Digital privacy in academia and beyond

Bottom line: you have none.

Go look at the posts and comments on this by potnia theron and fighty squirrel. If you use your University's network access, you may as well consider them to have a list of every site you visit, if not a keylogger for what you do online. If you use your business email address for non-business things, you are inviting your boss to know anything you wrote. When I worked at National Lab, we knew our phones and mail accounts were monitored, so people used cell phones/alternate email accounts or face to face meetings for private discussion. What is true then is as true now--never, ever put anything in email that you would not mind becoming public knowledge. If you get involved in anything that triggers an investigation of you (even as a witness to something, even if it was something crazy your office mate did, even if it is something innocuous taken out of context), your electronic history will be combed through in detail. Best to confine specific gripes about specific people to in person conversations!

At the same time, while privacy tools like TOR help, human nature is working against you. It is really, really hard to stay anonymous on the Internet. One minor mistake posting using the wrong account, checking email without TOR, or referring to something done by an alternate persona, and you are done. Private VPN sites don't work for everything one might want to do, making it really hard to stop your access provider from tracking you at least some of the time.

I use a thin pseud because I don't want it to be easy to find me, but I am well aware that there probably are people who know (or could find out quickly if they so desired) who I am. Almost everyone in truth relies on "I am a tiny needle in a giant haystack" for privacy, but that only works if no one decides to look for information about you.

5 years later

It is hard for me to believe that is has been nearly 5 years since I last posted on this blog. Since my last post, I have been granted tenure and promotion (yay!), graduated my first set of students (yay!), fired my first student (boo!), and taken a sabbatical (yay!). Mostly good things, happily.

I strongly admire those who can continue regular blogging in the late stages before submitting a tenure dossier. I know that I couldn't. Now that I am in a more stable position, I am re-evaluating how I allocate my time. I find I miss blogging--the venting was fun, as was the pontificating. I miss the conversations with my commenters (alas, scattered to the wind now). But mostly blogging is for me, really. It helps me organize my thoughts a bit, and lets me write in a low pressure, low stakes setting.

So I guess I am back for now. I'll be sending off my 2 cents into the void again. Thoughts on the final run-up to tenure to come.

More on non-academic jobs

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.

8 months of Prodigal Academic

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.

Everybody's doing it...

...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!