Lies, damn lies, and statistics

Grad students are generally less likely to want to continue in research careers as they go along; less than half of grad students are happy with their stipend; and European grad students are happier than US grad students: nature survey of 5000 grad students

For fun, you can also download the data tables.

***

In other news, something I figured out the hard way:

although it is relatively easy for universities to hire people with interdisciplinary backgrounds for postdocs, it is much harder to get interdisciplinary faculty positions. That could lead scientists without a history of close affiliation with an established department to serial fellowships and postdoc limbo, or job-hunting challenges in the broader market

No kidding.

Cooking in other people's kitchens.

I've used the kitchen to talk about lab, and I still think it's the best analogy.

Since it's an issue now with some of the consulting I'm doing, I'm going to elaborate a little more.

When I was a grad student, I really liked my lab in a lot of ways. The people who set up our workspace did a great job of arranging the equipment and we had plenty of room to do what we needed to do.

Having said that, my labmates were not always the best roommates. Not everyone was equally conscientious about replacing shared consumables . Also, some of our equipment was old and unreliable, and there were things we needed that we couldn't afford.

So naturally, by the time I graduated, I had a wish list of what I wanted in my postdoc lab. Some people think it's stupid to worry about this kind of thing, but my feeling is that if you're going to be running around in there 60+ hours a week working with your hands, the day-to-day stuff really does make a huge difference in how productive you're going to be. Not to mention how quickly you're going to get tired and frustrated and want to go home. And some projects will be virtually impossible without the right tools.

Looking back on my postdoc interviews, I asked the right questions. But my PIs lied. They all overstated their resources. For example, if I asked about a specific piece of expensive equipment, they said "yes we have one of those" but the truth turned out to be something more like "there is one in the next building over" or "there used to be one on campus."

Worse than that, after I joined their labs, they regularly dismissed my requests. They implied that I was being "high maintenance" and told me that I needed to be more patient or learn how to make do with less. Which was especially insulting considering that I knew quite well how to make do with whatever was around, but my point was that it was a giant waste of my time and expertise to make me do it that way.

I particularly resented the PIs who didn't understand the distinctions between doing things the cheap way vs. the right way. I tried to explain that the cheap way works sometimes, but the right way works EVERY TIME. Do you want it to be reproducible? Do you want all the iterations to be done quickly? Doesn't it actually end up costing you more money in the long run when it doesn't work and ends up taking longer/more iterations?

I think a lot of my career frustration has come from this lack of control. You know, like when you take those surveys for biotech companies, and they ask you whether you

a) evaluate equipment and approve purchases

b) make recommendations for equipment

c) have no input

The hierarchy in most labs is that the PI does (a), postdocs do (b), undergrads do (c), and grad students/technicians usually fall somewhere in the b-c range depending on seniority and the size of the lab.

I got really tired of playing the b string, especially when my recommendations were always ignored. I had to watch helplessly when Blond Guy wanted to buy something that I knew was worse. But nobody else knew that, nobody would listen to me even though I had more expertise, and the boss liked him better than me. So we always got what Blond Guy wanted, and I got screwed.

This really wore me down. I spent basically my entire career working with:

a) not enough equipment

b) old/broken equipment

c) the wrong equipment

One of the things that really made me want a faculty position was this carrot: that I would someday be able to set up my own lab the way I wanted it.

Like my kitchen. Sure, I might not have everything right away, but I could make the decisions about what to get and where to put it, and gradually make improvements.

I wouldn't have to make do with whatever cheap knockoff junk they bought at a flea market because they didn't know any better.

I think the kitchen analogy helps explain what I mean. It's one thing to visit someone's house and make do when they don't have what you need. Say you visit for a holiday. No big deal. It's just one day.

Now imagine that you have an ailing relative and you have to stay in their house and cook for them every day for a year. And this relative is sickly but prone to tantrums so you can't make any big changes without risking their wrath (or maybe you're afraid of losing your inheritance, ha ha).

Let's say they only like bland food, and you have to cook for them, but they won't let you make something different to eat yourself. So now you're stuck not only cooking bland food in a crappy kitchen, but you have to eat the bland food, too.

Does that sound like fun?

Sure, you can sneak into the kitchen in the middle of the night and make yourself something spicy without anyone finding out, but you still have to put the kitchen back the way it was when you're done. Or you have to go over to someone else's house and beg to use their KitchenAid mixer every time you want to bake.

I guess my point is, it's all well and good to talk about being a "team player", and I can enjoy that if I am treated as a team member. What I don't like is being told to put up or shut up. I didn't sign up to do science so I could follow blindly along behind my fearless leader. I signed up so I could get in the kitchen and cook up something new and different.

Anyway, I'm writing about this now because I still have some residual anxiety about making suggestions and asking for things. I always ask, it just stresses me out. I was told NO too many times. NO was often accompanied by personal and professional insults about how demanding and unreasonable I was being just because I had asked for something.

Just being told NO is ok. Just being insulted can be ok if you still get what you asked for. But the repetitious combination was really degrading.

One of the weird things about consulting is that you're essentially telling somebody you barely know what they should cook and how to run their kitchen. Even when they are receptive, sometimes it's hard to get over that initial fear of having to break the bad news that no, you can't make creme brulee with a cigarette lighter.

Especially when you know the subtext of the contract is whether you'd consider working on this project long-term, and the only honest answer is, "Not unless you'll let me remodel your kitchen."

Three unlikely things

I'm still doing some mentoring and some scientific consulting. Some is unpaid, and the rest is underpaid, but it's better than nothing (at least for now).

I really had gotten used to being told nearly every day that I was wrong, or crazy, or that my suggestions wouldn't work, or that the things I worried about didn't matter.

So lately I'm amazed to find that people are seeking my advice (outside this blog, even!). They say my ideas and contributions are interesting and important.

Yesterday I had one of these nice experiences. I met with a group to discuss a project. Three things happened that I would have considered unlikely when I was a postdoc, and to have them all happen at once like this would have meant that hell was freezing over.

1. I pointed out a potentially important problem and the immediate reaction was, "Wow, you're right!"

2. I suggested trying something my way because it's much faster and easier and they said, "Your way sounds much better! Let's do that!"

3. They said they were really impressed with my CV.

Thinking back on it, I'm surprised enough that I felt this deserved a blog post. Why is it that these people reacted so differently to me than the people I was working with during my postdoc?

Is it just because everyone in the group was a woman?

Is this is how some men feel in academia?

Trust but verify: side-effects of a life in science

I had an interesting experience about a week ago while hanging out with a new friend.

We were buying beer and pooling our pocket money to give as a present for the host of a going-away party, and didn't have anything to wrap it in. We wanted to be classy and get an envelope.

The scenario basically went like this. We walked into a small liquor store and bought beer. Then we went up to the counter to pay.

Friend: Do you have any envelopes? Or plain white paper?

Cashier: No.

Friend: Okay, we'll just take the beer.

Then we went and looked around the store again, to see if there were any office supplies we had somehow missed. We couldn't find anything.

Then my friend did the unthinkable.

Friend: Are you sure you don't have any plain white paper? Just one sheet back there behind the counter?

Cashier: Oh, yes. Here you go.

I was dumbfounded. Essentially the same question, asked twice, yielded opposite answers.

(If this happens in science, you go home and drink whiskey and come back the next day and try it 8 more times and take careful notes and try to figure out why you got one answer 5 times and the opposite answer 3 times, and then you modify your protocol and do it another 8 times and if you get the same answer 7 times, you publish it and say +/- 1. And write a long discussion section explaining what you think the variables are.)

In this case, I would never have thought to ask again. I spent the whole week thinking about it.

It reminded me of this time during my postdoc when I was struggling with setting up a new technique and I wasn't sure I really wanted to do it and it didn't work on the first try and it was a total pain the ass so I really didn't want to do it over again.

My advisor gave me two pieces of seemingly conflicting advice:

1. I'm sure you did it right. Don't second-guess yourself.

2. Just try it one more time. If it still doesn't work, move on. Get everything fresh and just try it again before you give up.

Now, statistical gurus will tell you that these two truths are not mutually exclusive. Yes, you could have done it perfectly the first time and just happened to grab a black sock instead of a red one. Yes, if you stick your hand back in the sock drawer and rummage around again, this time you might get a red sock.

But when you're trying to make the all-important decision WHAT DO I DO NOW, sometimes it's hard to feel like you're making the right choice. Are you wasting time by trying again? Are you being impossibly stubborn when you should really try a different approach? Or are you giving up too easily?

Which also reminds me of a time during grad school when I was struggling with a technique that worked initially and then stopped working for no apparent reason. I could not figure out what had changed. I hadn't changed anything.

One of my committee members said: You're near an edge.

And I said, What?

She explained that sometimes you get lucky and something works when it shouldn't. Then you go chasing after what are actually the wrong conditions for an experiment, when you'd be better off chucking the whole thing and starting fresh from first principles.

In this particular case, she was absolutely right. We redesigned the experiment and I got it working, consistently.

I never did get it to work the original way again.

It's a little heartbreaking and mind-fucking when you think you've seen something real, and potentially really interesting, and you can't reproduce it. If you're lucky, you're in a field where there are plenty of things to choose from, and you can pick any one of these to pursue or at least try a few times.... before you give up. And then you take a deep breath and try a different one.

In real life, you don't get all these do-overs.

Sometimes you're dealing with the most unpredictable thing in the universe: other people.

I've noticed that doing science for so long has made me really reluctant to trust my own decision making. Yes, in science I always went with my gut, and when I let people (my advisors) talk me out of doing that, I always regretted it. But it was also a fairly low-risk endeavor. I learned early on how to test the waters with cheap, quick pilot experiments. And I never got too attached to any one experiment (unlike my advisors and the ubiquitous asshole reviewer).

I think this lack of self-trust is actually one of the things that makes a great scientist great. The unwillingness to trust any result, no matter how appealing, until it has been thoroughly verified.

You can't say, "Well, it must be right, I did it! And I am awesome!"

No. You have to say, "This might be wrong."

You have to say it over and over and over. Even if you did it yourself with your own two hands, and saw the result with your own two eyeballs. Even if you think it's the coolest thing in the world and you desperately want it to be published in Cell so you can get a faculty position and a grant and a fleet of minions to do your experiments for you.

You always have to keep in mind that the journey isn't from Maybe Wrong --> Definitely Right.

It's from Uncertainty ---> Close Enough For Now.

On a long enough timeline, everything turns out to be just an approximation of the truth.

Sometimes you're pretty much right and you can be proud of that. But you can't really be sure until hindsight.

In real life, sometimes you have to go with your gut and hope you aren't completely fucking everything up. And sometimes when you ask for what seems like an impossible do-over, you can get one. Just because you asked nicely.

Same shit, different day.

Over the weekend I had another one of these unpleasant conversations with a guy I already knew I didn't like. This one went like this:

Guy: So, what do you do?

Me: Well, I'm unemployed right now. So, nothing.

Guy: What did you do before?

Me: Science.

Guy: Biosciences?

Me: Yeah.

Guy: What kind of job were you looking for?

Me: Well, I really wanted to be a professor. I did x # of years of postdoc.

Guy: You really don't look old enough to have done all that.

Me: Yeah, uh, thanks. Actually, I think that might be part of why I've had so much trouble getting a job. Nobody seems to think I look like I could be a professor.

Guy: Well, you could always go back to school for nursing.

Me: Uh, yeah, because I'm so nurturing and I really want to go back to school. Great idea, thanks.

------------------

I realized later that in that short conversation, he managed to reveal that he clearly thought that my most salient features are:

a) not credible

b) too young

c) very female

So naturally, I thought of my blog handle, and the subject of my last post about change. Some things really don't change as much as you'd think.

***

I had a conversation last week with an older woman who is not a scientist, but she has a friend who is married to a scientist. She seemed to think that because her friend's husband was able to get a job in a flyover red state, I should be able to get one if only I'd be willing to move to a remote, anti-choice anti-gay marriage location. And truthfully, I don't think I'd want to do that now. Up until last year, I would have done it. But not anymore.

Anyway, she seemed unwilling to believe that it's orders of magnitude easier for an older man to move to a new department after already being on the tenure-track than for a younger unemployed woman to get hired into an assistant professor position anywhere.

Because she had the authoritative dataset of (n=1).

***

Oh, and let's not forget the conversation with the woman whose teenage son wants to go into the biosciences. She said he's working in a lab at the university!

I said that's great, I did that when I was his age.

Her jaw dropped.

And I went on to get my PhD, I told her. And I did all this postdoctoral training. And I can't find a job.

Maybe all mothers are like this about their sons, I don't know. She seemed to think her son was like, exceptionally gifted or something. And maybe he is, but I suspect she has no idea how many equally smart people there are with similar aspirations.

I tried to explain that the job market is very crowded, and will probably stay that way, so he might be better off finding a different career path now, while he's still young and has the freedom to look around easily.

Of course she seemed to think I must be insane, or stupid, or both.

So what else is new.

- InsaneStupidYoungFemaleUnemployedScientist.

Scientiae post: Change is the only constant

I wasn't sure I was going to write for the Scientiae topic this time around, but I saw this article by David Brooks in the NYT and thought it was an interesting topic. I think I have written about this in various forms before, so in that sense, maybe my view has changed, or maybe it is constant. Maybe I am at least partly repeating myself. But the David Brooks article is full of fun factoids, anyway.

The gist of what he's saying is that previous generations were taught to be modest, specifically

a culture that emphasized self-effacement — I’m no better than anybody else, but nobody is better than me .

He says our culture has shifted towards thinking we're better than we really are.

Now, I find this particularly interesting.

I'm in my mid-thirties, so I'm not a college kid (the ones he says are particularly proud) and I'm not as old as David Brooks himself (presumably the more self-effacing bunch).

So where does my generation fit into all this? I feel like I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't.

But allow me to explain.

I went to a very competitive school when I was growing up, and one of the things that the school best illustrated was that no matter how good you were or how hard you tried, somebody was better than you at something, but everybody had something they were good at.

So while we were taught to have self-confidence (or try to, anyway), we were taught to be realistic about our abilities (or try to, anyway). In other words, you're probably better at some things than you are at others.

I am pretty good at the bench, for example, but I'm not good at basketball.

At all.

And that is OK.

I think it is ok for me to be confident in my lab bench skills, because I have worked hard for a long time on that particular skill set. And I think it is ok for me to say "I suck at basketball" because I really do and nobody would disagree with me.*

Having said that, I have received very strange reactions, both on this blog and in real life, when I exhibit any form of self-esteem about anything OR express any self-doubt.

In other words, I should probably just keep my mouth shut!

But let me give you a couple of examples of "Damned if I do or don't".

I have worked with scientists who said I was "arrogant" if I pointed out why certain experimental plans would not work, citing the literature and technical pitfalls and suggesting alternative approaches.

I have gotten similar reactions on this blog when I said I think I would be good at running a research lab of my own. That is my subjective assessment and prediction. Sure, I might be wrong. All I ever wanted was a chance to try.

On the other hand, I have worked with PIs who said I lacked confidence if I expressed frustration of any kind or, god forbid, asked for any kind of help or advice.

Similarly, I have had commenters tell me that I am too negative, and that I am too insecure, because of things I wrote on this blog.

And I've been told that I haven't been able to get a job because I'm either

a) not as good as I think I am
b) not selling myself well enough.

You can see my conundrum. It's a fine line to walk, and it's something that affects any job search. I still have not figured out that balance of explaining what I'm good at, and where I want to improve, but that I'm still the best hire even though I'm neither arrogant nor openly admitting to be lacking in any areas of the job description (even though I am).

Yeesh, that's nearly impossible to do. Especially for someone who is as compulsively honest as I am.

Ideally, in academic science, you would have someone (maybe a few of your former PIs) saying how great you are, so everyone knows and you don't have to sell yourself at all. Right? Isn't that the ideal?

But we all know that was not what happened for me. Does it mean I suck? Does it mean my PIs are arrogant and/or insecure themselves?

Maybe. Maybe they think I'm not as good as I should be, and that I would make them look bad if they helped me get a job. Or maybe they feel like it would be too arrogant of them to brag about their trainee? Nah, that can't be it. They have no problems bragging about themselves! Even though they're supposedly of the earlier generations that were taught to be self-effacing. They are very good at self-promotion. But I can't just mimic them, because that would be considered arrogant from a person my age. Right?

Now, everybody knows it's entirely possible to be both arrogant AND insecure, but I feel like I have a pretty healthy concept of what I can and cannot do.

Maybe I'm completely wrong about that, but I could make a two-column list and tally up all the ways I am competent or incompetent at certain tasks.

And anybody who knows me is aware that quite often I will say I can't do something and then succeed at doing it anyway. I come from a long line of people who love to vent, and I have a stubborn streak. I will admit I have a hard time giving up and grad school only reinforced my belief that I can sometimes do the impossible if I just try hard enough.

Does that mean I lack modesty? I'm sure some people think so.

*although I am good at Wii basketball, but that doesn't count.

Response to a question

At 8:26 AM, Anonymous said...

I went ahead and reported my PI. It seemed at first they could do something for me. But then I finally got the answer; PIs run their own separate groups and everyone has a different style of running their group. As such, we can't help you.
So, on it goes with a PI that wants me to work 12 hours a day (minimum), 6 days a week (minimum).
I am sick of it and wish there was a way out.
What do you do now, MsPhD? Did you find another job? Is it related to science?
Maybe unemployment even is not that bad.

I had the same experience, although in my case I was not complaining about the hours. I knew I was expected to work hard, and I did.

If the long hours are your major complaint, I say start applying for industry and government jobs. It might take you a year or more to find a job you like.

There is no academic postdoc lab where you can screw around, unless you plan to end up unemployed anyway.

To answer your question, I did not find a job.

The economy is terrible and all these statistics you hear about people who have PhDs being employed are bullshit - most of them include postdoc appointments in their calculations of "employment". However, all of us who did a postdoc and ended up with:

zero social security
zero unemployment benefits
zero "work experience" as far as anyone in the Real World is concerned

will tell you that a postdoc is "employment" only in the sense that you are making enough money to make ends meet (usually).

Universities consider it "training" or even refer to postdocs as "postdoctoral students".

The paradox is, postdocs don't qualify for access to the student rates for the gym, and aren't allowed to use the Career Center or any Alumni Services.

So look at it this way: you already don't have a job. At least you can pay your bills, right?