Because I am trying to get as many papers out as possible before I deliver about 3 months from now, I have been in intense writing mode and getting increasingly angry with myself for making the same mistake I have seen many of my colleagues make:
Letting the student graduate before all the papers that we have agreed on are written up and submitted.
It's always the same -- there is a job opportunity, or some other time-sensitive extraneous impetus, so the student must graduate sooner rather than later. The student pleads and swears to high heaven that they will wrap up all the still-looming papers afterwards, if only you let them finish. And then they graduate and the papers never happen.
My colleague across the hall has lost a number of papers like that: the student leaves, stops keeping contact, and the papers are never even drafted. With a close collaborator a similar situation happened recently: a student received a nice job offer from a big company, with one half-written paper still in the works. The student graduated and left months ago, and has since been completely incommunicado. We have dropped the project altogether, as the collaborator and the new student haven't been able to make sense of the data left behind (what was measured and what not, what exact conditions etc.) A lot of work is simply lost because the collaborator does not have the time or the money to repeat everything with the new student; the experimental data is quite interesting and somewhat counterintuitive. My postdoc and I have been working on the theory, which we will also drop since there now isn't sufficient experimental data to confirm that the counterintuitive phenomenon is indeed happening and is not an artifact.
Although I promised myself I would never do that to myself -- let the student graduate before all his/her obligations to the group have been fulfilled (the papers we have agreed on are written up and submitted), it turns out I am as much of a pushover as the next faculty, if not more. I am facing a similar situation with two of my group members, one former student but still here, postdoc(k)ing temporarily, one still a student.
I let the temp postdoc graduate at the end of 2010 because we figured a couple of months would not mean much, and graduating in 2010 (sooner) looks better on his CV than 2011 (later). He was going to stay as a temporary and part-time postdoc while interviewing for jobs and wrapping up two more papers. Instead, in the 3 months he's been here after the PhD, all he's been doing is cramming for his interviews, going on interviews, and he started training to do experiments with some of my experimental collaborators. I have been paying him this entire time. He only just gave me a pathetic draft -- unworthy of a second-year grad student, let alone someone experienced in writing papers -- of what's supposed to be the crown jewel paper from his thesis, which clearly demonstrates he doesn't give a rat's ass about it any more. Thank you, GMP, for having been my advisor and paying me as an RA for 5 years; now that I have the PhD, even though you are still paying me, I thought this might be a good time to spit in your face.
The other, current graduate student just came back from the APS March Meeting last week, where he spoke with his desired future postdoc advisor, who said he'd take the student but they should make it ASAP as he's got some flex funds expiring in the fall two years from now. So now the student, who has been taking lots of classes, more than what he needed and for longer than he needed to in order to get an MS in a "purer" discipline along the way, all of a sudden wants to crank out 3 papers by the end of the year (yeah, like that's gonna happen with his writing speed) and go do the postdoc. I am completely furious. I am sorry, but I am under the impression that if I pay you as an RA for years, the least you can do is have some time after you are done with classses to do the goddamn research and produce some science that the nice funding agency paying you can show for all the money it expended on you. But that's just me being deluded, right? The only way all these papers are going to happen is if I write them from scratch and he's permitted to work on loose ends at his new position. What's the likelihood of the latter happening?
I know there is an overwhelming sentiment in the blogosphere that faculty are universally bad to students, selfish, unyielding, providing insufficient guidance and oversight, alternatively providing too much oversight/micromanaging/stifling students, or being unaccommodating of the students desires to do this, that, or the other.
But the longer I am faculty, the more cynical I am forced to become. Graduate students can be really quite selfish, too: they are there to forward their own career goals, often willfully ignorant of who actually pays their stipend, that those stipends are not prizes for their awesomeness, but rather money from the federal government for which the advisor's group has to do a certain amount of work. They ignore what goes into acquiring said money, that it's not anybody's God-given right, and that a failure to produce papers damages their group's prospects for doing science in the future.
When the advisor is unyielding about graduation and holds it contingent on certain papers being ready, the advisor is perceived to be a selfish tyrant. Well, when the student leaves all the work behind and never look back after having promised to complete it, I fear the student is a selfish liar.
The PhD advising relationship is a symbiotic one: it's supposed to benefit both the advisor's group and the student's career goals, and it assumes everyone involved is an adult. It's not a parent-child relationship, where the child (student) can count on unconditional love and support no matter how self-centered they are. Failure to produce papers -- and I assure you I am not a GlamourMag-obsessed maniac -- is indeed a grave one, for everyone involved. The work does not, in fact, exist until it has been published in a peer-reviewed journal.
Dear faculty colleagues, yes, you can indeed be too much of a pushover: you want to do the right thing and be fair and accommodating of the students' future, but then they end up screwing you over. I, for once, am now considerably less likely to accommodate future requests for great flexibility in graduation dates. I cannot afford falling out of grace with program officers because I am not delivering on promised papers. And I will not keep letting other people down, whose CV's and/or future job prospects may also depend heavily on the work that never gets published. Feel free to call me a tyrant. I consider it a case of "Once bitten, twice shy."
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Friday, March 25, 2011
Industry Job after a PhD
Once your PhD students graduate, how much assistance do you, as their PhD advisor, owe them in terms of finding employment? I am in a physical science field and most of my students go into industry (others go to postdocs; I have one who spent a couple of years in a company and is now at a national lab). Usually, it takes an industry-bound student a couple of interviews and they find a job.
There is no doubt that you owe your students the best possible recommendations that you can honestly give them. And you owe it to them to send the recommendations to as many places as they need, as often as they need, pretty much for the duration of their career and yours. You owe it to them to talk to whomever is interested in them or their work, and you owe it to them to remain their mentor and supporter for as long as they need your mentoring and support.
Now, I have a student who has been with me for 5 years, did a lot of really nice work and published a lot of papers, some of them already highly cited. He graduated in December and has stayed for a short-term postdoc to wrap up some additional papers and interview. He was dead-set on finding an industry job, but after 6 interviews (mostly over the phone) he has no offers. Apparently, his resume looks good, but he cannot sell himself, not even to the point of landing an on-site interview.
I am not sure how to help him at this point. He has been well-connected to the university community, participated in numerous career fairs and workshops. I have pulled the industry contacts I have, and he got a couple of interviews this way, but they didn't work out. He tells me that feels he does not have the skills they need and that his training has somehow failed him. He might have a point, but to what degree can I personally ensure his future employability in an arbitrary company? It's not like a company pays me to train their future staff. A PhD is a degree demonstrating that you have done a cutting-edge, long-term project with (ideally minimal) supervision from beginning to end, that you have expertise in a certain general area and deep expertise in a certain subarea. A PhD degree means you can do quality science, that you have the brainpower and skills for analytical thinking, and that you can pick up new things quickly.
There appears to be a dissonance between academic training and industry requirements. In academia, you need to be very good at what you have chosen to do: you are judged based on how deep your expertise in your chosen field is and how original your contributions within it are. In all the interviews for industry jobs that my student had (and this holds for other students, who were successful in landing similar jobs), the interviewers didn't seem to care about what he did for his PhD, or how original or complicated his contribution was; they cared about the different tools he could use and quizzed him on the course-level knowledge about a lot of different systems in his general expertise area. They cared about specific things that they wanted him to know right now; the ability to pick up new things efficiently apparently didn't come to play.
It's tough finding a job. I personally never desired to work in industry (I have deep aversion to people telling me what to do). When I was looking for a job in my last year on the PhD, I knew what I wanted -- faculty position or bust -- and didn't ask my advisor for anything beyond the letters of recommendation. I didn't think it was his job to find me a job. I was under the impression that most students are of the same mindset (looking out for themselves).
I can't help but feel that I have failed this student in that all his training didn't actually prepare him for what he wants to do. It doesn't help that he's not the world's best communicator and can come off as a bit of a jerk (we've been working on this) by virtue of downlplaying everything about himself, his work, and everyone involved. In his case it all comes from modesty, but does not look too good. He would make a great research scientist, however. He is technically great and loves dabbling in different projects, and is thus well-liked and respected by my experimental collaborators and their numerous students. He's actually very happy here and now, disappointed by the interview cycle, plans on staying a bit longer as a postdoc and learning to do experiments with some of my collaborators, so he should be set at least temporarily...
What do you think, my dear readers, how much of a responsibility does or should a PhD advisor really have in helping a student land his/her first after-PhD job versus how much of this responsibility lies with the student? How well do we, as advisors, prepare our PhD's for nonacademic jobs? Are we, being career scientists and academics, at all qualified to prepare students to be anything but scientists and academics?
There is no doubt that you owe your students the best possible recommendations that you can honestly give them. And you owe it to them to send the recommendations to as many places as they need, as often as they need, pretty much for the duration of their career and yours. You owe it to them to talk to whomever is interested in them or their work, and you owe it to them to remain their mentor and supporter for as long as they need your mentoring and support.
Now, I have a student who has been with me for 5 years, did a lot of really nice work and published a lot of papers, some of them already highly cited. He graduated in December and has stayed for a short-term postdoc to wrap up some additional papers and interview. He was dead-set on finding an industry job, but after 6 interviews (mostly over the phone) he has no offers. Apparently, his resume looks good, but he cannot sell himself, not even to the point of landing an on-site interview.
I am not sure how to help him at this point. He has been well-connected to the university community, participated in numerous career fairs and workshops. I have pulled the industry contacts I have, and he got a couple of interviews this way, but they didn't work out. He tells me that feels he does not have the skills they need and that his training has somehow failed him. He might have a point, but to what degree can I personally ensure his future employability in an arbitrary company? It's not like a company pays me to train their future staff. A PhD is a degree demonstrating that you have done a cutting-edge, long-term project with (ideally minimal) supervision from beginning to end, that you have expertise in a certain general area and deep expertise in a certain subarea. A PhD degree means you can do quality science, that you have the brainpower and skills for analytical thinking, and that you can pick up new things quickly.
There appears to be a dissonance between academic training and industry requirements. In academia, you need to be very good at what you have chosen to do: you are judged based on how deep your expertise in your chosen field is and how original your contributions within it are. In all the interviews for industry jobs that my student had (and this holds for other students, who were successful in landing similar jobs), the interviewers didn't seem to care about what he did for his PhD, or how original or complicated his contribution was; they cared about the different tools he could use and quizzed him on the course-level knowledge about a lot of different systems in his general expertise area. They cared about specific things that they wanted him to know right now; the ability to pick up new things efficiently apparently didn't come to play.
It's tough finding a job. I personally never desired to work in industry (I have deep aversion to people telling me what to do). When I was looking for a job in my last year on the PhD, I knew what I wanted -- faculty position or bust -- and didn't ask my advisor for anything beyond the letters of recommendation. I didn't think it was his job to find me a job. I was under the impression that most students are of the same mindset (looking out for themselves).
I can't help but feel that I have failed this student in that all his training didn't actually prepare him for what he wants to do. It doesn't help that he's not the world's best communicator and can come off as a bit of a jerk (we've been working on this) by virtue of downlplaying everything about himself, his work, and everyone involved. In his case it all comes from modesty, but does not look too good. He would make a great research scientist, however. He is technically great and loves dabbling in different projects, and is thus well-liked and respected by my experimental collaborators and their numerous students. He's actually very happy here and now, disappointed by the interview cycle, plans on staying a bit longer as a postdoc and learning to do experiments with some of my collaborators, so he should be set at least temporarily...
What do you think, my dear readers, how much of a responsibility does or should a PhD advisor really have in helping a student land his/her first after-PhD job versus how much of this responsibility lies with the student? How well do we, as advisors, prepare our PhD's for nonacademic jobs? Are we, being career scientists and academics, at all qualified to prepare students to be anything but scientists and academics?
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Traveling without Moving
If I had to point out one aspect of my career that having small children has significantly impaired, it would be my ability to travel. In geek-speak, I am seeing a zeroth-order effect of reduced travel due to years of bearing and raising small kids on my group's well-being and its immediate future.
About a week after I defended my PhD, I moved to my shiny new tenure-track faculty position at a big state R1 with my then 4-year-old son. We were living apart from dad during my first 2 years on the tenure track, so he could work on his degree; traveling in these two years was extremely difficult for me because there was no one to take care of my son -- dad was 2,000 miles away. Occasionally my husband would come to babysit so I could travel, which meant he was taking time off and I would still barely get to see him. These two years were not fun; they were very stressful on our marriage. I was quite busy and quite miserable, and so was my husband; I worked a lot and everything was new -- teaching, recruiting students, and writing many, many grants.
After 2 years on the tenure track, my husband joined us, and I swear I got pregnant the minute he walked through the door. So due to pregnancy and breastfeeding, my travel was even more restricted in years 3 and 4 of tenure track. I did go to the most important conferences (breast pump and all), but traveling minimally is not the same as traveling as much as possible and leaving no networking stone unturned.
By year 5 on my tenure track, my academic record looked pretty good, except that I felt I did not get enough exposure. That's when I undertook the "tenure tour", a full year of aggressive self-promotion and extensive travel in order to have my work seen and heard and to try to meet all of the potential letter writers whom I hadn't already met. It was a grueling travel schedule, and quite embarrassing in certain ways -- I was shamelessly prodding people to invite me to give seminars, and I was hosting a tremendous number of senior guest speakers whom I didn't know well enough to wrangle an invitation for myself. The self-promotion year was quite stressful on my husband and my children. Whenever I left, someone immediately got sick (with a fever and either pukes or diarrhea, so as to maximally gross out my husband who's quite squeamish). It all worked out, I was approved for tenure smoothly at the very beginning of my 6th year, with what I hear were glowing letters all around.
One significant downside of reduced travel in my field is the reduced potential for funding. Let me explain. NSF and DOE are available sources of funding, but the funding rates are fairly low and there is peer review. I think DOE program officers have a bit more leeway in what they do with the reviews (if a programmatic relevance of a project is high and reviews are decent, you will get funded), whereas at the NSF whatever the panel says pretty much goes. NSF program directors have the ability to somewhat stir the panel, but not by much.
However, most well-funded people in my field are well-funded because they have money from one or more of the DOD agencies (such as the AFOSR, ONR, DARPA, ARO, etc.) Actually, some of my well-funded experimental collaborators have almost completely given up on submitting proposals to the NSF since it's little money and such a crap shoot. Now, the thing with DOD agencies is that one's potential for funding depends largely on one's project's programmatic value to that specific program officer's portfolio. In other words, getting money ultimately depends on how well you know your program officer and how willing he is to work with you and make you part of his portfolio. So traveling and talking to program officers, making an effort to be on their radar, and establishing a personal connection is critical. I have some DOD funds, mostly with collaborators, but I have done nowhere near enough fundraising travel and have been reprimanded by my senior collaborator many times for that. (This senior collaborator is not understanding when I mention having small kids; he considers all these to be stupid excuses and a weakness not worth discussing. So we no longer discuss it.)
I have so far conducted the work of my group so as to minimize travel and maximize research output per dollar. It's worked well, so far, but some of my grants are expiring next year and I must leave no funding stone unturned. However, I am tired, burned out, and going to give birth in a few months. My potential for travel and schmoozing is significantly diminished at the most inopportune of times... I do try to compensate by pestering people via email and phone. Not sure these media enable me to present my most charming self, though.
But it's not all bad. I can compare my career trajectory with that of a colleague from another, closely related department, who started at the same time I did and is also a computational scientist. The colleague is single and took to travel and fundraising immediately, and drew lots of money early on. In contrast, I stayed put and was more successful in recruiting students and advising them early on, so I had papers from my own new group ready for publication early in year 2. The colleague took a significantly longer time than me to successfully recruit students and get output from them, even though their group grew much more rapidly and there was more money around. Overall, my publication rate with a smaller group has been and remains higher than the colleague's and I graduated my first student earlier. However, I think the colleague brought in more dollars to the university that I did. I have another young and single collaborator from another institution -- that dude travels so much, I can't see how it makes sense for him to pay the mortgage. He lives on planes and in hotels and is insanely well funded.
What about my female colleagues with kids? Two have stay-at-home husbands. Many don't travel all that much. Many employ overnight nannies. It's hard. And drains energy. I am not sure how my husband will cope with 3 kids, so I don't think I will be traveling much until the baby is older. What will that do to my funding and my still emerging fame? Probably not too much good. But I choose to believe that I can do a lot of good science and good advising without burning a lot of kerosene. Even if I am deluding myself, I don't really have much choice. I have never regretted having kids and my career/family balance is what it is.
So what's the moral of this story? Travel as much as you can, while you can. Travel for fundraising, travel for networking, travel for exposure. If you don't, be aware that your career will take a hit. It may not be lethal, but it will be damaging. If you have visions of grandeur, efficient fundraising and extensive networking are key, so you better dust off your frequent flier card. If you choose to be earth-bound, or if the choice is made for you at least temporarily, there is still plenty you can do for your career, but be realistic about the inevitable compromises and sacrifices that you will have to make.
Here's the song that inspired the title of this post. Enjoy!
About a week after I defended my PhD, I moved to my shiny new tenure-track faculty position at a big state R1 with my then 4-year-old son. We were living apart from dad during my first 2 years on the tenure track, so he could work on his degree; traveling in these two years was extremely difficult for me because there was no one to take care of my son -- dad was 2,000 miles away. Occasionally my husband would come to babysit so I could travel, which meant he was taking time off and I would still barely get to see him. These two years were not fun; they were very stressful on our marriage. I was quite busy and quite miserable, and so was my husband; I worked a lot and everything was new -- teaching, recruiting students, and writing many, many grants.
After 2 years on the tenure track, my husband joined us, and I swear I got pregnant the minute he walked through the door. So due to pregnancy and breastfeeding, my travel was even more restricted in years 3 and 4 of tenure track. I did go to the most important conferences (breast pump and all), but traveling minimally is not the same as traveling as much as possible and leaving no networking stone unturned.
By year 5 on my tenure track, my academic record looked pretty good, except that I felt I did not get enough exposure. That's when I undertook the "tenure tour", a full year of aggressive self-promotion and extensive travel in order to have my work seen and heard and to try to meet all of the potential letter writers whom I hadn't already met. It was a grueling travel schedule, and quite embarrassing in certain ways -- I was shamelessly prodding people to invite me to give seminars, and I was hosting a tremendous number of senior guest speakers whom I didn't know well enough to wrangle an invitation for myself. The self-promotion year was quite stressful on my husband and my children. Whenever I left, someone immediately got sick (with a fever and either pukes or diarrhea, so as to maximally gross out my husband who's quite squeamish). It all worked out, I was approved for tenure smoothly at the very beginning of my 6th year, with what I hear were glowing letters all around.
One significant downside of reduced travel in my field is the reduced potential for funding. Let me explain. NSF and DOE are available sources of funding, but the funding rates are fairly low and there is peer review. I think DOE program officers have a bit more leeway in what they do with the reviews (if a programmatic relevance of a project is high and reviews are decent, you will get funded), whereas at the NSF whatever the panel says pretty much goes. NSF program directors have the ability to somewhat stir the panel, but not by much.
However, most well-funded people in my field are well-funded because they have money from one or more of the DOD agencies (such as the AFOSR, ONR, DARPA, ARO, etc.) Actually, some of my well-funded experimental collaborators have almost completely given up on submitting proposals to the NSF since it's little money and such a crap shoot. Now, the thing with DOD agencies is that one's potential for funding depends largely on one's project's programmatic value to that specific program officer's portfolio. In other words, getting money ultimately depends on how well you know your program officer and how willing he is to work with you and make you part of his portfolio. So traveling and talking to program officers, making an effort to be on their radar, and establishing a personal connection is critical. I have some DOD funds, mostly with collaborators, but I have done nowhere near enough fundraising travel and have been reprimanded by my senior collaborator many times for that. (This senior collaborator is not understanding when I mention having small kids; he considers all these to be stupid excuses and a weakness not worth discussing. So we no longer discuss it.)
I have so far conducted the work of my group so as to minimize travel and maximize research output per dollar. It's worked well, so far, but some of my grants are expiring next year and I must leave no funding stone unturned. However, I am tired, burned out, and going to give birth in a few months. My potential for travel and schmoozing is significantly diminished at the most inopportune of times... I do try to compensate by pestering people via email and phone. Not sure these media enable me to present my most charming self, though.
But it's not all bad. I can compare my career trajectory with that of a colleague from another, closely related department, who started at the same time I did and is also a computational scientist. The colleague is single and took to travel and fundraising immediately, and drew lots of money early on. In contrast, I stayed put and was more successful in recruiting students and advising them early on, so I had papers from my own new group ready for publication early in year 2. The colleague took a significantly longer time than me to successfully recruit students and get output from them, even though their group grew much more rapidly and there was more money around. Overall, my publication rate with a smaller group has been and remains higher than the colleague's and I graduated my first student earlier. However, I think the colleague brought in more dollars to the university that I did. I have another young and single collaborator from another institution -- that dude travels so much, I can't see how it makes sense for him to pay the mortgage. He lives on planes and in hotels and is insanely well funded.
What about my female colleagues with kids? Two have stay-at-home husbands. Many don't travel all that much. Many employ overnight nannies. It's hard. And drains energy. I am not sure how my husband will cope with 3 kids, so I don't think I will be traveling much until the baby is older. What will that do to my funding and my still emerging fame? Probably not too much good. But I choose to believe that I can do a lot of good science and good advising without burning a lot of kerosene. Even if I am deluding myself, I don't really have much choice. I have never regretted having kids and my career/family balance is what it is.
So what's the moral of this story? Travel as much as you can, while you can. Travel for fundraising, travel for networking, travel for exposure. If you don't, be aware that your career will take a hit. It may not be lethal, but it will be damaging. If you have visions of grandeur, efficient fundraising and extensive networking are key, so you better dust off your frequent flier card. If you choose to be earth-bound, or if the choice is made for you at least temporarily, there is still plenty you can do for your career, but be realistic about the inevitable compromises and sacrifices that you will have to make.
Here's the song that inspired the title of this post. Enjoy!
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Optimist/Pessimist
Today, my postdoc and I went to grab some lunch. This is my postdoc's second year with the group and he has been doing very well. He has grown tremendously in all professional aspects, from writing papers and giving talks, to preparing grants and mentoring other group members. He has been traveling a lot, to many, many conferences. I have sent him to give invited talks in my stead on several occasions (sometimes on projects quite unrelated to his) and he has risen to each occasion beautifully. He has been taking criticism and advice seriously, and took advantage of every chance to better himself through professional workshops and participation in collaborations with other groups. I am quite proud to see the growth my postdoc has shown in the time he's been here. He appears confident and bursting with good ideas, and I can certainly see him leading his own group at this point.
Over lunch, we chatted about his future prospects. He has sent out his tenure track applications (I think around 25) and has been waiting for responses. His record looks very good and we know he has been shortlisted at a couple of very good places, but still no interviews. He has also applied for a couple of postdoc fellowships. I have a number of grants pending and several more in the works, and I promised him that, if the tenure track search doesn't work out for some reason this year, that I will do everything in my power to provide continued support for him so he can stay here and keep trying for TT for another year or two.
His response surprised me a bit: he said that something is bound to work out, it's just the question of what. Either he'll get a TT position, or will get one of the fellowships he applied for, or I will get some of the grants currently in review. But something will certainly work out, as we have our tentacles in enough places that by virtue of statistics something must...
What took me aback is how positive his outlook was. My attitude tends to be that it can easily happen that nothing works out... That there is noting certain about any aspect of funding, that the fact he sent out all those applications doesn't mean much as there are plenty of smart people who never make it, that all my grant applications and all of his fellowship applications mean squat. He can easily end up unemployed... Don't worry, I didn't shatter his dreams, I kept my mouth shut. But I honestly don't know if I was always this gloomy, or if being a faculty has brought it out rather than simply amplified it.
I guess I qualify as a pessimist. My husband certainly says so. I consider it one of my major flaws: nobody wants to be around a grouch; sunny, upbeat people are much more fun to live with and to be around. My husband is an optimist and I envy him -- life seems so much more enjoyable for him. He seems so carefree. I wonder how I can get on whatever drug it is that he's on, but alas, no drugs are involved (unless you count playing World of Warcraft for several hours every day). Maybe his mother cuddled with him more when he was a kid or something, because my hub is just one happy person.
I feel bad about being a pessimist because in all honesty I have a pretty good life; I really should not complain. Yet I always do. It's an inherent tendency to amplify the negative and downplay the positive. Here's an example: a couple of weeks ago, I heard that an NSF grant of mine would not be funded (I still have other 4 grants pending, some at the NSF and some at other places). It took me 10 days to calm down -- I was in disbelief, then angry, then started maniacally looking for alternative sources of funding, talking to program managers in multiple agencies, and am now in the white-paper-writing stage and hoping to submit several new grant applications based on the carcass of the rejected one.
In contrast, today I found out that I had received a pretty cool teaching award. It's a fairly big deal, a nice named award that is pretty competitive, comes with a plaque and a bit of money and an award ceremony. I am particularly pleased because it emphasizes excellence in teaching undergraduates and requires letters from students. I love teaching undergrads (even if I often despair at their poor command of calculus), they are adorably bewildered and so very fun to watch as they work on grasping difficult concepts. Anyway, the award is a nice recognition and a nice bullet on my CV. I should be very happy, right? Well, the elation lasted for a total of 7.32 minutes. Shortly thereafter I was back to "meh."
Dear reader, are you an optimist or a pessimist? Are you different in your personal and professional lives? How do you keep your spirits up in the face of professional woes?
Over lunch, we chatted about his future prospects. He has sent out his tenure track applications (I think around 25) and has been waiting for responses. His record looks very good and we know he has been shortlisted at a couple of very good places, but still no interviews. He has also applied for a couple of postdoc fellowships. I have a number of grants pending and several more in the works, and I promised him that, if the tenure track search doesn't work out for some reason this year, that I will do everything in my power to provide continued support for him so he can stay here and keep trying for TT for another year or two.
His response surprised me a bit: he said that something is bound to work out, it's just the question of what. Either he'll get a TT position, or will get one of the fellowships he applied for, or I will get some of the grants currently in review. But something will certainly work out, as we have our tentacles in enough places that by virtue of statistics something must...
What took me aback is how positive his outlook was. My attitude tends to be that it can easily happen that nothing works out... That there is noting certain about any aspect of funding, that the fact he sent out all those applications doesn't mean much as there are plenty of smart people who never make it, that all my grant applications and all of his fellowship applications mean squat. He can easily end up unemployed... Don't worry, I didn't shatter his dreams, I kept my mouth shut. But I honestly don't know if I was always this gloomy, or if being a faculty has brought it out rather than simply amplified it.
I guess I qualify as a pessimist. My husband certainly says so. I consider it one of my major flaws: nobody wants to be around a grouch; sunny, upbeat people are much more fun to live with and to be around. My husband is an optimist and I envy him -- life seems so much more enjoyable for him. He seems so carefree. I wonder how I can get on whatever drug it is that he's on, but alas, no drugs are involved (unless you count playing World of Warcraft for several hours every day). Maybe his mother cuddled with him more when he was a kid or something, because my hub is just one happy person.
I feel bad about being a pessimist because in all honesty I have a pretty good life; I really should not complain. Yet I always do. It's an inherent tendency to amplify the negative and downplay the positive. Here's an example: a couple of weeks ago, I heard that an NSF grant of mine would not be funded (I still have other 4 grants pending, some at the NSF and some at other places). It took me 10 days to calm down -- I was in disbelief, then angry, then started maniacally looking for alternative sources of funding, talking to program managers in multiple agencies, and am now in the white-paper-writing stage and hoping to submit several new grant applications based on the carcass of the rejected one.
In contrast, today I found out that I had received a pretty cool teaching award. It's a fairly big deal, a nice named award that is pretty competitive, comes with a plaque and a bit of money and an award ceremony. I am particularly pleased because it emphasizes excellence in teaching undergraduates and requires letters from students. I love teaching undergrads (even if I often despair at their poor command of calculus), they are adorably bewildered and so very fun to watch as they work on grasping difficult concepts. Anyway, the award is a nice recognition and a nice bullet on my CV. I should be very happy, right? Well, the elation lasted for a total of 7.32 minutes. Shortly thereafter I was back to "meh."
Dear reader, are you an optimist or a pessimist? Are you different in your personal and professional lives? How do you keep your spirits up in the face of professional woes?
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Technical Writing Pet Peeves Cont'd
I had a lot of fun reading about everyone's technical writing pet peeves in the comments to last week's post Written Off.
I have also realized that I am a petty, petty person: I get upset about more than 80% of all the peeves that different people have cumulatively listed! And I must have been separated at birth from at least two of my anonymous commenters..!
I wanted to follow up on a couple of specific comments. Anon on March 10 wrote:
I'm curious: do you have a couple of examples of particularly well-written papers? I'd like to see what you consider the pinnacle of scientific writing.
Well, I like my own technical writing, but perhaps I am a little biased there. :) I have a few favorite writers, one of them my frequent collaborator, but I am afraid that revealing their names would convey a bit too much about what I do. So I will refer you to Editor's Choice articles in Physical Review Letters (PRL for short). All PRL articles should be accessible to an audience broader than just the narrow specialists, and those papers marked as Editor's Choice should be particularly successful in this regard and promote reading across disciplines. Here are two papers that are fairly far removed from my research field, but I was able to enjoy and appreciate them, and that says something. One is
a single-author PRL by Sabine Hossenfelder, who also happens to blog on Backreaction (thanks Alex for recommending it!)
Bounds on an Energy-Dependent and Observer-Independent Speed of Light from Violations of Locality.
Another one I remember from longer ago is Andread Karch and Lisa Randall's
Relaxing to Three Dimensions. Lisa Randall is well known for writing popular science books.
A comment that struck a chord was that of Anon on March 15:
Pet-peeve: when a professor (who is a non-native English speaker) attempts to correct my English.
News flash to the professor: you may have a PhD and know more about science, but your English is not your forte.
When it comes to writing technical manuscripts, it's not just about one's command of English: it's about the proper structure of the manuscript, using the proper jargon, and most importantly conveying the message clearly. I find that students who are native English speakers can sometimes be particularly difficult to educate in this regard, because no matter what the comment is, they automatically assume they know better.
I am a faculty and a non-native speaker of English. I think that most faculty who are not native English speakers are aware of the fact that their English may not be perfect. However, most often what the student may view as an issue of language is actually something much different and much more critical: either something is wrong with the paper structure (e.g., you must actually motivate why you are doing what you are doing, you must also state clearly what is new in your paper and why), the style is inappropriate (e.g., adjective diarrhea has no place in technical writing), or perhaps the paper is simply unclear or bursting with redundancies. Often it can be a matter of the student not really understanding what it is that it new and important, or missing the big picture of how our work fits in the grand scheme of things; this issue comes up equally often with native and non-native English speaker students, and this is where the advisor's technical expertise is key.
If you are a native English speaker being advised by a non-native English speaker faculty, next time when your advisor tries to correct your manuscript, please ask yourself honestly whether he/she has a point. I bet you dollars to donuts that, more often than not, the advisor is primarily trying to correct the structural faults of the manuscript, improve the presentation (make it clearer or more succinct), and explain better what the motivation is or what your results mean. I suppose it is possible the advisor simply has control/micromanagement issues or is overestimating the quality of his/her English... However, if you dismiss your advisor's comments a priori because you consider yourself infallible by virtue of being a native English speaker, you are (a) coming across as disrespectful and needlessly irritating your advisor, and (b) most likely passing up a very good opportunity to improve your technical writing.
I have also realized that I am a petty, petty person: I get upset about more than 80% of all the peeves that different people have cumulatively listed! And I must have been separated at birth from at least two of my anonymous commenters..!
I wanted to follow up on a couple of specific comments. Anon on March 10 wrote:
I'm curious: do you have a couple of examples of particularly well-written papers? I'd like to see what you consider the pinnacle of scientific writing.
Well, I like my own technical writing, but perhaps I am a little biased there. :) I have a few favorite writers, one of them my frequent collaborator, but I am afraid that revealing their names would convey a bit too much about what I do. So I will refer you to Editor's Choice articles in Physical Review Letters (PRL for short). All PRL articles should be accessible to an audience broader than just the narrow specialists, and those papers marked as Editor's Choice should be particularly successful in this regard and promote reading across disciplines. Here are two papers that are fairly far removed from my research field, but I was able to enjoy and appreciate them, and that says something. One is
a single-author PRL by Sabine Hossenfelder, who also happens to blog on Backreaction (thanks Alex for recommending it!)
Bounds on an Energy-Dependent and Observer-Independent Speed of Light from Violations of Locality.
Another one I remember from longer ago is Andread Karch and Lisa Randall's
Relaxing to Three Dimensions. Lisa Randall is well known for writing popular science books.
A comment that struck a chord was that of Anon on March 15:
Pet-peeve: when a professor (who is a non-native English speaker) attempts to correct my English.
News flash to the professor: you may have a PhD and know more about science, but your English is not your forte.
When it comes to writing technical manuscripts, it's not just about one's command of English: it's about the proper structure of the manuscript, using the proper jargon, and most importantly conveying the message clearly. I find that students who are native English speakers can sometimes be particularly difficult to educate in this regard, because no matter what the comment is, they automatically assume they know better.
I am a faculty and a non-native speaker of English. I think that most faculty who are not native English speakers are aware of the fact that their English may not be perfect. However, most often what the student may view as an issue of language is actually something much different and much more critical: either something is wrong with the paper structure (e.g., you must actually motivate why you are doing what you are doing, you must also state clearly what is new in your paper and why), the style is inappropriate (e.g., adjective diarrhea has no place in technical writing), or perhaps the paper is simply unclear or bursting with redundancies. Often it can be a matter of the student not really understanding what it is that it new and important, or missing the big picture of how our work fits in the grand scheme of things; this issue comes up equally often with native and non-native English speaker students, and this is where the advisor's technical expertise is key.
If you are a native English speaker being advised by a non-native English speaker faculty, next time when your advisor tries to correct your manuscript, please ask yourself honestly whether he/she has a point. I bet you dollars to donuts that, more often than not, the advisor is primarily trying to correct the structural faults of the manuscript, improve the presentation (make it clearer or more succinct), and explain better what the motivation is or what your results mean. I suppose it is possible the advisor simply has control/micromanagement issues or is overestimating the quality of his/her English... However, if you dismiss your advisor's comments a priori because you consider yourself infallible by virtue of being a native English speaker, you are (a) coming across as disrespectful and needlessly irritating your advisor, and (b) most likely passing up a very good opportunity to improve your technical writing.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Written Off
In an attempt to get as much work done as possible before the inevitable decline in cognitive abilities due to infant-induced insomnia, I am now working maniacally to finish multiple white papers, start drafting grants for the May through Sept deadlines, and prepare all nearly-ready journal manuscripts for submission.
The latter activity has of late been the bane of my existence.
1) When I spend many, many hours editing your excruciatingly comprehensive paper in equally excruciating detail, and you give me the next version in which large chunks of text have been untouched so I have to fuckin' do it all over again, I will bite your head off. Do not bat your eyelashes in dismay at my wrath: ENTER THE GODDAMN CHANGES WHEN I REQUEST THEM.
2) If I tell you that the introduction sucks so badly that nobody can tell what the hell we did that was new or why we bothered with the work to begin with or where our work falls in the grand scheme of things, that means you HAVE TO COMPLETELY REDO IT.
When all I write in big, screaming letters is REVISE THOROUGHLY, and then talk to you to give you pointers along which it needs to be revised, that does NOT mean that the writeup is perfect. In fact, it means that it stinks so bad that the only way to save humanity from such a pathetic attempt at scientific writing is to burn it, and no amount of ink would have been enough to specifically mark all that is wrong with it. REVISE COMPLETELY.
3) Have mercy towards the reader. Do not bestow on him/her artificial, painfully cumbersome compound adjectives that no one in their right mind would use in speech. When techniques Awesome, Breathtaking, and Crucial are combined into an über-technique for a measurement, please, please don't say "Awesome-Breathtaking-Crucial-measured quantity". Saying "quantity measured by the combined Awesome-Breathtaking-Crucial (A-B-C) technique" is fine.
4) Do not keep your paper at arm's length, like it's a poisonous reptile that will hurt you if you get too close. Don't write in a detached, (cumbersome adjective alert!) passive-voice-heavy style. If you hate your paper, it will hate you back, and the reviewers will hate both of you even more. Clear, fluid, and engaging writing is absolutely critical. I cannot emphasize enough how strongly the good quality of writing correlates with short review times and overall better review outcomes.
5) Just because you found a specific analytical derivation or a computational intricacy or an experimental protocol particularly daunting and were proud of yourself for surmounting this obstacle, that does not necessarily qualify said obstacle for a central position in your paper. The paper must present a story with the technical details necessary to describe the work and support your message without obscuring it. For the 20 pages of details that are only likely to be read by a poor grad student soul entrusted with reproducing your data, there are appendices and online supplementary documents.
6) Don't be lazy with references. One of the most common complaints I have regarding the writing of my students, even those who write compelling technical prose, is underciting. I am looking at a manuscript written by a recent PhD grad of mine, who is sticking around for a short-term postdoc while interviewing for jobs: there is a large amount of text in the introduction, ironed out through multiple conference abstracts and his own PhD dissertation writing process; in the text, there are statements we know to be true, but they are not trivially obvious and should therefore be accompanied by appropriate references. He did not cite anyone.
7) Random pet peeves: I hate "impact" used as a verb. Not sure why, I just do. I hate reading about stuff being "negatively impacted" by the leprechaun turd production. I have a collaborator who savors it (in contrast to "to influence" or "to affect," for instance) and it's driving me crazy. Then again, I also used to feel passionately against "thus," but have since developed a tolerance to it. And I hate it when people take liberties with abbreviating journal titles as they see fit (and not as they are standardly abbreviated). I am religious about the serial comma.
I invite you to share your own technical writing pet peeves.
The latter activity has of late been the bane of my existence.
1) When I spend many, many hours editing your excruciatingly comprehensive paper in equally excruciating detail, and you give me the next version in which large chunks of text have been untouched so I have to fuckin' do it all over again, I will bite your head off. Do not bat your eyelashes in dismay at my wrath: ENTER THE GODDAMN CHANGES WHEN I REQUEST THEM.
2) If I tell you that the introduction sucks so badly that nobody can tell what the hell we did that was new or why we bothered with the work to begin with or where our work falls in the grand scheme of things, that means you HAVE TO COMPLETELY REDO IT.
When all I write in big, screaming letters is REVISE THOROUGHLY, and then talk to you to give you pointers along which it needs to be revised, that does NOT mean that the writeup is perfect. In fact, it means that it stinks so bad that the only way to save humanity from such a pathetic attempt at scientific writing is to burn it, and no amount of ink would have been enough to specifically mark all that is wrong with it. REVISE COMPLETELY.
3) Have mercy towards the reader. Do not bestow on him/her artificial, painfully cumbersome compound adjectives that no one in their right mind would use in speech. When techniques Awesome, Breathtaking, and Crucial are combined into an über-technique for a measurement, please, please don't say "Awesome-Breathtaking-Crucial-measured quantity". Saying "quantity measured by the combined Awesome-Breathtaking-Crucial (A-B-C) technique" is fine.
4) Do not keep your paper at arm's length, like it's a poisonous reptile that will hurt you if you get too close. Don't write in a detached, (cumbersome adjective alert!) passive-voice-heavy style. If you hate your paper, it will hate you back, and the reviewers will hate both of you even more. Clear, fluid, and engaging writing is absolutely critical. I cannot emphasize enough how strongly the good quality of writing correlates with short review times and overall better review outcomes.
5) Just because you found a specific analytical derivation or a computational intricacy or an experimental protocol particularly daunting and were proud of yourself for surmounting this obstacle, that does not necessarily qualify said obstacle for a central position in your paper. The paper must present a story with the technical details necessary to describe the work and support your message without obscuring it. For the 20 pages of details that are only likely to be read by a poor grad student soul entrusted with reproducing your data, there are appendices and online supplementary documents.
6) Don't be lazy with references. One of the most common complaints I have regarding the writing of my students, even those who write compelling technical prose, is underciting. I am looking at a manuscript written by a recent PhD grad of mine, who is sticking around for a short-term postdoc while interviewing for jobs: there is a large amount of text in the introduction, ironed out through multiple conference abstracts and his own PhD dissertation writing process; in the text, there are statements we know to be true, but they are not trivially obvious and should therefore be accompanied by appropriate references. He did not cite anyone.
7) Random pet peeves: I hate "impact" used as a verb. Not sure why, I just do. I hate reading about stuff being "negatively impacted" by the leprechaun turd production. I have a collaborator who savors it (in contrast to "to influence" or "to affect," for instance) and it's driving me crazy. Then again, I also used to feel passionately against "thus," but have since developed a tolerance to it. And I hate it when people take liberties with abbreviating journal titles as they see fit (and not as they are standardly abbreviated). I am religious about the serial comma.
I invite you to share your own technical writing pet peeves.
Thursday, March 3, 2011
Giving Up on Giving Advice
Much has been written about junior researchers, students and postdocs, not receiving enough advising about the different career prospects or not enough training in the aspects critical for their desired careers (e.g. teaching, grant writing, or mentoring for the academically inclined).
Today I want to write about giving up on giving advice to someone. Because sometimes people simply don't want your advice, even though it will likely be to their career's detriment. Even though you are actually their advisor so it is really your job to look out for them and, yes, give them advice.
I wrote about this particular student before. He is very talented, and I think I have made it clear that I consider him to be. Perhaps that is a problem and too much praise made him think himself infallible.
He wants to be a faculty member. I think he has the technical prowess and the intellectual capacity, but is lacking in a number of other skills and his CV does not still look as good as I would like it to look at this stage of his career. I have tried to speak with him several times about what he needs to do to improve his chances of becoming a faculty. A couple of days ago was the last time we spoke, and at that point I swore to myself that this was the last time I was offering him advice. It's like talking to a brick wall. For every suggestion I made he had a counter-argument. Apparently, he knows best.
1) The student spent significantly longer than usual taking classes because he wanted to also get an M.A. in another department (corresponding to a "purer" discipline); I was on board with that, and he has really enjoyed his classes. However, that did detract from research, and we are only now to submit his first first-author paper (a comprehensive piece of work); he also has a second-author paper and a book chapter from his work here. He wants to be done with his PhD by the end of the year (which will be the end of his 4th year with me), and I told him that he will not have the number of papers that my very good students typically have when they graduate (7-8 journal papers plus a number of conferences, and I try to have each also write either a book chapter or a review). The bare minimum I request, in order for a student to graduate with a PhD, is three journal papers, preferably first-author; but, I think he is very good and his CV should do his abilities and hard work justice. It would be a shame for him to graduate with the bare minimum of papers, when an additional 6 months or a year (putting him at 5 years on the PhD) may result in several more.
He said the following: he expects to go to a very specific person (a big fish in a small pond kind of guy) to do a postdoc and he will make up for deficient publications there. I asked: how does he know that person will even be having money/hiring a postdoc? How does he know this person wants to work with him, have they been in contact? (No.) If he needs to go elsewhere, he may need to switch topics completely, and may have a long ramp-up time before he can publish anything. He may not get along with the postdoc advisor. There is no guarantee that the postdoc cures all CV ailments.
2) I got a TT position right after my PhD and never saw a grant proposal until it was time to write one; I would have been grateful for a chance to see how they are written, and now that I am a faculty I make a point of having my students and postdocs with academic aspirations take part in the proposal writing and review process. A few months ago, I had the student read through a proposal and give comments. He did it grudgingly and was grumpy the whole time. I told him that, since he says he wants to be a faculty, he needs to see how proposals are written, but all he commented on was that this deterred from his real research and that he was way too busy with classes.
3) While his English is fine, his writing is pretty bad. I rarely read something so dry, dense, and conveying almost contempt towards the reader. Editing his recent, very comprehensive paper, has been killing me. I have told him several times that he needs to work on his writing and that he needs to tell a story first and foremost and not fuck the reader in the eyeballs (no, I didn't say that, but I wish I had). His response was that perhaps we didn't always have to write such long papers (?!) You write a paper when you have something important to say, and paper length and publication venue depend on what it is that you want to say. Every paper has to be good, but no, not every paper has to be long.
4) My favorite: interactions with people. I have become blue in the face on many occasions talking about how important it is to talk to people at conferences: go to talks, introduce yourself, talk about your work, listen to other people talk about theirs. That is how you get ideas for new work. He does not like to go to seminars, does not want to mentor junior students, has refused to TA to get teaching experience. When he goes to a conference, he doesn't talk to anyone, doesn't want to network. When he gives talks, he stares at his feet or the screen and speaks in monotone. When two of my students recently graduated and I took the group to dinner, he was the only one who didn't come. He does not like people.
And he told me that most people are like him (presumably introverted) and not like me (presumably extroverted; for the record, I find active networking uncomfortable, but I do it anyway; that's the only way to prosper). I asked whether he knew anyone younger than 50 who shuns people and happens to have a faculty position? He didn't have the answer to that one.
5) When I asked him a few days ago if he knew what faculty actually did, he said very firmly that he had a very good idea and that he was sure that he wanted to become faculty. And then he topped it off with a gratuitous slight that we didn't do research anyway, so apparently this is an easy job!
My husband says that I should not be surprised that the student is so unreceptive to my advice -- he is a guy, after all, and all guys hate being given unsolicited advice. That might be true, but I am his advisor and am expected to advise him about his career. A person who thinks they know best about the job they never held, better than someone actually doing the job, is not a particularly smart person.
I for one am done giving this student advice. I have talked to him time and time again, and I am officially done talking. He is free to screw up his career all on his own.
Today I want to write about giving up on giving advice to someone. Because sometimes people simply don't want your advice, even though it will likely be to their career's detriment. Even though you are actually their advisor so it is really your job to look out for them and, yes, give them advice.
I wrote about this particular student before. He is very talented, and I think I have made it clear that I consider him to be. Perhaps that is a problem and too much praise made him think himself infallible.
He wants to be a faculty member. I think he has the technical prowess and the intellectual capacity, but is lacking in a number of other skills and his CV does not still look as good as I would like it to look at this stage of his career. I have tried to speak with him several times about what he needs to do to improve his chances of becoming a faculty. A couple of days ago was the last time we spoke, and at that point I swore to myself that this was the last time I was offering him advice. It's like talking to a brick wall. For every suggestion I made he had a counter-argument. Apparently, he knows best.
1) The student spent significantly longer than usual taking classes because he wanted to also get an M.A. in another department (corresponding to a "purer" discipline); I was on board with that, and he has really enjoyed his classes. However, that did detract from research, and we are only now to submit his first first-author paper (a comprehensive piece of work); he also has a second-author paper and a book chapter from his work here. He wants to be done with his PhD by the end of the year (which will be the end of his 4th year with me), and I told him that he will not have the number of papers that my very good students typically have when they graduate (7-8 journal papers plus a number of conferences, and I try to have each also write either a book chapter or a review). The bare minimum I request, in order for a student to graduate with a PhD, is three journal papers, preferably first-author; but, I think he is very good and his CV should do his abilities and hard work justice. It would be a shame for him to graduate with the bare minimum of papers, when an additional 6 months or a year (putting him at 5 years on the PhD) may result in several more.
He said the following: he expects to go to a very specific person (a big fish in a small pond kind of guy) to do a postdoc and he will make up for deficient publications there. I asked: how does he know that person will even be having money/hiring a postdoc? How does he know this person wants to work with him, have they been in contact? (No.) If he needs to go elsewhere, he may need to switch topics completely, and may have a long ramp-up time before he can publish anything. He may not get along with the postdoc advisor. There is no guarantee that the postdoc cures all CV ailments.
2) I got a TT position right after my PhD and never saw a grant proposal until it was time to write one; I would have been grateful for a chance to see how they are written, and now that I am a faculty I make a point of having my students and postdocs with academic aspirations take part in the proposal writing and review process. A few months ago, I had the student read through a proposal and give comments. He did it grudgingly and was grumpy the whole time. I told him that, since he says he wants to be a faculty, he needs to see how proposals are written, but all he commented on was that this deterred from his real research and that he was way too busy with classes.
3) While his English is fine, his writing is pretty bad. I rarely read something so dry, dense, and conveying almost contempt towards the reader. Editing his recent, very comprehensive paper, has been killing me. I have told him several times that he needs to work on his writing and that he needs to tell a story first and foremost and not fuck the reader in the eyeballs (no, I didn't say that, but I wish I had). His response was that perhaps we didn't always have to write such long papers (?!) You write a paper when you have something important to say, and paper length and publication venue depend on what it is that you want to say. Every paper has to be good, but no, not every paper has to be long.
4) My favorite: interactions with people. I have become blue in the face on many occasions talking about how important it is to talk to people at conferences: go to talks, introduce yourself, talk about your work, listen to other people talk about theirs. That is how you get ideas for new work. He does not like to go to seminars, does not want to mentor junior students, has refused to TA to get teaching experience. When he goes to a conference, he doesn't talk to anyone, doesn't want to network. When he gives talks, he stares at his feet or the screen and speaks in monotone. When two of my students recently graduated and I took the group to dinner, he was the only one who didn't come. He does not like people.
And he told me that most people are like him (presumably introverted) and not like me (presumably extroverted; for the record, I find active networking uncomfortable, but I do it anyway; that's the only way to prosper). I asked whether he knew anyone younger than 50 who shuns people and happens to have a faculty position? He didn't have the answer to that one.
5) When I asked him a few days ago if he knew what faculty actually did, he said very firmly that he had a very good idea and that he was sure that he wanted to become faculty. And then he topped it off with a gratuitous slight that we didn't do research anyway, so apparently this is an easy job!
My husband says that I should not be surprised that the student is so unreceptive to my advice -- he is a guy, after all, and all guys hate being given unsolicited advice. That might be true, but I am his advisor and am expected to advise him about his career. A person who thinks they know best about the job they never held, better than someone actually doing the job, is not a particularly smart person.
I for one am done giving this student advice. I have talked to him time and time again, and I am officially done talking. He is free to screw up his career all on his own.
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