Even in Kyoto

This week: successfully unsnarled the Introduction and Methods for a manuscript I'd like to get submitted soon.

I haven't revisited the Results or Discussion yet. A project for tomorrow.

I do think I'm getting closer to submission, at least. There's at least some small hope I could get this submitted by the end of the month, which is really important for tenure, largely because I need to work on writing the sequel and try to get that submitted by the end of July.

No pressure.

One of the challenges of academic writing is that I have to continually persuade myself that the things I'm reporting on have some small significance or importance or insight to offer. This is often the most challenging aspect of writing for me. I'm not curing cancer or solving world hunger, but hopefully I am at least enriching our understanding of and appreciation for the natural world.

I am revisiting a manuscript I've had a hard time touching in a while. Time is a tool, for writers. Sometimes we can instead attain distance from a piece of writing by handing it over to other people, who can help us discover the intellectual ruts and pitfalls. But at other times, there isn't an other to whom we can make the request.

With time, we can reapproach with new and different eyes. Between my last visit and this one, I've reviewed more manuscripts, and I have taught the scientific writing course here three times. Both have helped me practice and articulate what constitutes a more effective piece of scientific writing. What now jumps out most readily from this old manuscript is how plodding my text was.

The downfall of plodding text is that it dooms exciting findings. If it won't sparkle for me, why would I expect it to sparkle for anyone else?

One of the other issues I've been thinking about between then and now, is how to best reframe the work. The old intellectual frame never fit well to begin with, but it was hard for me to articulate why, because I had less of an intellectual context when I wrote the manuscript. A funny part of that is that some of this wasn't really my fault; when I first wrote the manuscript, some of the intellectual context didn't exist in the way it does now. I have also learned a lot more biology between then and now, biology that fits better and will better support the work.

In any case, blogging about writing is an excellent way to procrastinate from the more painful work of actually working on the writing.

On Sunday at around 2 am, an undergraduate student at my institution died. I received word about this when I checked my email Sunday morning, in a message from our College President. This isn't the first time that a student has died (nor do I expect it to be the last, unfortunately), but just as every student is unique, every incident is unique. We are all born into this world, we inhabit it for a time, and we die.

I didn't really bring things up with the freshmen I am teaching; the student who died was a junior, so I had to figure they might not know the student so well, and besides, with other things that have happened with that freshman class this semester, I think it's pretty clear that I understand that they can have a lot of shit going on and I am there to help keep them safe as I can, et cetera, in the context of our shared goals to enjoy science and learn stuff.

Not so much my other class. Even before class a couple of students got in touch because they are pretty messed up right now. In that initial message as well as in follow-up messages, the college did its due diligence in terms of pointing out support resources and holding gatherings for students.

But of course, that's not always enough. In conversations with students, I of course go back to thinking about Zack's disappearance and how much that messed me up as a basis for comparison - and that was in an era where things weren't so overshadowed by a global pandemic, and during grad school, where the pace of events is different.

I also wound up sharing a bit about my existential struggles with my research students: how can I possibly focus on writing a paper about some silly and esoteric topic when there are so many very real struggles happening right now? It takes a huge amount of willpower.

And of course I also wind up thinking about my father, in more ways than one. He has told me stories about the point in his life when he had moved to Berkeley to go to grad school, where there was one particular pivotal day. He had moved there to pursue a PhD in Physics, but shortly after arriving it became clear that his undergraduate Physics education was inadequate preparation for the rigors of the program at Berkeley. Things came to a real head for him one day while sitting in class, where the professor teaching the class made some remarks about the Vietnam War draft and ongoing protests at Berkeley; at the end of that class my dad got up, walked out, and never returned.

Among everything, when I do some soul-searching, I still deeply want to work on and finish up these silly academic manuscripts - throw them into the massive river of data and findings and discoveries, even knowing that the current rate of paper churn does not correspond to anything resembling substantive progressive change, scientific, social, or otherwise.

As I was biking home yesterday, trying to process everything, it came to me that rather than seeking progress and advancement in these academic works, perhaps I should rather approach them as prayer instead. The assembly of thought and ideas and careful hours spent in the field and in laboratories, deepening at least my personal understanding and respect for the world around us. That is something easier for me to justify doing. With prayer, we cast our thoughts and intention outwards, knowing that we may never get any response, or that the response may take a form we could never have anticipated or come up with.

In a related fashion, I think about and talk to my memories of my father while riding around on my bicycle; the lucky pennies I encounter are small reminders to pause and have gratitude.

I can see some of my students caught up in a horrible swirl of events right now; one encountered a professor utterly unsympathetic to a missed class and is now worried about winding up with a lower grade because of it. And that touches on a point: having doggedly continued to pursue their studies in the midst of the global pandemic, many of these students are still very much feeling their way around in the dark, because the old academic standards and expectations from the prepandemic era have shifted in uncertain and confusing ways. In some cases, students who should not have passed a course were able to pass that course; if anything, grade inflation has been exacerbated. A lot of the back-and-forth feedback between professors and students became heavily filtered and diminished because it was forced onto digital platforms. It is massively confusing.

But the need for those conversations and for that back-and-forth doesn't magically go away. More than anything, if my ultimate goal is learning, I have to make my expectations for students less rigid, while still providing enough structure and incentive for them to keep going. In so many cases, often what we wind up learning differs from what we set out to learn.

What I am really hoping is to ask them to take some of these recent and horrible experiences and find a way to continue forward. This is different for each of them, so I think the best I can do is try and tell them some stories about my own writing and struggles to keep moving forward. I think it comes down to saying, well, here we are, at this college. What are the best ways that we can honor the memories of those who have died before us? I think those who have died before us would call us to continue trying to be our best selves, to do our best work, to leave a positive impact on the world and those around us. So let's do what we can to pick ourselves up and honor those memories and move forward.

I finished reading Insect Diets: Science and Technology. A lot of the later chapters seem to generally reiterate subjects from the earlier chapters, or talk about issues specifically associated with mass-rearing, which is defined as rearing millions of insects, as for a large-scale sterile release program. Those are subjects that aren't as directly relevant to me, so reading those chapters was a bit of a slog. My next fun academic reading project will be to read the newly-published edition of Biochemical Adaptation. I should also work my way through the rest of Protein Turnover to see if there are any specific subjects I need to know more about and think over.

Not too long ago, I read this interview of Robert Caro, author of the book The Power Broker, which is about a guy named Robert Moses who had a huge influence on shaping the urban fabric of New York City and its surroundings. While the stuff about Robert Moses is fascinating in and of itself, I also appreciated all of the discussion about what it's like to go from journalistic writing to writing an in-depth investigative book.

I'm also envious of the writers getting to use the research and study rooms at the New York Public Library. Those spaces just sound so heavenly and productive. My rough equivalent is going down to the Biosciences Library on the second floor to sit at a kiosk among all of the undergraduates, who have special savory habits like wearing WAY too much cologne, talking on their cell phones, talking to each other, and bringing in take-out food to eat and slobber over in the "group study" spaces. And this is at a fairly studious university, overall.

Maybe there are other secret writing spaces on campus that aren't so terrible, but if there are, I haven't found them yet.

Wouldn't it be nice if demanding a revised draft of a manuscript NOW resulted in such a thing?

Sigh.

Instead it seems to just push me over the edge of the stress-performance inverted U-function.

To some degree, this has to do with how I process feedback from other people. It's an instinct to drag my heels and fight because I *know* that I know the literature way better than coauthors and am trying to think it through on a deeper level than they are. I refuse to turn in embarrassing and shoddy work. And I know this is to my detriment at a certain point, but I've also observed firsthand that turning in stuff that's half-baked is seriously embarrassing and an even larger waste of everyone's time.

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."

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.

The cat is making small noises as she sleeps on top of the heap of freshly-cleaned bedsheets.

I spent too much of the morning procrastinating, by vacuuming the house, cleaning the litterbox, cooking crepes, watering the garden, tending the worm bin, washing dishes, and doing laundry. I draw the line at lawnmowing. I skipped the household trip to Austin so I could get work done today. Time to shower and trim my fingernails. I'm spending the afternoon being irritated by incidental noises: the next-door neighbor's loud radio music and barking dog, someone else's leaf-blower, the mariachi music of the neighbor across the street. My small table, adjacent to the cat's litterbox, makes me think of Jane Austen's writing spot. I can't force myself to sit still. If I sit in the living room, the cat yells at me because she's on the other side of the fence. When all the chores are finished, I'm sleepy and slightly hungry. Time for a snack. Maybe time to cook some dinner.

Three paragraphs down, two paragraphs to go. Let go of the need for a perfect first draft. Let go of the need to intensively scrutinize the literature. Let go of the side points, about incidental things from other studies that are only tangentially related. Stop aimlessly web-surfing. Let go of constant connectivity.

I once naively thought that if I lived in a place with fewer distractions (=moving to Texas), I'd be more productive. That might still be true, and the lesson I might have learned is rather that when I'm relatively satisfied with my life, I'm more productive. Hard to say for sure. I create my own distractions no matter where I live.

I'm still staring down the throat of a lot of academic writing projects.

I procrastinate by reading stuff about how to write.

The false promise of an office at this institution is still one of the things that most greatly angers me about my experience here. A desk in a laboratory does not have a door that can be closed. A hallway to someone else's lab space is NOT an office.

My living situation for the fall is going to be even more full of people than the Villa Maria house. The Villa Maria house was already too crowded. Hard to think there.

The library on the main campus has individual study rooms available.

I will make appointments with myself, to go to the library, and write.

These days, I have the following on my plate:

-Postdoc proposal due next Monday. A (mercifully) fairly short application. I don't think my chances are particularly good; the last successful candidates look highly "groomed" for the position. Plus, I don't think I've nailed the question of, "How do I turn myself and my research program into an attractive woman-scientist narrative?" I know women who have. It's not always easy to do, especially when one's research program jumps around a bit and isn't something super-sexy, like birds. It's reminding me of the stupid point during senior year of college when I thought it might be a good idea to apply for a Rhodes scholarship. Actually, much of this year reminds me of that year. Too much stress and flailing about over what the future will hold, and applying for all sorts of things, many of which are unrealistic. I shouldn't be too hard on myself, though, because on the flipside women often get told that they don't apply for enough things. And if I don't apply for things, I can't get things. Anyway. That's that thought process. Easily depressing.

-Respirometry manuscript. Here, too, I'm at that point where the major question is, "How do I clearly articulate why this experiment is groundbreaking and exciting?" Because when I think about it, the experiment provides a good, insightful perspective. It's a stage of narrative construction that I still struggle with.

-"Short-term experiment" This one is a meaty paper. Just not enough hours in the day to work on it.

-The next leafcutter paper. Whenever I think about it, I get excited about this one. I keep getting stuck in data analysis doldrums, but I really need to get this paper submitted and published. The other day, I discovered that my first dissertation chapter has been cited, which is exciting because it means people are interested in it and are reading it. Once I get the next leafcutter paper out, I'll be in a much better position to point to my accomplishments and say, "Hire me/give me money/etc."

Lots of writing. With practice, I hope I can push through the roadblocks more effectively. I know that I know a lot and have a number of valuable skills, but I still wind up rocking back occasionally, wondering about my merit and the folly of trying to make an academic career work, feeling inadequate and stupid about the things I don't know or don't do well.

And it's hard, when I can remember all-too-vividly that fall semester when I had to really live on the edge, and the whole experience of moving out here.