rebeccmeister | Entries tagged with academia

This morning I packed up the bug nerd corner.

I have no idea when, if ever, I'll have another bug nerd corner. That's the uncertainty of life, moving, and academia. While I am feeling more human these days, as a result of not working quite so many 12-hour days in the past week, starting the moving process inevitably dredges up a whole bunch of emotions. This is happening in particular because I will be going from a two-bedroom apartment back to a room in someone else's house. I am going to miss having my own kitchen, even though I know that there can be many rewards to a shared kitchen if one lives with other creative cooks.

There won't be room for the door-desk, so I am at least initially planning on using my sewing machine table as a desk again, which is what I did for a month when I lived with

scrottie. But that is forcing me to look again at the pile of creative projects: how to arrange various postcards, stamps, punches, old calendars, sewing supplies, oil paints, and watercolors, so things are both reasonably accessible but able to be put away? Will I even have time for these things in the next phase? I've made some progress on the quilting project, but not nearly as much as hoped.

Packing things for longer-term storage (1-2 years) is also different from packing things for 6-month storage. I don't expect to be able to answer the question of whether or not it is worthwhile to save things for that long.

However, I would say that I am glad to have gotten rid of as much stuff as easily possible. It's just those intermediate and uncertain categories that are hard to scrutinize.

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One of the hardest parts - I am still not applying for any jobs this year. I need to phrase that in an active tense. I am anxiously thinking about it, but despite having some time I have not been updating my website and CV, revisiting my research and teaching statements, or keeping a list of job ads and deadlines. Why am I stalling out? Did I burn myself out too early by trying to apply in previous years? Is it because reference letters feel like a sticking point, given present circumstances? Is it because I don't know how to phrase things about "Berkeley - pending Nov 30"? Is it that feeling that I don't have a broader research vision (even if the state of my ideas is actually on par with peers, which is something I don't know)? Is it that I just can't work up enthusiasm for any of the job ads I've read? Is it that it's exhausting to bash one's head up against this process where there will always be at least 35-40 highly-qualified people applying for one job? Is it the lack of an in-person social support system?

On this last point - more than one person who's made it to the next stage has spoken warmly of they help they received from postdoc peers when applying for jobs - giving practice talks to each other, going over each others' application materials. This has strongly reminded me of how, when I was working on my comps and dissertation, other people spoke warmly of friends and loved ones who cooked for them, kept them fed and housed and clothed. My life and job circumstances just haven't afforded me those kinds of luxuries. Research has kept me locked in the lab too much (especially here!), and who knows whether that's my own damn fault or not, because I know I managed to develop good social supports in Arizona. More likely, it's the lack of adequate time, because it takes more than 9 months to find the right people to be friends.

I read this thing over the weekend, on how to not drop out of graduate school, and it made me sort of angry. Don't get me wrong - it's full of useful and constructive ideas that are comforting when it comes to coping with the trials and tribulations of grad school. Just wait, though, innocent students, until you hit the postdoc stage. You have no idea what's coming next, and if you thought grad school was hard, you're in for a wake-up call.

Just now I encountered this post on how moving is the hardest part of academia.

Yep. Nine months later and I really don't have any friends here. First-year syndrome. I don't mean to state that in a complaining fashion - that's just how it is. The closest I've come is the Randonneuring dudes, and I know there are other awesome cyclists afoot but I don't make it out to 'cross races or to the bike co-op or basically out of the house much at all, so it's hard to get to know anyone.

The hard part is trying to dig up motivation without any social support. C'mon, motivation, help me out here!

It feels so strange to be here without

scrottie. Coming back is starting to feel like returning to Boston, the familiar intermingled with the new, trying to make sense of my sense of identity. Thinking about some of the influential individuals here who became a part of my local family but have passed away too soon, too recently (Okie, BCH). Thinking about other individuals who used to live here but who have also moved on to other places, other lives.

It's hard to be here, scrambling to write a presentation that feels so intellectually important, but for which I cannot do full justice because I am just too.damn.busy. I need to practice it so I don't stumble too horribly during delivery. It is simultaneously important (on the level of a job talk) and unimportant (instead I should be applying for jobs, working on the current experiments, writing papers, helping new-boss with grant-writing). The perpetual PhD question, too: is this really going to be an earth-shattering subject? Or is it so much fuss over a subject so trivial? I don't think so but I struggle the most with the higher-order thinking, especially when my nose is shoved up against the trees.

There's a limit to my ability to think, one that I can exercise, but a limit, nonetheless. There's a limit to how much work I can do - something I can also stretch, but only up to a point. I have to operate within these limits and not give up, in the hopes that all this work will be a worthwhile exercise.

Let me see if I can remember how yesterday went. This is so I can remember the insanity some day in the future.

8:30 am: Arrive at lab.
Check scintillation counter for yesterday's results. Write them down, then wash the scintillation trays so they will be dry in time for use later in the day.
Go to walk-in cooler and centrifuge sample set 1 (first TCA precipitation; 24 samples in each of the numbered sets I reference)
Put sample set 2 in scintillation tray and put in scintillation counter to count radioactivity (protein samples from 4-5 days ago, stored in drawer)
Add scintillation fluid to sample set 3 (lipid samples from yesterday) and put in drawer to dark-adapt for at least 1 hour
Pull styrofoam cooler out of plastic cooler inside the walk-in cooler and bring to main lab space
Write out labels for the 24 crickets to be injected on a set of thick-walled glass tubes and a set of 25-mL Erlenmeyer flasks
Put tubes in styrofoam cooler, walk up five stories and one building over to get dry ice, then put styrofoam cooler back in plastic cooler back in walk-in cooler
Prepare 8 more corks for the flasks (folding and pinning filter paper to the corks; didn't have enough dry the night before to prepare all of them in advance)
Inject crickets with radiolabeled acetate (around an hour and change of nonstop motion, averaging ~2 minutes between injections, plus additional prep work between sets of 8 crickets to make controls and keep crickets at 27 degrees C in one of the cricket rooms) - they then incubate in the flasks for 3 hours when acetate-injected
Retrieve sample set 1 from the walk-in cooler, remove TCA with a pulled pipette and discard; add second batch of TCA, vortex, and put back in the walk-in cooler
Get final weights for food dishes and frass dishes from yesterday's 21 crickets (these have to sit out in ambient conditions for 24 hours before being re-weighed)
Pick frass out of the food dishes for the crickets that were just injected and put it in 1-ounce deli cups to sit out; leave food dishes to sit out, too. Think the same thought every day: if I ever switch careers and try to get a job as a cake decorator, I am totally going to list "picking insect frass out of food with fine forceps" as relevant experience.
Set up 24 scintillation vials to collect the filter paper strips from the crickets

Eat lunch for 20 minutes

Grab first set of 8 crickets from the cricket room, grab styrofoam cooler
Every two minutes: pop off a cork, shake out a cricket, lift the lid to the styrofoam cooler and stuff her into one of the freezing-cold tubes and then cap the tube. Then use a pair of forceps to strip the filter paper off the pins and stuff it into a scintillation vial. To the vial add scintillation fluid, cap, label, and put in a tray.
In the one-minute increments between crickets, work on other incremental tasks: pour sample set 4 (yesterday's protein samples) into scintillation vials, add scintillation fluid, cap, number, and store in drawer to dark-adapt and count two days later
Centrifuge sample set 1 again, remove the second batch of TCA, then add sodium hydroxide and tissue solubilizer and put back in the walk-in cooler until there's enough time to sonicate them
Pull out another set of 24 cricket ovarioles from the freezer to thaw and prep for lipid extraction, and write them down in my lab notebook (sample set 4)
…Crickets done. Go to scintillation counter, write down results from sample set 2, put sample set 3 plus the freshly collected filter paper samples (carbon dioxide) into the counter and start to count (lipid tray gets counted first so the carbon dioxide samples have time to dark-adapt while sitting in the scintillation counter). Bring sample set 2 back to the lab and stick back in a drawer for storage.
Okay, time to start the day's lipid samples. I guess that's sample set 5? They have been marinating in chloroform-methanol in the walk-in cooler for ~24 hours. They get sonicated, then stuck in the centrifuge. While they are centrifuging, I sonicate sample set 1 and stick it on the heat block, caps open.
Remove chloroform-methanol from sample set 5 with a pulled pipette and transfer to a clean set of eppendorf tubes (contains extracted lipids). Tedious.
Add more chloroform-methanol to sample set 5, sonicate again, and centrifuge again. Meanwhile, add the first bit of chloroform-methanol to sample set 4 so they can marinate overnight
…several more detailed steps to purify the chloroform-extracted lipids from sample set 5. These samples wind up in scintillation vials and are left in the fume hood overnight so all of the chloroform-methanol will evaporate out (it interferes with detection of radioactivity). Then leave the lipid-free remnants in the fume hood to dry out for 1-2 hours. At some point I close the caps to sample set 1 so they can cook overnight without drying out. Also pull out the first set of 8 crickets (now dead) so they can thaw out for dissection.
Dissect the 24 crickets: cut open, pin in place, remove ovarioles and weigh them, note the flight muscle characteristics. When finished, store in the freezer for now.
Add TCA to the lipid-free remnants from sample set 5, sonicate, and leave in the walk-in cooler overnight. Phew, done in there, it gets COLD after a while at 4 degrees Celsius.
Go to cricket room and sort crickets: remove all of the winged adults from the 12 focal aquaria and either kill them or move them to a new aquarium to be kept as breeders. Keep track of how many long-winged vs. short-winged females I remove.
Double-check current sample sizes for different treatments (especially how many long-winged crickets with pink flight muscle). Portion out fresh diets for the crickets that I will sort out and set up tomorrow (diets need to sit out in ambient conditions for 24 hours before given to crickets) - these will be ready to inject next Monday.
Wash the radioactive labware
Wash the cricket cages from the day's crickets so they'll be ready for tomorrow
6:30 pm: Leave lab and hurry to bike shop before it closes at 7 pm.

It would be interesting to wear a pedometer on days like today. Also, I am SO RELIEVED to have discovered that my old bike shoes (Specialized) are actually shaped right to take the pressure off of my metatarsals/metatarsalgia.

Tomorrow in addition to repeating the above I will need to also: prepare fresh radiolabel, prepare a full set of corks, and set up crickets on the diets. I'll be relieved if I get done before 8 pm tomorrow.

Current Mood: busy

So, life in Postdoc-Limbo is going to continue for another year and a half, at least. I just got my official offer letter from UC Berkeley, so I can make the announcement more public. I'm extremely excited to be working with a top-notch evolutionary physiologist there, on a project that will continue from the work I've been doing with these wing-dimorphic crickets. It looks like I'll be moving out there in October.

The thing is, to some extent, California is wasted on me. I'm a Pacific Northwest girl. At least it's not permanent. I am also coming to grips with what it's like to live as a postdoc. I'm still learning new things, which is great, even if the life-in-limbo aspect absolutely SUCKS.

But I should give you something science-themed to ogle, in addition to this announcement.

Here's a snapshot of what I've been working on, recently:

Tracking the metabolic fate of glycine: trapping cricket carbon dioxide

I've written out a more detailed description of the current research within this photo album - click through to see that and several other photos.

Edit: This photo sends you to my photostream, not the album, arg. The album is here, with my most recent work featured towards the very end.

Just a brief update regarding that troublesome manuscript I vaguely referenced earlier in the week. Somehow*, between yesterday and today, things started coming together, so today I got it turned back over to my co-~~authors~~bosses. Ka-POW!

Now back to eleventy-hundred other projects. But still - this is the pace of writing, for me. Several agonizing days that feel slow, stupid, and sluggish, and then finally, an actual sense of progress. I think some interesting things can come of this particular manuscript, but it's going to take a lot of brain-power to get it there.

*I was in really bad physical shape yesterday, which partly explains some of my woes. I woke up with a sinus headache at 5 am, which didn't go away until I took a Tylenol at 11 am, and even after that, the weird leg muscle thing was bothering me and I was generally sleepy and stupid and unproductive. A classic example of why experts caution people against just diving in to a new exercise regime. I knew that was a risk when showing up to a new ride, and repeatedly checked in with the other riders. Even with all that, it's too easy for me to get all excited and push myself too hard. Live and learn, hopefully.

I'm struggling with the current cricket manuscript, but it occurs to me that one of the subliminal elements in the struggle is an underlying power struggle. When I started my PhD, one of the things I strongly respected about my advisor was the emphasis she put on her students owning their own dissertation research. This emphasis is not an easy one for anybody involved, and comes at certain costs, but with certain benefits as well. She actually developed this emphasis in reaction to several unfortunate events, one of which I'll briefly describe. The main unfortunate event involved a student mentored by her husband (also an academic), who was carefully shepherded through the early stages of their* PhD, up until they had to take their comprehensive oral exam and defend their dissertation proposal. Well, this student got up in front of their committee and couldn't explain themselves to the committee.

It is important to know how to collaborate, yes, but in the American system it is unacceptable to outsource one's intellectual development, so clearly this situation did not stand, and it was a hard experience for all involved - a great sense of shame. When an advisor lets an unprepared student get up in front of a committee, it usually indicates poor mentorship, not failure on the part of the student - at least, mature committee members should be cognizant of this distinction and not abusive of their power over the student. At the same time, it's also impossible to predict how committee dynamics will shake out. Sometimes committee members feel it's important to prove their intellectual chops to each other, and use the unfortunate student as a punching bag in this exercise. I hope this generally isn't the case, and more than anything it again can reflect poor mentorship on the part of the advisor, who is hopefully sensitive to the interpersonal dynamics among the faculty to a degree that he or she can steer a student clear from such trouble. In my own case, I intentionally chose an intellectually challenging committee, and was rewarded by some tough questions, but I did so for the purpose of putting together as good a dissertation as I could muster. And I intentionally avoided having certain people as committee members based on recommendations about how well (or unwell?) they worked with my advisor's academic style.

So then, the postdoctoral experience. There are some fields where one's personal research activities are most effective if they're closely guided by more established researchers. In physiology, it's very difficult to throw undergraduates into a laboratory and expect them to come up with groundbreaking experiments. In many cases, it makes more sense to hand them a chunk of a larger puzzle, so they can make a meaningful contribution over a shorter timeframe.

But that's undergrads, and I'm referring to the postdoctoral experience. Postdocs can fall into a similar category, depending on the nature of the project, funding, and the project timeline. If I had been successful in acquiring my own funding, presumably I would be working on a project over which I felt and had more ownership, and would feel more power to steer the ship myself. However, in accepting the postdoc position I accepted, I voluntarily gave up some of that power. But I did so knowingly, because I saw the position as an opportunity to gain a number of useful skills that I could apply to other contexts in the future. And I've definitely gained those useful skills.

The challenge is, that doesn't make the power struggle go away, and it's a double-edged sword. On the one hand, my co-authors are awesomely enthusiastic and excited about my experiments and the papers I'm working on. On the other hand, at times I have followed suggestions and pressures down blind alleys due to this power differential, when a part of me was quietly raising doubts about the navigational decisions early on. This leads to regrets.

The difficulty of the situation tends to manifest most strongly when staring at a half-written manuscript. I find myself rehashing out the whole series of decisions that led to the present state of the manuscript (the data analysis), and start experiencing doubts over the direction of the manuscript and what to do next (massive "Now where was I and how did I get here?" reiterations). By this point, I know that I have to think myself out of this particular box at this particular point, and find myself wishing I were willing to be just a bit more obstinate about things in the early stages. Then again, I've always liked to collect lots of data, and in a lot of cases more data makes things harder, not easier.

Despite all of this emotional baggage, I must still forge on, and persevere. As my graduate advisor would say, there's no such thing as a perfect experiment. That said, there are insights to be gained from all experiments, but we must get back to work to find them.

And on that note, perhaps now I can get back to work on this pesky manuscript.

*I don't know the student's gender, and this pronoun seems more straightforward than "she/he."

Some reasonably useful things have popped up today.

Time to review adjunct employment policies - from the Chronicle of Higher Ed

Should you settle on the red pill, here's how to get into graduate school. (I say, run away! run away! to most people, or, consider a master's degree).

And if that's successful, your job isn't done. Assess the lab culture in your prospective lab.

And, don't rush the good work.

I've been quiet, I realize.

Things have been hectic, between the conference and visiting with family, such that I have had little mental free space.

But! I got to have drinks with

annikusrex last night at the Stumbling Monk, where she beat us handily at Scrabble, despite a lack of practice.

The topic casting a shadow over other things at the moment is plans and future employment. I can only see about six months into the future at the moment, a future that will involve moving to a new town (Lincoln, NE) where I know very few people. At the conference I just attended, I had a series of ever-so-brief encounters with several different key figures who all made the conference worthwhile. One of those encounters happened on the final afternoon of the conference, in a symposium entitled, "How cool is entomology?" which I figured would kind of be entomology-lite but also a chance to reflect on the exciting and meaningful things that draw different kinds of people into entomology (it was, and I'm glad I went). One of the speakers is a faculty member in the department at Lincoln, and in a quick chat about my pending move she offered to forward on my contact information to her rather large research group to help me track down accommodations. Something of a small gesture, but a meaningful one. It also made me reflect on how long it took me to meet any women faculty in the research group in Texas (answer: too long).

Hard to know what sort of place I'll move into in Nebraska. I think my intention will be to establish a relatively simple/minimal living arrangement so it's easy to go between work, home, and the grocery store. Walkability would be luxurious.

I'm still in the story-gathering phase of things, to some extent, too. One of the only other female Attine-ologists was at this conference, too, and I had only a brief five-minute window to chat with her about specifics within our heavily male-dominated and hierarchical sub-sub-subdiscipline. Once again, she was helpful and encouraging.

Comparisons aren't always helpful, though. I encountered a saying the other day: "Never compare your inside with someone else's outside." I don't know my exact vision at the moment, in full detail, but I retain a sense of vision and purpose as I seek out what's next. It's more than just a successful career; it's how I address the question of "What is the good life?" Its shape is yet being revealed to me.

A solid Tuesday's work and a re-evaluation of the job application situation now leave me in a slightly more sane state of affairs, mid-week.

Things may come crashing down again tomorrow, or they might kindly wait until Friday, depending on who gets back to me about what, when. I'll turn in one more job application this week, and another one the following week, most likely. I have something that resembles a decent (if not good!) talk for next week's conference, and I'm pretty excited about presenting the talk, too. Great data. The talk is on the next cricket stuff that needs to get turned into a manuscript and published. Here's how the writing process is lined up, at the moment:

1. Turn in revisions to Cricket Manuscript 2 to journal (MS 1 is already published) - early next week, hopefully.
2. Work on revisions to Cricket Manuscript 3; goal is to have it first-submission ready by mid- to late-December
3. Work on revisions to Leafcutter Manuscript 2 (MS 1 already published); I'd like to have this one first-submission ready by mid-December as well, but this one is a bit more tricky to push out the door due to people politics that differ from the cricket people politics.
4. Work on data analysis and rough-drafting of Cricket Manuscript 4; goal is to have a solid draft together by the end of January.
5. Figure out how to move forward on the next leafcutter manuscript - evaluate the state of samples that haven't been analyzed yet, figure out what can get done before I leave Texas, and prepare samples for travel. Decide on whether it will be about behavior or about nutrients.
6. In the spring, see if we can push out ~3 or 4 more cricket manuscripts...I've got data for Cricket Manuscript 5, but have barely touched it for the sake of data analysis.

Lots of computer time. Something tells me I won't mind, at least during the wintry season in Nebraska. And by the way - I'm going to Nebraska for at least six months, starting sometime in January. Slightly more definite announcement at this point. Looking forward to it, and the spring brevet season there.

I made myself go in to the lab today to force myself to work on job applications.

Instead, I made some decent headway on a leafcutter manuscript that has gotten the back-burner for the past three weeks while I've scrambled to get other more immediate things done. You know, like all those talks and workshops and cricket manuscript revisions and manuscript reviews.

Not a total loss. But for this week, I am going to have to set a goal of getting out one application per day, on top of writing a conference talk and wrapping up the cricket manuscript resubmission.

Working on a manuscript is a pretty terrible form of procrastination, if you know what I mean.

1. Claremont is POSH.

2. The Biomathematics and Ecology Education and Research meeting is, once again, awesome. It's making me think about spending a bit of spare time taking some additional math courses. Also, I think you'd be surprised by the gender balance and level of diversity.

3. I'm thinking of some additional interesting modeling questions to pursue with my favorite pet biological system. I hope I'll figure out a way to do so. Hard when so much brainspace is getting eaten by crickets these days.

Current Location: United States, California, Claremont

This has been an Intense visit with my brother and his family and his university department. He has been giving me a tremendous amount of useful mentoring - we've chatted quite a bit about what it's like to be caught in a mentoring vaccuum, which is an apt description of my current academic circumstances. Things are such a nonstop whirlwind and that's likely to continue for the next 4-5 days. It's good to have so much to digest, but it's going to take some time to unpack.

Talk 2 is finished. The next iteration will be stronger.

I have landed in Riverside, CA, for a visit with my brother and his famdam. Already it's apparent that this is going to be a whirlwind of a trip. I'm going to have to photograph his lab for you - many of you will find it highly entertaining, for many different reasons.

Today I'm hanging out on campus. Tomorrow I'll hang out with my sis-in-law and the wee babes (3-year-old nephew and 8-month-old niecelet). I'm glad to have had some practice living with a five-year-old. Children are cute and entertaining, especially when they aren't your own so you don't have to do all the work.

Thursday, I'll do the usual "meet-and-greet" that's part of being a visiting seminar speaker, and then I'll give the departmental seminar (no pressure!). Mid-day Friday, I'll head off to a biology-math meeting at Claremont. Sunday afternoon, I'll head over to Arizona. Monday, I'll probably give another seminar talk and meet with people. Maybe by next Tuesday I'll be able to hunker down somewhere for a bit.

It's challenging to manage combination work-leisure trips, but at least I enjoy my work.

Current Mood: busy

Today, let me tell you about my friend SB*. I got to know SB during my early years of graduate school - she had a position as a research professor and collaborated with my advisor on some ant and bee projects while her husband wrapped up his PhD in mathematical biology. During my first couple of years of grad school, her office was around the corner, so we interacted on a near-daily basis. One of SB's big jobs was running a program to encourage minority participation in research, and she is perfect for that kind of job because she's incredibly skilled at setting up safe environments that encourage open and honest dialogue among people (you'll notice, for instance, that she always refers to significant others as "partners"). So I also knew SB through this role, as she facilitated some of the undergraduate research participation in our lab.

When we became friends, she was going through a particularly rough stage of her academic transition. She and her husband have the classic "two-body" problem, and her husband's an especially interesting character with particular needs and inclinations (some might label him "eccentric," but I would label him "awesome, unconventional, interesting, and inspiring"; a tad bit more about that below). I think she spent something like 3 solid years on the job market, interviewing at multiple institutions and turning down somewhere around 6 really good job offers in the process of identifying the right fit. There was one point in the midst of the interviewing season where she showed me a copy of her monthly travel calendar, where almost every single day was streaked with highlighter indicating that either she or her husband were traveling somewhere. It was insane. There were only two days in that entire month where both of them would be at home together with their four-year-old daughter.

Eventually, SB and R wound up heading to Washington, DC for a year while he completed a postdoctoral fellowship, and eventually after that, they both FINALLY landed jobs at an institution that seemed satisfactory for both of them, in Canada, where SB is from (R is from Arizona but is an all-climate, all-terrain animal). Unsurprisingly, SB has been tremendously successful there. A year or two after she and R started their jobs, 3.5 years into my PhD, SB joined a group of us on an expedition to Portland, New South Wales, Australia, to work on a project studying solitary and communal sweat bees. We spent that month of December sharing a bunkbed in a rickety cabin in a camper park by the ocean, while collecting the ground-nesting sweat bees, which we put into observation nests for experimental work.

The trip was an important counterpoint to many of my other graduate school experiences - only myself and one other grad student from my lab were there, along with three faculty members, one from France, one from Canada, and one from the U.S. Personal attention from faculty, all day, every day! Being in close contact with these three taught me some powerful lessons - PK had been studying the sweat bees for 20 years, and provided expertise about the system of study, so she made it possible to hit the ground running. Lesson: have good knowledge of your study system, either through your own direct observation or through collaboration with an expert. RJ brought an incredible work ethic: work hard, process and analyze your data ASAP (don't leave it sitting!), maintain good cleanliness standards in your workspace. SB brought attention to logistics: plan out the experiments and experimental design carefully, and be wise about how you budget your time - your time is precious and valuable. She had to do this because she had to work on writing grants AND on the Australia project at the same time. She would often get up at the crack of dawn so she could have a cup of tea and spend an hour or two writing.

But in that time SB was also good about asking difficult questions and listening, in particular about how to handle the delicate interpersonal politics involved in assembling a dissertation. I look up to her as a mentor in that regard, still. She's the kind of mentor who allows others to be human beings, not work-robots, is open-minded and non-judgmental, and consistently encouraging. I relied on her perspective and judgment as a source of encouragement during many of the low periods of my dissertation-making experience.

She also gave me my first bike trailer, after her daughter got too big for it and she and family moved away from Tempe. The bike trailer was world-changing on a practical level.

During her visit yesterday, it was interesting to be reminded that I've been able to give her gifts in return as well over the years. I had completely and utterly forgotten that I brought her back a caribiner mug from Seattle at around the time I gave one to my father. She says she still has it and uses it regularly, and thinks of me! Her mug must be at least 10 years old by now (meanwhile, I'm on my third such mug, having lost two predecessors). When we were in Australia, we'd also had conversations about fitness. Given her longstanding interest in paddle sports (she once spent several months kayaking around Hudson bay), I suggested she look into a rowing machine. Somewhat to my surprise, she did, and used it to climb her way back to a healthy, fit lifestyle (she now runs to work - a 5k. Interestingly, her partner RG cycles and canoes to work, up until he's no longer able to sled and bash his way into the water in the winter).

I think of her often, too, because she also studies crickets, and has been thinking about them for much longer than I've been studying them. She's also still my role model for the greatness that an individual can achieve - a phenomenal mentor, but also a wonderful human being.

Her visit brought with it a tangible feeling of relief, because here's someone willing to listen to me and understand what it has been like to be a postdoc and try to survive in this kind of environment, who really gets it. And amazingly, she does this for everyone.

*This story is oddly-difficult to write, because SB is a person I hold in very high esteem, and it is awkward to decide the appropriate level of "sharing" for these kinds of personal stories. And yet it is important to me to celebrate the good people in the world and in my life, so here we are.

A friend just sent me a link to an article in Slate that tries to explain the academic job market to laypeople. The article's making the rounds among my friends, of course, because many of us are in this exact position right now.

It used to be that people in certain disciplines could point to an article like this one and say, "Yes, well, this is true for the humanities, but you people knew what you were getting yourselves into when you signed up for this hot mess, so don't come whining at us now."

In the post housing-market collapse era, things have shifted even for those in many science-related disciplines. The year my brother got his job, it was one of only two jobs advertised in Animal Behavior. There have been a lot of initiatives to increase the number of PhD's in STEM (science, technology, engineering, medicine), but this effort inevitably butts up against the finite, and in some cases, dwindling, number of academic positions. It's common for there to be 300 applications for a single job, and when you think about it, there are probably multiple well-qualified people in that application pool.

The housing market collapse had a huge effect on state economies, which were dependent on revenue generated from property taxes and sales. States had to figure out what to do in the face of this funding shortfall, and because taxes are unpopular, they had to make "tough decisions" about where to trim the fat instead (note: not the chancellors' paychecks! Those guys are like CEOs, kind of like football coaches, who all generate revenue, supposedly, unlike the lazy faculty). Primary education was a no-go, but secondary education was fair game.

Solving those financial shortcomings has been difficult for state schools, as well - they don't want to raise tuition, because that's almost as unpopular as taxes AND it hinders them in achieving their mandated mission of public education. They can't fire tenured faculty, either, even those faculty members who have decided to postpone retirement because they lost too much money during the housing market collapse. Those must be waited out. Instead, vital administrative services get slashed, classroom sizes go up, and faculty are pressured to bring in more research dollars from anywhere, everywhere. That also means that new hires are now expected to come in already possessing advanced fundraising capabilities, on top of the ability to do kick-ass science or scholarship. These academics no longer actually do research; they write grants and try to drum up money and publicity, largely from federal institutions that have also seen their budgets shrink in recent years.

So, Regan's "trickling down" seems to continue to work well, doesn't it.

Did you read that story, recently, about how modern philanthropists differ from historical philanthropists, in earmarking their financial contributions for special causes? Gone are the days when philanthropic foundations were established; now, the money goes specifically to targeting a pet disease or disorder. Who knows what the ALS Foundation is going to do with the overabundance of donations they've gotten from their viral fundraising campaign.

What I'm forced to ask, on a personal level, is, are there alternatives, for an individual who wants to keep a foot in the scientific door? The piece that seems most logistically complicated to me is retaining library privileges. If I simply move up to Seattle, how will I access the current academic literature so that I can finish writing topical and timely manuscripts? Add that to the list of things to work on.

A week or two ago, I suggested to

scrottie that he read A Room of One's Own, by Virginia Woolf [he'd previously been conflating it with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, which is completely different and irritating, as best as I can tell*]. He wound up reading it last Friday in an epic five-hour bathtub-sitting session, and pulled out a few quotations to share with me. Here's one that he found a touch hilarious because it suggests Woolf is as enamored with food as I am:

"One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. The lamp in the spine does not light on beef and prunes ... if she had left two or three hundred thousands pounds to Fernham, we could have been sitting at our ease tonight and the subject of our talk
might have been archaeology, botany, anthropology, physics, the nature of the atom, mathematics, astronomy, relativity, geography. If only Mrs. Seton and her mother and her mother before her had learnt the great art of making money and had left their money, like their fathers and their grandfathers before them, to found fellowships and lectureships
and prizes and scholarships appropriated to the use of their own sex, we might have dined very tolerably up here alone off a bird and a bottle of wine ... We might have been exploring or writing; mooning about the venerable places of the earth; sitting contemplative on the steps of the Parthenon, or going at ten to an office and coming home comfortable
at half-past four to write a little poetry."

But it remains painfully true for me that a thousand little pinpricks seem to interfere with my ability to concentrate on and think and write about certain scientific subjects of interest. Friday was a dismal day, despite my running off to the Medical Sciences Library's Quiet Study area for real, honest Quiet. Yesterday, I started to finally converge on the appropriate context for what, in shorthand, I've been calling the Cricket Respirometry paper. I wish I could think faster, but sometimes I just can't. At least I *know* when I've settled on the appropriate context, after reading and thinking about 50 different papers on the topic.

The mental and emotional energy can be exceedingly difficult to summon, though. So much so that I couldn't will myself out of bed and over to the Rec Center this morning, and I couldn't will myself to head in to the office, either. A brief mental illness. Eventually, after lying in bed for a while, things started whirring and clicking and humming again. I often despair that these shoddy work habits mean I'm not cut out to be an academic, but then I return to the short-term mission of getting my hard-won, taxpayer-funded work out into the world, and those thoughts send me back to the keyboard. There are other fields that require the development of this sort of thought-space, although probably too often programmers wind up having to turn something in before a deadline and don't have a chance to fully develop their work. On the flipside, stuff needs to be declared "finished" after a certain point, even with its imperfections, and the book How to Write a Lot is still a useful kick in the pants.

And so.

*I tried to go to a production of the play at Tufts, but got there 20-30 minutes late, so I sat outside of the the theater and tried to just listen through the first act, which sounded dull, and now I can't remember if I then decided to leave or if I sat through the second act as well. Regardless, I'm not especially motivated to give it another try. This also reminds me of my own conflation of The Society of Mind with a certain other institution of a completely different nature that calls itself something similar.

Here's a list of some high-caliber academic books I have been working on reading recently. Getting to read this stuff is one of the huge perks of this job. My standard strategy for academic books is to obtain a library copy to read first. If I find the book sufficiently useful, I purchase a copy (usually a used copy).

Physiological Ecology: How Animals Process Energy, Nutrients, and Toxins, by William H. Karasov and Carlos Martinez del Rio. This work is mostly vertebrate-focused, but contains numerous useful things for an invertebrate physiologist as well, and is necessary reading for the purpose of being able to conduct cross-talk about organismal physiological ecology. The thing is, in many cases, people have worked out an understanding of how animals work in vertebrate systems separately from the people who have worked out an understanding of how animals work in invertebrate systems. Both the similarities and differences are fascinating. One thing I found most telling is how K&M have subdivided their topics - digestive physiology is covered in great depth, but is discussed completely separately from "Production in Budgets of Mass and Energy." I wish I had read this book when it first came out in 2007. I would make it required reading for graduate students. I'm going to buy a copy as soon as I can.

Mechanisms of Life History Evolution: The Genetics and Physiology of Life History Traits and Trade-Offs, edited by Thomas Flatt and Andreas Heyland. A rich text for the purpose of gaining perspective on the approaches used to study life history evolution - that is, how to understand the diverse forms of life found all around us on this planet today. This is a meaty text, and some of the contributed chapters are stronger and more articulate than others, so I would recommend skipping around. That said - there's stuff on both vertebrates and invertebrates in here, and I decided it was worthwhile to buy my own copy.

Similarly, I'm finding Experimental Evolution: Concepts, Methods, and Applications, edited by Theodore Garland, Jr., and Michael Rose, to be so worthwhile that I've just ordered a copy of this book, too. I've been hesitant to label myself as an evolutionary biologist in part because I've felt like I've lacked the perspective and tools in my toolbox to do the work of evolutionary biologists. If I can manage to sit down and work my way through this entire book, I think I'll gain the confidence to be able to call myself an evolutionary biologist. I've covered subtopics associated with evolutionary biology (social evolution, population ecology), but this book looks like it will provide the scope of the field as a whole.

More specific books:
Ecological and Environmental Physiology of Insects, by Jon Harrison, Art Woods, and Stephen Roberts. One of my Ph.D. committee members is a coauthor on this book, so I might be a bit biased. I think this book provides a nice complement to Chapman's The Insects: Structure and Function, as a good introductory text to topics in insect physiological ecology. EEPI has been written to be accessible to newcomers in the field. It's not a huge subdiscipline, but it's a cool one to work in. I might be biased on that front, too.

Organization of Insect Societies: From Genome to Sociocomplexity, edited by Jennifer Fewell and Juergen Gadau. This is another situation where I might be biased because I know both editors quite well. Ahem. As with Mechanisms of Life History Evolution, I would recommend that interested readers pick and choose among the chapters - some are excellent and well-written, while in my view others don't do full justice to their subject. One feature I appreciate about this book and also EEPI is that both books explicitly talk about the future directions for their respective fields. Some graduate-level textbooks can make it sound as though we already know everything we need to know about a subject, which is far from what a graduate student should come to understand over the course of her graduate studies. Why not make that fact apparent, and give future students a leg up on figuring out how to construct a thesis or dissertation?

Ecological Stoichiometry: The Biology of Elements from Molecules to the Biosphere, by Robert Sterner and Jim Elser. Hmm, a protip has just occurred to me: if a grad student's dissertation committee members have written books, it would be wise for that graduate student to read those books. Which is to say, this is another one written by a committee member. I grappled with aspects of ES. On the one hand, it's well-written and covers a fascinating perspective for understanding how the biological world works. On the other hand, it doesn't quite cover some crucial things that an insect nutritional physiologist needs to know and think about, because insects don't eat carbon. For those crucial things, the insect nutritional physiologist needs to turn to The Nature of Nutrition: A Unifying Framework from Animal Adaptation to Human Obesity, by Stephen J. Simpson and David Raubenheimer. She also needs to read some contemporary papers on the subject, but these two books will provide a solid starting point.

For the Attine-ologist, I would suggest Herbivory of Leaf-Cutting Ants: A Case Study on Atta colombica in the Tropical Rainforest, by Wirth, Herz, Ryal, Beyschlag, and Holldobler. It's important to read this book before reading The Leafcutter Ants: Civilization by Instinct, by Bert Holldobler and E.O. Wilson, or The Superorganism : The beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies (also by Holldobler and Wilson). These two books have their place as inspirational and accessible texts, but they are too superficial for graduate studies. Reading Wirth et al. will make this sufficiently clear.

I think I will stop there for now. This list covers most of the books sitting on my work bookshelf these days, other than the stats textbooks.

I had a good phone conversation with my mom last night, while she walked around outside my grandpa's house and checked on the state of the fruits and vegetables. During our conversation, she found that this year the pear tree has made fewer, but larger pears, as compared to last year. The blueberries have gotten picked, and there are a number of "zero-maintenance" pumpkins that have been produced from seeds she planted.

Even though she reads this blog (hi, Mom!), our conversation still highlighted how important it is to still communicate in more direct and multiple ways. For one thing, she had a lot of questions about my current situation. I've put off articulating about many of the details for multiple reasons. For one thing, I don't want to catch a bad case of foot-in-mouth disease. Money is a large deciding factor in whatever happens next, and there are no certainties in that department. That's a fact of life for a postdoc.

We're coming up on the job application season, which means another round of sitting down to review what's out there and trying to imagine how different scenarios could play out. Assuming I find things worth applying for, and assuming I'm sufficiently well-qualified by this stage, job interviews will happen sometime over the winter, and further job-negotiation dances will happen in the spring.

But let's be pragmatic here. When I look around at how other postdocs look on paper, I think - there are a tremendous number of people who are highly qualified for these jobs, which pay pitiful salaries. On the one hand, maybe that means that applying for these jobs is just perpetuating what Marge Simpson said about grad students making "a terrible life choice." On the other hand, I still firmly and passionately believe in doing aspects of this work. The "aspects" part is important. My identity as an academic differs from the identities of others as academics, so I bring a certain perspective and set of priorities to the job. The trick is to highlight the strengths of those priorities in my job applications, as well as to find an institution that fits well with my priorities. Not simple.

Being pragmatic on other fronts: my funding here has a definite end, at the end of November. Certain people have strong incentives to ensure that I'm able to finish up and publish the work I've done here, and certain other people have other incentives to ensure that I'm pushing out more of the work I did for my dissertation. MY incentives are that I like to put out good, novel, interesting science into the world, and want all of my hard work to see the light of day. I've put most of my belongings into a moving cube, sent off to Nebraska, so that they're well-situated if things pan out in Nebraska. If things don't pan out in Nebraska, well, that's not going to be the end of the world and I won't wind up like my friend V, whose stuff are in storage in one state and who can't afford to get that stuff to the current state.

So I could instead go up to Seattle, be with my family there, and figure out how to integrate myself into the local academic happenings. A pretty satisfying backup plan. Plus, who knows what is going to happen with my father's health, or the health of other family members there. Or I could go back to the Phoenix area and figure out how to carry on with work there. My Arizona safety net isn't quite as robust as my Seattle one, but then again, I have another very strong incentive (

scrottie) to go there. (not to mention the rest of the life created there)

Funny how, in both cases, the incentives are centered around family and loved ones. In actuality, this is utterly unsurprising. I think

sytharin in particular could relate.

And so there it is for now. Not a simple web. But overall, I still feel like an incredibly lucky person. Remember this, when you struggle: people born in the U.S.A. these days have been born into an incredible country. We have electricity in our homes, clean running water, and overall a better social safety net than people in times past and in many other parts of the world. We must put these gifts to good use.

First, have you yet read the Wired article about the new grasshopper species discovery? If you think it's tl;dr* watch the video first, then backtrack and read about this interesting line of work. It's somewhat relevant to me because I'm studying a wing-dimorphic cricket species - crickets are also Orthopterans, and "wing dimorphism" means that, within the species, there's variation in wing length and flight capability - as described in the Wired article, there have been important changes in flight capability in grasshoppers over evolutionary time.

Next, this piece on publicly prominent scientists should provide food for thought, regardless of how you feel about Richard Dawkins. It's pretty sad that most Americans don't know about the many other awesome women and minority scientists doing amazing things these days.

And lastly, I'll toot my own tiny horn briefly. I've updated my leafcutter ant research methods album over on flickr. I still feel I have a responsibility to the taxpaying public to share how I do the science that it funds. Besides, it's cool.

*too long; didn't read

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Even in Kyoto

hearing the cuckoo's cry / I long for Kyoto (Basho)

Entries tagged with academia

Under the magnifying glass

Grumpity grump

Hello, Tempe!

"So, how was work today?"

The next leg of the adventure

No dull moments

Power struggles in research and writing

Academic links

Words

Cancel the Panic; we'll hold it sometime next week instead

At least something got done!

Observations

Digestion

Whirlwind

Old Friends

Why can't you just go off and "do science" on your own instead?

Think space

Academic Book Reviews

The only certainty is uncertainty

A good day for fun science updates