A few days ago I learned that a grant proposal of mine to an agency that routinely uses panel reviews would be declined. What makes me feel even crummier is that my proposal was ranked N+1, where N is the number of grants that will be funded (N is also a very small positive integer). So, close but no cigar. The reviews were good, but obviously could have been better, and were in the usual vein of calling for tightening, focusing, distilling, purifying the idea and the message... The program manager was very encouraging about revising and resubmitting, which is what I intend to do, but still...
When I think about grant proposals, I sometimes think about a very good friend of mine, whose pastime is building custom-configuration computers; he really enjoys it and is very good at it. I asked him why he doesn't try to cash in on it or at least go into some type of consulting, because he seems lukewarm (at best) about his actual job and very passionate about his pastime. He answered along the lines of "It's only fun as long as it's a hobby. It would no longer be fun if I actually had to do it to get paid."
For an academic scientist or engineer, writing grants would be the most enjoyable thing in the world if only it weren't so darn important to actually get the money.
When you think of it, writing a proposal means you get to immerse yourself completely in research, learn a lot of new things, ask exciting and far-reaching questions, brainstorm, dream big, and distill your thoughts and ideas through writing. As an added bonus (in my opinion, at least) writing a proposal gives you an excuse to drop all menial work and cancel unwanted - ahem, unnecessary - meetings without feeling guilty (everyone is very sympathetic when you say "I have a proposal deadline"). For me, writing a grant is a guilt-free exile into what I love best -- research.
But...
One's career and the livelihood of one's students and postdocs hinges on the success in getting grants (Professor in Training has a nice recent post on the challenges of grant writing). Funding rates are depressingly low (in my division at the agency above the funding rate is a tiny bit over 10%). This means an average faculty writes a large number of grants to get one funded; of course, I am not assuming grant awards are completely stochastic -- we all know to correlate merit with fundability --- but the number of grants that are competitive is larger by a factor of 2 or 3 than the number of funded ones; there just aren't enough funds around... Depending on your research area, some agencies do have significantly higher funding rates than the agency mentioned above that all of scientists and engineers apply to, but you have to become part of the in-crowd first.
I remember how helpless one feels on tenure track before getting that first grant. The world of funding agencies seems unpredictable and hostile, and you are wondering how long and how thin you can stretch those start-up funds...
Once you have actually received a few grants, the world of funding agencies still seems unpredictable and hostile, but there is no time to rest. Now that you have received some money, you realize that you are actually constantly running out of it and need to keep writing: there is always some grant expiring, or about to expire next year, and the student supported on it is midway through their PhD... One could say "Well, your students could always TA" but that is not a universal truth, only in departments that teach large service courses. I dread becoming one of the, admittedly very few, faculty in my department who have not had research support (and thus, any summer salary) for a number of years. They once did, but now they don't and likely never will again, because they stopped trying. I am not sure why certain people completely cease to write grants once they are tenured, but I don't think it's because they are not driven. Rather, my guess is that it has to do with disillusionment and hopelessness, as the wells of funding in certain fields dry up.
I think the only way to keep going at it -- writing many, many grants -- is to try to fully savor the pleasant, creative part of grant writing, and try to minimize the damage to your soul by the unpleasant parts (a.k.a. being declined). I believe that if a person finds absolutely no fun and no enjoyment in the grant writing process, then getting a faculty position in science or engineering may not be worthwhile.
Lastly, grant writing with colleagues can be very enjoyable, with lots of exciting brainstorms if the collaboration is a good one. An important added benefit is that you have someone to commiserate with when the grant is declined, and someone to celebrate with when it's finally funded.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Serving Right, Inside Higher Ed
I have always thought that there are too few scientists in mainstream academic media. So when I was contacted several weeks ago by Inside Higher Ed about contributing occasionally as their advice columnist, as the editor liked a few of my early posts and wanted to include a scientist's point of view, I thought about it for a little while and decided to give it a shot. I am really not sure how qualified I am to write for a broad university public, as the world of science at large research universities is the only world I know, but I guess we'll see how it goes. Bottom line, there is now a career advice column in IHE called, just like this blog, "Academic Jungle". The first column post was published last Friday, and it is called "Serves You Right". I encourage you to check out the comments at IHE, as they are quite different from the type of feedback one gets in the scientific blogosphere. In the future, I will write for IHE perhaps biweekly and will post the article on the blog a few days later. Below is last Friday's column in full; its tone and scope have been tailored to a broader university audience, hopefully with some success.
Serves You Right
Research, teaching, and service are the defining trinity of a university professor's job. Their relative importance depends quite strongly on the type of academic institution and one’s career stage. Understanding how to strike a balance between institutional requirements and one’s own career interests can sometimes be tricky, and young faculty are often in danger of overcommitting to activities that do not benefit their long-term career prospects.
Most tenure and promotion criteria at universities state something like "In order to receive tenure, a candidate must demonstrate excellence in research, teaching, and service." In reality, this means that excellence in research is absolutely mandatory for promotion and the level of excellence you achieve is in direct correlation with how easily you will get tenure. Provided your research record is spotless (i.e., you received a lot of external funding if you are in a science discipline or another where that’s the norm, published many papers in top journals or books with respected publishers), graduated some Ph.D. students, and gave many invited talks), the university will be fine with good teaching and adequate service. It doesn’t work the other way: excellent teaching or service do not get you promoted in the absence of a stellar research program. Bad teaching may result in tenure denial, though.
But can't you have an outstanding research record, as well as outstanding teaching and outstanding service? The answer is "Yes, in principle," but nobody will believe you. The problem is that, if you are devoting too much time and showing too much zeal toward either teaching or service at a large research university, your colleagues will wonder what it is that you are not doing instead (i.e., why you are not spending all this time on research). Unfortunately, in order to be considered a serious enough scholar in many departments in large research universities, you have to manifest a slight level of disdain for teaching and service. (How this bodes for the quality of undergraduate education is a topic for another column, or perhaps a few.)
While the quality of research and teaching can in principle be measured, through the number of papers or amount of grant money or teaching evaluations, service is a vaguely defined category that has the potential to drain a junior faculty’s energy with poor return.
So what is service and how much service is enough?
Service is a set of faculty duties that demonstrate good citizenship in the department, university, and the broader scientific community. Therefore, we can roughly divide service into service to your institution and professional service to your scholarly community.*
Service to the institution can be further divided into departmental service and service outside the department. Departmental service requires a fair bit of time, and it includes serving on various committees (e.g., undergraduate and graduate student admissions, facilities, curriculum, student advising), serving on students’ master’s and Ph.D. defense committees, or serving in an administrative capacity (e.g., being chair). Service to the university outside the department also involves being elected to serve on various committees, but these are often open to tenured faculty only. On tenure track, it is reasonable to assume that most of your service to the university will be in fact service to your department; which makes sense as the department is your champion in the tenure process.
Professional service to the broader scholarly community comprises activities such as reviewing research papers, serving on the editorial board of a journal, serving on organizing and program committees of conferences, mail-in and panel reviews of grant proposals, as well as serving on the board of a professional society or a federal funding agency.
The level of department and university service for a junior faculty member should be fairly light. I recommend that most service activities be skewed toward professional activities in your broader disciplinary community, which, besides being service, have the additional benefit of enhancing your research program and your visibility in the community. For instance, reviewing papers enables you to stay abreast of latest developments in the broader field, being part of technical program committees for conferences gives you visibility and enhances your network, serving on grant panel reviews strengthens your ties with the program managers and helps you feel where the field is moving.
Find out what the absolute minimum of service is that the department requires and stick with that. Often, this means you will serve on one committee, and try to pick one that you either feel passionate about (e.g., facilities or curriculum planning) or one that does not require a lot of time. If you are really passionate about serving your institution, I advise that you somewhat curb the passion until after tenure. Try not to commit to more than one additional committee in excess to the required minimum. Serving on the master’s and Ph.D. defense committees for your colleagues’ students is extra, and these will help strengthen your bonds to the faculty in your sub-area; however, these activities should also be practiced in moderation.
Sometimes junior faculty feel that they owe it to someone to put in excessive amounts of service. The reasons for this are different: for instance, women are sometimes pushed into extra committee roles because committees need gender diversity or it is perceived that all women like service because they are stereotypically nurturing and caring. If you are a female, and even if you love service and happen to be nurturing, I recommend you fight tooth and nail to not perform any more service than your male counterparts. This will not only free up your time, but will also establish that you are not a pushover, which is important for your future standing in the department.
Another example is when a junior faculty member feels vulnerable, such as when he or she is the trailing spouse in a spousal hire, or when the hire is a member of a minority group and thinks people will perceive him or her as a beneficiary of affirmative action. In these situations, some tenured faculty feel the new hire is not really meritorious and the new hire often feels that he or she needs to perform extra service in order to get into the colleagues’ good graces and demonstrate good will. If you are in this situation, the worst thing you can do is pile on all the extra service tasks; not only will this course of action detract from your research and result in confirming naysayers’ doubts, but it also makes you seem insecure and hungry for approval and will only exacerbate any ill will the colleagues may harbor towards you. I know this is hard, but you have to keep telling yourself that you have as much right to have your faculty position as anybody else and that you do not owe anybody anything above and beyond what every other tenure track faculty does. Be friendly and civil and do your share, but be firm and protect your boundaries.
In general, while on tenure track at a university, it is a good idea to be a little selfish. Your goal it to get tenure, and that means the primary focus is on developing your research program and the secondary one on honing your teaching skills. Regarding service on tenure track, find out the minimal requirements for an assistant professor in your department. Stay close to that minimum for the duration of tenure track, even if you burn with desire to serve more. Instead, devote more time to professional service that brings visibility to your work, and enhances your research program and funding prospects. If any free time opens up after trimming unnecessary commitments, spend it with your family and recharge. Once you have secured tenure, you will have plenty of opportunities to take on additional service roles and engage more deeply in faculty governance at your institution.
------------------
* Outreach to the broader community is sometimes cited as a separate category from research, teaching, or service. For instance, in tenure guidelines at some universities, outreach is scored separately for candidates who have a significant outreach component in their portfolio. On the other hand, for most scientists and engineers outreach to the broader community is an inherent part of the research and education activities, and is even mandated by some funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation. Therefore, while outreach to the broader community is very important, I would say that it is not universally considered to be a part of service.
Serves You Right
Research, teaching, and service are the defining trinity of a university professor's job. Their relative importance depends quite strongly on the type of academic institution and one’s career stage. Understanding how to strike a balance between institutional requirements and one’s own career interests can sometimes be tricky, and young faculty are often in danger of overcommitting to activities that do not benefit their long-term career prospects.
Most tenure and promotion criteria at universities state something like "In order to receive tenure, a candidate must demonstrate excellence in research, teaching, and service." In reality, this means that excellence in research is absolutely mandatory for promotion and the level of excellence you achieve is in direct correlation with how easily you will get tenure. Provided your research record is spotless (i.e., you received a lot of external funding if you are in a science discipline or another where that’s the norm, published many papers in top journals or books with respected publishers), graduated some Ph.D. students, and gave many invited talks), the university will be fine with good teaching and adequate service. It doesn’t work the other way: excellent teaching or service do not get you promoted in the absence of a stellar research program. Bad teaching may result in tenure denial, though.
But can't you have an outstanding research record, as well as outstanding teaching and outstanding service? The answer is "Yes, in principle," but nobody will believe you. The problem is that, if you are devoting too much time and showing too much zeal toward either teaching or service at a large research university, your colleagues will wonder what it is that you are not doing instead (i.e., why you are not spending all this time on research). Unfortunately, in order to be considered a serious enough scholar in many departments in large research universities, you have to manifest a slight level of disdain for teaching and service. (How this bodes for the quality of undergraduate education is a topic for another column, or perhaps a few.)
While the quality of research and teaching can in principle be measured, through the number of papers or amount of grant money or teaching evaluations, service is a vaguely defined category that has the potential to drain a junior faculty’s energy with poor return.
So what is service and how much service is enough?
Service is a set of faculty duties that demonstrate good citizenship in the department, university, and the broader scientific community. Therefore, we can roughly divide service into service to your institution and professional service to your scholarly community.*
Service to the institution can be further divided into departmental service and service outside the department. Departmental service requires a fair bit of time, and it includes serving on various committees (e.g., undergraduate and graduate student admissions, facilities, curriculum, student advising), serving on students’ master’s and Ph.D. defense committees, or serving in an administrative capacity (e.g., being chair). Service to the university outside the department also involves being elected to serve on various committees, but these are often open to tenured faculty only. On tenure track, it is reasonable to assume that most of your service to the university will be in fact service to your department; which makes sense as the department is your champion in the tenure process.
Professional service to the broader scholarly community comprises activities such as reviewing research papers, serving on the editorial board of a journal, serving on organizing and program committees of conferences, mail-in and panel reviews of grant proposals, as well as serving on the board of a professional society or a federal funding agency.
The level of department and university service for a junior faculty member should be fairly light. I recommend that most service activities be skewed toward professional activities in your broader disciplinary community, which, besides being service, have the additional benefit of enhancing your research program and your visibility in the community. For instance, reviewing papers enables you to stay abreast of latest developments in the broader field, being part of technical program committees for conferences gives you visibility and enhances your network, serving on grant panel reviews strengthens your ties with the program managers and helps you feel where the field is moving.
Find out what the absolute minimum of service is that the department requires and stick with that. Often, this means you will serve on one committee, and try to pick one that you either feel passionate about (e.g., facilities or curriculum planning) or one that does not require a lot of time. If you are really passionate about serving your institution, I advise that you somewhat curb the passion until after tenure. Try not to commit to more than one additional committee in excess to the required minimum. Serving on the master’s and Ph.D. defense committees for your colleagues’ students is extra, and these will help strengthen your bonds to the faculty in your sub-area; however, these activities should also be practiced in moderation.
Sometimes junior faculty feel that they owe it to someone to put in excessive amounts of service. The reasons for this are different: for instance, women are sometimes pushed into extra committee roles because committees need gender diversity or it is perceived that all women like service because they are stereotypically nurturing and caring. If you are a female, and even if you love service and happen to be nurturing, I recommend you fight tooth and nail to not perform any more service than your male counterparts. This will not only free up your time, but will also establish that you are not a pushover, which is important for your future standing in the department.
Another example is when a junior faculty member feels vulnerable, such as when he or she is the trailing spouse in a spousal hire, or when the hire is a member of a minority group and thinks people will perceive him or her as a beneficiary of affirmative action. In these situations, some tenured faculty feel the new hire is not really meritorious and the new hire often feels that he or she needs to perform extra service in order to get into the colleagues’ good graces and demonstrate good will. If you are in this situation, the worst thing you can do is pile on all the extra service tasks; not only will this course of action detract from your research and result in confirming naysayers’ doubts, but it also makes you seem insecure and hungry for approval and will only exacerbate any ill will the colleagues may harbor towards you. I know this is hard, but you have to keep telling yourself that you have as much right to have your faculty position as anybody else and that you do not owe anybody anything above and beyond what every other tenure track faculty does. Be friendly and civil and do your share, but be firm and protect your boundaries.
In general, while on tenure track at a university, it is a good idea to be a little selfish. Your goal it to get tenure, and that means the primary focus is on developing your research program and the secondary one on honing your teaching skills. Regarding service on tenure track, find out the minimal requirements for an assistant professor in your department. Stay close to that minimum for the duration of tenure track, even if you burn with desire to serve more. Instead, devote more time to professional service that brings visibility to your work, and enhances your research program and funding prospects. If any free time opens up after trimming unnecessary commitments, spend it with your family and recharge. Once you have secured tenure, you will have plenty of opportunities to take on additional service roles and engage more deeply in faculty governance at your institution.
------------------
* Outreach to the broader community is sometimes cited as a separate category from research, teaching, or service. For instance, in tenure guidelines at some universities, outreach is scored separately for candidates who have a significant outreach component in their portfolio. On the other hand, for most scientists and engineers outreach to the broader community is an inherent part of the research and education activities, and is even mandated by some funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation. Therefore, while outreach to the broader community is very important, I would say that it is not universally considered to be a part of service.
Monday, June 21, 2010
On Quality Control in Research Publication
In a comment to the previous post, Neo wrote:
Can you please discuss something about this? I would be very thankful if you can go for a separate post. The title of article (from the chronicle) is
"We Must Stop the Avalanche of Low-Quality Research"
Neo, thanks for the suggestion. I really wasn't planning on posting on this topic as it did get a good and thorough analysis on FSP's blog; the post can be found here. I like FSP's blog very much in general, and my thoughts on this particular issue are well-aligned with what she wrote, plus there are some very thoughtful comments there.
But I think we all need a break from my previous post, and science is always a good way to recharge, so I can try to give you a short version of what I think. My first impression was that this article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed had a fairly strange composition of authors (from English, mechanical engineering, medicine, management, and geography departments). I am wondering if any recommendation could ever be valid for research in each one among such a wide variety of disciplines. For instance, I really can't say anything about how people in English or management should publish their work, as I have very little knowledge of how their work is evaluated. But as far as science and engineering go, peer-reviewed publications are the norm and I think they are a good norm. Nowadays, you have to have a balance of high-impact papers with the overall number of papers; moderate-impact papers are sometimes not cited too highly, but that doesn't mean they are worthless. There are a lot of important details to the scientific process that are not 'hot' but need to be publically available so that someone else wouldn't have to duplicate everything. DrugMonkey wrote about that here. Most faculty do a good job of balancing high-impact work with moderate-impact work (see a related post by FSP here). We have duties to students and postdocs who have to come out with papers (e.g. I think it's unfair to keep a postdoc for many years with zero papers, holding off to get one big splashing paper in the end), and we have a duty to the scientific community and funding agencies to document both the results of the work and the process.
I felt that every paper that I was a coauthor on was a good one: we felt we had something important to say and that we wrote it as clearly as we could. Some papers were exceptional, but all were, in my mind, solid pieces of work. If I hadn't thought so, I would not have written/coauthored them. I cannot speak for everyone, but my feeling is that a vast majority of scientists are ethical people who love their work and are serious about it, and would never publish what they felt was trivial.
How frequently something gets cited is a different issue. Papers on hot topics in prestigious journals get cited a lot, but so do papers with egregious errors and so do review articles. So I am wary of any system where someone's worth is determined by the number of citations alone, because that immediately eliminates people who, for instance, work in not-currently-hot, but important areas with difficult challenges. And it eliminates whole disciplines because the number of citations scales with the size of the field. There are some relatively robust metrics such as the Hirsch h-index that tell you about a relative merit of a scholar, but again these are strongly discipline-dependent and are not infallible.
I personally really enjoy writing comprehensive articles for Very Good Journal(s) in my discipline, with impact factors 2-6; I always get good constructive feedback in review, and the reviewers are almost invariably well-chosen and knowledgeable. These papers do get cited per year about as much as the impact factor says, but some get cited considerably more and some less. However I think every paper of mine in Very Good Journals was cited at least a few times after 2-3 years (i.e., none had zero citations at end of year 3, but a couple of papers had only a couple of citations). Of course, this is anecdotal, but I would say this means the review process works and the papers are read, and, from a quick scan of who cited these papers, they are largely specialists in my discipline. Papers in Hot Jurnals (IF 6-15) or Super Hot Journals (IF above 15; the categorization into hot and super hot is mine and the limits are totally approximate and based on my field's norms) have appeal beyond one's immediate discipline and a broader readership, and a higher citation potential. However, they can be a pain as they are commonly published after unpleasant and long battles, where in addition to the paper's technical merit, other effects play roles, such as the notoriety of coauthors and everyone's egos. However, there is no doubt publications in Hot and Super Hot Journals are significant boosts to your CV and are widely read, so if you feel you have done some super hot science, don't sell yourself short.
Science is a creative enterprise, so imposing external quality and volume control cannot be done the same way as imposing it on, say, the quality or production volume of tomato soup. I am not sure what type of quality control in science, except internal, we could envision without squashing certaing types of disciplines or smaller group efforts. I also don't think there can be any regulation that would reign in the prolieration of papers: there are more scientists, more work is being done, and all participants are evaluated on merit and output volume too, and going for merit without regard for volume means simply ignoring the current laws of the game. A good CV shows a balance of high-imact with moderate-impact papers (composition varies with discipline and career stage), and the number of papers published per unit time that scales non-linearly with group size and is, again, discipline-dependent. Quality control is one of those issues where a single researcher should strive to instill good practices in his/her own sphere of influence, but beyond that it's simply an ill-posed problem with too many variables. I train my students to differentiate between good solid work and work that is more hype than substance and work that is truly transformative; we strive to present good-quality science in every single paper we submit, flashy or not. I believe most scientists do the same, and that's the best quality control we can ask for.
Can you please discuss something about this? I would be very thankful if you can go for a separate post. The title of article (from the chronicle) is
"We Must Stop the Avalanche of Low-Quality Research"
Neo, thanks for the suggestion. I really wasn't planning on posting on this topic as it did get a good and thorough analysis on FSP's blog; the post can be found here. I like FSP's blog very much in general, and my thoughts on this particular issue are well-aligned with what she wrote, plus there are some very thoughtful comments there.
But I think we all need a break from my previous post, and science is always a good way to recharge, so I can try to give you a short version of what I think. My first impression was that this article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed had a fairly strange composition of authors (from English, mechanical engineering, medicine, management, and geography departments). I am wondering if any recommendation could ever be valid for research in each one among such a wide variety of disciplines. For instance, I really can't say anything about how people in English or management should publish their work, as I have very little knowledge of how their work is evaluated. But as far as science and engineering go, peer-reviewed publications are the norm and I think they are a good norm. Nowadays, you have to have a balance of high-impact papers with the overall number of papers; moderate-impact papers are sometimes not cited too highly, but that doesn't mean they are worthless. There are a lot of important details to the scientific process that are not 'hot' but need to be publically available so that someone else wouldn't have to duplicate everything. DrugMonkey wrote about that here. Most faculty do a good job of balancing high-impact work with moderate-impact work (see a related post by FSP here). We have duties to students and postdocs who have to come out with papers (e.g. I think it's unfair to keep a postdoc for many years with zero papers, holding off to get one big splashing paper in the end), and we have a duty to the scientific community and funding agencies to document both the results of the work and the process.
I felt that every paper that I was a coauthor on was a good one: we felt we had something important to say and that we wrote it as clearly as we could. Some papers were exceptional, but all were, in my mind, solid pieces of work. If I hadn't thought so, I would not have written/coauthored them. I cannot speak for everyone, but my feeling is that a vast majority of scientists are ethical people who love their work and are serious about it, and would never publish what they felt was trivial.
How frequently something gets cited is a different issue. Papers on hot topics in prestigious journals get cited a lot, but so do papers with egregious errors and so do review articles. So I am wary of any system where someone's worth is determined by the number of citations alone, because that immediately eliminates people who, for instance, work in not-currently-hot, but important areas with difficult challenges. And it eliminates whole disciplines because the number of citations scales with the size of the field. There are some relatively robust metrics such as the Hirsch h-index that tell you about a relative merit of a scholar, but again these are strongly discipline-dependent and are not infallible.
I personally really enjoy writing comprehensive articles for Very Good Journal(s) in my discipline, with impact factors 2-6; I always get good constructive feedback in review, and the reviewers are almost invariably well-chosen and knowledgeable. These papers do get cited per year about as much as the impact factor says, but some get cited considerably more and some less. However I think every paper of mine in Very Good Journals was cited at least a few times after 2-3 years (i.e., none had zero citations at end of year 3, but a couple of papers had only a couple of citations). Of course, this is anecdotal, but I would say this means the review process works and the papers are read, and, from a quick scan of who cited these papers, they are largely specialists in my discipline. Papers in Hot Jurnals (IF 6-15) or Super Hot Journals (IF above 15; the categorization into hot and super hot is mine and the limits are totally approximate and based on my field's norms) have appeal beyond one's immediate discipline and a broader readership, and a higher citation potential. However, they can be a pain as they are commonly published after unpleasant and long battles, where in addition to the paper's technical merit, other effects play roles, such as the notoriety of coauthors and everyone's egos. However, there is no doubt publications in Hot and Super Hot Journals are significant boosts to your CV and are widely read, so if you feel you have done some super hot science, don't sell yourself short.
Science is a creative enterprise, so imposing external quality and volume control cannot be done the same way as imposing it on, say, the quality or production volume of tomato soup. I am not sure what type of quality control in science, except internal, we could envision without squashing certaing types of disciplines or smaller group efforts. I also don't think there can be any regulation that would reign in the prolieration of papers: there are more scientists, more work is being done, and all participants are evaluated on merit and output volume too, and going for merit without regard for volume means simply ignoring the current laws of the game. A good CV shows a balance of high-imact with moderate-impact papers (composition varies with discipline and career stage), and the number of papers published per unit time that scales non-linearly with group size and is, again, discipline-dependent. Quality control is one of those issues where a single researcher should strive to instill good practices in his/her own sphere of influence, but beyond that it's simply an ill-posed problem with too many variables. I train my students to differentiate between good solid work and work that is more hype than substance and work that is truly transformative; we strive to present good-quality science in every single paper we submit, flashy or not. I believe most scientists do the same, and that's the best quality control we can ask for.
Friday, June 18, 2010
To Silence the Mockingbirds?
Today is my 1-month bloggiversary. After a month of blogging, and a little longer of following the happenings in the scientific blogosphere, I feel largely exhausted and disillusioned.
Why did I start blogging to begin with? I am a female professor in a competitive STEM field at a major research university. I am an academic, and I lead a complicated professional and personal life. I started blogging because I like to write and I feel I have something to share with people who lead similarly complicated lives. I wanted to connect to other scientists and academics, and hear how they face their challenges. I wanted to have a discussion among peers about the issues that penetrate our daily lives: how we manage research, teaching, and service with personal demands. I trust my readership are smart, educated, and thoughtful people. I believe I am one of such people myself.
There are indeed a number of very balanced scientific blogs that espouse the type of discussion I envision. And I have received a number of interesting comments and emails since I started blogging. People don't always agree with me and they certainly don't have to, but as long as they want to have an honest and respectful discussion, I am happy to engage.
Unfortunately, these supportive, constructive interactions are often and forcefully overshadowed by unpleasant ones. Even the most balanced of bloggers get surprisingly vitriolic comments, sometimes on the least inflammatory of topics! Where does this come from?
I was an unwilling recipient of a lot of negative attention by you-know-whos and a whole host of snide-comment writers a couple of weeks ago. They thought they saw something in one of my posts that wasn't there. This generated bursts of traffic on their sites and mine, resulted in a storm of unpleasant comments, judging and patronization galore. Everyone had a bone to pick. It was a couple of exciting days and gratuitous venom in the scientific blogosphere.
But these pile-ons are nothing specific to me. Apparently, the blogosphere is alive with the sounds of bullying. While I think bullies are a vocal and obnoxious minority, their effects can be so strong and so negative that they completely overshadow the majority of positive interactions one enjoys. Moderate people, while numerous, are significantly less vocal, which I find unfortunate, because these are the people I would actually like to hear much more from.
Tearing up someone's blog post is pretty easy. It is as easy as getting a research paper rejected without a chance of resubmission. You don't think so? Here's how it goes: no paper is perfect; if you are set on tearing it apart, all you have to do is find one among the assumptions/approximations that have been made, proclaim that it is ill-conceived and incorrect (nothing is ever 100% correct) and should be done better/more precisely/differently. Then you amplify said shortcoming, throw in a snide remark or two, comment on how the authors are dumb as bricks and this awful work is in the same vein as their group's regular shoddy output, and that no amount of additional experiments could possible salvage such an ill-conceived project, and there you have it: paper rejected, authors irritated, and you are feeling empowered. Scientific bullying at its finest. It’s all about picking a nit and blowing it up into a ballon-size louse. You can tear apart absolutely any paper if you are set on doing so. But do we as scientists do that? No. Or at least we should not. We trust people's qualifications; even if we don't know the authors, we believe they have been taught stuff at school so they are not idiots, and then we try to evaluate if there is something new and interesting in the paper and if it has been presented in a coherent and informative way.
So tearing apart is easy. Being snide/judgmental/patronizing at someone else's expense is easy. Bullying -- in science or on a middle school playground -- is easy. Really, any type of destruction is easy.
I am perfectly capable of running my real life; no one needs to tell me how to train my students or run my lab or how to split chores with my spouse in a blogosphere-preapproved way. I assume my readers are capable of running their lives too and do not need me to judge or patronize them. They may be interested in my experience, my thoughts, and perhaps some advice. And that is what I am interested in from other people in the scientific blogosphere.
But of course, there may be people with different takes on what is important for a vibrant scientific blogoverse. So please share your thoughts:
--Should someone's right to mock/ridicule/vent/judge/patronize ever trump my right to have a discussion with peers where everyone is treated with respect?
-- Does the blogosphere have to be a hostile environment for people who want to talk about life as an academic? Does the ubiquity of attackers restrict the population of bloggers to only those who can deal with these attacks? Is that good or bad?
-- Is it not enough that I must have a tough hide for my life as a female scientist, in order to handle day-today challenges of research, teaching, and service? Do I have to now special-order one for my blogosphere persona in order to keep blogging, and, if so, who is going to pay for it and where can I get it in purple?
Why did I start blogging to begin with? I am a female professor in a competitive STEM field at a major research university. I am an academic, and I lead a complicated professional and personal life. I started blogging because I like to write and I feel I have something to share with people who lead similarly complicated lives. I wanted to connect to other scientists and academics, and hear how they face their challenges. I wanted to have a discussion among peers about the issues that penetrate our daily lives: how we manage research, teaching, and service with personal demands. I trust my readership are smart, educated, and thoughtful people. I believe I am one of such people myself.
There are indeed a number of very balanced scientific blogs that espouse the type of discussion I envision. And I have received a number of interesting comments and emails since I started blogging. People don't always agree with me and they certainly don't have to, but as long as they want to have an honest and respectful discussion, I am happy to engage.
Unfortunately, these supportive, constructive interactions are often and forcefully overshadowed by unpleasant ones. Even the most balanced of bloggers get surprisingly vitriolic comments, sometimes on the least inflammatory of topics! Where does this come from?
I was an unwilling recipient of a lot of negative attention by you-know-whos and a whole host of snide-comment writers a couple of weeks ago. They thought they saw something in one of my posts that wasn't there. This generated bursts of traffic on their sites and mine, resulted in a storm of unpleasant comments, judging and patronization galore. Everyone had a bone to pick. It was a couple of exciting days and gratuitous venom in the scientific blogosphere.
But these pile-ons are nothing specific to me. Apparently, the blogosphere is alive with the sounds of bullying. While I think bullies are a vocal and obnoxious minority, their effects can be so strong and so negative that they completely overshadow the majority of positive interactions one enjoys. Moderate people, while numerous, are significantly less vocal, which I find unfortunate, because these are the people I would actually like to hear much more from.
Tearing up someone's blog post is pretty easy. It is as easy as getting a research paper rejected without a chance of resubmission. You don't think so? Here's how it goes: no paper is perfect; if you are set on tearing it apart, all you have to do is find one among the assumptions/approximations that have been made, proclaim that it is ill-conceived and incorrect (nothing is ever 100% correct) and should be done better/more precisely/differently. Then you amplify said shortcoming, throw in a snide remark or two, comment on how the authors are dumb as bricks and this awful work is in the same vein as their group's regular shoddy output, and that no amount of additional experiments could possible salvage such an ill-conceived project, and there you have it: paper rejected, authors irritated, and you are feeling empowered. Scientific bullying at its finest. It’s all about picking a nit and blowing it up into a ballon-size louse. You can tear apart absolutely any paper if you are set on doing so. But do we as scientists do that? No. Or at least we should not. We trust people's qualifications; even if we don't know the authors, we believe they have been taught stuff at school so they are not idiots, and then we try to evaluate if there is something new and interesting in the paper and if it has been presented in a coherent and informative way.
So tearing apart is easy. Being snide/judgmental/patronizing at someone else's expense is easy. Bullying -- in science or on a middle school playground -- is easy. Really, any type of destruction is easy.
I am perfectly capable of running my real life; no one needs to tell me how to train my students or run my lab or how to split chores with my spouse in a blogosphere-preapproved way. I assume my readers are capable of running their lives too and do not need me to judge or patronize them. They may be interested in my experience, my thoughts, and perhaps some advice. And that is what I am interested in from other people in the scientific blogosphere.
But of course, there may be people with different takes on what is important for a vibrant scientific blogoverse. So please share your thoughts:
--Should someone's right to mock/ridicule/vent/judge/patronize ever trump my right to have a discussion with peers where everyone is treated with respect?
-- Does the blogosphere have to be a hostile environment for people who want to talk about life as an academic? Does the ubiquity of attackers restrict the population of bloggers to only those who can deal with these attacks? Is that good or bad?
-- Is it not enough that I must have a tough hide for my life as a female scientist, in order to handle day-today challenges of research, teaching, and service? Do I have to now special-order one for my blogosphere persona in order to keep blogging, and, if so, who is going to pay for it and where can I get it in purple?
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Group Morale
Today I talked on the phone with my postdoc, who had presented work done by himself and a couple of other students at a conference (he was the only group member there). If went well, he got some nice questions, but what I noticed was how he was always saying "We are the only group that did this... Bigwig's group considered only [a small subset of cases] so our group rocks." He could have said "I" or "we", but he was indeed referring to "the group" several times through the conversation.
It got me thinking about how important the concept of belonging to a group actually is to students and postdocs. My feeling is that it is VERY important, and that the group's cohesiveness is critical for everyone's feeling of contentment. We meet every 3-4 weeks as a group, and more often in the summer. I am vigilant about having pictures of new students put up on the group website, so that they promptly become initiated into the group and get their tiny bit of webspace. And there is a ritual about updating the group picture once a year to document how we are growing and changing. Sometimes I feel quite dorky insisting on these things (rounding them all up for a photo is not a small feat), but I think it's worth it. I think students, especially new ones and even more so international ones, do need a sense that they belong someplace, and that place is their research group. I have noticed that new students do start putting the group name in their email signature almost right away: New Student, Cool STEM Group, Univ of Where GMP Works, Someplace, USA. I never ask them to do any of this, they clearly see it from older members of the group, but it is interesting to see how quickly (within the 1st week or so) they adopt some form of an email signature that resembles the one above...
When I was a grad student and later as a freshly minted tenure-track faculty, there were many conferences which I attended alone. It was useful, but not always much fun beyond the technical program. In contrast, 2/3 of my group went to a large conference this spring. It was cool to see how supportive of each other they were; everybody was very focused on making it to each other's talks, they were each other's sounding boards and first point of contact for feedback. And they were pretty blunt to each other! There is a very important conference in my specialty in a few months. I will not be attending, but about half of my group will, and I am sure they will do great as well as have a nice time.
My friends from grad school are among my closest friends, the people I go to when I need an honest opinion on many issues. When you've pulled lots of all-nighters together, that has the ability to form a lasting bond. In many ways, working in the same research group is not unlike being siblings: you mature together professionally, go through the same growing pains, have the same (quirky? unreasonable? plain cool?) academic parent -- the advisor. Academic siblings are often trusted future collaborators. Being an advisor, it is certainly heartwarming to see your academic kids grow up and be proud to have belonged to your group, their academic immediate family.
It got me thinking about how important the concept of belonging to a group actually is to students and postdocs. My feeling is that it is VERY important, and that the group's cohesiveness is critical for everyone's feeling of contentment. We meet every 3-4 weeks as a group, and more often in the summer. I am vigilant about having pictures of new students put up on the group website, so that they promptly become initiated into the group and get their tiny bit of webspace. And there is a ritual about updating the group picture once a year to document how we are growing and changing. Sometimes I feel quite dorky insisting on these things (rounding them all up for a photo is not a small feat), but I think it's worth it. I think students, especially new ones and even more so international ones, do need a sense that they belong someplace, and that place is their research group. I have noticed that new students do start putting the group name in their email signature almost right away: New Student, Cool STEM Group, Univ of Where GMP Works, Someplace, USA. I never ask them to do any of this, they clearly see it from older members of the group, but it is interesting to see how quickly (within the 1st week or so) they adopt some form of an email signature that resembles the one above...
When I was a grad student and later as a freshly minted tenure-track faculty, there were many conferences which I attended alone. It was useful, but not always much fun beyond the technical program. In contrast, 2/3 of my group went to a large conference this spring. It was cool to see how supportive of each other they were; everybody was very focused on making it to each other's talks, they were each other's sounding boards and first point of contact for feedback. And they were pretty blunt to each other! There is a very important conference in my specialty in a few months. I will not be attending, but about half of my group will, and I am sure they will do great as well as have a nice time.
My friends from grad school are among my closest friends, the people I go to when I need an honest opinion on many issues. When you've pulled lots of all-nighters together, that has the ability to form a lasting bond. In many ways, working in the same research group is not unlike being siblings: you mature together professionally, go through the same growing pains, have the same (quirky? unreasonable? plain cool?) academic parent -- the advisor. Academic siblings are often trusted future collaborators. Being an advisor, it is certainly heartwarming to see your academic kids grow up and be proud to have belonged to your group, their academic immediate family.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Academia the Unappealing
At a recent meeting with my collaborators and their groups, I asked a collaborator's student, who is getting ready to graduate, if she planned on going on the academic track (postdoc, then tenure track). She said 'Oh, no way!' Another student, who will graduate in a few months, concurred that he would never ever consider going into academia.
My colleagues (the other faculty) and I looked at each other in mock disbelief. Actually, these days I almost never hear that students want to continue into academia. So we started chatting about why it is so, and what it is that we as faculty do to make academia look so unappealing to students. My collaborator's student said that she wanted to explore other things in life. For her, it was a question of whether she would get more deeply into her technical field or broaden her horizons professionally, and the latter is her choice.
The other student said he felt it was all too much about egos (I guess that doesn't bode well for us, the PIs!), and that he preferred working as part of a team (he had a previous position in industry before grad school). He missed that -- being able to work on technically focused projects, exchanging ideas and information, and not having to worry about self-promotion. One of my faculty collaborators pointed out that there was certainly some serious elbowing going on in industry if one wanted to rise through the ranks to, say, division manager, but that, yes, if my student wanted to stay on an elbow-light technical path, he could probably pull it off in a solid company.
Another student said that he thought that more flexibility in academia was a myth and that we were all enslaved by the granting agencies. He openly asked if we would ever do the project we were all meeting about if it hadn't been in a hot area, with a lot of funding, and we had been successful in getting the grant. I couldn't help but chuckle: I understand that from his romanticized perspective of what science is, jumping on the wagon to do work in one’s general area just because it is hot and fundable is somehow superficial or otherwise unseemly, and I remember thinking that too, a while ago. I now look at it as simply being in tune what other people actually care about and what goes on in the field. And, as a former professor of mine said once upon a time: "There are no trivial questions, regardless of area, as long as you are at the area's cutting edge."
My view of what we as academics do has grown progressively more cynical over the years, but I think I am also cured of quite a bit of snobbery I had going in. It used to be all about what I think is cool or technically challenging, regardless of what anyone else thought. Nowadays, what I do is much more driven, one way or another, by what other people care about: what the program manager wants to fund, what is hot in the field, what people want to read about and cite, and what my collaborators want to do. Of course, I am not advocating being constantly in a reactive mode in terms of research direction, but you have to keep abreast of what the rest of the world is doing, adjust your internal gauge to accommodate for the overall scientific trends, and have a healthy mix of projects that range from pure discovery-driven personal passion to hot new stuff where funding is being funneled. I feel that, unless you keep a mix, you either sink (no funds if projects are not hot) or you sell your soul (it’s no fun if all you ever do is chase the berries).
At the same meeting, a student of mine chimed in "Well, if you didn't have to teach and write grants and advise us, you'd have many more papers and do much more work on [my pet topic]." I told him that while I would certainly do much more on that one topic, I could not possibly do, on my own, all the work that he and all the other students before him have done cumulatively on all the different projects. As for my pet project of yore, I used to long to work on it and would savor the little chunks of time I could carve to devote to it. But I grew weary of it; I realized that there is a very, very small community thinking about these problems, which are really hard, and that most people were making incremental, nearly insignificant tweaks to known models. There are two or three really big, important questions to answer in the context of my pet topic, and I realized that if I am going to keep working on it, I might as well grab the bull by the horns or not engage at all. So there you have it, plans for my next sabbatical.
I know it took me a while to make peace with the fact that I now manage much more than I do research. However, I really enjoy reveling in the big picture and living vicariously through –- uhm, overseeing -- my students' work, going through the details of different, distinct projects with each one of them. I would never be able to have this much breadth if it was just me. And then, there is writing. Writing papers is my favorite part of a project: through writing, things fall into place, first in my mind and then in the manuscript. I love how writing helps me think and distill the picture into the essential science behind months of work. And then I get to talk to people about the work at conferences and get new ideas for follow-on work after I hear colleagues talk about their projects... What’s not to love?
I believe academic research is a wonderful pursuit, and I think that, if a person is realistic about what it takes to secure enough funding to sustain a viable group, one can actually still have a lot of flexibility and a lot of fun, with awesome, very smart people. Some of whom then grow up and tell you they think academia sucks and they would never ever do what you do. Oh well.
------------------
N.B. I wanted this post to somewhat balance out the many posts in the blogosphere that focus on too many people wanting to go into academia and no one being able to. My experience is quite the opposite: the students in my and my collaborators' groups are quite against going into academia. I was surprised by how passionately some students were against it. Rather, I was expecting that for more of them academia were an option, maybe not a too appealing one, but I didn't expect to hear we're selling out souls to the granting agencies or that students view our advising as a poor substitute for doing research on our own. None of the students involved in the discussion had families, so the work-family balance didn't come up, but it is a very important issue that does dissuade many people from an academic path (see, for instance, irongrrl's comment below). My take is that there are wonderful research and non-research opportunities out there for people with PhD's, and most of them pay significantly better than academia and are very intellectually stimulating. All of my graduated PhD students went to well-paid, supportive industry jobs or national labs and are doing great, so this article should not be construed as me passing judgment on non-academia track, quite the contrary. It's just that I was taken aback by how unappealing academia was perceived to be by the students at this particular meeting, but perhaps this is exactly how it deserves to be perceived nowadays, with competition too fierce and claims on one's life and sanity too high...
My colleagues (the other faculty) and I looked at each other in mock disbelief. Actually, these days I almost never hear that students want to continue into academia. So we started chatting about why it is so, and what it is that we as faculty do to make academia look so unappealing to students. My collaborator's student said that she wanted to explore other things in life. For her, it was a question of whether she would get more deeply into her technical field or broaden her horizons professionally, and the latter is her choice.
The other student said he felt it was all too much about egos (I guess that doesn't bode well for us, the PIs!), and that he preferred working as part of a team (he had a previous position in industry before grad school). He missed that -- being able to work on technically focused projects, exchanging ideas and information, and not having to worry about self-promotion. One of my faculty collaborators pointed out that there was certainly some serious elbowing going on in industry if one wanted to rise through the ranks to, say, division manager, but that, yes, if my student wanted to stay on an elbow-light technical path, he could probably pull it off in a solid company.
Another student said that he thought that more flexibility in academia was a myth and that we were all enslaved by the granting agencies. He openly asked if we would ever do the project we were all meeting about if it hadn't been in a hot area, with a lot of funding, and we had been successful in getting the grant. I couldn't help but chuckle: I understand that from his romanticized perspective of what science is, jumping on the wagon to do work in one’s general area just because it is hot and fundable is somehow superficial or otherwise unseemly, and I remember thinking that too, a while ago. I now look at it as simply being in tune what other people actually care about and what goes on in the field. And, as a former professor of mine said once upon a time: "There are no trivial questions, regardless of area, as long as you are at the area's cutting edge."
My view of what we as academics do has grown progressively more cynical over the years, but I think I am also cured of quite a bit of snobbery I had going in. It used to be all about what I think is cool or technically challenging, regardless of what anyone else thought. Nowadays, what I do is much more driven, one way or another, by what other people care about: what the program manager wants to fund, what is hot in the field, what people want to read about and cite, and what my collaborators want to do. Of course, I am not advocating being constantly in a reactive mode in terms of research direction, but you have to keep abreast of what the rest of the world is doing, adjust your internal gauge to accommodate for the overall scientific trends, and have a healthy mix of projects that range from pure discovery-driven personal passion to hot new stuff where funding is being funneled. I feel that, unless you keep a mix, you either sink (no funds if projects are not hot) or you sell your soul (it’s no fun if all you ever do is chase the berries).
At the same meeting, a student of mine chimed in "Well, if you didn't have to teach and write grants and advise us, you'd have many more papers and do much more work on [my pet topic]." I told him that while I would certainly do much more on that one topic, I could not possibly do, on my own, all the work that he and all the other students before him have done cumulatively on all the different projects. As for my pet project of yore, I used to long to work on it and would savor the little chunks of time I could carve to devote to it. But I grew weary of it; I realized that there is a very, very small community thinking about these problems, which are really hard, and that most people were making incremental, nearly insignificant tweaks to known models. There are two or three really big, important questions to answer in the context of my pet topic, and I realized that if I am going to keep working on it, I might as well grab the bull by the horns or not engage at all. So there you have it, plans for my next sabbatical.
I know it took me a while to make peace with the fact that I now manage much more than I do research. However, I really enjoy reveling in the big picture and living vicariously through –- uhm, overseeing -- my students' work, going through the details of different, distinct projects with each one of them. I would never be able to have this much breadth if it was just me. And then, there is writing. Writing papers is my favorite part of a project: through writing, things fall into place, first in my mind and then in the manuscript. I love how writing helps me think and distill the picture into the essential science behind months of work. And then I get to talk to people about the work at conferences and get new ideas for follow-on work after I hear colleagues talk about their projects... What’s not to love?
I believe academic research is a wonderful pursuit, and I think that, if a person is realistic about what it takes to secure enough funding to sustain a viable group, one can actually still have a lot of flexibility and a lot of fun, with awesome, very smart people. Some of whom then grow up and tell you they think academia sucks and they would never ever do what you do. Oh well.
------------------
N.B. I wanted this post to somewhat balance out the many posts in the blogosphere that focus on too many people wanting to go into academia and no one being able to. My experience is quite the opposite: the students in my and my collaborators' groups are quite against going into academia. I was surprised by how passionately some students were against it. Rather, I was expecting that for more of them academia were an option, maybe not a too appealing one, but I didn't expect to hear we're selling out souls to the granting agencies or that students view our advising as a poor substitute for doing research on our own. None of the students involved in the discussion had families, so the work-family balance didn't come up, but it is a very important issue that does dissuade many people from an academic path (see, for instance, irongrrl's comment below). My take is that there are wonderful research and non-research opportunities out there for people with PhD's, and most of them pay significantly better than academia and are very intellectually stimulating. All of my graduated PhD students went to well-paid, supportive industry jobs or national labs and are doing great, so this article should not be construed as me passing judgment on non-academia track, quite the contrary. It's just that I was taken aback by how unappealing academia was perceived to be by the students at this particular meeting, but perhaps this is exactly how it deserves to be perceived nowadays, with competition too fierce and claims on one's life and sanity too high...
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Mentee, PhD
Starting a tenure-track position is a little like going through puberty again: it's scary and exciting to become entirely independent. Depending on the field, people may have gone through one or more postdocs prior to getting a tenure track position, and some have had a fair bit of experience in securing their own funding and governing their own work, so some aspects of a tenure-track position are not new to them. However, I don't think anyone can fully prepare you for what type of havoc the simultaneous pile-on of teaching, grant writing, student and staff recruitment, and service wreaks in your life. Sort of like no one can prepare you for how it is to have your first kid, only sans poop.
The first year is pretty brutal, as all the courses one teaches are new and preparing for them takes a lot of time. And then there is grant writing -- I wrote over a dozen grants my first year, some on my own, some with colleagues. I remember being entirely miserable after my 1st semester, because between teaching, grant writing, service (albeit little), and housework, I was completely exhausted and had no time to do research, which is what really recharges me. So in my second semester I dramatically increased the number of instances I said "no" to offers of grant co-PI-ships and nonessential service, carved out some solid blocks of time to devote to writing papers, and I reached the end of my 1st year feeling much more upbeat.
Tenure track is a stressful period in which one learns to teach, advise students, write proposals to raise grant money, and get along with the colleagues, program managers, and collaborators. One's career actually can go astray many ways; the home department will usually want to protect its investment and help one achieve tenure. During tenure track, a faculty will typically receive annual evaluations, which may or may not always be in writing and may or may not always be detailed enough to be useful. In my first few years, I'd get these vague single-paragraph evaluations that neither praised nor criticized, but the department switched to longer, more detailed evaluations around my mid-tenure-track, and these were quite useful as they listed specific things the department thought about my research, teaching, and service to date.
A mechanism that is implemented some places is to assign a mentoring committee to a faculty on tenure track. These can consist of one or two faculty who are supposed to be the first point of contact for tenure track faculty when questions regarding teaching, research, or service arise. The committee may be required to meet with the assistant professor to go over the progress report, with or without the department chair. The two faculty in my mentoring committee were well-intentioned but I never felt particularly free to ask them for advice, so while they certainly didn't hurt my case I don't think they had as much of a positive effect as they could have, had the lines of communication been more open. I also has an outside-of-department senior female mentor assigned through a female mentoring program, and while she was a wonderful person, I felt that she certainly had better things to do than advise me, so we were in touch quite rarely. In general, all my formally or semi-formally assigned faculty mentors were nice and collegial people but not too available, so I avoided bothering them.
At the very beginning of my tenure track, I asked my former advisor for input on all things academic. But that subsided quickly, and I would say that the most and the best advice on anything academia-related I got from my collaborators. They are the people I trust and the collaboration makes the lines of communication open. While these people never got service credit for answering my inquiries (my formal mentoring committee did get service credit for it), I wish they had somehow been compensated for the time and effort. But I think this is a case of pay-it-forward: you give back by trying to help other junior faculty, so this blog is a bit of me paying my debt forward.
Anecdotally, I know that in some big research schools people are left to sink or swim, and almost no written, unambiguous feedback is given to them on how they are progressing towards tenure – sometimes not until the 3rd year review and sometimes not even then. The lack of feedback just makes a difficult journey even more stressful. I recommend finding out early what the university-mandated and department-mandated types of feedback are, and if there is any type of mentorship you have the right to I advise that you try to have it materialize. Ensure you get all the feedback that you have the right to (and then some), and do so early on.
I am curious to hear how prevalently mentoring committees are assigned in science and engineering departments to oversee a young faculty's career development, and, if assigned, how useful/successful they are in helping the candidate and making the evaluation process less stressful and more transparent.
The first year is pretty brutal, as all the courses one teaches are new and preparing for them takes a lot of time. And then there is grant writing -- I wrote over a dozen grants my first year, some on my own, some with colleagues. I remember being entirely miserable after my 1st semester, because between teaching, grant writing, service (albeit little), and housework, I was completely exhausted and had no time to do research, which is what really recharges me. So in my second semester I dramatically increased the number of instances I said "no" to offers of grant co-PI-ships and nonessential service, carved out some solid blocks of time to devote to writing papers, and I reached the end of my 1st year feeling much more upbeat.
Tenure track is a stressful period in which one learns to teach, advise students, write proposals to raise grant money, and get along with the colleagues, program managers, and collaborators. One's career actually can go astray many ways; the home department will usually want to protect its investment and help one achieve tenure. During tenure track, a faculty will typically receive annual evaluations, which may or may not always be in writing and may or may not always be detailed enough to be useful. In my first few years, I'd get these vague single-paragraph evaluations that neither praised nor criticized, but the department switched to longer, more detailed evaluations around my mid-tenure-track, and these were quite useful as they listed specific things the department thought about my research, teaching, and service to date.
A mechanism that is implemented some places is to assign a mentoring committee to a faculty on tenure track. These can consist of one or two faculty who are supposed to be the first point of contact for tenure track faculty when questions regarding teaching, research, or service arise. The committee may be required to meet with the assistant professor to go over the progress report, with or without the department chair. The two faculty in my mentoring committee were well-intentioned but I never felt particularly free to ask them for advice, so while they certainly didn't hurt my case I don't think they had as much of a positive effect as they could have, had the lines of communication been more open. I also has an outside-of-department senior female mentor assigned through a female mentoring program, and while she was a wonderful person, I felt that she certainly had better things to do than advise me, so we were in touch quite rarely. In general, all my formally or semi-formally assigned faculty mentors were nice and collegial people but not too available, so I avoided bothering them.
At the very beginning of my tenure track, I asked my former advisor for input on all things academic. But that subsided quickly, and I would say that the most and the best advice on anything academia-related I got from my collaborators. They are the people I trust and the collaboration makes the lines of communication open. While these people never got service credit for answering my inquiries (my formal mentoring committee did get service credit for it), I wish they had somehow been compensated for the time and effort. But I think this is a case of pay-it-forward: you give back by trying to help other junior faculty, so this blog is a bit of me paying my debt forward.
Anecdotally, I know that in some big research schools people are left to sink or swim, and almost no written, unambiguous feedback is given to them on how they are progressing towards tenure – sometimes not until the 3rd year review and sometimes not even then. The lack of feedback just makes a difficult journey even more stressful. I recommend finding out early what the university-mandated and department-mandated types of feedback are, and if there is any type of mentorship you have the right to I advise that you try to have it materialize. Ensure you get all the feedback that you have the right to (and then some), and do so early on.
I am curious to hear how prevalently mentoring committees are assigned in science and engineering departments to oversee a young faculty's career development, and, if assigned, how useful/successful they are in helping the candidate and making the evaluation process less stressful and more transparent.
Monday, June 7, 2010
Meeting Blues
Meetings rank pretty high on my list of the things I hate. I don't mean conferences or professional gatherings or panel reviews, but rather meetings where I am captive in a room due to a professional obligation for what feels like an eternity, with little intellectual stimulation. I never met a meeting I didn't want to cancel. I am always, always, overjoyed if any sort of meeting is cancelled, and I feel like I have received a tiny precious gift of extra time.
In my advisor's group, we had these long weekly meetings with all group members, where we would go around the table and everyone would tell what they had been up to. It went on for hours, and then I'd talk for 2 min and that was it. It was one of my first experiences being a member of a captive audience and I resented it for the most part. Most often, the updates shared were brief and disconnected and of little meaning to anyone but the advisor and the person giving the update. But occasionally, someone would have a breakthrough or was presenting someone else's breakthrough or was giving a practice talk to go to a conference, and then it would really be fun and stimulating and I was grateful we had these meetings. I started suspecting it was not me missing a "meeting gene", but rather the suboptimal organization of meetings that was causing me grief.
With becoming faculty came faculty meetings. And committee meetings. I used to think that no one in their right mind could enjoy faculty and committee meetings, but was I wrong! There is a subspecies of Narcissistic Loudmouths who enjoy listening to their own voice much rather than going home to dinner; my theory is that their spouses are also fed up with the round-the-clock patronizing monologues, so Narcissistic Loudmouths are encouraged to stay at work for as long as they wish.
Faculty governance is a wonderful concept, in that everyone can in principle be heard and decisions are made after thoughtful discussion among peers. In reality, it doesn't work like that: the Loudmouths take over and no one can get a word in edgewise. There are some very smart and thoughtful but quiet people in my department whom I would actually like to hear from, but who either avoid coming to meetings or, when they do, they don't participate. The louder and more obnoxious you are, apparently the more attention you get. Faculty meetings imitate life.
When I became faculty, I also started building my own group, and, as I was taught during my training, we started having group meetings. While I was engaged the entire time, I found that most students were, just like me before them, looking painfully bored throughout the meeting, and I couldn't go into sufficient technical detail when needed with anyone, not with everyone just sitting there dying of boredom. So within a year or so I stopped having the group meetings, and switched entirely to weekly 1-on-1 meetings. Overall, that's much more time spent on my side, but all the time is very effective as I can engage with a particular group member as much as he/she needs. And I still get the little burst of joy when the 1-on-1 meeting is over quickly or if the student cancels.
After the first couple of years on tenure track, I tried instilling group meetings on top of the 1-on-1 ones, with frequency depending on the current group size and teaching and travel schedule. However, if the meeting is in the middle of the day or late in the day, I am always interrupting doing something else; if in the beginning of the day, the meetings destroy the early-morning thrust that I like to use to attack some intellectually nontrivial tasks. Overall, however frequently we'd have the regular group meetings, I realized I still dreaded them and they were still not an efficient use of anyone’s time.
So what I settled on now, and I think it's a sustainable model for me and my group, are 1-on-1 weekly meetings (from about 20 min in duration for new students to 1 or 1.5 hours for senior students and postdocs, duration flexible), with larger group meetings organized as needed. We don't meet as a group unless there is something of interest to all: breakthroughs, interesting work by others, people presenting at conferences. Just like when I was a grad student, these types of meetings – where the meeting is content driven, rather than the meeting being a must regardless of content -- are much more engaging for everyone, and I think we have them on average once a month. Over the summer we meet more often as a group, since (a) everyone has more time and (b) it's an important integrative experience for the interns and undergrads who augment our group over the summer. No one seems to mind. Maybe because during the summer often there's also pizza.
I have colleagues who swear by group meetings and actually have them several times a week. I have a couple of collaborations that require weekly meetings and they are OK (if I don’t forget my laptop). I am in a hard STEM field, and for my specialty my group size (~10 people, of which 1 postdoc) is on the large side. My understanding is that, in certain fields such as, e.g., biomedical sciences, groups of 30+ with many staff and postdocs are common, but I may be mistaken. Such groups do exist in my broader field (not in my specialty) but are very rare (which has to do with primary sources of funding, but that's a topic for another post). There is probably a critical group size where it becomes impossible to have weekly 1-on-1 meetings with everyone; rather, a more feasible model is likely a large group meeting and then individual ones as needed. I suppose in groups with many staff and postdocs, a majority of issues can be resolved without the PI.
So how does your group operate in terms of meetings? Mostly 1-on-1, mostly group meetings, or a combination?
How large is your group? What's your field?
What do you feel the pros and cons are of how meetings are handled in your group?
If you are a student or postdoc, do you have as much time as you need with the PI? What about the attention you get from postdocs or staff members?
Alternatively, cast your vote in the poll below.
In my advisor's group, we had these long weekly meetings with all group members, where we would go around the table and everyone would tell what they had been up to. It went on for hours, and then I'd talk for 2 min and that was it. It was one of my first experiences being a member of a captive audience and I resented it for the most part. Most often, the updates shared were brief and disconnected and of little meaning to anyone but the advisor and the person giving the update. But occasionally, someone would have a breakthrough or was presenting someone else's breakthrough or was giving a practice talk to go to a conference, and then it would really be fun and stimulating and I was grateful we had these meetings. I started suspecting it was not me missing a "meeting gene", but rather the suboptimal organization of meetings that was causing me grief.
With becoming faculty came faculty meetings. And committee meetings. I used to think that no one in their right mind could enjoy faculty and committee meetings, but was I wrong! There is a subspecies of Narcissistic Loudmouths who enjoy listening to their own voice much rather than going home to dinner; my theory is that their spouses are also fed up with the round-the-clock patronizing monologues, so Narcissistic Loudmouths are encouraged to stay at work for as long as they wish.
Faculty governance is a wonderful concept, in that everyone can in principle be heard and decisions are made after thoughtful discussion among peers. In reality, it doesn't work like that: the Loudmouths take over and no one can get a word in edgewise. There are some very smart and thoughtful but quiet people in my department whom I would actually like to hear from, but who either avoid coming to meetings or, when they do, they don't participate. The louder and more obnoxious you are, apparently the more attention you get. Faculty meetings imitate life.
When I became faculty, I also started building my own group, and, as I was taught during my training, we started having group meetings. While I was engaged the entire time, I found that most students were, just like me before them, looking painfully bored throughout the meeting, and I couldn't go into sufficient technical detail when needed with anyone, not with everyone just sitting there dying of boredom. So within a year or so I stopped having the group meetings, and switched entirely to weekly 1-on-1 meetings. Overall, that's much more time spent on my side, but all the time is very effective as I can engage with a particular group member as much as he/she needs. And I still get the little burst of joy when the 1-on-1 meeting is over quickly or if the student cancels.
After the first couple of years on tenure track, I tried instilling group meetings on top of the 1-on-1 ones, with frequency depending on the current group size and teaching and travel schedule. However, if the meeting is in the middle of the day or late in the day, I am always interrupting doing something else; if in the beginning of the day, the meetings destroy the early-morning thrust that I like to use to attack some intellectually nontrivial tasks. Overall, however frequently we'd have the regular group meetings, I realized I still dreaded them and they were still not an efficient use of anyone’s time.
So what I settled on now, and I think it's a sustainable model for me and my group, are 1-on-1 weekly meetings (from about 20 min in duration for new students to 1 or 1.5 hours for senior students and postdocs, duration flexible), with larger group meetings organized as needed. We don't meet as a group unless there is something of interest to all: breakthroughs, interesting work by others, people presenting at conferences. Just like when I was a grad student, these types of meetings – where the meeting is content driven, rather than the meeting being a must regardless of content -- are much more engaging for everyone, and I think we have them on average once a month. Over the summer we meet more often as a group, since (a) everyone has more time and (b) it's an important integrative experience for the interns and undergrads who augment our group over the summer. No one seems to mind. Maybe because during the summer often there's also pizza.
I have colleagues who swear by group meetings and actually have them several times a week. I have a couple of collaborations that require weekly meetings and they are OK (if I don’t forget my laptop). I am in a hard STEM field, and for my specialty my group size (~10 people, of which 1 postdoc) is on the large side. My understanding is that, in certain fields such as, e.g., biomedical sciences, groups of 30+ with many staff and postdocs are common, but I may be mistaken. Such groups do exist in my broader field (not in my specialty) but are very rare (which has to do with primary sources of funding, but that's a topic for another post). There is probably a critical group size where it becomes impossible to have weekly 1-on-1 meetings with everyone; rather, a more feasible model is likely a large group meeting and then individual ones as needed. I suppose in groups with many staff and postdocs, a majority of issues can be resolved without the PI.
So how does your group operate in terms of meetings? Mostly 1-on-1, mostly group meetings, or a combination?
How large is your group? What's your field?
What do you feel the pros and cons are of how meetings are handled in your group?
If you are a student or postdoc, do you have as much time as you need with the PI? What about the attention you get from postdocs or staff members?
Alternatively, cast your vote in the poll below.
Friday, June 4, 2010
Splitsville and Intellectual Offspring
I have a collaboration with a relatively well-known midcareer faculty (midcareer meaning here 10-20 years since getting first TT job); I am tenured but still in what can be considered early career (0-10 years since starting first TT). We shall call My Collaborator MC, for obvious reasons (I know, it's totally uninspired; I was toying with Collaborator in Question, CiQ for short, but I think the pun may be in poor taste). The collaboration is relatively recent (the last 2+ years), and we have complementary, non-overlapping expertise. We have advised one student jointly, and developed a New Technique, where the New Technique should be thought of as a set of necessary physical insights, processes, and new developed tools. In particular, an important part of New Technique is Cool New Tool. Both our expertises were instrumental in the development of New Technique/Cool New Tool.*
This all sounds like a match made in heaven, right? Well, the problem is what next.
During the course of the collaboration, I have found it very hard to work with MC, as MC is very busy and important, and has different priorities in career right now. I am very focused on research and publishing (I guess I never relaxed after tenure track) and my work style is such that I am in my projects up to my elbows, I interact with my group members quite frequently and on the level of technical details. So the collaboration has been very frustrating for me (maybe for MC too, but he/she doesn't let on): I have been facing long turnaround times to send something to print because of MC's busy schedule, which is made more difficult by the fact that MC really insists on having everything written and done 'just so'. In the end, I have had to simply accept MC's writing style and tempo of work in order to get things out, but have found the whole process extremely stifling. Also, MC and I have completely different views on how students should be advised, when papers are ready to be presented at conferences, how frequently a student gets to travel to present the work... Overall, I have not been happy with the collaboration (although it has been productive) and don't foresee it continuing into the future, past the graduation of the joint student and the completion of the present grant.
So the question is -- what next? I have told MC that he/she can do whatever he/she wants with New Technique/Cool New Tool, it's OK by me if MC writes proposals and papers beyond our current project without me and it's OK to use the full New Technique and employ the Cool New Tool. However, in our conversations it became clear that MC expects to be part of future proposals of mine where New Technique and/or Cool New Tool is used. This irks me, because I have a number of ideas for proposals that I can write on my own and that somewhat utilize New Technique in a peripheral way; I do not want to have to run every idea of mine by MC. I would be happy to have MC as a collaborator if the collaboration hadn't been quite so uncomfortable; I simply want to sever the ties, but I think I have the right to enjoy some benefits of New Technique and to use the Cool New Tool. In all fairness, MC did indicate that he/she wants me on his/her future grants, but I just want out.
So when you are divorcing your collaborator, how do you divide the custody of your joint work, i.e., your intellectual offspring?
Here are some thinking points:
- Do you think MC has the right to expect to be a co-PI or consultant on my grants just because we developed New Technique? And if so, for how long is this acceptable? Is there a point in time (after a certain number of months or years, or a certain number of papers) where I can guilt-freely just stop thinking about MC?
- Do I have, at all, the right to use New Technique or utilize Cool New Tool without participation of MC? Is there a degree to which I have this right, and how do you measure it? We did develop New Technique and build Cool New Tool together and I told MC he/she can use all for whatever he/she wants later on (I expect no type of lingering commitment because of my participation in the original project, and was expecting the same on MC's side, but instead I have this request for continued engagement, which I want to avoid). I could continue to develop New Technique/Cool New Tool for the purposes of the projects I envision (within my area of expertise), and I would not be in direct competition with MC.
- A clean way would be for me to continue on my own and never use New Technique or employ Cool New Tool, but is that fair to me? I would say in terms of expertise we contributed 50-50, but timewise I probably put in more as I was more involved in the technical details, especially regading the actual development of Cool New Tool. This is the biggest issue here; it took 2 years to develop Cool New Tool in particular and I suppose I could do it all over again on my own, but it feels like such a waste of time; I feel I should not have to do it all over again from scratch and should be able to enjoy the fruits of my work.
- Finally, would your answers differ in the cases of MC being a man/woman?
MC is a nice and collegial person and I'd like to do this in a non-confrontational way if possible. MC is also known to hold his/her cards close, so I don't expect him/her to consult me on his/her plans. I have received suggestions to just go about my business with proposals as though I have full custody of New Technique/Cool New Tool and claim naiveté if MC objects; that may be sage advice, but strikes me as perhaps unnecessarily sneaky. Hence this post!
Thoughts?
---------------
N.B. Prodigal academic wrote a nice related new post which I encourage you to check out. I also wrote about collaborations a bit earlier, and will continue to do so periodically, as I find them to be a fascinating mix of science, psychology, and politics.
* After Melissa's comment, I included explicit references to Cool New Tool, to make it clear that there is something tangible at stake that I would like to be able to use and that would take a long time to build again from scratch.
This all sounds like a match made in heaven, right? Well, the problem is what next.
During the course of the collaboration, I have found it very hard to work with MC, as MC is very busy and important, and has different priorities in career right now. I am very focused on research and publishing (I guess I never relaxed after tenure track) and my work style is such that I am in my projects up to my elbows, I interact with my group members quite frequently and on the level of technical details. So the collaboration has been very frustrating for me (maybe for MC too, but he/she doesn't let on): I have been facing long turnaround times to send something to print because of MC's busy schedule, which is made more difficult by the fact that MC really insists on having everything written and done 'just so'. In the end, I have had to simply accept MC's writing style and tempo of work in order to get things out, but have found the whole process extremely stifling. Also, MC and I have completely different views on how students should be advised, when papers are ready to be presented at conferences, how frequently a student gets to travel to present the work... Overall, I have not been happy with the collaboration (although it has been productive) and don't foresee it continuing into the future, past the graduation of the joint student and the completion of the present grant.
So the question is -- what next? I have told MC that he/she can do whatever he/she wants with New Technique/Cool New Tool, it's OK by me if MC writes proposals and papers beyond our current project without me and it's OK to use the full New Technique and employ the Cool New Tool. However, in our conversations it became clear that MC expects to be part of future proposals of mine where New Technique and/or Cool New Tool is used. This irks me, because I have a number of ideas for proposals that I can write on my own and that somewhat utilize New Technique in a peripheral way; I do not want to have to run every idea of mine by MC. I would be happy to have MC as a collaborator if the collaboration hadn't been quite so uncomfortable; I simply want to sever the ties, but I think I have the right to enjoy some benefits of New Technique and to use the Cool New Tool. In all fairness, MC did indicate that he/she wants me on his/her future grants, but I just want out.
So when you are divorcing your collaborator, how do you divide the custody of your joint work, i.e., your intellectual offspring?
Here are some thinking points:
- Do you think MC has the right to expect to be a co-PI or consultant on my grants just because we developed New Technique? And if so, for how long is this acceptable? Is there a point in time (after a certain number of months or years, or a certain number of papers) where I can guilt-freely just stop thinking about MC?
- Do I have, at all, the right to use New Technique or utilize Cool New Tool without participation of MC? Is there a degree to which I have this right, and how do you measure it? We did develop New Technique and build Cool New Tool together and I told MC he/she can use all for whatever he/she wants later on (I expect no type of lingering commitment because of my participation in the original project, and was expecting the same on MC's side, but instead I have this request for continued engagement, which I want to avoid). I could continue to develop New Technique/Cool New Tool for the purposes of the projects I envision (within my area of expertise), and I would not be in direct competition with MC.
- A clean way would be for me to continue on my own and never use New Technique or employ Cool New Tool, but is that fair to me? I would say in terms of expertise we contributed 50-50, but timewise I probably put in more as I was more involved in the technical details, especially regading the actual development of Cool New Tool. This is the biggest issue here; it took 2 years to develop Cool New Tool in particular and I suppose I could do it all over again on my own, but it feels like such a waste of time; I feel I should not have to do it all over again from scratch and should be able to enjoy the fruits of my work.
- Finally, would your answers differ in the cases of MC being a man/woman?
MC is a nice and collegial person and I'd like to do this in a non-confrontational way if possible. MC is also known to hold his/her cards close, so I don't expect him/her to consult me on his/her plans. I have received suggestions to just go about my business with proposals as though I have full custody of New Technique/Cool New Tool and claim naiveté if MC objects; that may be sage advice, but strikes me as perhaps unnecessarily sneaky. Hence this post!
Thoughts?
---------------
N.B. Prodigal academic wrote a nice related new post which I encourage you to check out. I also wrote about collaborations a bit earlier, and will continue to do so periodically, as I find them to be a fascinating mix of science, psychology, and politics.
* After Melissa's comment, I included explicit references to Cool New Tool, to make it clear that there is something tangible at stake that I would like to be able to use and that would take a long time to build again from scratch.
Thursday, June 3, 2010
All the Angry Ladies (and Gents)
If you are reading this, chances are you caught yesterday's, shall we say, unfavorable reactions by Dr. Isis and Zuska to my post “Cultural Diversity in a Research Lab”, followed by a flurry of comments. You get full credit only if you read the original post and comments, and not relied on Isis' or Zuska's digests, because we are all scientists, and we should not take anyone's opinion for granted.
So let's wrap this up with a few comments left after yesterday’s post:
Comrade PhysioProf said...
And isn't it a lovely fucking coincidence that this "Trojan horse" strategy allows the privileged to tell the oppressed to just shut the fuck up, lay low, and not rock the boat--i.e., not do anything that might disturb existing power relations?
June 3, 2010 5:05 AM
GMP (GeekMommyProf) said...
CPP,
Yeah, I get from Zuska's article that I am now an agent for the oppressor...
But what should I tell my students instead: you will get a job because in all fairness the world owes you one? You just get good and angry and you will get a job?
And for the last time: whoever thinks I am one of the privileged and doing this out of convenience, I am not. I am a 1st generation immigrant, English is not my 1st language. Where I got as a woman in this field and in this country was by playing by the current rules of the game. My personal clout was too small to change the rules, so I decided to show "the oppressors" that I can beat them at their own game. This is what I am advocating to my students, as this is what I know to work.
Rocking the boat while having little clout will get you nowhere (except maybe wet). Once you actually are in the system you have more power to make changes.
Or alternatively my international students can remain out of the system, unemployed, and angry. But as long as they gave the oppressors' boat a good shake, I am sure they will feel great.
June 3, 2010 6:47 AM
Isis the Scientist said...
If you write a pseudonymous blog, no one is going to know that you are an immigrant/brown/a chicken/etc. What they will read is a post that tells the foreign kids to shower and learn the language. I still may not agree with you entirely, but what you wrote in your last comment is infinitely more informative and heartfelt than the above post was.
If you're going to blog using a pseudonym, you have to remember that people don't know you're not a trained monkey unless you provide them with a point of reference.
June 3, 2010 7:00 AM
I call hypocrisy: if I am an immigrant whose 1st language is not English, it's sort of OK that I tell foreign kids to learn English and take showers, but if I am not an immigrant, then I am a bigoted overprivileged byatch and the same comment is unacceptable? Is there any scenario in which a benevolent American-born native English speaker is permitted to give the same advice? Does the comment not have a face value irrespective of who gives it?
I was going to mention my foreign-born status in the original post, but decided not to because I think it’s too personal and revealing. But people apparently interpolate as they will in the absence of information… But wait, isn’t that prejudice?
I am going to allow comments to this post today, and then I will close them.
There are other interesting issues to discuss, apart from my nonexistent xenophobia.
So let's wrap this up with a few comments left after yesterday’s post:
Comrade PhysioProf said...
And isn't it a lovely fucking coincidence that this "Trojan horse" strategy allows the privileged to tell the oppressed to just shut the fuck up, lay low, and not rock the boat--i.e., not do anything that might disturb existing power relations?
June 3, 2010 5:05 AM
GMP (GeekMommyProf) said...
CPP,
Yeah, I get from Zuska's article that I am now an agent for the oppressor...
But what should I tell my students instead: you will get a job because in all fairness the world owes you one? You just get good and angry and you will get a job?
And for the last time: whoever thinks I am one of the privileged and doing this out of convenience, I am not. I am a 1st generation immigrant, English is not my 1st language. Where I got as a woman in this field and in this country was by playing by the current rules of the game. My personal clout was too small to change the rules, so I decided to show "the oppressors" that I can beat them at their own game. This is what I am advocating to my students, as this is what I know to work.
Rocking the boat while having little clout will get you nowhere (except maybe wet). Once you actually are in the system you have more power to make changes.
Or alternatively my international students can remain out of the system, unemployed, and angry. But as long as they gave the oppressors' boat a good shake, I am sure they will feel great.
June 3, 2010 6:47 AM
Isis the Scientist said...
If you write a pseudonymous blog, no one is going to know that you are an immigrant/brown/a chicken/etc. What they will read is a post that tells the foreign kids to shower and learn the language. I still may not agree with you entirely, but what you wrote in your last comment is infinitely more informative and heartfelt than the above post was.
If you're going to blog using a pseudonym, you have to remember that people don't know you're not a trained monkey unless you provide them with a point of reference.
June 3, 2010 7:00 AM
I call hypocrisy: if I am an immigrant whose 1st language is not English, it's sort of OK that I tell foreign kids to learn English and take showers, but if I am not an immigrant, then I am a bigoted overprivileged byatch and the same comment is unacceptable? Is there any scenario in which a benevolent American-born native English speaker is permitted to give the same advice? Does the comment not have a face value irrespective of who gives it?
I was going to mention my foreign-born status in the original post, but decided not to because I think it’s too personal and revealing. But people apparently interpolate as they will in the absence of information… But wait, isn’t that prejudice?
I am going to allow comments to this post today, and then I will close them.
There are other interesting issues to discuss, apart from my nonexistent xenophobia.
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Cultural Diversity in a Research Lab
The demographics of my research group represents fairly well the demographics of my broad field: there are very few women (presently none), and a large number of international students from all over the world, many from different parts of Asia and a few from Europe. The fact that my group members are presently all male is not ideal, but, on the upside, I can look at cultural aspects of the dynamics without the gender component perhaps obscuring the conclusions.
Having people from all over the world comes with challenges. An important part of my maturation as an academic has been to handle these culture-related challenges as they arose in a fashion that I hope is clear-cut, fair, and inclusive.
For instance, occasionally I will have 2 or 3 people from the same country, and they tend to speak in their native language when at work, which excludes others from the conversation. Since conversations in the lab are first and foremost supposed to be work-related, and since the language of instruction at the University is English, I now explicitly require that all the conversations in the lab or office be in English.
In my opinion, perhaps the most important skill a foreign-born graduate student should acquire during graduate school in the US is excellent command of English. I have often been quite disappointed at the quality of incoming students' English (completely incommensurate with test scores): it is frustrating for them to take classes and for both the student and me to talk about research tasks. I therefore insist that students for whom English is not a native language work tirelessly on improving it, through English-as-a-second-language courses, reading a variety of literature (from technical to popular), watching US programming, and -- most importantly -- through opening up to become friends with native English speakers. Unfortunately, I have had a few students communicate, directly or indirectly, that they feel learning English is not really important, and they spend years without exiting the comfort sphere populated exclusively by their compatriots. This is quite saddening, because a technically excellent PhD student, who wants to work in the US but cannot speak English fluently, often becomes an unemployed PhD graduate. I have found a strong correlation between the speed with which a student's mastery of English ramps up in the first few years and subsequent technical productivity; I believe both are manifestations of a strong motivation to succeed.
Occasionally, there will be a clash in the lab. At one point in time, I had a very conservative and outspoken US student, with mediocre technical skills, tell one of my international students (a very mellow guy, very technically strong) to "go back to [the student's country of origin]" after the latter student challenged the former one on a technical issue. I have had a situation or two where global politics was discussed in the lab and passions ran high; one of my explicit instructions nowadays is that I will absolutely not tolerate arguments about world politics or religion in the lab.
There are also some amusing (at least in hindsight) aspects of diversity, where diversity should be interpreted in the broadest sense (i.e., not as US vs non-US folk). For instance, some of my lab/office rules now include explicit instructions on proper food storage (e.g. food should be stored in the fridge and not left out to rot on one's desk for days) and hygienic habits (frequent showers and washing laundry). This sounds silly, but I have had more than one occasion of a student with a strong body odor (these were sometimes local and sometimes international students, all with various backgrounds), where the smell was so strong that it would disrupt the work of others to the point of them avoiding to come to the lab after complaining in vain. Not only am I now well versed in conversing about someone being stinky (which used to haunt me as possibly the most uncomfortable conversation ever), I have had to occasionally do it more than once, and in one case, after repeated conversations, I had to threaten termination of research assistantship unless the situation improved (it did). I have also talked with students about laundry issues such as fabric softener choice, and I once researched Al-free deodorant for a student who would not use any deodorant for fear of cancer. I remember thinking whether this was really part of my job description as their research advisor, but I suppose it is, because I see no one else volunteering...
But, challenges aside, having a culturally diverse group is much better than having a culturally uniform one. For instance, often I have students who have excellent technical training but have been schooled in a system where initiative and independence are discouraged; I have others who are very independent and creative, which their school system fostered, but may lack, sometimes significantly, in math and physics skills. Together, the mix enables all of them to become much better young researchers overall, as they learn from each other.
It has also been quite heartwarming to see how friendships forge, sometimes between people whom you would never expect to bond, with origins very remote from one another. It is interesting to see how often students who are good friends end up coming up with very original research ideas; I have had several student-initiated papers, where it was always two students, from very different backgrounds, who became good friends in grad school and came up with an idea that meshed their expertise and resulted in cool new science.
In my opinion, getting to know one person from a certain cultural background really well has the ability to bring the whole culture much closer to you than any touristy trip ever could. Personally, I certainly have a much better appreciation for the cultures of several countries after having advised students from there. Our foreign students and postdocs are their nations' great ambassadors in the US and on the global scene. At the same time, our local, but culturally and racially diverse students, bring about the best of the US into global science.
What is your favorite anecdote that illustrates the joys or challenges of working with a culturally diverse research group?
Having people from all over the world comes with challenges. An important part of my maturation as an academic has been to handle these culture-related challenges as they arose in a fashion that I hope is clear-cut, fair, and inclusive.
For instance, occasionally I will have 2 or 3 people from the same country, and they tend to speak in their native language when at work, which excludes others from the conversation. Since conversations in the lab are first and foremost supposed to be work-related, and since the language of instruction at the University is English, I now explicitly require that all the conversations in the lab or office be in English.
In my opinion, perhaps the most important skill a foreign-born graduate student should acquire during graduate school in the US is excellent command of English. I have often been quite disappointed at the quality of incoming students' English (completely incommensurate with test scores): it is frustrating for them to take classes and for both the student and me to talk about research tasks. I therefore insist that students for whom English is not a native language work tirelessly on improving it, through English-as-a-second-language courses, reading a variety of literature (from technical to popular), watching US programming, and -- most importantly -- through opening up to become friends with native English speakers. Unfortunately, I have had a few students communicate, directly or indirectly, that they feel learning English is not really important, and they spend years without exiting the comfort sphere populated exclusively by their compatriots. This is quite saddening, because a technically excellent PhD student, who wants to work in the US but cannot speak English fluently, often becomes an unemployed PhD graduate. I have found a strong correlation between the speed with which a student's mastery of English ramps up in the first few years and subsequent technical productivity; I believe both are manifestations of a strong motivation to succeed.
Occasionally, there will be a clash in the lab. At one point in time, I had a very conservative and outspoken US student, with mediocre technical skills, tell one of my international students (a very mellow guy, very technically strong) to "go back to [the student's country of origin]" after the latter student challenged the former one on a technical issue. I have had a situation or two where global politics was discussed in the lab and passions ran high; one of my explicit instructions nowadays is that I will absolutely not tolerate arguments about world politics or religion in the lab.
There are also some amusing (at least in hindsight) aspects of diversity, where diversity should be interpreted in the broadest sense (i.e., not as US vs non-US folk). For instance, some of my lab/office rules now include explicit instructions on proper food storage (e.g. food should be stored in the fridge and not left out to rot on one's desk for days) and hygienic habits (frequent showers and washing laundry). This sounds silly, but I have had more than one occasion of a student with a strong body odor (these were sometimes local and sometimes international students, all with various backgrounds), where the smell was so strong that it would disrupt the work of others to the point of them avoiding to come to the lab after complaining in vain. Not only am I now well versed in conversing about someone being stinky (which used to haunt me as possibly the most uncomfortable conversation ever), I have had to occasionally do it more than once, and in one case, after repeated conversations, I had to threaten termination of research assistantship unless the situation improved (it did). I have also talked with students about laundry issues such as fabric softener choice, and I once researched Al-free deodorant for a student who would not use any deodorant for fear of cancer. I remember thinking whether this was really part of my job description as their research advisor, but I suppose it is, because I see no one else volunteering...
But, challenges aside, having a culturally diverse group is much better than having a culturally uniform one. For instance, often I have students who have excellent technical training but have been schooled in a system where initiative and independence are discouraged; I have others who are very independent and creative, which their school system fostered, but may lack, sometimes significantly, in math and physics skills. Together, the mix enables all of them to become much better young researchers overall, as they learn from each other.
It has also been quite heartwarming to see how friendships forge, sometimes between people whom you would never expect to bond, with origins very remote from one another. It is interesting to see how often students who are good friends end up coming up with very original research ideas; I have had several student-initiated papers, where it was always two students, from very different backgrounds, who became good friends in grad school and came up with an idea that meshed their expertise and resulted in cool new science.
In my opinion, getting to know one person from a certain cultural background really well has the ability to bring the whole culture much closer to you than any touristy trip ever could. Personally, I certainly have a much better appreciation for the cultures of several countries after having advised students from there. Our foreign students and postdocs are their nations' great ambassadors in the US and on the global scene. At the same time, our local, but culturally and racially diverse students, bring about the best of the US into global science.
What is your favorite anecdote that illustrates the joys or challenges of working with a culturally diverse research group?
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