rebeccmeister: (cricket)
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.
rebeccmeister: (bikegirl)
About a month ago, a friend of mine posted a link to a brief PBS story about "Handsome" clothing for women and transgender individuals. I've just finally watched it, several weeks after reading and pondering a piece for women on dressing for academia. I can't get over one point in the Dressing for Academia article, the point about wearing makeup. On one level, I can understand what drmellivora is saying about make-up making a woman seem more competent. I understand and appreciate the role of professional dress in the academic workplace.

But on a personal level, ...I just can't. I can get myself to put on lip gloss occasionally, but my skin crawls at the thought of being covered up by anything beyond that. Even light moisturizers make my skin crawl. My skin demands to be kept bare. And with wearing glasses, I have zero interest in shoving anything in the direction of my eyeballs. It just sounds like a recipe for smearing goop on my glasses.

I used to wear more skirts, but there are points where those feel emasculating, too, particularly because I am not comfortable sitting in chairs like a normal human being. Skirts were fine for grad school they're splendid for bicycling, but they make me feel a bit like a gangly heron in the lab, and they aren't exactly lab-safe anyway. I'd like to feel competent without also feeling gendered. So the idea of being able to look professional without feeling gendered is more appealing to me than trying to look professional in fluffy blouses. Part of it for me also comes from being relatively tall and strong. I want to dress to project confidence, and I don't want to dress in a way that makes people focus on my gender.

I can find long-sleeve cotton dress shirts that feel comfortable and appropriate, but I haven't found much that's short-sleeved that appeals, and I'm still working on jackets. Polo shirts make me feel too sporty-mc-sport-a-lot. I've acquired a couple pairs of trousers that work, so long as I don't try bike commuting in them and ruin them prematurely, but things could still be better in that department (ugh thigh-squeezers). Some high-quality stuff that's still appropriate for warm weather would be nice, too (e.g. linen pants). A lot is confounded by climate.

Anyway. I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all approach for how to portray ourselves in professional settings, but it's at least comforting to hear the stories of other people who've felt similarly left out when clothes-shopping.
rebeccmeister: (Acromyrmex)
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
rebeccmeister: (cricket)
As mentioned in my previous post, I spent a lot of time over the past week with I, a new graduate student. Interacting with her is reminding me of a number of little things that I have learned over my time as a scientist. A lot of those little things are obvious, in retrospect, but I always have to wonder if I would have spent less time flailing around if I'd known about or thought about many of them earlier in my career. A few examples:

1. Enter in your data as you collect it. (this is what I'm working on today, which is what made me think about this entry)

2. Along those same lines: Clean up as you go along.

3. While writing manuscripts, keep a text file with a "to do next" list. Actually, this should be started even before you start writing a manuscript. For me, it has been the simplest way to put down a project and then be able to pick it back up with minimal fuss.

4. When meeting with other people, put as much as you can into writing, but keep it simple. To have a focused meeting, have a goal for the meeting and put that at the top. Do you want feedback on a specific piece of writing? Do you want help with the experimental design? Do you want help figuring out the holes in your logic? Are you trying to figure out who to put on your committee or who to include in the project? The sooner you can get concrete specifics in writing, the easier it will be for others to help you make progress.

5. Have a plan for analyzing your data *before* you collect the data. You might change your mind later on, but this will save you many potential massive headaches. This means having a thorough outline of your experiment and its dependent variables. Is it frequency data? Continuous data? How many treatments are you comparing? How many figures in a paper will this translate into?

6. Consider keeping annotated bibliographies for projects. I don't know about you, but my brain and memory are small, and the amount of literature I need to be familiar with is large, and covers a wide range of themes. Annotated bibliographies are a shortcut for organizing your thoughts about the literature, and for staying on task with #3. I just keep mine in text files. No need to get fancy.

7. There are a lot of other useful sources of information that might be helpful. Don't skip over them. Read them in the evening before bed. This book comes highly recommended (although I haven't read it, I suspect if I read it I would do a lot of nodding). For academic writers in all walks of writing, I've found How to Write a Lot helpful, too.

8. For keeping the different parts of a research project organized, here's an idea of how I structure my files. I'll come up with a short name for the project and will make a directory (folder) for it. Within the directory, I'll have subdirectories for: datasheets, raw data (as it is entered in to the spreadsheet), figures, R scripts, and the manuscript. I'm not good at throwing things away, so whenever I generate new files, I make a directory within a folder, label it "Old," and stick the previous version in there.

9. I like Zotero as an open-source browser plugin for keeping track of references. I still download pdfs of references into a big (separate) folder, and label them with the authornames, year, and a few keywords. Note that this is completely separate from my annotated bibliographies.

I suspect I'll think of ten more pointers somewhere further down the line, but this should be a good starting list.

What work-organization insights have you wished you'd had at an earlier stage?

Get it Done

Feb. 5th, 2014 11:32 am
rebeccmeister: (bikegirl)
A good grad school friend contacted me about a week ago about setting up a virtual Writing Club. She has a couple of dissertation chapters she wants to publish, and is looking for a kick in the pants to work on them, because it's all too easy to let those things slide in the face of seemingly more immediate concerns.

I'm excited about this. I, too, have more dissertation chapters I want to publish. So far, our efforts have gotten me to open one up and work on its "to do" list.

I wish I found it this easy to establish a working relationship with people at my current university, to get the cricket writing flowing better. I *know* I could get a whole lot more done if I had just a bit more collegial structure for writing these cricket papers. It's stupidly difficult to write this stuff in isolation, and I say "stupidly difficult" because it doesn't have to be this difficult. It just has to be:

-Schedule time to write.
-Stick to the scheduled time.
-Write.
-Track writing progress.

The thing on campus is that what used to work for quiet space is now overrun with graduate students. Maybe I need to start walking over to the closest library for some new quiet space.

The other thing is figuring out how (when/if) to get feedback from my supervisors.
rebeccmeister: (bikegirl)
So, I wrote a few posts back about some of the emotional components of the job application process. Shortly thereafter, the New York Times Magazine published a lengthy article about the continued gender gap in the sciences. Versions of this article are appearing on a regular basis these days, which is both heartening and disheartening: there's recognition that there's still a gender divide in the sciences, we know many of the causes, and yet we still lack a good, clear, widespread strategy for addressing the gender divide.

As the NYT article points out, we need to use more than just anecdotal evidence to change a systemic problem. And yet, this is a change that requires action on a personal level - direct encouragement of young scientists by their higher-ups.

Here's the story of things that have been lifelines for me.

1. Going to an all-girls high school. In an all-girls high school, the girls cannot sit back and let ambitious boys run everything. My AP Physics class contained half of the women in Washington State who took the AP exam; there were eleven of us, and nobody told us we couldn't do physics (that seems to be a statement out of a different era). HNA provided an atmosphere where we were all encouraged to be at the top. I think all-girls schools wind up being way more important than all-boys schools because so much of the rest of society is already implicitly centered around males (male power structures).

2. Working with supporting undergraduate research mentors. Two stories here:

I spent three years doing research in Psychology at my undergraduate institution, under an abusive male supervisor. I went home in tears on more than one occasion, despite putting in a tremendous amount of effort into work in the lab, and had to have a serious meeting with the department chair about some of the ridiculousness. It was one of those cases of a person who knew how to skirt the line between appropriate/inappropriate, so he could never be called out on things, but could make life pretty miserable. When I got ready to apply for graduate school and decided I wanted to apply for an NSF predoctoral fellowship, I was told, "You're never going to get one. Don't bother applying." When I decided I wanted to study animal behavior instead of psychopharmacology, the reaction was, "Pfuh!" (which is to say, if what you're doing next isn't exactly the same as what you're doing now, it's going to be useless!)

I spent one undergrad summer working at the Joslin Diabetes Institute. I got an internship through my high school; my professor/research mentor was an alum of my high school, and accepted me into the program by way of a simple phone interview - a pretty big leap of faith. In that lab, everyone helped out everybody else, and the whole lab benefited. I distinctly remember my research mentor turning to me at one point and saying, "I think you should consider earning a Ph.D." That one moment made me decide to apply for graduate school.

3. Finding supportive graduate mentors. Graduate school involves learning how to create an environment for oneself that allows one to thrive. This isn't an accidental process, unless a person is insanely lucky; it takes reflection and action. There were points in my graduate career where my advisor was an absentee advisor, for many reasons. It was good for me to have to consciously say to myself, "How am I going to go out and ask for help to get things done?" Many informal connections in grad school - friendships with other faculty members and graduate students - were critical to my graduation.

4. Support in postdoc/faculty transitions. A single line uttered by one of my graduate committee members has stuck in my head and resonated. He said, quite simply, "I think the big difference for a lot of women scientists is a lack of confidence." When I think about this line, I think - I have to have faith in myself, that I can keep going, that I can do good science and make good contributions to my field. Confidence is an internalized source of encouragement.

I can tell that my support system here in Texas is weaker than the support system in Arizona. There isn't a chapter of the Association of Women in Science at this institution; really, this institution is about 10 years behind the times, culturally. Overall, that weakness is still inherent to most postdoctoral positions; the postdoc is separated from the system that created her and must stand on her own two feet and navigate the academic world independently. My supervisor mostly leaves me to my own devices, and is as supportive as he can be. But I most strongly feel the positive effects of the unequivocal support I receive from my co-advisor at UNL. I'm kind of amazed, actually, at how good he is at respecting young scientists and just emanating a sense of support. That doesn't mean he makes things easy or cuts anybody any slack; he's just excited to see people do good science, and makes it clear that he's invested in helping others succeed in whatever capacity they wish to succeed.

5. Family support. Let's just point out I got very lucky on this front. My family is academically-oriented, so my parents have always been supportive of their childrens' efforts to further their education. Additionally, my older brother has provided what support he can.

Sometimes, when a person is fumbling around in the dark, even the flicker of light from a match can make a big difference.
rebeccmeister: (Acromyrmex)
If a person wanted to, she could probably spend her entire day reading about, researching, and commenting on disparities between conditions for working men and women. Today, for example, is "Equal Pay Day". This is the day to which women would have to work to earn the equivalent salary earned by male counterparts in 2012. If you subscribe to the basic idea behind Your Money or Your Life, well, think about this extra three-and-a-half months pretty carefully, and what will happen over a woman's lifetime.

I have a hard time juggling the despair/hope/uncertainty/grim resolution/anger/determination sometimes. Here's a sampling of some of the stuff I've read recently on the subject:

http://jezebel.com/5992479/if-i-admit-that-hating-men-is-a-thing-will-you-stop-turning-it-into-a-self+fulfilling-prophecy
http://www.nature.com/news/inequality-quantified-mind-the-gender-gap-1.12550
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/psysociety/2013/04/02/benevolent-sexism/
http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/jEGOb5320WMOVI1boGOfGN/Urvashi-Butalia--Childless-naturally.html
http://www.amazon.com/Chrysalis-Sibylla-Merian-Secrets-Metamorphosis/dp/0156032996/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1365609154&sr=1-1&keywords=Chrysalis
http://www.news.pitt.edu/women_STEM

Sometimes, this gets confusing and head-scratching. Of the last item, I have to think, hmm. I suppose the category these researchers are describing would include me. I can even give some anecdotes on the subject. When I was a freshman/sophomore, two of my professors told me I should consider majoring in a more mathematical science. I didn't have a good concept of what I'd do with such a major, though, so I stuck with what I knew I was interested in - bio-psychology. We'll never know if that was good or bad. Am I just a statistic? Am I just a number? Should you just file my life away in an "outcomes" column on one of these studies?

Women Don't Ask is still highest on my list of things-to-read that (1) raises awareness, but more importantly, (2) provides constructive strategies for women seeking equality.

In the meantime, I'm continuing my personal data-gathering. Some of those stories feed into the "despair" part of the equation, some give some hope, all feel really personal and sharp - a friend who is struggling to find teaching positions with fair pay that would allow her and a partner to live the kind of life she strives for (namely, that would make it feasible to have kids, along with a job where she's treated with respect); a friend who is now in the "now what?" casting-about, post-doctoral stage with no job; two friends who are burned out on academics and trying to figure out how to transition to industry jobs (don't look for help from academics on this front!); a friend who is working full-time while finishing writing a master's thesis (think your job is hard?); a friend with an incredibly supportive husband who was packed up with her and move to Germany so she could pursue a dream postdoc position (but what's next?); a friend juggling a postdoc job and baby and sick husband; a friend who's gotten an awesome postdoc but whose boyfriend has gotten a job on the other side of the country. Also, I've accidentally left a lot of people out because I have a small memory.

Nature pissed me off recently when they profiled four "superstar" women with "children" (some are pregnant and not yet parents) who have stubbornly figured out how to manage children and stellar scientific careers. As a commenter noted, are we women supposed to take note of these superstars and aspire to be like them? Is that realistic? Shouldn't we reserve some hope for the possibility of having a scientific career AND having a personal life, whether that personal life involves having children or other passions/pursuits?

I mean, do I know what's next? No. I don't. I have that list of second postdoc positions to apply for. I'll be watching the job market like a hawk this go-around. I have no idea if [livejournal.com profile] scrottie will follow, if I go to Europe or Australia or deeper into the Deep South. I have thoughts about "biological clocks" and appropriate times and places for children (not Texas, and not right now), but no idea if children are even in my future at all. I have thoughts about foster children, too. I still know I love this science stuff, even when the going gets tough. I still love teaching, too. And my family, and the Pacific Northwest, and art, and rowing, and reading, and hiking, and riding my bicycle. I still want to stay far enough away from most industry jobs to be able to provide informed commentary on industry (there may be an upcoming post on GMO's, for instance).

And I have work to do.

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