Interrupted

In a comment to my previous post, Alex expressed doubts about the validity of the main finding reported in the post and requested hard data, in a visually easy-to-grasp form, to support it.

I am nothing if not a scientist, so here it is:


Fig. 1. Main finding.



Fig. S1. (Supplemental material) Main finding's siblings, visiting at the hospital. The book is a "coloring book for siblings".

Not sure about sharing the birth story here, but I might in some form later.
Still, there is plenty of material from my 48-hour hospital stay and the issues surrounding it for several posts, even if you have no interest whatsoever in people's birth stories.

Vignette 1:

The hospital stay was really exhausting overall, and I am not blaming the baby one bit.

The reason is that too many different people kept interrupting the rest of me and my baby. The endless stream of people kept coming in to check my blood pressure and temperature, check the status of my uterus shrinking, check the baby's weight, temperature, oxygen level in blood, screen for metabolic disorders, give his first shoot, administer hearing test (twice)...
Especially checking the vitals was brutal: various nurses and nurse's assistants would come in at all hours and wake me and/or the baby. I remember this being an extremely annoying aspect of my previous hospital stays, but this time it really struck me as overkill. I could not get more than 20 min of uninterrupted sleep even though the baby was (N.B. On day 1 after birth, you really should get some shut-eye, because baby will, too, due to exhaustion from the labor. Starting day 2, incessant suckling ensues in order to get the milk supply going, so you will have zero chance for sleep in the coming days.) And yes, every time a shift changed, new staff would come to introduce themselves even if I never saw them again.

Anyway, I know all the staff have checklists of how often things need to be recorded, but there has to be a better way. I fail to see how it's good for anyone if I cannot get any sleep for days. I don't know if this is how seriously ill, on long-term hospital care patients are also handled, but there should be some balance between getting all your checkmarks and letting the person actually rest...

The Stork Has Landed...

... and delivered a 9 lb 9 oz bundle of boy. I mean... joy! :-)
All is well. He's huge and very hungry.

Late

It's my real-life birthday today, I am turning 38 -- a nice number, divisible by 19. I am also 39 weeks preggers, so we're in the home stretch.

While I was doing the dishes around 1 am (since I can't sleep due to the heat, a huge tummy, and a terrible disagreement between my mattress and my back), I received an email from my dad (he's overseas, in my home country). He was congratulating me on my birthday, some awards I had received (he seems to check my faculty site often) and impeding baby news.

And I got very sad.
My husband (who also stayed up late, we're pretty bad that way) asked if it was because I had turned a year older. It's totally not that. I actually care very little for birthdays, my own in particular. In part probably because I am still in my 30s, so still (sort of) young. We'll see how I feel when I turn 40... Largely because I am generally happy with how things look in my life -- I am where I hoped I would be at this age, I have a great family and the job I always wanted, so nothing major to lament. Life is good. (Knocking on wood!)

Seeing my dad's email made me feel quite nostalgic.
You see, I don't really get to see my parents very much at all, and yes it is expensive to travel, for me or for them, but mostly I just don't want to. I am not a very good daughter. They were good parents, so it's not like I have a reason to avoid them. But the longer I stay away the more difficult it becomes to reconnect.

I call my parents on the phone, but rarely, especially my dad, who's hard to pin down. I think they have moved on from me too, pouring their love and attention on my younger sibling who is there. That's OK with me. I had a good childhood. I am grateful to my dad for the good genes he passed on: the talent for math, whatever little gift I have for writing, the perfect eyesight, and the hair which won't start getting grey for many years still.

I generally severed ties with my home country, I don't follow current affairs there. I have a tendency to burn bridges, that's the way I know how to move forward; lingering is hard. I grew up in a large city, a multimillion-people cosmopolitan area; I had a very urban upbringing and still have fairly urban tastes. I loved my city growing up, and especially loved the college years. I hadn't visited the city in more than 5 years, and I may never do it again. There were some awesome bands (I am partial to the garage rock sound) I enjoyed as a teenager and young adult. So, I turned on some music that I listened to when I was growing up (which I never do, it makes me too emotional) and finished the dishes. It was my small nod to my youth which is far both in space and in time. And to my parents who are very far away, and thankfully doing very well without me.

My boys and I will probably go out to eat to celebrate my birthday. There will be lots of chocolate involved.

Does Anyone Care about Your Work-Life Balance?

In real life, that is.
Based on my experience, the answer is -- no. No one but you (and hopefully your significant other) cares about your work-life balance.

There is never a scarcity of conversation about work-life balance in the blogosphere, especially for working mothers. There is no shortage of opinion regarding whether it is ethical enough or feminist enough for highly educated women to work part time or drop careers altogether -- people believe that educated women owe it to the society or other women or future generations of boys and girls to keep working; other people believe that women owe nothing to anyone except themselves and their families, and are perfectly within their rights to SAHM their kids and thereby find fulfillment. Whatever your take is on these issues, this post is NOT about them.

I am fairly exhausted by the recent flurry of blogosphere activity on work-life balance that was sparked by a New York Times article written by Dr Karen Sibert. Several bloggers I know have taken a stab at the article (Historiann, Isis, Cloud, and others), and it seems that Dr S does not have many supporters for her "suck it up and keep working full time, you owe it to the patients/society" message. Instead, there is an overwhelming outrage at the thought that doctors should sacrifice personal life for the profession and there are numerous calls for making work hours more humane and general practice more appealing, so the shortage of primary care doctors would not be blamed on female doctors who work part-time.

One reason for my exhaustion (besides obviously reading too many comments on too many blogs) is the fact that all these calls for balance are, when you think of it and with all due respect, painfully redundant, futile, and ultimately irrelevant. All the well-meaning commenters are preaching to the choir; in reality, the whopping 12 weeks of unpaid maternity leave and nonexistent tax-breaks for exorbitant childcare expenses are all you need to know about how much this society really values working mothers. In societies where working parents are considered worthwhile humans and workers, there are accommodations for work-life balance, especially parents caring for small children. Here, it's not the case, and we can all blog our hearts out, it means nothing.

In my experience, the only people who seem to be concerned (or at least say that they are) with anyone's work-life balance but their own can be found in the blogosphere. Certainly no one with whom I am in regular contact in real life gives a rat's ass about my work-life balance: whether I have any, whether I would like to have a different one, whether I face any hardship in achieving any semblance thereof. Everyone in this glorious society is too busy, and presumably too exhausted and overstretched, to think about anyone but themselves.

I am in a medium-size department (~40 faculty) in a discipline that is considered extremely macho. In my department, there are 5 women faculty. Of the 5 women, 4 are tenured: two women are senior to me (full profs), one is roughly my contemporary (we are both associate profs), and one is a few years junior, up for tenure soon (assistant prof). All the women are married. The two full professor women had kids after they had received tenure. I came to the TT with one kid in tow, and I had another one midway through the tenure track. The other two women are childfree.

I remain the only female faculty who has ever had a kid on the tenure track.
I remember mentioning this fact in the presence of the assistant professor woman; there were other people around. She rushed to point out that a male colleague of ours (who has a stay-at-home wife), also had a kid (also No 2 for him) on the tenure track. While new fathers do suffer some sleep deprivation in the baby's first year, it is NOT the same as for a new mother, especially one who breastfeeds. This male colleague had no problem working 12-hour days starting the week his kid was born (perhaps hiding from the baby at work?) I was a complete zombie for many months after birth, definitely not 100% -- physically or mentally. What truly pissed me off was that the first reaction of my female colleague (who btw says she wants to have kids, but is waiting for tenure) was to trivialize my experience. I didn't want to continue the conversation and regurgitate the tired (but true) spiel of how women have it harder than men when the child is born -- whoever does not see that does not want to see it. But I remember this situation as one of many in which I have found the female camaraderie to be completely nonexistent.

My collaborators are overwhelmingly male (95% of them). A number of them are close to my age, having 2 or 3 kids. They all have stay-at-home wives, or wives working only part-time (e.g. giving a few piano lessons per week). My husband works full time.
Over the years, the subject of work-life balance came up a few times with my male collaborators, and after a few sentences I see they no longer want to talk about it. They consider my job and my obligations to be exactly like those they have and when there emerges a hint that they may not exactly be the same, I suppose they want to avoid yet another crazy woman rant/vent/whine-a-palooza and rush to change the subject.

I wish that I could tell my male colleagues that, in addition to all the work at the actual job that I have to do, which is the same as theirs, I am still mommy and do all the non-negotiable-mommy duties that their wives do and a significant load of chores. I don't know how much my male colleagues with stay-at-home or part-time working wives do at home in terms of chores, but I imagine they probably don't do more than my husband who also works full time: my husband mows the lawn/takes care of the yard in the summer and cleans the snow in the winter; he took over a lion's share of vacuuming/cleaning clutter and laundry about a year or two ago, when I simply gave up. He also takes our older son swimming twice a week and packs his lunch. I am the primary breadwinner in the family. I also do 100% of the cooking, washing dishes, and grocery shopping. I also do nearly 100% of playdate organization, immunizations, summer camp tracking, any forms that need to be filled, and communication with the daycare/schools or other parents. I do a vast majority of childcare, especially sick-child care: 90% of the time if someone has to stay at home from work for a sick kid or take him to a doctor it's me because I don't have a boss. I do 100% of middle-of-the night calls for a drink of water, needing to pee, vomiting, or getting another dose of ibuprofen for a feverish kid. Also, I am always on the poopy-underwear and cleaning-the-potty duty because I tolerate bodily excrements better. Only mommy is allowed to get my younger son ready in the morning or give him a bath and put him to sleep, every single day. And my biggest peeve -- I never get to sleep in on the weekends. :-(

That's what I would like to tell my male colleagues if they cared to hear. However, they likely know all this, but simply don't care. Many times I have had to cancel a meeting when a kid is sick; I do not recall any of my male colleagues with kids having ever done that. I have yet to see any of them, whose kids are of similar ages to mine, cut down on the number of trips or meetings because of their kids; they don't have to, because there is always their wife to pick up the slack. But that doesn't matter -- since I have the same job as them, if I cannot cut it, it's my weakness; I should make it work and not whine about hardship or ask for special consideration. Right?

I know people have their own problems. But this society operates with so much stress and fear about the future placed on everyone's shoulders that, instead of listening to one another and hoping to help, what I overwhelmingly see in real life is that any obstacle that a person overcomes becomes a badge of honor and enables said person to look down on all others with "Look what I had to go through to meet these criteria of excellence. You too have to rise to them or go to hell." I admit I am frequently guilty of this attitude myself. We'd all nominally like more of a balance in our own lives, but don't wish for others to have a balance, because then they may drop more work in our lap. This is what I hear or read way too often in regards to maternity leave from both men and women who are childfree or have kids but also stay-at-home spouses: us breeding women should be removed from the workforce because we are such a burden on everyone else when we take a leave to have kids. It is oh so very very unfair that all the righteous workers who don't harbor uterine squatters end up picking up the slack after our lazy postpartum asses.

It's been a while since I stopped discussing work-life balance with most colleagues in real life. And I have stopped justifying why I am missing meetings or trips. But then my current pregnancy became obvious. As my belly grows, my perceived IQ and competence drop -- I become ever less a scientist, and ever more a lower being: just another procreating woman. Who apparently dumps work on others.

So, yes, while it's nice to read all these calls for work-life balance on the internet, when it comes to real life, I fear most of us only care that we ourselves get the balance. If balance for all means sometimes shouldering a bit more because someone else temporarily cannot, and especially if they cannot because of personal choices that we ourselves would not make, then the concept of balance becomes unacceptable; instead, rigid rules must be followed and complete sacrifice at the altar of work is expected. What I see in real life is nothing more than every man and woman for themselves. Until that changes, we're all screwed. But I am totally not holding my breath for it to change in my lifetime. I'd sooner expect to see a real live unicorn.

Cleaning Up

The most common reason that makes me delay returning nearly finalized manuscript drafts to students is the missing/inadequate big picture coupled with painful underciting. I edit the text mercilessly and extensively; generally, on the technical parts of the manuscripts, edits do not take me too long. What does take long is to create a proper and compelling introduction with adequate coverage of literature and the exact positioning of our contribution within the context of the state of the art.

Ideally, the big picture -- why we do what we do and what it is that we did that was novel and why anyone should really care -- gets visited repeatedly during the course of the project, well before there are publication-worthy data. The student reads many, many papers, we talk extensively, investigate different approaches, weigh the pros and cons, take detours and go on tangents, revisit the issues many times... The big picture should never be lost in the advising process and I think that faculty, regardless of discipline, will agree with me on this issue. I think we would all like to think that we try to instill in our students the birds view of the research along with the ability to look into the nitty-gritty details. One without the other is not good training.

But then comes the manuscript drafting part. And this is what baffles me -- even my best students, who are technically stellar and I know have read lots of relevant literature -- give me initial drafts with a measly single paragraph "background", in which barely 10 references have been thrown together to supposedly introduce the work, and with generic sweeping statements that beg for a reference but nothing is cited (we're talking comprehensive papers here, so the number of citations is not constrained). As though it is too tedious to position oneself, and the student can't wait to get to the fun stuff, i.e. their own technical contribution. We have a really big problem when the student really does not understand what the big picture is, even though they might have executed a technical task; this is indeed an advising fail. But I see this sloppy underciting and lackluster introductions even from very good students and often postdocs.

That's where I feel like I am picking up dirty socks and generally cleaning up after my kids. I am the maid whose duty is to tidy up, and I go and do a thorough literature survey to make sure we didn't miss anything among the new developments, that we have paid dues to the important contributions of yore, and to actually explain why we bothered with the work.

Now, I have weekly group meetings and we ofen talk about strategies for writing better papers. I am sure I am totally annoying as I constantly repeat my spiel on the importance of citing and proper motivation. We also often talk about efficient strategies for quickly mapping out the state of the art in a field, through identifying key papers and then following their citation branches, while weighing the outcomes with the offspring papers' age, citations count, prestige of the journal, quality of the group, relevance to our own work, etc. Generally, before a student ever sits down to create the first draft, we talk about the outline -- what's the paper about, what is its message, why is it important? Yet, this particular part -- write thy introduction well and with ample citations -- does not seem to stick. Why, I wonder? Is it because they don't care as they know I will pick up the slack anyway?

I don't remember any formal mentoring from my PhD advisor on how a paper is supposed to be structured, or what it means to write a good paper. As I student, I always thought you just read lots and lots of papers and patterns start to emerge -- the good papers give you a feel for the state of the art and open problems, and then tell you which open problem they solved and how. A good introduction is like a vortex: it starts from a broad view of the field, then narrows it down seamlessly to important and open problems, so that by the time the reader is hit on the head with the "In this paper, we..." hammer, there is no doubt in the reader's mind that what is being presented is new and extremely important.

So yes, even after multiple back-and-forths editing a manuscript with a student and major rewrites of the whole text, in order for the process to ever converge I still end up doing a lot of time-consuming clean-up: a full literature check and multiple overhauls of the intro and abstract in the final version. Because, as the lead PI, if the paper sucks,it's my reputation on the line, not that of the student.

Are there any good tips on training one's students to (a) not be too lazy to look up references, (b) not be careless about putting in the references that they are actually aware of and have read and used in research, (c) try to appreciate the importance of a good introduction, (d) try to actually write a good introduction themselves as opposed to fiddle with it pro forma through multiple revisions and essentially wait for the advisor to do it?

More on Manuscript Writing with Junior Coauthors

Thursday was a long but generally good day. Among other things, we got the referee report back on one of our manuscripts. Here's an excerpt:

RECOMMENDATION: Minor Revision
Sufficient New [Science]: Yes
Well Organized and Clearly Written: Yes
Good Title: Yes
Good Abstract: Yes
...
TECHNICAL QUALITY RATING: Outstanding
PRESENTATION RATING: Outstanding

[The authors] employ a set of well-know numerical techniques, and also some new approaches... but their combined use is very novel and creative.

The analysis is very carefully performed and presented, with a detailed explanation about how the authors have solved notoriously troublesome problems such as ...

Overall this is an outstanding contribution which pushes forward the state-of-the art.

This is a report from a reputable society journal (the full report is much more detailed, with specific requests for minor revisions). The paper is quite long, it will be close to 20 double-column pages in print (including appendices though), yet the actual peer review took only 3 weeks. That means the referees (a) were not horribly discouraged at the though of reviewing it, which is remarkable for very long papers, and (b) once they got around to reviewing it, they did not drop it, pissed, after page 3, because it was poorly written. Which is totally what I do with poorly written papers and that's why it takes me forever to review them -- I keep going back and getting annoyed and dropping them and picking them up again...

I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to write clear, fluid prose and polish, polish, polish before submission. Because the time you invest in polishing your paper translates into time/hassle saved in the review process and probably saves some health units of your reviewers. Now, if you are in the business of GlamourMag chasing, there are obviously no guarantees even if you write on par with Mario Vargas Llosa (or insert another writer you like). But, in my experience, for society level-journals, there is a high correlation between the tender loving care with which you massaged your manuscript prior to submission and its smooth acceptance. TLC also means that you do not publish before you feel you have a compelling story, and you have dotted all the i's and crossed all the t's. The paper above was about 4-5 months from first draft to submission-ready.

Now, why am I talking about manuscript writing -- again? I am currently working on 3 manuscripts in parallel, trying to get as much done and submitted as possible before I deliver (3 weeks left). These are all very comprehensive manuscripts, so there's a lot of material and it's going slowly.

Today I met with one of my students on whose manuscript I am currently working. We have gone through multiple revisions already and it's nearing completion, but there are still places that were significantly changed from the last revision and, since they are newly drafted, look pretty bad. We were going over the manuscript and I said something like "I completely don't understand what you are trying to say here" and he responded along the lines of "I know you don't understand what I am doing and you don't like my writing."

Then it dawned on me: he thinks I don't know what he is doing technically, which is absolutely NOT true, and that's why I dislike how something is written. Instead, what I have been trying to convey -- apparently quite unsuccessfully -- is "When a person reads this part of your text, it is impossible to understand what you are trying to say and why. I know exactly what you are doing and why, and you still threw me for a loop with what is written -- how do you think someone who is doing only a cursory read of the text will react?"

There is a tangent here on why this student thinks I don't know what I am doing; it may be his ego (he is very smart) and there may be an undercurrent of sexism there. But I can't afford to worry about it now, I just want the goddamn paper done and submitted. So I told him, in my most empathetic voice, that he should not worry. That I know what I am doing and will not ruin his paper by rewriting it, and that I promise that clarifying these points will make the paper easier to read and people will like it and cite it more. That certain subsections ought to be moved to appendices as they restrict the flow of the paper, but that they also ought to be expanded for completeness, so that someone who wants to reproduce his work has all the needed information at hand. So he should go and expand the sections I requested while I work on the remainder of the text.

I should probably delegate more paper reviewing to this student, so he can learn the differences between good and crappy writing. And he should go talk to the student who is first author on the paper mentioned early in this post about how much hammering that manuscript received before submission in order to get the glowing reviews and smooth acceptance.

Are You Your Advisor?

I write a lot about advising students and postdocs. But, whenever I write about a topic that touches mentoring, I invariably get some comments in which I am perceived as some sort of tyrannical monster who despises her underlings.
I don't think this is true in the least. I care deeply about the success of my students and postdocs. However, I write most about the mentorship aspects that I find puzzling or irritating -- blogging is conducive to venting, and I for one loooove complaining and ranting, so I write disproportionately more about the negatives than the positives. I also don't delude myself that I have all the answers; I am a much better advisor now than when I first started and am presumably significantly less effective than I will be 20 years from now. Most people, me included, try to do their best at the given point in time and with the experience and resources they have. One of the many similarities between advising and parenting is that the harshest critics are those people who are not parents themselves -- many (most?) of us who have kids thought we'd do everything so much better once it's our turn, only to find out that things are so much harder than we anticipated and many of other people's parenting choices that we so vehemently criticized start to completely make sense. The same with advising -- things look much different once you actually have to do it yourself.

I am sure much of what we do as advisors reflects how we ourselves were advised. But, I am also sure there are many differences, as we perhaps try to correct the things we didn't like when we were students or postdocs. Sometimes -- perhaps often? -- things that made us furious as trainees start to make a lot of sense once we are on the other side. Sort of how you develop newfound appreciation for your own parents once you become a parent yourself. And then there are undeniable differences in style we bring with respect to our advisors, simply because we are indeed different people or we may be at drastically different stages in our careers or at different types of institutions or we simply envision a different work-life balance for ourselves. So here are a few vignettes from my grad school life, which I think influenced how I advise students now.

1) I got a faculty position right after grad school, so my PhD advisor is the advisor who had the greatest influence on my career in every aspect. (In other fields, perhaps a postdoc advisor had a dominant influence.) My advisor was very well known and awe-inspiring. He also had a reputation for having a really bad temper and being extremely bellicose with colleagues, which hurt his recognition in the long run and did not help his advisees. He did not like being wrong or challenged in an environment where he perceived he would lose face; you could see his blood boiling and him becoming increasingly agitated and very unpleasant when it was becoming clear that he was losing an argument. I learned that the best way to go about is to drop the issue that we argued about and let him cool down, and then follow up with an email exchange. He was at the end of the day always in the pursuit of the truth and would always acknowledge when I was right in the end; the key was to finalize the exchange so that everyone has had the time to process it. I think this little bit of workaround around his temper was key in the two of us getting along very well for many years, and much better than he got along with many other students.But, it is also important that every single time the original idea or argument was always much improved after having talked/emailed with him -- just the process of hashing it out was extremely stimulating and useful.
-- What's the moral of this story? One is that advisors are people, with all that entails: they are not infallible or stoic; they get tired and pissed and defensive and everything else that other people get, so consider this aspect in your interactions. Second, when I have a disagreement with a student/postdoc, this experience taught me not to get defensive or aggressive (I am not 100% successful in this aspect, I admit) but to persevere in the discussion for everyone's benefit. Even when you as an advisor are wrong, you typically have a lot to bring to the discussion because you have much more experience in various aspects of the scientific process, so the idea is always much better and cleaner after the discussion than before it.

2) My advisor had a number of non-negotiable rules. For instance, I was trying for years to convince him to use Latex for text processing, and he would never budge. It was MS Word exclusively for all text, Power Point for all presentations, and one specific programming language and one image processing software for all programming and image processing needs. Nobody was allowed to use anything else for anything research-related. At the time, I honestly thought he was just a petty tyrant for insisting on such uniformity and failing to see the benefits of Latex; now I see the benefit of uniformity within the group to streamline everything from training new members, to software licence renewal, debugging and trouble shooting, sharing codes and other files. As soon as I was on my own, I went back to using Latex for most text processing; when he heard of it, my advisor told me somewhat sadly that I had switched over to the dark side. Now my group uses Latex for research papers and theses while we use MS Word for shorter texts and because virtually all our collaborators use only MS Word. We all use PPT for presentations and one programming language and one image processing software, as uniformly so as my old group did.
-- This story teaches us a couple of things too: (1) While you work in someone's group, it's going to be their way, whether you like it or not. Once you are on your own and lead your own group, you can do things any way you like. (2) Some rules are there for a good reason, which may not be obvious until you are in your advisor's shoes. Try to give them the benefit of the doubt that they actually may know what they are doing.

3) On the other hand, my advisor was very hands off in other aspects of mentoring students. For instance, we had weekly group meetings, but not during my entire time in grad school. He would rarely seek a student out and would generally expect you to come to him if you had problems; when you asked to see him, he'd accommodate you pretty promptly within a day or two, even though he was very busy. I was happy with this style and I think it works well for people who are independent. But I knew there were my group mates who really would just do nothing for weeks or would go off on unproductive tangents for way too long, and then once they got together with the advisor after a long time and presented what was, shall we say -- suboptimal output -- unbelievable wrath was unleashed upon them. Which only made them even less likely to seek meetings in the future and the vicious cycle continued. In my own group, we have weekly group meetings as well as weekly 1-on-1 meetings: my best students would likely be fine to be left alone, but for most students, especially when they are new, weekly 1-on-1 meetings keep them out of trouble/away from being stuck for long and the feedback offers them reassurance.
-- What's the moral of this story? Don't assume independence in all your students. Actually, assume that most will not be as driven or as independent as you may like them to be, at least initially, and ensure they have enough structure (or, if you will, hand holding or micromanaging) to maximize their own potential and make good progress in good time. This is critical especially in the initial stages of a research project. Brilliant students do well almost irrespective of the advisor. I think a successful advisor is one who can get a decent quality research output from a student who is not entirely independent or obviously brilliant from the start -- for many such students picking out a good topic and seeing them through their initial struggles can actually reveal a great hidden potential once they gain some confidence, and that's where structure and regular feedback is key.

4) When I was a grad student I was quite productive, wrote many papers and went to a lot of conferences. My advisor even threw a couple of his invited talks my way. I traveled more than his average student, to probably 5-6 conferences per year in my last few years. When I became faculty, I thought that's what I needed to do -- send my students to as many conferences as possible and have them present all the work.
But there was one significant difference between my advisor and me. When I was a graduate student, he was in his 60's, well known and well funded. He needed neither exposure nor funding, and could send me wherever and whenever. I, on the other hand, was a newbie faculty -- I neither had his funding resources, nor the name recognition or clout that he commanded. I had to balance sending students to conferences against ensuring that I myself got enough exposure, and doing it all on what were initially
relatively modest funds. I only realized this after several senior faculty colleagues kept insisting that I myself needed to travel and get exposure in order to get tenure, and that delegating everything to students at the beginning of my career would be devastating. So my students initially went to 2, occasionally 3 conferences per year. I also did not start delegating my invited talks (which were initially quite few and far between) to group members until I was near the end of my tenure track; invited talks mean a lot on the CV in my discipline, and count for a lot at tenure review time. Was this selfish? Perhaps. But had I not received tenure, I would not have ended up being of much use to anyone, including my students in their subsequent careers.

5) When I was a graduate student, I subbed for my advisor a lot. A LOT. One semester, I actually ended up teaching more classes than him (it's not like I was a TA or anything like that. He would just tell me that he'd be going out of town for 2 weeks and that I needed to cover these chapters from the book in class). I don't know why he did it -- initially it looked like he distributed the subbing load among students, but at some point it became only me. My guess is that he knew I wanted to be faculty and figured I could use some practice. I think I ended up subbing for him in about 5 different courses during my grad school. I actually enjoyed it but it was often a lot of time to prep.
-- What I do differently is that I ask my students if anyone wants to substitute. I think that for some of them it would be a good idea considering that they either want to teach or simply need practice talking in front of an audience, and I try to nudge them to do it and explain my reasons for thinking they should do it, but if nobody wants to (which is usually the case), I don't make them do it. I consider teaching classes to be my obligation; it is a situation in which the learning outcomes of the class, especially with undergrads, do depend strongly on the quality of teaching, and if I have to twist arms to get someone to cover, it's not going to be a fun experience for anyone. So then I ultimately reschedule.

If you are a faculty/PI or a scientist out of academia, do you think your professional self resembles your advisor? What are the differences and similarities? If you are a student/postdoc, what are your advisor's characteristic that you might like to emulate in your career and which ones would you hate displaying yourself?

On Presenting Research Data

When I was a graduate student, I remember lovingly poring over every single figure in every single paper or presentation of mine. When I was making power-point presentations, each presentation would have a really clever title page with a unique picture that was a pun or some sort of twist on the talk title. Colors and animations were abound, and I spent a lot of time adjusting the timing and sequence on every one of them, aiming for the perfect pitch. I constantly changed the color scheme, the font type and size, and as needed even redid the figures to accompany my grand vision. In hindsight, I was wasting way too much time tending to the presentation aspects that did not really enhance them; my advisor was pretty hands off so his input was minimal.

But once you become faculty, the sheer volume of stuff you need to present per unit time goes up dramatically. You give many, many more talks, of varying duration (depending on the conference, you can have 2-5 min poster teaser presentations, 10-30 min long contributed talks, 30-45 minute invited or plenary talks and seminars, as well as variable duration presentations to funding agency representatives). Collaborations become the norm, and often you present not only your own group's work but that of your colleagues. Sometimes, those colleagues don't send you their materials till the night before the presentation.

So doing things as quickly and efficiently as possible becomes very important. That's why it's important to simplify and streamline, typically at the expense of visual awesomeness. I now have clear and simple guidelines for making figures and presentations so that I can quickly take bits and pieces from different papers and different presentations and still throw together a decent-looking conference abstract or a presentation in virtually no time.

When it comes to presentations, I use variants of a simple, neutral template (there are still some frills on the title page but not much) and a simple, widely available sans serif font (Arial) for all presentations. All the text is in black; if something needs to be highlighted, it's either in red or in blue. I keep animations to a minimum as presentations often need to be printed as handouts (such as for grant reviews) or I may have to end up using someone else's computer -- I had a really bad PC-->Mac animation experience, and have yet to recover from it. By the way, my pet presentation peeve is the use of any serif font on PPT's. While serif fonts are great for printed matter -- the serifs help you to visualize and follow a line -- they make my eyes hurt on screen. Also, I am very much not a fan of bright letters on a dark background. Blogs with this layout are also very hard to read.

I also have clear and simple guidelines for making publication-quality figures and I request that my students follow them. Everyone in my group uses the same software to plot figures, so tried-and-true best practices are highly transferable:
this is how large your axis labels, tick labels, and legend font need to be, and these are the preferred line colors and thicknesses. We discuss the layout of figures in group meetings and brainstorm on how data should be best presented. When it comes to 2D plots, I insist on a simple color palette -- black, red, and blue -- it works well for most 2D plots. The work we do is such that there are also lots of 3D plots involved; the software we use has awesome 3D features and makes wonderful colorful plots.

Students often start by disregarding these guidelines because they feel they know better how to make their data look all purty. That's not necessarily bad, but with new students we invariably have to go through the territory of having a figure with, for instance, red and magenta curves (*shrugs in horror at the color clash*), or the very common issue of microscopic and completely illegible lettering on the figures once they are shrunk down to size they are in print (society journals we publish in most frequently all have a 2-column format with figures no wider than ~3 in). I understand that the students feel ownership of the data and feel they can do better then some st00pid template, but it is exhausting having to hash it out with each one of them that a simple color scale with appropriately scaled lettering goes very very far and that they do not have to reinvent the wheel. Getting them to accept best practices is part of mentoring, but certainly among its more tedious aspects.

There are also challenges associated with different formats. For instance, we use Latex for all our papers, but do presentations in PPT and nearly all of my collaborators use only MS Office. So we need good quality eps figures for Latex documents (vector graphics is also ideal for any type of printing, such as large posters), while in PPTs and Word documents bitmaps (such as high resolution tiff) work best. And then if you want to showcase your figures on the web, jpegs are the norm. So the next best thing to me actually plotting everything myself is receiving a desirable figure in multiple formats right off the bat. It drastically reduces the poor student's chances that their insane advisor will ask for a better quality/different format figure the night before a conference talk or before a proposal is due.

One additonal thing I have recently implemented is heavier use of the group's web repository. Each student has a folder and all the final-version codes, presentations, and source files for papers and figures should be uploaded there. It has been taking a while to get people in the habit of putting everything online, but it's becoming an excellent repository of material that can be accessed remotely whenever needed.

I invite you to share your presentation pet peeves and best practices. Please also state your field, I am curious how much variation there is among different disciplines.

Mush

-- Heat and hormones have turned my brain into mush, so I fear I don't have a coherent essay in me. What I do have is a pair of totally epic cankles that scream "36 weeks pregnant!!" and a wedding ring that I can no longer take off; a friend called me a Rolie Polie today, for realz. Also, people keep telling me that I look very cute -- I am 6 ft tall, so cute is not exactly an epithet that people usually apply to me (at least not since the 2nd grade). But I guess I will take a cute Rolie Polie over a waddling peach-colored elephant, which accurately captures my appearance.

-- I had a very bad mommy moment yesterday. I completely lost my temper with my eldest son (age 11) and swore at him, CPP style. He was completely flabbergasted. Not that anything justifies my outburst, but a bit of background information may be warranted. My son is an extremely picky eater. He calls himself a junkivore: essentially, he does not eat without protest anything that's not pizza or hotdogs or just plain carbs. We have been battling over food ever since he was little, and while he always ends up eating what I cook, it is never without constant eyerolling and protesting. Ne-ver. He does not like anything I make and it drives me up the wall. Yesterday, he took one look at my roasted potatoes and chicken, accompanied by stir-fried vegetables, and proclaimed that he would rather just eat apples than "that stuff." I totally lost it and haven't spoken with him until tonight. While I am a champion grudge holder, I cannot stay mad for very long at any of my kids. He looked so sad, moping around as I ignored him all afternoon. We made peace at bedtime, as I didn't want him going to bed so blue. But he didn't make a peep about dinner tonight. Aaaaah. Maybe I will have some peace at dinnertime in the next few days.

-- I performed a little experiment. I have two papers in the final pre-submission stage, which means that the back-and-forths between the students and me have resulted in steady-state manuscript forms, however they are still not totally acceptable so I simply have to completely rewrite some parts (OK, a lot of the text). I have told myself that I don't get to work on the papers until I have completely cleared up all of my pending service obligations. (OK, so maybe I am procrastinating a little.) I was wondering how long it would take me to plow through my to-do list of doom.

It took me nearly two weeks. Two weeks (!) to go through all the stuff that I mostly don't even get paid for. Numerous paper and proposal reviews -- when did I agree to do this many, I was under the impression that I rejected requests a lot? I am organizing a fairly major conference in my specialty next year, so there is a lot of logistical planning that needs to be done early, as in now. And the department is going through some sort of accreditation process that requires enormous amounts of book keeping and sifting through papers. I am apparently a sucker for punishment by service -- it's so very easy to let it totally get out of hand.

I remember a post by Cath@VWXYNot? where she saw on a guy's board something like "Review papers and book chapters are for people who don't have data! Never say yes!" I have to come up with a similar cautionary yet catchy phrase pertinent to academic service. We totally need an appropriate demotivational poster.