software

2010-08-27T16:44:00.002-07:00

Endnote has pissed me off for the last time (I hope)! Now that I have a really large library, it is difficult to find things in it. I sometimes have formatting issues, and it can be annoying to add something to the library. Basically, the software is layer on layer of new stuff on old, and it is just not working for me anymore. Now that I am finishing up an old collaboration (where we used to send each other drafts with Endnote libraries), I am taking this chance to try something else.

Lots of people recommended Papers to me (since I have an old Mac in my office), but I find I am using the Mac less and less (since my lab instrumentation is all Windows based, and I like to look at the raw data occasionally). It looks like I will probably start hooking my PC subnotebook up to my big monitor. So I want at least a cross-platform solution.

I decided to try out Mendeley, and I like it so far. I let it grab my paper data out of the pdf files, which took a little while. Once set up, I found that while most of the details it grabbed were correct, I do need to look at entries before using them. Rather than wasting time fixing stuff, I am fixing entries as I use them. There is a tool to look papers up by title in Google Scholar if the data grabbed from the pdf is incorrect, and that is pretty handy.

I am not used to using anything but Adobe to read pdfs, but the ability to add notes to my papers (and highlight text) seems like it could be pretty handy. It is also possible to share annotated papers, which I may eventually do with my group. I signed up for the Web account, but I don't know if I will use it. For now, I just want something that can insert references properly into my manuscripts (I am not a LaTeX person) and search through my library of pdfs.

I'll post a more extensive review after I use Mendeley for the manuscript I started yesterday. Anyone else have paper/reference management software suggestions?

Impressions and realities on the job

2010-08-25T12:42:00.000-07:00

Inspired by posts by Dr. Isis, Gerty-Z, and Prof-like Substance, plus my own panic here in year 2 at Prodigal U, I've been thinking about training and preparation along my career track.

When I was an undergrad, I did research. I worked in a lab for 1.5 years (full time over the summer), participated in group meetings, did my share of lab maintenance, and worked with grad students. I thought I knew what grad school would be like. I was completely wrong--grad school threw me for a total loop. I felt lost (there was no clear path to get to my degree). I had all this time, but yet no time at all. Progress was really, really slow, and I was so clueless. I had no idea how to manage my time effectively without classes and deadlines to help me. I didn't know how to properly test things or document them, so I had to repeat a whole series of experiments. I didn't know about all the time TAing takes, all the different pressures on students to study and finish experiments and do this side project quickly and train this new student and help this undergrad in lab while still making progress on my own stuff.

When I was a grad student, I worked with postdocs. I thought I knew what being a postdoc would be like. I was wrong. As a postdoc, I was now THE expert on my technique. My National Lab colleagues were relying on me, ME! to tell them if certain experiments were possible, if certain data was reasonable, if certain timelines were realistic. I had no backup. There was no one else on the project who knew my technique (which is what I was brought in for), but I knew nothing of the system I was studying (which is what I went to learn). I panicked quite a bit when I realized that, then knuckled down and did it. Being a postdoc (at least in my case) was a lot more responsibility and a lot more independence than being a student. It took a lot of getting used to be considered an expert after all those years as a student.

When I was a student, we used to sit in the lab and wonder what our advisor did all day. We would laugh about it actually. Now, I am drowning in it.

What is a degree worth?

2010-08-23T07:14:00.000-07:00

There were a lot of interesting points in the comments of my last post from Dr. G, Hope, and GMP about the value of a PhD, and of higher education in general. I agree with the sentiments expressed by all three that in an ideal world, all PhD candidates would be trained to be scholars to the same standards, regardless of where they started from or plan to end up.

But reality is a lot messier than that. There are many pressures that support the admission of "unqualified" students to grad school, including state funding per student, the need for warm bodies as TAs or RAs, or the desire to grow a program. There are more spots (at least in my STEM field) than truly qualified applicants. Students with good recommendations, great grades, and research experience are admitted immediately, often without the whole admissions committee seeing the file. This doesn't fill up our whole program.

There are two kinds of "unqualified" that we will consider admitting--students with mediocre to poor grades, but great research experiences/recommendations and students with mediocre grades from well regarded programs (students with mediocre grades from unknown programs are just not admitted). The first group are often students who had to work a lot in school, students with learning issues (like diagnosed or undiagnosed dyslexia), or students who had to learn English while undergrads in an English language program.

The second group is full of students who got into a good undergrad program and then coasted and directionless students. Some of these students will be late bloomers, and be wonderful grad students--that is the case for one of my collaborators. In this case, the student had pretty poor grades from a pretty good undergrad program (which was used as an excuse for admission). The poor grades were clearly due to lack of effort, since this student discovered true passion for the field in their senior year as an undergrad, and excelled in research as a grad student. Alas, this is generally the exception and not the rule. The result is a department full of mediocre, poorly motivated, and difficult students with a few gems that are heavily sought after.

A huge additional problem for faculty members is the quality of the BS degree (which is no fault of the students, to be sure). As GMP said,

Another issue is the complete devaluation of the BS degree. It's become almost what a high-school degree used to be 30 years ago. Now you can't do almost anything without a BS; also, in order for everyone to get a BS, it has become watered down, with emphasis on breadth rather than depth, so basically all in depth technical training is now deferred to grad school.

When I was a grad student, I and my fellow US-educated students noticed how far ahead technically the European and Asian students were than we were. We had all received good grades, and did well in our programs, but the emphasis on liberal arts meant there was a lot less time for core instruction in the details of our field. This is a mixed blessing--several of my European colleagues are jealous that they never got to take classes in history, literature, or art (which I thoroughly enjoyed myself). On the other hand, I lacked a lot of depth in my field. This causes a few problems down the line. First, incoming students must be treated as if they have limited technical knowledge and skills at best, which means lots of training for people running labs. Second, lots of people don't really know/understand what the field is really like, which leads to a relatively high attrition rate of people abandoning their programs after a year or two.

This devaluation of the BS degree means that the MS and PhD have followed suit. Since the BS students are coming in with less knowledge, more of the PhD has to be spent on bringing them up to speed and less on more advanced training. We also don't want PhD training to last more than 5 years or so. Given that a fair fraction of the admitted students are less qualified, and that we want to maintain the value of degrees in our department, we end up tailoring expectations and experiences of the PhD to the students' end goals. Otherwise, too many would not make it through.

Personally, I will not grant a PhD to anyone not capable of doing PhD-level technical work, but I can already see that some of my students will be better than others at things like writing (papers and proposals), idea generation, working independently and other scientific skills. The department has a line in the sand to get a degree, but in practice, this is worked out by the PhD committee. What are the requirements of a PhD scientist? How can we make uniform standards for people with uneven skills? As a committee member, it is really, really hard to see someone working hard who will not make it. Sometimes, it isn't apparent until the student has been around for a while. I am a replacement committee member for someone on the bubble (who had been in our program for 3-4 years), and it is really difficult.

And what about my standards? Should I not allow a brilliant researcher who writes poorly in English to graduate? What about someone who is wonderful at scholarship in general, but is weak at generating new research ideas? These people would be valuable assets in the right position, but will never be successful faculty members because they are good scientists, but not necessarily good scholars. They have PhD level training and PhD level skills in some aspects of science. Do we restrict PhDs only to people who are capable of TT-like positions? I don't think there is an easy answer.

Overproduction of PhDs?

2010-08-20T10:22:00.001-07:00

I saw this interesting post and follow-up comments at Inside Higher Ed by Monica Harris, a professor of Psychology. In her post, Prof. Harris discusses the poor academic job market in psychology and how she tried to warn potential students about it. In the end, she says:

After a few years of watching the academic job market collapse into a seeming death spiral, I also started to wonder whether my "full disclosure" strategy of trying to scare off prospective graduate students was adequate. I started to entertain the possibility that if the problem was too many qualified applicants for too few jobs, then perhaps the responsible – even ethical – course of action would be for me to stop contributing to the oversupply of applicants.

So, a few weeks ago I revised my departmental web page to include the following statement: "Notice to prospective graduate students: I will not be accepting new students in my lab for the indefinite future."

This seems like a total overreaction to me. Now, I am in a STEM field, so even though the academic job market is poor, there is still pretty good demand for Masters and PhD holders in my field outside of academia, especially in non-research positions. According to the scientific societies that track such things, unemployment is low among PhD-holders, and in general remains much lower than the general unemployment rate even in times of recession.

Furthermore, what percentage of grad students go in wanting to become academics? In my field, it is pretty low--maybe 30%? None of my current students (or in fact any of the many students I have interviewed for my group) have said they want to be professors, which is similar to what GMP has experienced in her field. Maybe this is not the case for the social sciences and humanities. Even so, I find it hard to believe that the skills of a PhD in anything (statistics, research skills, writing, analysis) are not transferrable to other job areas.

In my own experience, I have a friend who went to a top-10 University, published in Science, and uses his PhD to teach high school (which was his plan all along--he just loved his field, and wanted to spend a little time delving into it before starting his career). Another former classmate is now an ordained clergy person, after getting a PhD in our field (also for the love of it). This on top of all the PhD holders I know in law, business, non-research science, and other occupations by choice, not as a last resort. Given the HUGE variety of motivations for getting a PhD, it seems kind of patronizing to say "I am going to save you from yourself, kid." Especially in fields where the main cost is opportunity cost, and grad stipends are livable.

I can understand the feeling that there are too many PhDs, but I think that is because there are more people in general, and more of those people than ever before have opportunities that used to be reserved exclusively for rich, white, Christian, heterosexual men. I do not believe that academia is a pyramid scheme, any more than I believe admissions to prestigious Universities are a pyramid scheme. My fear is that if we restrict admissions to PhD programs, we will go backwards on the progress we have made towards diversity. Tightening admissions requirements would screw over the disadvantaged in our society. I would much, much rather allow people to make their own choices and roll the dice on a TT job if they so desire.

Tenure (on a personal level)

2010-08-18T07:18:00.000-07:00

FSP and GMP both discussed tenure, why it is important, and why it is unlikely to go away any time soon. On a more personal note, I am contemplating when I should go up myself. Since I am not a brand new scientist, when I started at Prodigal U, I negotiated the right to go up for tenure any time after my 3rd year (though I can wait the normal 6 if I want to). If I am denied early, I can go up again at the normal time (in theory with no penalty).

I was talking in the hall a few days ago to 2 of my colleagues, one tenured and one not about the issue of going up early. My tenured colleague asked "why would you want to?". My untenured colleague said "I totally would if I could."

On a personal level, I would like to have the certainty of tenure. We moved to Prodigal City, which is far from National Lab City, because I am pretty sure I will get tenure here. I have no desire to uproot my family again after 6 years, especially since the Prodigal kids will be in school by then. Going up early means fewer years of tentative roots just in case. Professionally, I'd get a 5-6% raise (which is nice, but not really a motivator). When recruiting, I'd be able to tell students I have tenure (which can be a big deal to some students).

So what are the costs to early tenure? It is true that in my department assistant professors are somewhat protected from onerous service obligations, so I'd be giving that up. I would be giving up eligibility for "young investigator" and "new investgator" awards, but I am already not eligible for any of the shiny Federal young investigator awards anyway, since I am too far out from earning my PhD (which is totally fair, since I have a lot more experience than a new grad). If I am denied early, that could put a black mark on me for future rounds.

In the short term, going up after 3 or 4 years won't really change what I am doing. I feel like I had a great first year, and would like to capitalize on that momentum. If I can get some more funding next year, maybe it becomes worth it to push for tenure after 3 years in case I have a dry spell later. So, what would you do?

Using startup money

2010-08-13T07:28:00.000-07:00

I am through my first year and also mostly through my startup money. I have a little "nest egg" of about $20k that I plan to nurse along for emergencies/a little boost sometime in the future. I've been told that the accountants at Prodigal U start to get antsy about unspent startup after 4-5 years, so I have a few years to worry about it.

When I started my position, I saw lots of advice about balance, teaching, recruiting, setting up, etc, but not much about how to best use startup funds. Startup funds are magic money--not tied to any particular project or any particular budget, they can be spent on anything. This type of money is so amazingly rare in academia that I am unlikely to ever have significant amounts of it again. Watching funds disappear from the account can be painful, since they are in effect irreplaceable.

When I started at Prodigal U, all I had was my startup money to buy equipment and supplies, to pay salaries, to travel, and to cover user fees for instrument access. The temptation (at least for a cheapskate like me) is to horde it--what if nothing else comes in? My new chair and my PhD advsior both told me that it is more common for new profs to cheap out on buying stuff than to burn the startup too quickly, and that you can always ask the department to help you pay for students, but you can never get wasted research time back, so I decided to spend. I took a "burn the ships" approach to my startup. I would turbocharge my first year by spending on anything that would get me going faster and worry about the funding situation later.

This was a deeply considered decision. To be at the cutting edge in my research area requires some very expensive equipment. I decided to buy most of what I will need rather than depend on instrument access in other labs. I was thinking 1) I have priority usage, so we can work 24 hours a day if necessary, 2) we can modify the equipment as needed and make permanent installations of commonly used setups, and 3) equipment money is hard to get and user fees can really add up. That said, burning through my startup like this means I cannot hire a postdoc or technician until I get some decently funded proposals.

So far, it has been a good decision. My equipment is humming along and producing nice data. I had 3 proposals funded this year (1 new investigator, 1 solo small grant, and one as co-PI with 2 other profs). None are huge money, but I can probably support 4 grad students with what I have in hand. I have 2 grad students plus myself as personnel (augmented by 3 summer students), and I will probably take 2 more grad students if I can find the right ones. And then I need to find more money.

The postdoc thing weighs on my mind a bit--would I be going faster if I had one? In my field, postdocs last 1-3 years, so it just didn't seem worth it to me to invest so much time into someone so temporary in the very beginning. Mine is a student-heavy strategy that is only possible because my first 2 students are doing amazingly well in terms of research productivity. Sometimes I wish I had hired a postdoc right away, especially when things are not going well in the lab and there is troubleshooting to be done. But then I see some colleagues waiting around for instrument time while we are using our own, and I am happy again.

Looking back at grad school

2010-08-10T10:40:00.000-07:00

Inspired by Ambivalent Academic, as a submission for Samia's zomg grad skool carnival!!!1, and in honor of the 10th anniversary of my PhD defense (yikes, has it been that long!), a look at the things I took too long to learn in grad school (or things I should have learned in grad school, but learned later):

1. Ask questions. In high school, classwork came really, really easy to me (you can hate me now). In college, I quickly learned things would be different, but I also had this notion I should keep my ignorance to myself. This notion followed me into grad school and is dumb, dumb, dumb!

Your professors want you to come to office hours to discuss the course material (assuming you are doing all the work and keeping up in class). They especially want you to dig deeper into the material and have fun with it, and then come ask questions about your digging. Going to seminars with fancy, famous speakers is great, but only if you get something out of it! If you are confused, ask. I guarantee you are not the only one. I was one of those people who was always afraid to look stupid, and I missed out on my opportunity to ask the experts questions about their science. Now I have to learn that stuff myself, without the benefit of an expert.

2. Attend seminars (and pay attention). You never know what you will end up doing. It is really important to keep up in areas other than your research sub-field. I was so sick of my project after my PhD that I completely changed sub-fields for my postdoc. I was able to pick something else I was excited by from the great seminars I saw as a student, which narrowed down my interests to a manageable degree.

3. Push to attend meetings. In my PhD program, students could attend one meeting on the department. This was not advertised, and my PhD advisor only really encouraged his Golden Boy (tm) to attend meetings with him. Well, fuck him--I want to go too! I asked around a little, and lo and behold there was a fund to help students with tightfisted advisors travel.

When I found out about this money (it is a dollar amount per student), I was pretty annoyed, but I also wanted to get the most out of it, since advisor wasn't going to give me anything else. By proper budgeting, I used my money to attend 1) local society meeting, 2) International technique meeting which happened to be in my city (I volunteered to help out to defray costs), 3) national society meeting in a far away city (also did some volunteer work there), and 4) local society meeting in a nearby city. If there truly is no travel money in your department, apply for grad travel awards.

Meetings are super important for networking, job hunting, inspiration and feedback. You need to go if you want to stay in science!

4. Decide what you want to do with your degree. I was one of those idealistic idiots who just wanted to get paid to do research without any real plan for what happens next other than "industrial research, I think." This post show what a huge role dumb luck played in my career. This is not a good idea. You should think about what you want to do next so you can tailor your PhD to get the experience you need to actually reach that goal. Do you want to teach? You might want to do some more advanced TAing. Do you want to work in industry? You should meet with all the speakers from industry and try to work on an industrial collaboration if possible. Work at a government lab? You need to work on getting contacts. Whatever your goal is, there are things you can do to help yourself.

5. Let your advisor help you. It is what they are there for, and not just in the lab. You need to communicate when you are having problems. Your PI isn't a mind-reader. An example--I was assigned to TA a very time consuming class that I hated TAing. I was assigned it 3 semesters in a row. The 4th semester, they assigned it to me again (over my objections). I complained to my PI and he said "I didn't know you hated it so much! You should have said something earlier." He got on the phone. An hour later, I had a much better TA assignment, and I never was assigned my hated class again (yes, I TAed a lot--see point 6).

6. Be aware of your PIs career trajectory. My PI was winding down. He took a lot of students in a short period, but soon after stopped taking new ones. And he stopped writing new proposals too. So this meant we were cash strapped. If I looked carefully, I would have seen that he was getting towards the end of his active research career, but I fell in love with my project and didn't care. Projects come and go, but your funding comes from your PI. If they stop writing, you start TAing (in departments where that is possible).

7. You are at a major University--take advantage! Even though you are in grad school, you can probably see great theater, attend wonderful music performances and enjoy great art. Take advantage of the other things found at PhD U. You definitely have time to do stuff outside the lab, so go for it. Your PhD is a marathon, not a race. You don't want to burn out early. I actually took an intro class in another department for fun my second to last year, though this option is not available everywhere. I definitely started paying more attention to the art museum after 3 years at PhD U. Why did it take me so long?

8. Pick your advisor, not a project. See #6. I don't regret my choice, but I also followed an a-typical career path for a TT prof. Your labmates are also crucial, so make sure you meet your potential group before you join.

9. At most Universities, you can find someone to deliver pizza to any building at any time. And nothing tastes better at 2 am than hot, fresh pizza with your labmates!

10. Have fun! I really enjoyed my first 4 years of grad school. I loved learning, I loved my project, I had hobbies, I had a life. I could even save some money (I bought a few shares of Apple stock at its historic low. If I had more money to burn then, I would be rich now!) The hours could be grueling, but I was also working almost completely independently and following my interests. My labmates were smart and fun. If it is all painful, you should quit. Life is too short to suffer for some letters after your name. If you hate everything about grad school, you should reconsider a career in science.

Feeling refreshed!

2010-08-09T18:39:00.000-07:00

For the first time in a long time, I am feeling relaxed (or at least I was, before I went in to Prodigal U today). Limiting Internet access to 1 hour a day greatly enhanced my vacation. I could handle important work mails (and not abandon my students), but blow off unimportant stuff. I didn't feel cut off, but I didn't feel too connected to work. And the weather in our vacation spot was great all week!

In my absence, I see the science blogging arena has blown up. I'll have to get around to fixing my blogroll sometime this week.

Vacation!

2010-08-03T10:34:00.001-07:00

I am away this week and trying to limit my Internet access. Thus far, I've only been online once a day for about an hour. I am going to call that a success, since I am pretty aware of my Internet addiction. Have a nice week!

Next year's job market

2010-07-29T10:02:00.000-07:00

In my department at Prodigal U, we've been on a hiring binge. Over the last 10-12 years, we've run 1 to 3 searches a year (not all successful). How are these jobs opening?

1. Retirement! We've had three models--profs who really retire and no longer come in, profs forced out (he finally ran out of money after his last grant was not renewed) and profs who are tapering off to retirement but take Emeritus status even with a grant or two to make way for fresh blood (we have 2 or 3 of these). These voluntary Emeritus profs are really considering the interests of the department in going Emeritus, and as a bonus often end up as wonderful mentors (if you care enough to make room for someone, you also care enough that your replacement does well).

2. Old prof dies at the bench (yes, this happened--he had a heart attack in the lab at age 85 and died a week or so later in the hospital).

3. Non-deadwood, non-research active. These are the profs our Chair has been successful at getting the Dean to open lines to "replace". They are still very active in service to the department and University, and take much higher than normal teaching loads on service classes to free up the more active folks to teach the majors/grad students and have lighter loads. These people are really helpful in accommodating sabbaticals and family leaves without crushing the TT profs with work, so I really appreciate them!

4. Expansion. Prodigal U is growing both the number of undergrads and grad students, and as a service department, we got some extra TT lines in the past.

That said, I think our run of hiring is about to end. Given how Wall Street ate most people's retirement money, I am thinking the wave of retirements is likely to end for a while. Let's face it, unless you do research that requires arduous field work, most STEM professorial jobs are not particularly strenuous. It is easy to hang on for a long, long time, especially if your retirement savings have evaporated.

#2 is not only a random occurrence, but it seems really unlikely to happen again soon!

We've been really lucky to have a Dean who is interested in increasing the research profile at Prodigal U, so we've gotten to add some TT faculty to replace not just retirements, but also some of the research inactive faculty in the department. Now that Prodigal U is in budget crunch mode, we're not getting any more of these. And any expansion workload issues will similarly have to be eaten by the department.

I fear for those on the job market this year.

I write like

2010-07-28T07:01:00.000-07:00

I write like
Cory Doctorow

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Hey cool! I've always enjoyed Cory Doctorow's work. 0wnz0red is one of my favorite short stories, Boing Boing is an awesome site (though it is hard for me to keep up!), and I really respect all the work he has done with the Creative Commons license.

Who is an author?

2010-07-26T08:05:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about this issue today because I am having a disagreement with a collaborator about the author list of a paper. This collaborator considers themselves to be "strict" with authorship. I think they are being a total jerk. Our disagreement is over the status of technician on a paper.

At National Lab, like at a university, the PI gets to decide who is an author. My inclination, which is how things worked in my branch at National Lab is to list everyone who contributed to the work as an author. This means that technicians are authors, not just listed in the acknowledgements. This is different from the definition of an inventor for patent purposes (an inventor has to have made an intellectual contribution, which may or may not be true of a technician, depending on the tech and the lab). My collaborator (from a different branch at National Lab) prefers to use the inventor rules for authorship, and relegates everyone else (even some of the people who actually generated the data) to acknowledgments.

Thus the argument--I want my technician listed as an author. Collaborator wants my technician in the acknowledgements only. My technician took data that is critical to the paper, which I think earns authorship. My technician did this under my direction, and followed my protocols without changes, which my collaborator thinks means no intellectual contribution (and for a patent, they would be right). This was a joint project, so we are co-PIs, and I can't just override their objections. I am hoping to end this disagreement quickly (and amicably, but since I am no longer at National Lab, I will fight pretty hard for my tech, especially since collaborator will have limited opportunity to screw me over in the future).

The broader question of who is an author is interesting to me as a new TT prof. I've been in labs where authorship was treated as a prize to be handed out. All morality aside, this leads to awful group dynamics. But making everyone in the group an author is just as bad--why work when you can expand the CV for nothing? I've also been in groups where the bar to authorship is pretty high, and this can lead to reluctance to help out a groupmate with something time consuming. I've been fortunate to work mostly with people who are upfront about authorship rules, and don't renege at the end. I've heard many horror stories, though.

I am in a sub-field where collaboration is the norm, since our experiments require multiple disparate areas of expertise. A typical paper in my research area will have 3 to 10 co-authors. My own philosophy is to give proper credit as much as possible, both for ethical reasons, and because I find that people are far more willing to work with me when they know they will be properly credited. In my group, I keep track of what everyone is working on, and I also encourage my students to let me know when someone has made a substantial contribution that might be invisible to me as the PI so we give proper credit where credit is due. After leaving National Lab, I see how truly important this is, since I need to trust that my former colleagues will do the right thing with the projects I left behind. In my previous collaborations, each PI submitted a list of contributors in order of importance, and that combined list became the author list. I see now that I will need to discuss this issue right up front, since fighting about it at the endpoint is a real drain.

Affiliation question

2010-07-22T15:22:00.001-07:00

Quick reader poll--I am getting ready to submit the first of three papers I hope to write from data I took at National Lab. I did a substantial amount of data analysis here at Prodigal U, and of course, I wrote this paper here. If you were me, would you:

1) Put National Lab as your affiliation with a current address at Prodigal U?

2) Put both National Lab and Prodigal U as affiliations?

3) Put Prodigal U as your affiliation?

My colleagues at National Lab say I should do what is best for me careerwise, and don't worry about it too much. I would prefer to do #3, but I think that is misleading. I am leaning towards #2, since I did a bunch of the work at Prodigal U, but I suspect #1 is probably the proper thing to do (since all of the data originated there). Opinions?

Updated to add: I should also add that it is not uncommon for Fed scientists who move on to use only their new affiliations, since many Fed labs have irritating and/or lengthy internal review and release approval requirements. This can be reduced by minimizing the Federal affiliations of the authors (and thus the number of required approvals).

What I Look for in a Graduate Student

2010-07-19T10:29:00.001-07:00

Here at Prodigal U, it is the season for recruiting students. In my department, we admit students without an adviser. Students arrive in August, and meet with different professors to choose an adviser (and select appropriate classes for September). This is a relatively common method in my field, although at other universities (like PhD U), students pick advisers after a semester (and TA for support). Some (many?) students arrive already knowing who they want to work with, and some have already arranged it with their future adviser, which is perfectly fine. As a new prof, I ask for meetings with all the students interested in my research area, since I want to see as many people as possible to find good fits for my group. After last year, I have a much better idea of what I am looking for. Last year, I kind of did this a little "seat of the pants", and lucked out. This year, I have been thinking a bit more about recruiting ahead of time. So what am I looking for?

1. Previous research experience. It is really hard to tell if a student who has a high GPA will be good at research. If they already have some experience, I can get a reference from their previous mentor(s). I can also ask them to talk about their research to get more information about how they think about research and science. They also have some experience with the difficulties of research, and have more of an idea about what life in the lab will be like. I need fast starters, since I am just starting out, so this is a big one.

2. Good to great GPA. Grad students need to get a B in their classes to get credit towards a degree here. I want students who know how to study, learn quickly, and are motivated enough to do a good job on something required for their degree (even if they hate classes). I also don't want my students to be so absorbed in passing their classes that they don't get going in the lab. I am totally fine with students who started out poorly, but did well as juniors and seniors. The opposite trend I would find disqualifying.

3. Self-motivation. I am still working out how to select for this. I am a very hands off manager. I don't like to micromanage, and I don't want to have to enforce working hours/face time. I want students who like this kind of workstyle and can work efficiently in it.

4. Works well with others. We do a lot of collaborative work. Students looking for the lone wolf at the bench experience won't get it in my group, and I don't want headaches from territorial drama if I can avoid it. I talk about working with others up front. I also like to ask students about group projects they may have worked on--what they did, what the goal was, if the goal was reached, and where the problems were.

5. Excitement about working on a research project. I don't need my students to be super-peppy or anything, but if they look and sound bored when considering the possibilities in my lab, I will assume they are bored, and my group is not a good fit.

Last year I was lucky, and had 4 people interested in joining my group, of whom I took 2. I have been in "addition by subtraction" situations at work before, so I definitely know I would rather have no one than a poor fit for the group, especially now that the data is flowing nicely. I would like to add 1 or 2 more students this year, and then I will be at the limit of what I can afford without kicking the external support up a notch or 2. Any suggestions for other things to think about when recruiting?

How I got my National Lab job

2010-07-15T06:34:00.000-07:00

A couple of people have mailed me asking how I got a position at my National Lab. If you are looking for a good guide, I'd have to say don't look at me--I got my job through dumb luck. When I was finishing up, I thought I didn't want to go into academia, so I ruled out academic postdocs as a first choice option. I was hopelessly naive as a grad student and didn't even start looking for a job until I had less than a year left. I was also hopeless at networking. After I set my defense date, I posted my resume to monster.com and my CV to a few science specific sites. I used the on campus recruitment office to sign up for screening interviews with industry, sent my resume out to lots of different companies, and signed up at scientific meetings as a job seeker.

I had lots of screening interviews both on campus and at meetings. I had on-site interviews at companies in the semiconductor, pharmaceutical, and chemical/materials industries (oh the stories--industrial hiring is no more efficient than academia in my experience). I still had nothing lined up.

I was invited to interview for the postdoc position I eventually took at National Lab after my future postdoc advisor saw my CV on one of the science sites (that is the dumb luck part). Postdoc Advisor was looking for someone who could do the type of measurements I specialized in on a system completely different from my PhD field. National Lab needed my skills, I was sick of my sub-field and wanted to change research directions, so it was a match.

National Lab flew me out for a 1 day interview. This was similar to how I've seen academic postdoc interviews described--I gave a seminar on my PhD research, interviewed with the PIs of my potential project, and met other postdocs/staff working at the lab. As I later found out a a postdoc/staff member, the other postdocs/staff had veto power, but only for a specific reason. The decision was made almost exclusively by the PIs. I had lunch at the lab, but was on my own after 5 pm. It certainly was less tiring than either the TT or industrial on-sites I went to, and I got to see a lot more of the area, since I had free time the afternoon/evening before and evening after my interview.

A week later, I was offered the job. My offer was contingent on me applying for and receiving a National Research Council Research Associateship, which I did. If you are interested in getting one, I highly, highly suggest you find a mentor and work backwards (like what I did). I know that there are lots of people who cold apply to these programs (after all, the pay is awesome, and the science is hot), but every single postdoc at National Lab had one of these (or something else similar), and every single postdoc I have ever met there was recruited first, and applied second. I have never met a postdoc who applied for a research associateship without getting a mentor first, even at other national labs. I think it is a waste of time to apply first. I can't emphasize that enough (because the application is kind of long and annoying).

After I took the job, National Lab paid for my move. I moved and started working. I worked 10-12 hours a day, but only 5 days a week most weeks, and learned how to work much more efficiently so I could keep my weekends free. About 15-25% of the postdocs at National Lab are offered staff positions at the end (mostly to replace retirements--the average age of employees at National Lab is high). They are really into "try before you buy" because firing someone is very, very hard (this seems to be true everywhere--I know lots of industrial scientists who complain about deadwood). More established people who are beyond the postdoc level are brought in as contractors to make sure it will work out before being offered a staff position, at least at National Lab. I've heard this is pretty common at most national labs, but I only know my lab really well.

Helping students become scientists

2010-07-13T10:18:00.000-07:00

One of the most difficult tasks I am finding as a new TT professor is in teaching my students how to be scientists. Teaching them the nuts and bolts of how to do experiments--no problem. Showing them how to do a literature search--piece of cake. Helping them prepare talks and posters--more of a challenge, but I am up to it. Getting them to think like scientists, and not just people who can repeat protocols accurately--this is the hard part.

My group has reached the point where our lab is (mostly) set up and everyone is making some progress on their projects. Meetings are much more fun now, with new data to talk about nearly all the time. One of my grad students is doing extremely well--she is thinking up new experiments, figuring out how to test out ideas, bringing in new literature to think about, and generally owning her project. Some of this is of course very raw, but I can see how she is starting to think scientifically and creatively.

My other grad student is making good progress on data acquisition (which is of course important), but still needs a lot more guidance. He only does experiments we have discussed in detail before hand, and never does any kind of follow up (beyond rudimentary data analysis) on his own. He is happy to go ahead and do more, but only after I tell him what to do next. I find myself sending him papers on his project (which is normal), but he never looks to see how they have been cited, unless directed to specifically (which I've done many times). He isn't lazy by any means, just not very independent. I know he has only been in the group a year, but my summer students seem more independent (if less experienced) than he does.

I am thinking about my approach to mentoring--I have a fairly hands off approach that seems to be working well with 4 of my 5 lab peeps. I talk to everyone at least once a day informally, and walk through the lab a few times in case people want to talk. Maybe this student needs some more structure? Some more limited independent projects to try on before tackling his PhD project? I know that not all approaches work for all people, and I don't want this student to fall through the cracks through my own failure, since he is smart, interested in science, and a hard worker. My own experiences are not a good guide, since both my PhD advisor and my postdoc advisor were extremely hands off (more even than I am!).

Tenure and teaching

2010-07-07T19:09:00.000-07:00

The past two days, there has been an interesting discussion on tenure on a couple of the blogs I read. Drugmonkey discussed the decline in the number of TT positions. Female Science Professor discussed student input on tenure decisions and then teaching vs research and tenure, specifically in the context of a research school.

As I commented over on DM's post, I personally would not have moved to Prodigal U from National Lab without the possibility of tenure. I took a large paycut to come to Prodigal U, plus I had already passed the probational period in my Federal job. In my field, the pay goes as industry >> government > academia. In order to attract top scientists, universities need to offer some perks instead of monetary compensation (and research freedom alone won't cut it--it is possible to get that elsewhere with higher pay). Tenure also provides protections for faculty to research controversial topics, to be outspoken about university governance when necessary, and to be active in the local community without reprisals. The same type of job security is available at unionized workplaces and to government employees (at least at the Federal level), so it certainly isn't unique to academia.

FSP discusses another (and more interesting to me) question--should an excellent teacher but mediocre researcher get tenure at a research university? In my opinion probably not. In my comment to FSP's post, I was willing to consider the rest of the file, but we all (at a research school) know that research is the most important piece of research/teaching/tenure. How much should teaching count? Education is an important piece of the university's mission, so I strongly support denying tenure to bad teachers. Once a professor hits adequate, it should be enough to get tenure at a research university.

The situation of the mediocre researcher /excellent teacher at a research school generates a lot more discussion than the reverse, since it seems pretty clear (to me anyway) that an excellent researcher/mediocre teacher is likely to get tenure. There are a few possible backstories for our mediocre researcher /excellent teacher at a research school now going up for tenure:

1. MR/ET tried their best to reach the standards for tenure at their school and missed. It always sucks when someone falls short of the goal. However, this is the risk anyone accepting a TT position takes. It is bad for the person applying for tenure (they will be denied and have to move on) and bad for the department (they lose the investment in time and money in the person denied tenure). My university can't really afford to spend 6-7 figures in startup every 6 years, so we try to be very picky at the time of hire, and the tenure denial rate is low. This is something I investigated before I accepted my position, so I would have some understanding of how the standards are applied. As much as it sucks to be denied tenure, there are many people who go on to good careers both in and out academia after a denial, so it isn't the end of the world for anyone concerned (though it might feel like it).

2. MR/ET cared more about teaching than research, and this was reflected in their relative efforts and results. This one I don't really understand. We don't get to rewrite our job descriptions after accepting the position. There are many types of colleges and universities. If someone is not happy with the mix of responsibilities at one, they should look for a position someplace where there is a better fit. There are plenty of people at research universities who also excel at teaching, but at a research school, research has to come first. This is something MR/ET should have known going in.

3. MR/ET got really bad advice pre-tenure. Not sure how much more I can say about that. It is really important to have more than one mentor. It is really important to see how tenure decisions work at your school, keeping in mind that the ultimate decision is not the departments'.

I think in many ways it is "easier" to quantify research output than teaching excellence. It seems that most teaching is evaluated primarily through student evaluations (this is the case at Prodigal U), with maybe a direct observation or two. This is a terrible way to evaluate teaching, since first, it can be gamed by a professor catering to student whims without actually teaching anything (student evaluations are strongly correlated with grades), and second, students don't always appreciate a good teacher during a course, especially for difficult or required courses. Sometimes, it is only after time has passed (and the student uses knowledge from the course) that they realize the prof was a good teacher after all. Even worse, there are some studies (can't find the links) that show that students are biased in evaluations against women, non-native English speakers, disabled professors, and professors from visible minority groups. Student evaluations should be a part of the process, but clearly not the only factor.

I've heard that non-research universities are counting research productivity more and more. I am not sure if that is true (it is out of my direct experience for one thing), but I suspect that "quantitative" measurement is at least part of the issue.

Everybody's doing it...

2010-07-06T06:26:00.000-07:00

...so why not me? Since I started blogging 2 months ago, I've found it to be really fun and helpful to me personally in terms of organizing my thoughts about the topics I post on. When I began, I had all these grand thoughts about giving back to the community and about describing a different path to the TT. Now I am just enjoying having a place I can write about the things I am thinking about.

So anonymous readers--who are you? What do you like the best about the blog? What would you like to see more of? And thanks for reading!

Summer students

2010-07-02T06:17:00.000-07:00

I have always had summer students, even in my first year as a postdoc at National Lab. It is really fun to work with them. How can anyone not enjoy watching a students' eyes light up the first time they measure a spectrum or image a sample (no matter how standard the sample is).

Our summer students were undergrads, typically rising juniors or seniors, who often were outstanding at schoolwork (it was competitive to get a slot), but varied in lab ability. I've had wonderful naturals at labwork, and people who needed to stick to theory to be successful. All in all, I published papers with about half of the students I mentored at National Lab, and gave meaty projects to all of them, allowing them to work as independently as their abilities warranted. There were some people at National Lab who used their students as glorified dishwashers, keeping them very far away from any actual experiments. I think this is a total disservice to the students--they are there to see how science is done and to get some research experience, NOT to do scut work all day long. It also turns excited, interested students off of science, so it always pissed me off. Given the decent levels of support for summer students (it was an REU program), and the fact that we didn't have students the rest of the year, I was happy to take on the responsibility.

This is my first summer at Prodigal U, and I have 3 summer students in the lab. I was not sure I would add summer students right now, because proper mentoring of an undergrad can eat up a lot of time. That said, a major advantage of being at Prodigal U vs. National Lab is the wide availability of students interested in working in the lab for the summer--for pay, for credit, or even as volunteers (I have one of each). They are all really hard workers, and can be used for some tasks that are more appropriate for a short term lab member than a PhD student (such as ultrarisky projects). As a new faculty member, I've found that summer students are a huge help.

I have one summer student working out variant protocols for some important experiments. This frees up my PhD students to get further on taking actual data for publications and their projects. This student really wanted to have their own project, so this is a pretty decent compromise.

I have another student starting out a very, very risky project. If it doesn't work, the student got a lot of interesting lab experience and I didn't screw over a more long term student. If it does work, the summer student will be a co-author on the first publication, and I can put a new PhD student on that project without worrying that the project will fail spectacularly and without usable data.

My last summer student is doing some very important but repetitive measurements. This allows my grad student to work on pushing the envelope on her project, while getting the summer student an awesome poster for the student poster session and authorship on the paper that will almost certainly come out of the data (it is looking really promising right now). This student is really excited to have tons and tons of data to analyze (with a lot of help).

I was really leary of taking students this summer, with it being so important that my grad students make a lot of progress on their research. I screened the students pretty carefully (two I knew from my undergrad class), because I didn't want them to be a distraction in the lab. It has turned out to be a great decision, and I am really glad I did it.

Too Many Papers

2010-06-29T09:26:00.000-07:00

In (trying) to keep up with the literature in my field, I have often made that lament, especially after tracking down the 3rd in a series of Least Publishable Units that should have been one more complete paper. The LPU problem is directly related to the strongly held belief that more is better, especially when it comes to paper counts.

A week or so ago, there was this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that suggested that the problem is not one of LPUs, but instead of useless and boring research being published, wasting everyone's time and resources. Female Science Prof has an awesome refutation of this article, with Drugmonkey adding some additional arguments against. For the other side, Derek Lowe agrees with the CHE.

This topic touches in some ways on my previous post on old, abandoned data. Personally, I think the problem of old abandoned data is more significant than excessive publication of results. I've seen this play out in my own career. When I switched to a new research focus area, I aggressively searched out techniques that would speed our progress, only to find nothing much published that was directly relevant. Some of the stuff I did find was from the 60's and 70's, with low citation counts. This stuff was incredibly useful to us, even though it had lain fallow for 30+ years before someone found it worthwhile.

I've also seen the opposite occur. We had some incidental findings that we didn't think worthy of a separate publication. A few years later, another group replicated and published our (unpublished) "incidental" results. Their paper has been cited 12 times in the year and a half since publication in a field-specific journal with an impact factor of 6. It is incredibly difficult to predict in advance what other scientists will find useful. Since data is so expensive in time and money to generate, I would much, much rather there be too many publications than too few (especially given modern search engines and electronic databases).

Teaching Undergraduates--Observations of a Newbie

2010-06-24T08:48:00.001-07:00

In my department at Prodigal U, professors are guaranteed to keep classes they develop for 3-5 years, though sometimes they keep them for longer (less popular to teach classes, particularly good classes, untenured profs) or shorter (sabbatical or other leave replacements, course just not working out). I teach one grad class (enrollment ~15 mostly senior majors/grad students) and one large undergrad class (required class, enrollment 200-220 mostly premeds). I'll talk about my grad class in a future post.

I am at a big research intensive school. Research is the key thing for tenure here, however bad teaching can also block tenure. My colleagues are (mostly) very interested in doing a good job teaching, and our department has several award winning teachers, so the expectation is that new profs will be at least adequate, and hopefully much better than that. My department is a core science (think physics/chemistry/biology/math) so we have a lot of large classes for non-majors. Personally, I care a lot about my teaching, and not just because I tend to want to succeed at everything I do. I moved from National Lab specifically to work with students, so I have a lot of self-motivation in this area.

For my big undergrad class, I teach from Powerpoint slides on a tablet. My handwriting is pretty bad and I can't draw well, so my slides have important equations, plots, and illustrations on them. I mark them up a lot during my lectures. I make my slides available before and after class. I also have a Web discussion board, and post homeworks and solutions on the Web site as well. I don't grade homework, but I have simple electronic quizzes once per chapter or so covered (10 total, drop 2) worth a small fraction of the grade. My course has two midterms and a final. I tried to do one YouTube demo video a week to illustrate key concepts, which was pretty popular.

I was a bit nervous about running my own class for the first time, especially such a big one. I did OK--my evals were near the departmental average, even though this is an unpopular class, so I think that is pretty good for the first time through! So, as I look through and start to think about revising for next year, what did I learn?

1. The course overhead eats up a TON of time. Dealing with questions, problems, concerns, and grading is a huge timesink. To save my sanity, I only see students during my two office hours a week or right after class ends, though I hold open office hours on the day of exams. I do not take student phone calls, just email. To decrease grading disputes (particularly at the end of the course) I took a colleague's advice, and made grades permanent one week after handing back the exams.

2. Preparing exams takes a really, really long time (and I still missed a few typos!). I was as nervous on the day of my exams as the students! I was really lucky, and had a few exams from previous instructors to use as a guide to the appropriate question difficulty level. (Some) of the students have all the exams from this course back for a 15 year period, so I didn't worry too much if a question I liked was on a prior exam. In fact, I often just slightly modified assigned or related homework problems and/or problems I worked in lecture, and the course average was still a 68.

3. During the actual exam, there is a fine line between being helpful and being a distraction. The students will often ask lots of dumb, obvious questions when I am there, so just a peridioc walk through the exam room(s) is much better than hanging around any specific amount of time.

4. I wasted a lot of time before the semester started prepping lectures. Next time I develop a course, I will make a detailed outline, but only try to get a week ahead with specific lecture slides (since the course dynamic changes a lot).

5. Very few students come to office hours (even the open hours on the day of the exam), so having open office hours is a cheap way to show you care. Holding office hours and answering questions was my favorite part of the course!

6. People write really nasty things on teaching evaluations. Even though it is anonymous, I was really surprised by this. I also had a lot of good things (one person said they changed majors to my field partially due to my course--yay!), but the negative remarks can really get in your head.

7. Students expect a TON of stuff I never had as an undergrad (lecture notes posted, lectures recorded and online, unlimited 24-hour email responses from professors, individual appointments on demand). How demanding some of them were was a huge surprise.

8. Clear rules and expectations are very popular, even if you are a hardass. Almost every non-"worst prof ever" evaluation comment mentioned this and my availability for extra help as big pluses.

9. Incorporating some recent research results to supplement the textbook is a nice way to keep the top students interested and curious about the material. I did this, especially in places where I was really familiar with the material. Another "enrichment" thing that students like is some historical information about how measurements were actually made and about the personalities involved. This stuff was also praised in my evals.

10. There is no point in arguing about lame excuses. I don't have makeup exams--if someone can't make it, their points just get redistributed. I had a few off the wall excuses for missing exams. In general, unless the excuse was real (and the student had actually been studying and keeping up), students who missed midterms went ahead and flunked the final, so it all took care of itself. Dropping 2 of 10 quizzes also saved me a lot of grief.

Academia and Pyramid Schemes

2010-06-22T10:17:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking a bit about the whole "pyramid scheme" thing when it comes to academia. There are many people who bitterly accuse professors of actively setting one up and/or exploiting their students and postdocs who will "never get jobs". I don't think this is really true, and never did (even when I ran screaming from academia). For one thing, the unemployment rate among science PhD holders (going by statistics from professional societies like the APS, ACS, MRS, etc) is much lower than the general unemployment rate. All those PhDs not joining the TT are also not joining breadlines. For another thing, many PhDs are not even interested in an academic career (recently noted by GMP here).

I guess I don't really see much difference between academic job hunting, and job hunting in general. Starting out with undergrad admissions, there are many more qualified people for desirable positions than available slots. Who gets those slots is a matter of hard work (to get qualified) and luck (to be one of the qualified people who is "chosen"). So how is the TT any different from grad school admissions (in ANY prestige program), law firm partnership, company CEO, professional artist/athlete/performer, attending physician, investment banking, etc? The pool of qualified applicants is many times larger than the number of slots, and there are desirable perks to success (money/prestige/fame/security/intellectual freedom) making the supply of those willing to try for the goal pretty much infinite.

Maybe I have rose colored glasses on because I have always been lucky enough to find a position in research, but there are no guarantees in life. When I was interviewing in industry, I saw many really interesting jobs available to science PhD holders that were not in research. If I hadn't gone to National Lab, I would have been happy to take on one of those instead. Sure, my life would be different, but it wouldn't make my PhD a waste of time or a failed opportunity.

I've been telling my students that loving science isn't enough--they need to think about what they want to do with their PhDs, and start preparing for that before they are looking for a job so they can tailor their PhD experience appropriately (more teaching/writing/industrial partners/whatever). My current crew is undecided about what they want to do next. I do ask them periodically, though because 5 years goes by fast.

On Titles and Gender

2010-06-19T07:51:00.001-07:00

The recent discussion on gender in science at FSP's blog (inspired by FSP's column at CHE) have got me rethinking on a pet peeve of mine: students and titles. At Prodigal U, the departmental culture is such that students call the professors "Dr. Professor" unless invited to use something else. I have my group members call my "Prodigal", but I don't mind being called "Dr. Academic" or "Professor Academic" if they prefer.

When I teach my large undergrad class, many of the students call me "Miss", which drives me UP THE WALL! Even worse is when they call me Miss in email, after sending on a forwarded mail where they called a colleague "Dr. MaleProf". I sign my emails to students as "Dr. Academic", I call myself "Dr. Academic" on the first class, and I refer to all other profs as "Dr. Colleague". This year, I have the added service requirement of being the adviser for our incoming majors, so I anticipate even more "Miss" than ever before.

I am looking for a way to correct them (I would even prefer "Prodigal" to "Miss", which I hate! Outside academia, I use "Ms" anyway) without sounding like a pompous ass. I don't want to get more hate in my teaching evals (which go in the tenure file) than I already do for being a strict female prof. Any advice, or should I just suck it up until I have tenure?

In some ways, it is not all about me. I also want to get them properly socialized--I have been to several conferences where the session chair has called all the male presenters "Dr." and all the female presenters "Ms.", even when the female presenters are professors, and some of the male presenters are students. Getting them away from this at a young age seems like a good idea!

Work-life Balance

2010-06-17T13:12:00.000-07:00

A topical storm has been raging through my corner of the blogosphere on men, women, and work-life balance (see posts by Jim Austen, Dr. Isis, Janet D. Stemwedel, PLS, and unbalanced reaction) culminating in a interesting discussion over at Scientist Mother's blog, with a response by DM at his place. I saw this interesting article at Slate on how much time fathers spend with their kids, and how what they say about it has changed with time, and had the urge to add to the fray. Maybe we are in a generational shift--that would be awesome for my kids. But what does that say about now?

There is lots of talk about "lucky" people with equal partners, and on choosing the "right" partner, but I submit that this is not actually possible. NO ONE knows how they will behave in the long term for real. I know lots of people who thought they would do more housework, who meant to do their share at home, but then when they had to make a choice, they chose something else. "I need to work an extra hour a few nights this week, so can you cook dinner for me" becomes the status quo. Or "your job is more flexible than mine is, so you pick up the sick kid" becomes true for doctors, lawyers, professors, teachers, etc. Or "just until I make partner/get tenure/find a permanent position" becomes forever. So choosing an equal partner at age 25 or 30 doesn't mean that they partnership stays equal at 35 or 40. And once your life is intertwined with someone else's, and there are kids or pets or a house or shared sacrifices or whatever else, it is hard to walk away over the laundry.

My own two cents on the "calling out" kerfuffle--I agree with Scientist Mother that more men need to contribute to the discussion so that work-life balance moves off of the Style pages in the NYT and into the main section. At the same time, I think DM can and should blog about whatever he wants to. But if not the popular male science bloggers, who will take up the challenge? I personally have declined to be the pioneer woman on the TT at one of the places I received an offer, so I am not throwing any stones here. It is just something I think about--when should I step up and do something uncomfortable to make things easier for people that follow after me, and when can I let others do their share?

New PIs and Postdocs

2010-06-15T06:36:00.000-07:00

Prof-like Substance hosted an interesting discussion on fresh PIs mentoring postdocs (starting in the comments here and continuing in a separate post), prompted by the observation that some funding agencies are reluctant to fund a postdoc for a new PI. In terms of funding agencies, I have gotten that exact criticism myself--no postdoc for you, you are too new.

In terms of new PIs as postdoc mentors, I think that this depends a lot more on the person than on the career stage. Dr. Girlfriend is strongly opposed to the idea of allowing people new to the TT to mentor postdocs. She says:

I still do not get how someone who has no experience in running a lab and managing staff can be a good mentor to someone aspiring the this role.

A new PI can be an excellent mentor for graduate students because they are hands-on and heavily invested in their success.

However, a postdoc does not need training regards doing research - they require only experience in this respect.

Getting a job requires a good publication record, but getting tenure requires much more. A postdoc need to learn how to become a group leader and develop a project to take with them.

An associate and full professors will have current experience of interviewing and the tenure process because they are serving on search committees.

I will grant her point about managing personnel--this is something I am learning on the job. But in terms of actual experience with looking for an academic job, a person new to the TT will have given this far more thought recently than a more established mentor (after all, they just did it themselves). I was told that for this reason, new profs are sought out for search committees (my experience, shown here and here, and blogged about by Gerty-Z).

I am far, far invested in my students' success than a more established professor with a large lab. As a new professor, I need everyone to do as well as possible to show productivity for tenure. Personally, I have no track record, so I am highly motivated to help my lab folks get the best jobs they can.

I also highly object to the notion that a new PI will not allow a postdoc to develop a project they can take with them. I allow my lab peeps to do whatever they want to for at least part of their time. There is work that must be done, of course, but certainly this doesn't take up 100% of anyone's time. While I do expect to reap the benefit of the intellectual abilities of those in my lab, I am confident enough in myself and my creativity that I certainly would not force someone to leave behind a pet idea.

In addition, I (like many others) had to start from nothing (couldn't take anything from my National Lab, since it all belongs to the Fed Gov), so this is not the kiss of death for new faculty. Second, this can be a crutch and a major disadvantage. When we interview people who plan to continue work started in their previous lab(s), we wonder if the idea is theirs or the PIs. We also worry that they as a new PI will be directly competing for funding with their established mentor's lab, at least in the eyes of funding agencies.

Taking a postdoc in a new lab is certainly risky, since the new lab has no track record. But it is also much more open, since all the projects are brand new. I found this attractive to my first 2 students (they wanted to have their own projects right from the start), and I imagine that some postdocs would feel the same way. Other postdocs might value the connections/mentoring on running an established lab that a more experienced professor can provide. This seems like a personal decision, not a place for a hard and fast rule.

After the Offer--Negotiation and the TT

2010-06-10T18:20:00.000-07:00

PhD job seeker asked if their is negotiation around a TT job offer, and if so how it is done. This was my experience.

After I received my offers, I was given 2 weeks to accept or decline. During that time, at least one University flew spouse and I out so spouse could see the area upon request. One of the realities of a TT job search is that the candidate applies for many positions, likes some more than others, and is constrained by the varying schedules of different departments. As a candidate, you need to look out for your own interests, because no one else will.

In my case, one department was hiring for multiple positions. They met promptly after my interview, and I received an offer in less than a week (my first!). I was still interviewing at other places, and had at least one department that I was more interested in show an interest. As soon as I had the written offer in hand, I notified all the departments I was still interested in that I had an offer to try to speed up their time tables. In one case, I got an expedited interview. In another, the department still had one more candidate to interview, but I was currently their top choice. They gave me a firm date on which they could give me a decision. A third department had expressed verbal interest, but was dragging their feet on a written offer. My existing offer put their feet to the fire so to speak, and greatly sped up the process.

The offer I had in hand was good. I would have taken it happily if I hadn't decided I would strongly prefer Prodigal U. To give Prodigal U more time, I asked for another week to decide, while negotiating my salary and startup package for the offer I had in hand. Chaining offers like this is a fact of TT job search life, if a candidate is lucky enough to have more than one offer. Some people think it is unethical, but I see nothing wrong with it as long as you would actually take the job. It is a waste of time to negotiate and stall if there is no way you would take the offer. This can make the department lose out on their 2nd and 3rd choice candidate (if they in fact exist--in our searches, that hasn't always been the case). If I thought a job at Offer U was worse than my job at National Lab, I would have turned it down outright.

I eventually got an offer from Prodigal U. At this point, I had declined one offer and had another offer in hand (for more money!). This greatly strengthened my negotiating position, as did the fact that I already had a permanent job I liked. However, even if you receive 1 offer and your postdoc funding ends tomorrow, it is worth negotiating, especially for things that will help you be successful. Keep in mind, though, that a counteroffer technically declines the original offer, so be careful!

I asked for a much higher salary than my initial offer, which was scary (see above statement about counteroffers!). To justify the increased salary, I compared my current salary to the offer, I mentioned my higher offer elsewhere (but did not ask for a match--I definitely did not want to give the impression that I was all about the money, and my other offer was in an Engineering department, which generally pay better than a Science department like the one at Prodigal U). I also brought up my track record in competing for funding relative to a typical fresh postdoc (that's where being at a National Lab was a huge benefit). I was able to negotiate my starting salary up 15%, which is a pretty big deal, and definitely due to the fact that I was more experienced than a typical new TT hire. All future raises come as a percentage of base salary, so it is important to start out at a decent salary. I did take a pay cut from National Lab, though.

The major things I negotiated for were actually not salary related at all. Some other things I asked for: extra startup funds to cover user fees until I could buy my own equipment, 3 years of summer salary, support for 2 students for 2 years, doing my teaching in the Fall (when I would be ordering stuff) rather than in the Spring (when all the stuff would hopefully arrive) my first year, separate sample prep and instrument space, a spot in on campus daycare, a specific instrument lab location due to environmental issues impacting measurements, etc. This depends on your research needs. It was nerve-wracking to ask for stuff, and I hated it. I kept it professional and provided justifications for the things I was asking for, rather than trying to extract every last drop from my new department. Some things I got (extra startup for user fees, wet/dry labs), some things I didn't (daycare spot).

Something to remember is that in the cases I saw, the Chair was negotiating with the Dean on my behalf. It is to the Chair's and department's benefit to have the new TT member be successful. I got some good advice on things to ask for from some of the places I was interviewing at/negotiating with!

Interviewing (from the perspective of a faculty member)

2010-06-08T10:58:00.000-07:00

I meant to post this as a followup to this post sooner, but got distracted by other issues.

Although I am a new faculty member, this year I have interviewed 14 candidates for 3 positions in 2 departments. Interviews at Prodigal U take 2 days. On both days, most of the time is reserved for 1-on-1 or small group discussions. On day 1, the candidate gives an open seminar to the department. On day 2, the candidate gives a closed talk/has a detailed discussion about their research plans. This depends on how the search is being run. In one department, the search committee makes a recommendation, but the whole faculty discusses each candidate and votes on whether to make an offer. In this case, the research plan is a very informal talk given to the department members. In the other department, the search committee decides who to make an offer to, and the department is not directly involved, other than to submit comments. In addition, our candidates are usually hosted for 2 lunches and 2 dinners as well.

As a faculty member, and member of two search committees, I can say that searching is very time consuming for the department. Everyone takes this very seriously, since making a bad choice can potentially have repercussions for 30+ years. So what are we looking for?

By the interview stage, all of the candidates are well-qualified on paper. Once we invite someone to campus, we want them to wow us. We are already impressed with the candidates' accomplishments, now we want to see their polish. They have all had research success in the past, and all have some interesting ideas for the future.

The first thing we want to see is that the candidate "walks the walk, not just talks the talk". We all know people who have been carried along by a successful PI and/or research group who have great hands in the lab, but lack that creative spark required for a good research plan. Thus, it is really important that the candidate demonstrate their creativity/scientific thinking as well as their breadth and depth of knowledge. Giving a good seminar is critically important. However, it is also important that the candidate can discuss their work coherently, and not just in the context of their job talk. We give a fair bit of importance to how the candidate answers questions and to how they discuss science in the interview meetings.

In discussion of the planned research we want to see short, medium, and long term plans. These plans should be differentiated from the work done as a PhD student or postdoc. The candidate should have some idea of how big their ideal group would be, and also to know what they absolutely need equipment-wise to be successful. Better still is a list of big ticket items and an estimated cost. Especially for candidates coming from large and well-funded labs with access to unusual equipment, it is important to know what infrastructure the planned research requires. If Prodigal U doesn't have it, there is no point in coming here. Two questions that commonly get asked in these sessions are "who else is working in this area?" and "what is your angle that makes your work unique/different?"

In terms of fit, we want the candidates to be reasonably pleasant and polite (berating the departmental administrators is not a good idea), to have given some thought as to how their future work will fit in with current research in the department, and to refrain from outright sexist/racist/homophobic/anti-Semitic/etc. comments and behaviors (this should go without saying, but you would be surprised). We look at candidates energy level--are they excited by their work, or is it just something they do. We are looking for someone we wouldn't mind having in the office next door.

The fit thing cuts two ways. We want there to be enough overlap in research interests that the candidate can find collaborators in the department, but not so much that there is direct competition for students and funding. This can be a fine line. The optimal amount of overlap can vary from person to person. I enjoy collaborating with my colleagues, so I am fairly tolerant of research overlap. One of my colleagues is more territorial, and would prefer to have almost none. At the same time, we don't want to hire someone whose research is very far from everyone else in the department, as lack of sharable equipment and difficulty attracting students can be fatal to a new lab.

Of the 14 candidates I saw, 5 performed "below the bar" and would not have been hired under any circumstances. I've been told this is not atypical. For 3 of them, their research talk was awful (hey maybe that was me in year 1 of my search!) The other 2 did not have convincing or realistic research plans. Another 1 who was above the bar prompted questions because the proposed research was incredibly similar to work done in their PhD and postdoctoral groups.

For the remaining candidates, there is nothing they did wrong. It is just "right place/right time" luck that gets them the job or not. Of the other 8 candidates, 3 accepted offers elsewhere and 2 accepted offers here. The remaining 3 candidates were ranked below the 2 that we hired. 1 search went unfilled (and will be redone next year).

Old data and moving on

2010-06-06T12:59:00.000-07:00

I have three more publications planned to write up from my old National Lab. All of the data is relatively old, and some is ancient. I've decided to get this done this summer, so I can remove this as clutter from my brain. The extra publications on my CV won't hurt either!

It is kind of bittersweet--I am just about done with the most interesting of the three. This is data I took 5 years ago that is really exciting, but difficult to interpret. We always intended/tried to get some theoreticians on board to help us figure out why we see what we see, but it never worked out for various reasons. The funding ended, and so did the project, though the results are still interesting and novel 5 years later. So now I am writing it for a really good specialty journal, rather than a top-tier discipline-wide one. I really want the data to see the light of day. I am just about done with the first draft manuscript, mostly cleaning it up to send on to my old collaborators at National Lab. I am falling in love with my old data again, seeing why I always wanted to try to explain it better and try for a top tier journal. At the same time, I clearly need to move on to the things my lab is focusing on, so I am not sad to finally get a publication out of it.

Project #2 is similar--nice data that would have benefited from some additional measurements that were never made. This one should go into a good journal for my field, and I will write it as such, since this is the sub-area in which I am best known. Although this is not a major thrust in my new lab, I need to keep publishing in this sub-area because I will likely find very strong people to write letters in support of my tenure bid in this area. I have one student working on something related, so I am looking to see if there are any last measurements my student can do to improve what I already have.

Project #3 is really ancient--the last data was taken six years ago at the tail end of another project. I don't really need to write this one, but I had two summer (undergrad) REU students who worked on it, one of whom is now in a PhD program. I would like to get it done for them, even though it might not even be worth the effort, and will likely go to a minor specialty journal. I feel guilty enough as it is that I never got around to finishing this up. But data is data, and papers are papers, so I will probably spend a week or so on it. It also seems a shame to have data that tells a complete story (no matter how minor and unimportant to me now) go to waste.

I wonder how many projects like these get lost in the shuffle? How much interesting (and already paid for in money and blood) data is sitting in people's old lab notebooks?

Breaking up with a collaborator

2010-06-03T17:12:00.001-07:00

Managing collaborations is one aspect of science I find difficult. Social skills do not come easy to me in general, so I feel a little out of my element. I am not talking about the science part--the data discussions, the planning, the experimental designs. That part is all fun. I am talking about the social/political side.

In a collaboration, like in a friendship or romance, one day you can just realize you are just going through the motions. The science may be interesting, but the collaboration isn't working anymore. Maybe you are doing too much of the heavy lifting. Maybe your interests or goals have drifted apart. Maybe the work of maintaining a long distance relationship is no longer balanced by the benefits, or the specialized knowledge your collaborator had is now available in your lab. At that point, it might be time to end it. Especially for me now, newly on the TT when I am trying to establish myself for tenure, I can't afford to have collaborations in name only. Sure, I get some extra papers (maybe) as a middle author from their lab, but I need to have papers that are from my lab alone, and that makes the bar for collaboration a little higher, especially for work that doesn't require specialized knowledge or equipment.

It is hard to let go. I find myself wondering if I made the right decision. In the short term, we are now racing to finish a set of experiments before they do something similar. In the long term, the door is still open to work together again, but I am pretty sure it won't be on this particular project. So for today, I am letting myself wallow in doubt and loss, and tomorrow I will pick myself up and get cracking on the science!

The silence of the editors

2010-06-02T19:19:00.000-07:00

Another week, and still no word on our paper. Why is it when I review for this journal, I get 2 weeks to send in my review (and tons of emailed reminders), but when my stuff is being reviewed, it takes 3-4 months?

Thoughts about women in science

2010-06-01T06:49:00.000-07:00

Fueled by a recent set of posts by geekmommyprof and DrDrA, Ihave been giving this issue some thought. I've read many studies on gender in science and in Western society, since this is a long term interest of mine. This post is more about life as it is lived for women today, rather than the studies that are out there.

On discrimination. A quick look around the blogoverse, and particularly at blogs by women in science shows that many (but not all) women have experienced sexism, both overtly and subtly as part of a pattern that is only noticed over time/after talking to others. I too have experienced this in my life (on the receiving end and as an observer). One of the reasons I decided to start a blog is because reading about the lived experience of all these other women is a huge benefit to me, making me realize that it isn't just me, that I am not alone, and that I am not crazy (an issue with subtle sexism). I think that is why there is such a high proportion of women bloggers with respect to their representation in STEM fields.

I also notice that many of the women who state that they have never experienced sexism are younger. This also is consistent with my experience. In my first few years as a PhD student, I would have said the same thing. As I move up the totem pole, sexism becomes both more noticeable and more of an issue in my life. In retrospect as well, I can see that as a women in a male-dominated field, I was expected to conform to (male) social norms, and that this is a form of sexism as well. Venting via the Internet and reading others' posts helps me to process these issues in my life.

On diversity. It makes a huge, huge difference if the leadership is committed to diversity rather than giving lip service. My old division at National Lab was a great place to work partially due to the diversity in my colleagues. This clearly came from the top, as the division leader promoted women and underrepresented minorities into leadership roles, which attracted top female and minority candidates in job searches, which led to improved diversity in the division, which reinforced all of this. When my spouse came to a work-related award ceremony, an unprompted direct quote was "wow--the other divisions are a lot whiter and maler than yours is."

When I was interviewing for faculty positions, I noted the number of women and underrepresented minorities on the faculty and in the student body. Several departments had just one woman and no visible underrepresented minorities. This was hugely unattractive to me, especially after working in my diverse division at National Lab. My current department has almost 20% women and several underrepresented visible minorities on the faculty. This was an important secondary consideration (after research fit and startup package, and on par with location and salary). I definitely prefer to work in my department with many women at all ranks than to be alone or 1 of 2.

This is clearly a recruitment edge for my department. I do understand that by not wanting to be a pioneer, this just passes the burden to someone else, and I am grateful to the women who came before me for doing just that. But in this day and age, foresighted departments/workplaces/divisions should get to reap the benefit of their hard work to diversify in the past. The presence of women in positions of leadership in the department and at the university is an important signal, as I learned at my National Lab. As an example, in my department, faculty meetings start at 2, not at 4 or 5 so people who need to be home by 5:30 can see to both work and home obligations.

In my own group, I am fortunate. Although early in my career, I have 3 men and 2 women in my group (in my sub-field about 30% of PhDs go to women). Based on the inquiries I have received for next year, it looks like I will maintain this ratio. I didn't really do anything special to recruit women, though I welcome this outcome. My management style is fairly hands off, and I don't require specific hours (as long as the work gets done in a timely manner), which I think appeals to both men and women. My research is fairly interdisciplinary, resulting in group members with a variety of academic backgrounds, which can be an advantage. I think that diversity recruiting can be a vicious or virtuous cycle, where groups that are all-male can have trouble recruiting female students due to the actual or feared lab culture, and groups that are more balanced are more attractive to women (as in the case for me when I was job searching).

On the leaky pipeline. One aspect of the leaky pipeline is almost certainly lack of role models. As a student, I never had a female professor for any of my science or math classes (in undergrad OR grad school). I never knew a female faculty member with children until I was in my 5th year of my PhD program, and the only tenured woman in the department got pregnant. As a student, I never met an employed women scientist in my sub-field in real life until I was interviewing for jobs--all of the women I knew in my area of interest were students, postdocs, or names on papers. Almost all of the seminar speakers were male, all of the professors in my area were male, and almost all of the students (90%!) were male. It is really, really hard to be the only woman. In fact, in my subfield and department, the graduation rate for women PhDs was 10%. It gives me great sympathy for underrepresented visible minorities (though I know it is not the same thing). I understand why many people, even in the absence of overt discrimination, give up. My department claimed it was because they quit to have babies (bs, btw) or to relocate with a spouse (more plausible, but not 90%). Science is hard enough without stacking the deck against success. Things are better now, but not by much. Not by enough.

Partially as a result, as a student, I didn't want to be a professor. I did, however, want to go into research science. When I was interviewing in industry, I saw many instances of institutional sexism that fairly scream out "Boys Club--No Girls". For example, at one place, I had to sign something stating that I understood that women at a particular worksite were 5-10X more likely to have a miscarriage than the general public. When I asked what happened to pregnant employees, I was told they take their chances, they quit, or they transfer out of research. Gee that is really welcoming. Not surprisingly, there were not many women working there. It is frightening that they thought this type of environmental exposure was just fine, since it only impacted pregnant women (that they knew of). Men never are expected to choose between a family and a career, yet this happens to women frequently, and it is a major source of frustration. The company was otherwise very family friendly, and didn't seem to understand the disconnect here.

Unfortunately, the pipeline problem also is at least partially a societal problem. The culture of research science (and of other high powered careers like partner in a law firm or investment banker) assumes that people are willing to put work first and everything else second. There are many people, men and women, who don't want to do this. At the same time, there is social pressure on women to have children, to cook and clean, and to take care of sick family members. Something has to give--the competing pressures on women only make the decision against unending work occur earlier for women than for men. We will never "fix" the pipeline without "fixing" society to be more balanced.