So after a job search that started last September, during which I sent research proposals, statements of teaching philosophy and curricula vitae to distinguished institutions from Victoria, BC to the south of France (and during which I threatened to apply for a job in Finland, but that was mostly to get a reaction out of C), I have a job! A pretty good job, actually, where they seem really interested in my work. All I have to do is move to the complete other side of the planet, again, with C and L in tow, again, and then in 3+ years I'll start looking for a new job, again.
This is a huge opportunity, and I hope I can make the most of it. Right now I'm feeling some whiplash from the sudden change in perspective from a discouraged thinking-through of backup plans (work for Google? go off-grid and raise llamas? teach high school?) to excited what-ifs, watching travel shows about the new city, trying to picture L with the new accent, and an all-in commitment to my research. The structure of academic science is terrible, and there is nowhere near enough room at the top of the food chain for all of the people down at my level, but that's kind of neither here or there right now: it's time to go do my best, because that's what I like doing. Whether or not I get the job I want next time I go through the grinder, the next few years are going to be worth it.
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
June 6, 2011
January 21, 2010
Building on success
One of the other things I've been musing about since the Big National Conference is just how much feedback there is in My Science: in order for people to take you seriously, they have to know your name already, and once you're Somebody it is much easier to get the research funding and data access you need to do more good work. I don't assume that people have heard of me, with my mighty five (I think) publications in my old-school subfield, but I am trying to raise my profile by moving into sexier adjacent subfields, and by going to meetings and talking about my projects to try to make an in-person impression.
I have a good friend who is already On His Way. E is tremendously dedicated and creative, and also lucky to have thought up a timely and clever project with a well-known and socially adept advisor. He's a good speaker, the right people think well of him, and he just landed a highly respected research job. I'm glad he caught that wave, and hope he stays on it: he'll be great.
We have conceptual feedback as well, of course - research scientists tend to think of ourselves as meritocrats, respecting well-done and convincing work, and if Theory A was well-done and convincing, why should we entertain the possibility of Theory B? There's some ego acting here too: we couldn't have believed the wrong explanation for so long!
These are both deeply human tendencies, and will always play some role in the human scientific community. They can be mitigated with attention, and that's probably good: this article was eye-opening for me (in that makes-you-want-to-hide-under-the-bed kind of way). The effort to be fairer is both individual and institutional (or at least that's how I was thinking about it yesterday), and I think that the effort to be more flexible is mainly cultural. It's our job to not know all the answers, to keep thinking up questions we haven't solved yet, but it is hard to maintain a let's-see-what-happens attitude in a be-right-or-else environment.
On the advice of a total stranger on the Internet (what could go wrong?), I'm making up a new resolution for every month of the year rather than trying to do one thing all year. January's is to be a little easier on myself, to be less harsh a critic, and I see an opportunity for a corollary resolution here: I'm going to give more of a chance to papers whose authors I've never heard of, and I will try to see it as a sign of inquiry, not cluelessness, when people consider alternative explanations and make themselves persuadable.
I have a good friend who is already On His Way. E is tremendously dedicated and creative, and also lucky to have thought up a timely and clever project with a well-known and socially adept advisor. He's a good speaker, the right people think well of him, and he just landed a highly respected research job. I'm glad he caught that wave, and hope he stays on it: he'll be great.
We have conceptual feedback as well, of course - research scientists tend to think of ourselves as meritocrats, respecting well-done and convincing work, and if Theory A was well-done and convincing, why should we entertain the possibility of Theory B? There's some ego acting here too: we couldn't have believed the wrong explanation for so long!
These are both deeply human tendencies, and will always play some role in the human scientific community. They can be mitigated with attention, and that's probably good: this article was eye-opening for me (in that makes-you-want-to-hide-under-the-bed kind of way). The effort to be fairer is both individual and institutional (or at least that's how I was thinking about it yesterday), and I think that the effort to be more flexible is mainly cultural. It's our job to not know all the answers, to keep thinking up questions we haven't solved yet, but it is hard to maintain a let's-see-what-happens attitude in a be-right-or-else environment.
On the advice of a total stranger on the Internet (what could go wrong?), I'm making up a new resolution for every month of the year rather than trying to do one thing all year. January's is to be a little easier on myself, to be less harsh a critic, and I see an opportunity for a corollary resolution here: I'm going to give more of a chance to papers whose authors I've never heard of, and I will try to see it as a sign of inquiry, not cluelessness, when people consider alternative explanations and make themselves persuadable.
January 20, 2010
Admission
I went to the big national (US) conference for people in My Science a couple of weeks ago. Most people will claim that they find this conference very unproductive, because it is so general, but it is an important venue for job interviews and maintaining personal connections. I actually got quite a bit of work done with some far-flung collaborators, made a point of spending time with people whose general good will I will need in the future, and had an all-around fun class-reunion-type experience.
The meeting itself was overwhelmingly large, so I did not go to most of the talks or read most of the posters. This more focused approach still left me dead on my feet at the end of the first day, and the talks and discussions I did attend kept me busy and engaged. The overall experience sparked a couple of post ideas for me, and this is one of them: promoting demographic diversity is very important in My Science, is totally dependent on the good-faith effort of people who are already in the club, and is pretty much doomed in an admissions and promotion system where we are overwhelmed with applicants and starved for time.
The last speaker in a session I went to on mentoring talked about his experiences as a black man from a small college going into a big-time graduate program: outright hostility, awkward social dynamics, undergraduate classes, and a lasting commitment to making that experience better for students who would come later. He's now a professor at Florida State, and had a lot of interesting and practical things to say about making graduate programs attractive and accessible to people with backgrounds like his: rural, few family expectations for college, no lab experience, not white, few demographic role models in the field, and less likely to maintain confidence in the face of setbacks (and the whole game in My Science is psychological: you need to realize that everyone's insecure, even the really clever people, and you can't listen to your self-doubt).
The things he does to make FSU a more diverse place are these:
When I was in grad school, the students had some long conversations on the merits and methods of increasing diversity in My Science. The business-related arguments (that a diversity of backgrounds brings a diversity of problem-solving approaches and perspectives) don't really work in our field: at least from the insider's perspective, there's not much cultural to what we do. The main point, we figured, was justice: why should people gain or lose the opportunity to do science based on what they look like or where they come from?
Being on the graduate admissions committee for a year, it quickly became clear to me that "where you come from" has a lot of effects on where you can go: my institution was very highly ranked as a graduate school for My Science, and as such could be pretty baldly snobby about who was admitted. It didn't matter how good your grades were at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople; we've never heard of them, we don't know the people who wrote your letters of recommendation, so we don't know whether you are prepared to come here and keep up with people who had "good preparation" (read: known quantity) at the right universities as undergraduates. In order to maintain our prestige, we have to admit mostly/only students who we are confident will do well.
This is pretty obviously problematic for people who want to go to grad school to learn things, or to become professional scientists, and not just to boost the status of a particular school by their effortless brilliance. Overall, and this is something I was shocked to realize I hadn't been using as an admissions standard, admissions ought to be about what students can do, not just what they have already done. It's very difficult to evaluate that, and when you have three days to rank 150 applications, it's so easy to start using shorthands (where an applicant went to college, GRE scores, name recognition of their letter-writers). If your department is willing to work on cultivating the students, and not just putting them to work in the data-reduction mines, I don't think it would be that big of a gamble to shake up the admissions process.
The meeting itself was overwhelmingly large, so I did not go to most of the talks or read most of the posters. This more focused approach still left me dead on my feet at the end of the first day, and the talks and discussions I did attend kept me busy and engaged. The overall experience sparked a couple of post ideas for me, and this is one of them: promoting demographic diversity is very important in My Science, is totally dependent on the good-faith effort of people who are already in the club, and is pretty much doomed in an admissions and promotion system where we are overwhelmed with applicants and starved for time.
The last speaker in a session I went to on mentoring talked about his experiences as a black man from a small college going into a big-time graduate program: outright hostility, awkward social dynamics, undergraduate classes, and a lasting commitment to making that experience better for students who would come later. He's now a professor at Florida State, and had a lot of interesting and practical things to say about making graduate programs attractive and accessible to people with backgrounds like his: rural, few family expectations for college, no lab experience, not white, few demographic role models in the field, and less likely to maintain confidence in the face of setbacks (and the whole game in My Science is psychological: you need to realize that everyone's insecure, even the really clever people, and you can't listen to your self-doubt).
The things he does to make FSU a more diverse place are these:
- First, let them in
- Second, allow for remediation without stigma
- Third, make a comfortable department community (peer mentors can make a big difference)
- Fourth, advertise at meetings of minority scientists and at HBCs
- Fifth, involve your undergrads
When I was in grad school, the students had some long conversations on the merits and methods of increasing diversity in My Science. The business-related arguments (that a diversity of backgrounds brings a diversity of problem-solving approaches and perspectives) don't really work in our field: at least from the insider's perspective, there's not much cultural to what we do. The main point, we figured, was justice: why should people gain or lose the opportunity to do science based on what they look like or where they come from?
Being on the graduate admissions committee for a year, it quickly became clear to me that "where you come from" has a lot of effects on where you can go: my institution was very highly ranked as a graduate school for My Science, and as such could be pretty baldly snobby about who was admitted. It didn't matter how good your grades were at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople; we've never heard of them, we don't know the people who wrote your letters of recommendation, so we don't know whether you are prepared to come here and keep up with people who had "good preparation" (read: known quantity) at the right universities as undergraduates. In order to maintain our prestige, we have to admit mostly/only students who we are confident will do well.
This is pretty obviously problematic for people who want to go to grad school to learn things, or to become professional scientists, and not just to boost the status of a particular school by their effortless brilliance. Overall, and this is something I was shocked to realize I hadn't been using as an admissions standard, admissions ought to be about what students can do, not just what they have already done. It's very difficult to evaluate that, and when you have three days to rank 150 applications, it's so easy to start using shorthands (where an applicant went to college, GRE scores, name recognition of their letter-writers). If your department is willing to work on cultivating the students, and not just putting them to work in the data-reduction mines, I don't think it would be that big of a gamble to shake up the admissions process.
December 4, 2009
Complaint, interrupted
This morning, I was all ready to write a complaint as a post here. I've been kind of bothered about this issue for a while, and have never found the right platform for talking about it (plus, Chris is tired of hearing about it). The problem? The (sometimes) terrible music in a knitting podcast I listen to regularly. Sometimes it's great (Jonathan Coulton), and sometimes it's all obvious lyrics and overdone vocals. The injustice! I listened to the two most recent episodes this morning, and had the angry wind knocked right out of me: the music wasn't bad. It wasn't the best thing ever (and one of the bands, though apparently comprised entirely of women, was called "Girly Man", which...no.), but it was a nice mix of fun and poignant and bouncy. Darn you, podcast author with musical tastes that differ from mine, and also impeccable timing!
This doesn't get you out of a complaint, though. The podcast has rubbed me the wrong way before - the theme of the episodes for a while was "alchemy", which is fine as a metaphor, but (and I'll keep saying this through gritted teeth until the rest of you give up and go along with me) magical thinking is not science. People who made themselves crazy with mercury fumes while trying to transform lead into gold are not a model for informed inquiry or the scientific method.
I...get a little defensive about this. Needless to say, I never wrote this to the podcast author (no constructive point), but it bothered me every episode until she switched the theme to "Make Do and Mend", which was lovely and thoughtful. I liked that a lot.
This doesn't get you out of a complaint, though. The podcast has rubbed me the wrong way before - the theme of the episodes for a while was "alchemy", which is fine as a metaphor, but (and I'll keep saying this through gritted teeth until the rest of you give up and go along with me) magical thinking is not science. People who made themselves crazy with mercury fumes while trying to transform lead into gold are not a model for informed inquiry or the scientific method.
I...get a little defensive about this. Needless to say, I never wrote this to the podcast author (no constructive point), but it bothered me every episode until she switched the theme to "Make Do and Mend", which was lovely and thoughtful. I liked that a lot.
November 22, 2009
Looks like I picked the wrong day to stop sniffing glue
Or the wrong month to write something optional every day. I'm totally obsessed with my deadline (tomorrow!). On the bright side, starting tomorrow I'll have a different, still close, deadline. Woo?
November 18, 2009
Turn it around
I had a really frustrating time this morning, between the post office's short hours, some badly timed clumsiness, missing two trams and a bus all at the same time, and yet another trip to the store for yogurt. During my third attempt to get into the post office, when it was only 5 minutes until opening, it occurred to me that I could be feeling better just by being less outwardly grumpy. Instead of sighing and checking my watch four times and rolling my eyes, I smiled at the other people in line. Fake it until you make it, right?
I had a similar realization at work: in the proposal I'm writing, I've been stuck on the last section, trying to find the right way to say that the current state of the field I'd like to get involved in is not good enough, and that I'd do things differently, and ask the relevant questions, and get the more useful results. It kept coming across badly, though, and trying to read the section from a reviewer's perspective I was really put off by the negativity. I switched the perspective to "hey, some work has been done already, and I'll expand on it as follows:" and it got so much easier, both to write and to read.
I had a similar realization at work: in the proposal I'm writing, I've been stuck on the last section, trying to find the right way to say that the current state of the field I'd like to get involved in is not good enough, and that I'd do things differently, and ask the relevant questions, and get the more useful results. It kept coming across badly, though, and trying to read the section from a reviewer's perspective I was really put off by the negativity. I switched the perspective to "hey, some work has been done already, and I'll expand on it as follows:" and it got so much easier, both to write and to read.
November 15, 2009
Whoops, I missed one
I'm writing for a deadline, which is something I only do a few times a year, and it's got me a little wound up. I spent most of yesterday at work, and got a decent amount done. There's something about a totally empty building that helps disparate thoughts come together - maybe it's the opportunity to talk to yourself?
By the time I got home, it was time to make dinner, then time to put Liam to bed, then uuughghghghghghgh that was not how bedtime was supposed to go. Not a lot of interesting material for this space here, but I will try to make up for it with two posts today. First up: a list of things I want to bring back with me from my next trip to the States. In my last few trips I stocked up on lip balm, toothpaste and yarn, but there's always something else I wish was easier to find.
By the time I got home, it was time to make dinner, then time to put Liam to bed, then uuughghghghghghgh that was not how bedtime was supposed to go. Not a lot of interesting material for this space here, but I will try to make up for it with two posts today. First up: a list of things I want to bring back with me from my next trip to the States. In my last few trips I stocked up on lip balm, toothpaste and yarn, but there's always something else I wish was easier to find.
- Baking soda (it's hard to find here)
- Books (can't go anywhere without collecting books)
- Tums (the fruit kind are like a food group for me)
- Weird, it was a lot easier to come up with this list last time
November 11, 2009
Vacation day
Well, not really. I've got a looming deadline and a stifling case of detail-itis: I need to write a general introduction, a few overview paragraphs and some specific plans, but I am having a hard time backing up far enough to gain perspective. I wound up working from home today, and the change of scenery (and the ability to take a nap) made a big difference. I did bail on both my Wednesday meeting, though. Sorry, guys.
Tonight is Liam's kindergarten's St Martin's Day parade, and they've been getting ready for a while now. The kids all painted paper lanterns, and have been learning songs, and we'll go out at the end of the school day and walk around the neighborhood caroling. There are treats and gluehwein for afterward, and hopefully it will be a lot of fun.
Tonight is Liam's kindergarten's St Martin's Day parade, and they've been getting ready for a while now. The kids all painted paper lanterns, and have been learning songs, and we'll go out at the end of the school day and walk around the neighborhood caroling. There are treats and gluehwein for afterward, and hopefully it will be a lot of fun.
November 5, 2009
What do I read?
My online reading habits drift, partly as I find new sites I like, and partly because I'm one of those people who gets overwhelmed by bad news. I used to read some of the big-name feminist blogs (Feministe, Feministing, Pandagon) all the time, but stopped when it started to get me down that they were all reporting the same frustrating, sad stories. I'm at about that place with Shakesville, which is a real shame because the community there is very tightly knit, but the focus of the site is maybe too honest for me. A frank look at the world, from the perspective that people deserve to be treated fairly, gets to be too much when society refuses to play by the rules. I have picked up good habits from reading there, and at Shapely Prose - I can't even read the body-snarking comments at Project Rungay or the "I'm so fat" contests in some of the Jezebel threads, because they're so obviously wrong after just a little time in body-shame-free environments.
I can be a real news junkie at times - I was completely addicted to 538 in the month before the last presidential election, and the level of detail in FireDogLake's coverage of congressional hearings and debates is a great antidote for me to the hopeless superficiality of TV news. Lately, though, I'm getting that feeling again, where opening up a lefty news aggregator like Crooks & Liars creates this heavy feeling in my chest, where I wonder what's gone wrong since the last time I checked the US news.
Fortunately, news isn't the only thing on the internet: although I do research in physical science, I like to read about literature, history and philosophy. Maybe I'm making up for the time I didn't spend learning those things in college? Edge of the American West and Crooked Timber discuss a lot of subjects I don't know a lot about, usually with a good amount of backstory and nuance, and while I don't know what Michael Berube is talking about in his "Theory Thursday" posts, the thread about the Golden Compass series gave me a sci-fi/religious philosophy reading list that would take months to get through. I also used to read Language Log regularly, but quit when the "grumpy old man who doesn't allow comments on his posts" contributor started getting more airtime than the computational linguists.
I also read very little about my field, or those related to it, online. I don't think the blog environment works well for real science education: there isn't the time, or the possibility of real-time interaction, that make science education work. The surface-skimming of popular science reporting grates on me a bit, too: when I write for and read journals, it is with great care and precision, and blog-format writing doesn't have the time for all that. For me, the details are the interesting bits. There is also a little professional jealousy in action here, I should admit, because my subfield is only a little bit cool, and doesn't get the kind of attention or money that follow the sexier specialties.
I can be a real news junkie at times - I was completely addicted to 538 in the month before the last presidential election, and the level of detail in FireDogLake's coverage of congressional hearings and debates is a great antidote for me to the hopeless superficiality of TV news. Lately, though, I'm getting that feeling again, where opening up a lefty news aggregator like Crooks & Liars creates this heavy feeling in my chest, where I wonder what's gone wrong since the last time I checked the US news.
Fortunately, news isn't the only thing on the internet: although I do research in physical science, I like to read about literature, history and philosophy. Maybe I'm making up for the time I didn't spend learning those things in college? Edge of the American West and Crooked Timber discuss a lot of subjects I don't know a lot about, usually with a good amount of backstory and nuance, and while I don't know what Michael Berube is talking about in his "Theory Thursday" posts, the thread about the Golden Compass series gave me a sci-fi/religious philosophy reading list that would take months to get through. I also used to read Language Log regularly, but quit when the "grumpy old man who doesn't allow comments on his posts" contributor started getting more airtime than the computational linguists.
I also read very little about my field, or those related to it, online. I don't think the blog environment works well for real science education: there isn't the time, or the possibility of real-time interaction, that make science education work. The surface-skimming of popular science reporting grates on me a bit, too: when I write for and read journals, it is with great care and precision, and blog-format writing doesn't have the time for all that. For me, the details are the interesting bits. There is also a little professional jealousy in action here, I should admit, because my subfield is only a little bit cool, and doesn't get the kind of attention or money that follow the sexier specialties.
November 3, 2009
Permission
I have a deadline tomorrow, and really ought to be working on that instead of reading, but this article at Jezebel is so resonant for me, for a lot of reasons. It makes me wonder if I should go back to the used bookstore I was at on Saturday and buy that 100-Euro 1929 edition of A Room of One's Own. It reminds me of a story my friend L tells, about deciding she'd rather teach than do high-profile research, but being afraid to break the news to her internationally-famous research-powerhouse graduate advisor. The advisor, a woman who has been extremely dedicated to her research for many years, and who is very shrewd and direct, looked straight at my friend and told her "Well, we should make sure you're the best teacher you can be, then."
Permission to succeed. Just when you think you've gotten beyond working for gold stars on a chart, for proud looks from your parents and good grades, that little phrase blows it all away. I definitely want other people to think the work I do is interesting. It doesn't make it any more interesting for me, but the external approval tells me I don't have to prove that my work matters: smart people think I'm interesting! The sociology of research science, especially in my little specialized corner, is very complicated, and is strongly skewed by insecurity. Senior people who take the time to give serious advice, who think to ask junior people about subjects they're knowledgable in (as though they're already experts!), can make a big difference. Here's to good mentors, and good influences.
Permission to succeed. Just when you think you've gotten beyond working for gold stars on a chart, for proud looks from your parents and good grades, that little phrase blows it all away. I definitely want other people to think the work I do is interesting. It doesn't make it any more interesting for me, but the external approval tells me I don't have to prove that my work matters: smart people think I'm interesting! The sociology of research science, especially in my little specialized corner, is very complicated, and is strongly skewed by insecurity. Senior people who take the time to give serious advice, who think to ask junior people about subjects they're knowledgable in (as though they're already experts!), can make a big difference. Here's to good mentors, and good influences.
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