YoungFemaleScientist

Lies, damn lies, and statistics

2011-08-07T12:11:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-05-08T12:11:00.000-07:00

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

2011-05-05T08:09:00.000-07:00

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

2011-04-17T09:08:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-03-28T14:24:00.001-07:00

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

2011-03-11T09:23:00.000-08:00

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

2011-03-04T11:04:00.000-08:00

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?

The end.

2010-12-17T10:27:00.001-08:00

Yeah, folks, I'm really not feeling it lately. Between being completely sidelined by other bloggers who act like I'm just too crazy to be right, and not having much to write about here, and the fact that it's the end of the year, I'm thinking maybe it's time to shut down business for good.

Thanks to those of you who called me names, and generally held me up as an example of what not to be when you grow up.

Thanks to those who enjoyed the blog and said so, you're the best and made me feel like it was a worthwhile activity.

I'll still be around, maybe drop comments now and then on other blogs, but I think this will be the end of the formal posting.

Peace out.

Haven't I done anything already yet?

2010-12-13T09:38:00.000-08:00

Holiday parties, part 2.

More funny things about attending parties with no scientists: the way people try to get to know you by asking about your career aspirations. This is the more polite & friendly, less-condescending version of what I described in this previous post .

Dude: So, what do you do?

YFS: I'm not working right now.

Dude: So, what kind of thing do you want to do?

I pondered a bit over that question, because I couldn't figure out why it was bothering me. It's a perfectly reasonable thing to ask someone you've never met. Right?

In fact, it's probably more reasonable than what most scientists ask, which is past-tense, i.e. "What were you doing before?" or "What's your background?"

Because really, you might not want to talk about whatever you were doing before. It might not even be relevant.

In fact, I got tired of answering too honestly along the lines of, "Well, I'm trained as a scientist but I couldn't find a job and now I'm going to have to switch careers."

I thought the short answer version might send the message:

I don't really know you and don't really want to talk about it.

Apparently not.

I'm vaguely aware that an open-ended, future-directed question is where you're supposed to give your pitch. Because you never know when you're going to meet a rich philanthropist just looking for a place to donate for a tax write-off.

So I think I missed an opportunity or two by not having a prepared 30-second commercial for My Potential.

At a scientific meeting, I know exactly how to answer the "What do you want to do" question. I may not have ever been very good at it, but I did get better at launching into my condensed blurb about my exciting research project and how I still want to continue working on it if I only had the money & a (tenure-track) place to do the work and don't you have a search going on in your department?

But I need to be expecting to be asked anything beyond doing the usual name-handshake dance and nod.

Afterwards, I realized the problem is that I feel like they are making the perfectly reasonable assumption that I have done nothing thus far.

Obviously, because I'm not famous, and I don't drive a BMW.

Things I maybe should have said instead of just standing there clutching my drink and looking surprised:

"Well, you know I got my PhD several years ago and I have published X # of papers, so... Actually, I have already done what some people might consider a fairly significant body of work."

or

"I write a blog... sometimes."

Wow! A place to do pilot experiments?

2010-12-11T09:03:00.001-08:00

For a mere $25k, you can spend a year there? Complete with spa treatments?

I seriously thought this was some kind of joke, but it's not April, so...

check it out. As seen in a paid advertisement in Nature.

I am very curious to know how many people they have working there now, and what the breakdown is like. Are they mostly older? People from industry? Are schools buying memberships & sending students?

Ideas for fixing science, contn.

2010-12-05T18:53:00.001-08:00

Shooting the bullshit with a friend over beer, we started talking about a couple of articles that came out recently, including this one about productivity and money and this one about doubling the NSF budget, among others.

My friend was saying it can be wasteful to spend too much on basic research.

I was arguing that lots of basic research has applications later, like GFP and RNAi. There are plenty of examples of initially esoteric findings that turned out to be incredibly useful.

We were saying how it's important to fund both a sizable chunk of applied science and a healthy chunk of purely basic research, but we're not exactly sure what the best ratios would be.

Then we were talking about how there's no incentive to get a lot of bang for your buck. I've written before about how the average Cell paper costs about a million dollars or more, when you add up salaries and expenses to do the amount of work that is expected for "a complete story". Somewhere along the line (and I saw Drugmonkey mentioned this not long ago), quality got overrun by quantity. Now it seems like the only way to get high impact papers is to have a lot of money to spend, and the only way to get more money is to get high impact papers.

And thus, a cycle of nastiness was born.

But hey, that's NIH. Maybe NSF is not so bad (yet)? Currently, the NSF budget doesn't really cost much money, relative to other government spending.

On the other hand, just pumping money into it isn't going to solve everything, and if the NIH doubling is an example, it's likely to create a whole buncha additional problems that NSF hasn't solved before.

I said again that I think the problem is partly how research careers select for people who are okay with not trying to predict the future too far in advance. We'd all go crazy if our experiments didn't always turn out like we expected them to. Instead, happy researchers are the ones who are okay with that kind of uncertainty. We make plans, but we don't feel too compelled to stick to them if they don't make sense.

However, if you're going to run a government funding agency, and that's going to affect workforce issues, you kinda hafta be the sorta person who likes a PLAN. You really have to think about the consequences of your plans when it's going to affect entire generations of trainees not being able to get jobs fifteen years from now.

I don't know what's going on with the people at the top of the funding agencies, but Jeremy Berg is doing some interesting things with analyzing the data that everyone else has ignored until now.

I find it very amusing that apparently no one bothered to do these kinds of analyses before, or if they did, they weren't allowed to release it publicly?

Now I want to see what Jeremy Berg et al. are going to do about it.

Are there going to be real changes, or is this just an academic exercise where we're still afraid of pissing off the richest people (and yes, that's also a reference to the Obama tax cut nonsense going on right now).

Anyway, we were saying how maybe the real problem is the same old shit about bootstrapping. You can't start a project with no money. Or, you can, but you might have a hard time finishing it and getting it published.

I've always argued that our current funding system places way too much emphasis on reputation and doesn't pay enough attention to who is asking the right questions (especially considering the rampant problems with students and postdocs ghostwriting their PIs grants). It's not a level playing field when you won't let Cinderella come to the dance.

It's no secret that I dislike the current system, where universities take overhead money out of our grants and divert it to god only knows where. And I think it's unfair that you have to be faculty in order to apply for money. Your only alternative is to start your own business, in which case you'll need a lot more money because you'll have zero infrastructure.

My friend was suggesting that there should be money for doing pilot experiments, which would get around this problem that established PIs can use money from other grants to bootstrap future grant applications.

And the evil ones can effectively block their postdocs from doing the same.

I think that pilot bootstrapping facilities & mini grants could be a great solution. I suggested that getting your PhD should be enough training, and then you could go into a pool of qualified applicants who propose ideas and how to test them. Those proposals would be reviewed double-blind. That would be the first round. Then if your proposal was chosen, you'd be given some limited amount of time and money to generate some critical preliminary results, and a chance to present them to compete for an actual grant.

I dunno, something like that.

Point being that, yes, experience would be evident, and it would still be an advantage, but you couldn't check out of the lab completely and still claim to be *doing research*, like some senior PIs. And it would give an opportunity for the creative young folks to get into the game without having to jump through decades of bureaucratic nonsense and political dues-paying.

Still not sure what to do about the university problem, though. It just seems like the current granting system consists of throwing a lot of money into a black hole. And it sounds as though, at least according to Jeremy Berg's data, the more money you throw, the less return you get.

Douchebag Intrusion

2010-11-28T11:14:00.000-08:00

One of the wonderful things about the holidays is meeting friends of friends of friends at holiday parties.

Unfortunately, the transitive property does not apply, so the people two layers of friends removed... might assume they are automatically your friends, too.

I seem to keep running into these business/salesguy types who, for whatever reason, are

a) surprised to meet a girl PhD scientist
b) hitting on me (despite the presence of Mr.PhD)
c) not remotely attractive or charming
d) trying to tell me that I need to "figure out what I want to be when I grow up"
e) think they're much older than me, when in fact they are not
f) might even go so far as to tell Mr.PhD how lucky he is

Part (d) by far annoys me most. I think it's mostly because I look young, and because of that, most normal people don't understand that 5 years PhD + 8 years postdoc = I'm already pretty much all "grown up".

And when they ask me about my career, I say well you know I had pretty much figured out what I wanted to do, and that hasn't necessarily changed. And I try to hint that it's a much longer conversation than I want to have at a party. And I attempt to change the subject and/or go talk to someone else ASAP.

I'm not sure how they think they're helping me by giving me these lectures, or why on earth they think I would be completely honest about something deeply personal with a perfectly drunk perfect stranger. Or if this is just an extended part of (b).

And here I'm trying to be polite because, you know, friends of friends or whatever. Otherwise I would just tell them to fuck off.

Mostly I try to laugh and shake it off, because it's happened to me enough times now that I'm familiar with the type who does this, and I don't take it personally because I'm pretty sure they do it to everyone, all the time.

Also, when we walk away and Mr.PhD simply says, "I hate that guy! He's the textbook definition of a douchebag!"

That always makes me laugh.

Back room politics: analogy edition

2010-11-24T10:51:00.000-08:00

Article today in NY Times about a possible public safety database got me thinking about how this controversy is much like the current rift in scientific publishing.

In brief, there's a divide between the manufacturers, who don't want to be unfairly accused and/or undermined by fake reviews, vs. the consumers who fear that the manufacturers are just trying to make money regardless of who gets hurt.

This seems quite similar, I think, to parties who have gotten conflicting results and are both trying to publish them.

The manufacturer doesn't know if the consumer's experiences are real and/or due to user error. The consumer doesn't know if the manufacturer could have been aware of the potential safety issues and/or is already taking steps to fix the problem(s).

So let's talk about three options when it comes to conflicting data:

1. Just publish it: open access model, aka the public safety database.

Rationale: Who cares what was published before? Cite the earlier work, but say what you think is really going on.

Pros: Everything is out there.

Cons: It's a way to make accusations, which may or may not be backed up by expertise and evidence. Have you seen the movie Doubt?

2. Before publishing, contact the people who got the original results, and work out some kind of compromise. Aka, contacting the manufacturer first.

Rationale: The data can all be published anyway, most likely only the interpretations will be massaged, and/or both parties will benefit from the advanced exchange of information, while potentially saving face and mending fences.

Pros: Keeps everyone on the same page, prevents all-out wars, and avoids nasty surprises.

Cons: Gives the manufacturer (or your competitor) time to manipulate the situation to their advantage. May result in political pressure to hide data or interpretations.

3. Anonymous review. Aka, the current situation (and the traditional scientific publishing system).

Rationale: Allows the manufacturers to know who the consumers are and what accusations they are making, and ask for more evidence before having to address the potential problems raised by the consumers.

Pros: Protects the manufacturers from unfair or unqualified accusations.

Cons: Effectively silences the consumers if the manufacturers are powerful enough to block the data from coming into the public domain.

So, given a choice, what do you think the government should do about the public safety database? Do you think we should protect manufacturers, given the risk that our economy relies on them all staying in business? Would the whole thing fall apart if the abuses were made public? Is it better not to know?

Similarly, does it make more sense for science to remain as a manufacturer-driven economy, that is, one where the senior scientists have all the power? Doesn't the whole system rely on their expertise?

Or would it be better to have a consumer-driven economy, that is, one where those people currently referred to as "trainee" or "junior" are free to openly challenge the status quo without fear of repercussions?

Should you go to graduate school.

2010-11-17T11:23:00.000-08:00

A commenter writes:

I'm deciding whether to apply to PhD program in science (basic science research) or not. I've been unsure for many years, and time is tickling away.

If you could turned back time, would you have chosen to do the PhD route?

No, I don't think so.

How about Post-doc's?

No, I don't think so.

How hard was it to just walk away from the dream of getting tenured?

Honestly I never had a dream of getting tenured. I just wanted to run my own lab. I just wanted to be able to do my own research for a living, for a while. I don't even know if tenure is going to exist anymore, if you read the Chronicle of HIgher Education you'll see that tenure is... tenuous at best.

Deciding to walk away was a long, slow process of being miserable for a lot of years and thinking for a long time that what doesn't kill us makes us stronger... and then realizing that it still added up to a cumulative appearance of professional problems that I couldn't cure.

It took multiple friends and one therapist telling me that this was literally killing me, that it was eating me alive, that crying every day was not okay and that it wasn't worth being a martyr.

It also took realizing that while none of my so-called science "mentors" ever said I wasn't good enough, they weren't particularly encouraging, either. They were afraid to admit they might not be able to help me get a job, and one even told me I should quit. And maybe I should have quit when she said that, but I thought at the time (and still think) that she is unhappy and wanted to live vicariously through me leaving.

I realized I had to figure out my own limit.

And then I reached it. The second time my PI stabbed me in the back, I decided I had reached my limit and had to formulate an exit strategy, even if that strategy consisted of nothing more than putting one foot in front of the other until I made it out the door.

I've been following your blog for some time now. You seem to confirm everything that I have always feared about walking into the PhD, Post-doc, aspiring tenure position path.

I know it is hard -- based on observing grad students, post-docs, and those continuing to do more post-docs... many eventually go into industry, 1 actually got an assistant staff position (after over ten years of post-doc).

I might do this since I might have some of that slight chance. or I might have to make a DECISION now, and know that it is too small of a chance.

Yes, and even industry positions can be very hard to get, especially at the post-PhD levels. Especially if you have no industry experience.

Honestly, if I had to do it over again, I would have gone to work at a company for a year (at least a year!) before I applied to grad schools. It would be invaluable on your CV later, and it gives you a chance to see if you like doing research while having some gainful employment with benefits, the potential to stay on, and maybe even the chance to move up.

Or you might decide, after doing some benchwork, that you'd rather go to med school. I sometimes think I should have done that instead.

Or you might decide to do patent law or business school instead.

I might apply to professional schools (eg. PharmD).

My impression is that there are jobs for pharmacists, and that they pay well.

There are also lots of jobs for people with nursing degrees.

What are your thoughts, Ms.PhD?

Well, you've read my blog and my opinion hasn't changed.

I still think that the system is broken and very few people get through grad school and postdoc without regrets.

Some decide halfway through grad school that they're miserable, but they finish anyway and then leave.

Almost everyone else gets through grad school just fine but then runs into trouble during their postdoc.

Personally, I went in blind. I liked research and I had worked in labs, so I thought I knew. But I didn't realize that everyone was sheltering me and lying to me up until I went to grad school.

To this day, I think there were one or two people who genuinely believed (still believe) I would make a great PI someday. One of them told me, even as I was losing hope, that he thought I could be "one of the best". Whatever that means.

But I also think most of the people I came in contact with were barely hanging on themselves, and rather than telling me about their own uncertainties, chose to say nothing at all.

For example, I only found out later how many of my colleagues have been on anti-depressants.

A wise woman told me early on that I should "read between the lines". But I didn't know that she meant you have to pay attention to the silences.

Over time, I noticed that other students were getting better fellowships than I was, and I wondered why no one had encouraged me to apply for those or why my letters weren't good enough to help me win one. Or why grades from undergraduate classes seemed to matter more than the research proposal I wrote myself and got feedback on from my advisors.

I didn't know that many PIs write their grad students' and postdocs' fellowship proposals themselves. I didn't know until much later that I was competing with people who were willing to do that.

I wondered if it was that I wasn't good enough at science, but I don't think that was ever the problem.

It just didn't occur to me to find the Most Famous Dood I could find and kiss his ass to make sure he would write me a Most Glowing Letter (and possibly the entire research proposal section) for my grad school and postdoc funding applications.

I really thought you just showed up, figured out what interested you, and that if you worked hard people would notice and it would pay off.

But that's not how it works at all. You have to be strategic from before Day 1, you have to have all the political skills and then some family connections wouldn't hurt, either.

And don't kid yourself, that's probably true in all professions, to some extent.

I still think the most heartbreaking aspect of academic science is the hypocrisy inherent in claiming that science is the highest calling because it is supposedly supremely objective and ethical.

When, in fact, many of the most powerful scientists are neither objective nor ethical. There are subjective aspects to publishing, funding, and hiring, and there is plenty of room for unethical hijinks in those three areas.

And that is how the system determines who is successful in science and who is not.

Make no mistake, you will be competing with cheating, manipulating liars at some point in your career.

If you're bothered by that, then you probably won't be happy doing academic science.

Personally, it made me angry and depressed. I will not cheat, and I could not out-manipulate the liars. And I realized that for every one of these mini-battles I might win, there will always be another one to stress me out and make me more powerless and invisible when I lose.

And sure, I can blog about it, but there will always be trolls telling me I'm paranoid or that I should just put up with it like everyone else does.

Yeah, like everyone else who puts up with it by taking mind-altering drugs. Like that's a great solution.

Selfishly, I could tell you to go to grad school because I want more conscientious students to go into science and change things.

Realistically, I don't know if it's possible. I think that science is in a time of crisis (danger and opportunity) and it's anybody's guess whether things are going to change or just continue in a decomposing, downward spiral.

And I don't think it's fair for anyone to tell you it's worth investing your life in such a risky and potentially painful proposition.

My best mentor

2010-11-16T17:55:00.001-08:00

This year has been the fastest year ever. I can't believe it's almost Thanksgiving.

I've mentioned before that my best mentors were not in science. I'm going to keep this short, with no details. I'm especially missing this person lately, and having crossed paths is one of the things I'm most thankful for.

She's about ten years older than me, and probably the most thoughtful teacher I've ever met. She's the kind of person who watches her students like a hawk, and then goes home and thinks incessantly about what they need to learn and how to teach it. She'll go out of her way to learn new things herself so that she can help her students with whatever they need. No one asks her to do this, and no one told her this was part of her job. This dedication really makes her outstanding.

Some days are better than others, but no one ever doubts that she loves her work and that this is the best way for her make the world a better place.

She leaves her crap, as they say, outside the door. And she expects her students to do the same. If she's not feeling up to the task, or is otherwise distracted, she'll have someone else take over her responsibilities, rather than flaking out or doing a half-assed job.

She expects the best from everyone, and accepts no excuses, while still being genuinely concerned and supportive.

She's ambitious, and sometimes works a little too hard. While I can see her struggling to learn how to be patient with herself, she's always infinitely patient with her students.

She knows who she is, and has her priorities straight, but she's not going to impose them on anyone else.

All of this, and she's not at all self-conscious despite being in a very visible position. She exudes a kind of confident calm that puts everyone around her at ease.

She makes everyone feel like we're each her favorite student, while giving everyone enough attention and encouragement that there's no jealousy at all.

***

Looking back over this list of warm fuzziness, I still think one of the critical problems in science is the central conflict of interest built into the assumption of a mentoring relationship with the PI of the lab.

The best mentors I've had were always people whose own careers did not depend at all on my accomplishments.

All they asked of me was my continued effort.

And we knew that I was free to leave at any time. But I didn't want to, because they were awesome.

What I got from them in return for my hard work was a generosity of spirit that I think is impossible in a system where the PI's success rests far too heavily on the shoulders of the mentee, who in turn is shackled to the PI even if they're not getting what they need to make progress.

***

I miss my best mentor, and think of her often.

Be the Visible Bitch

2010-11-11T09:04:00.000-08:00

Some comments on the last post got me thinking about this question of women being overlooked, sometimes figuratively and sometimes literally.

That and a couple of links from physorg.com about gender bias in hiring, specifically related to how women are perceived.

There was a question about how to get noticed. I can list some tactics here, but I'm sure there will be additional feedback in the comments.

1. Wear bright colors

It sounds trivial, but wearing bright colors suggests confidence and makes you more visible than dark or pale colors. Go ahead, wear solid red, orange, or magenta. Do something with your hair, if only because it makes YOU feel more confident when you look in the mirror. Being visible starts with your wanting to be seen.

2. Take up space

Yes, I'm talking about mannerisms here. Sit up or stand up tall, don't hunch your shoulders like a shrinking violet. Be the tall poppy. As tall as you can be.

Smile! And gesture widely (not wildly) when you talk. Don't sit on your hands, use them!

Lean in rather than backing away, make eye contact with everyone around, and raise your voice. Pointedly making eye contact will help you figure out if people are hearing you or not.

At a group meal, move quickly to get a good seat, then pull your chair up and make sure nobody crowds you out.

3. Go to the microphone

At meetings where questions are taken from standing microphones, GO THERE. Practice. You might be nervous every time you do it, but it does get easier. Your first questions might ramble a bit, but practice and you'll learn how to be succinct.

4. Argue

Don't be overly nice and or polite. When someone speaks over you, call them on it. Practice saying firmly and loudly, "Let me finish."

Yell if you have to. Practice belting out things like, "Hey! I'm sitting there! Get your own chair!"

If you still want to be liked, there are comical ways of doing this so that everyone appreciates that you're just sticking up for yourself, not taking it personally.

5. Sit front and center

Figure out where your eye is drawn in any room. This depends on the lighting, so pick somewhere bright, whether it's near a spotlight, or near a window. Figure out the eye-line of the speaker or professor, and make sure they can see you. Again, you'll be able to tell because they'll make eye contact, and might even speak to you just to be friendly. You might be surprised the first time this happens.

6. Introduce yourself

Even if it feels somewhat awkward or isn't usually done. Pretend you're from a place where people do this all the time, even if you're not.

Say, "Hello, I'm ___, " and shake hands. Come up with a harmless question to ask, whether it's about the meeting about to take place, or the weather, whatever.

Practice being outgoing with everyone, and it becomes second nature. Quite often when you do this, you'll find that whomever you meet is instantly put at ease, and actually feels relieved. You made THEM feel more welcome because you went out of your way to think of their needs (secretly, most people are shy with strangers, especially in science).

Yes, it takes a lot of energy. You will be nervous at first, and then tired. But hopefully you will meet some genuinely decent people if you make a point of putting yourself out there. And then it gets easier.

In every case, be prepared to be rebuffed. Don't take it personally, just shake it off. Sometimes people are grouchy (think House, MD). Whatever, that's not your problem. Try to be relentlessly cheerful no matter what. Ideally, try not to care what these people think of you. You'll make mistakes, you might put your foot in your mouth sometimes, but that actually happens more often when you're worrying about it.

They might call you a bitch. But they won't ignore you, either.

Now I know, I don't usually sound like this on this blog, but I can typically pull off this kind of good behavior when I put in the effort. And yes, they do call me a bitch. No amount of being friendly or supportive of my colleagues will ever make that go away. But it's (mostly) because I'd rather argue than be ignored, and I'm often (usually?) right when it comes to scientific arguments.

Nobody likes you when you're right all the time. Especially if you say it with a smile! ;-)

I'm rarely ignored unless I choose to be in hiding. And sure, I have had times when I just wanted to hide, and I am very good at being invisible when I want to be left alone.

If you want to hide, by all means, go ahead. Wear dark, baggy clothing, sit in the corner, don't speak to anyone. No one will see you or give you a hard time... unless they accidentally sit on you.

Never mind about me, let's talk about you

2010-11-04T09:43:00.000-07:00

As a follow-on from my last post, last night I dreamt that it was pouring rain and I was working in a space that was sort of a combination of my thesis lab and one of my rotation labs (like the buildings had been joined, Inception-style). I just realized I was going to have to run a new kind of experiment I had never done before, but first I was going to have a cup of tea and start reading protocols and deciding how to do it.

This was a pretty good dream. Especially since supposedly pouring rain usually means good things are going to happen; same for tea, apparently.

***

In other news, I met with somebody who was supposedly going to, I don't know, be a potentially useful career contact or mentor.

But this person epitomized everything I do not want to be when I grow up:

1. Dislikable
2. Condescending
3. Enamored of Famous Names while apparently being unable to tell (or care?) that their science is crappy
4. Miserable & stressed out
5. Hypocritical
6. Misinformed
7. Self-absorbed

I'm wondering if I have to thank the person who set up the meeting. I think I'm supposed to be polite like that, even if the experience was not enjoyable or particularly useful. At least it was thought-provoking (as many of the worst experiences are).

This experience reminded me of what I don't like about scientists. And why it was always so hard to find anyone I admired to guide me through all the pitfalls of trying to make a living doing science.

But it amuses me that everyone seems to assume that I don't want to continue working on what I worked on before.

I guess it's because I'm not in academia right now. There's just this collective assumption that it's a one-way street, you can only leave but never go back, there's no other ways to do research, and nobody in their right mind would leave if they really cared about their project.

Right?

But how could they know any of that? Nobody ever asks me about my work.

I don't know why. It's kind of baffling to me. I ask them about their career path, and they don't seem to have even the basic manners to pause in their pre-recorded perpetually playing self-promotion tape to ask me about what I've done and why it was interesting.

Maybe I just look boring.

But don't we all know people who light up when they start talking about their favorite things?

I was reminded again that, boring or not, I still look very young - young enough to be quite often condescended to by people who are just a couple of years older than me.

And all the while, the Condescenders don't have any idea what I know or don't know. Because I can't get a word in edgewise without interrupting rudely.

It's always awkward when I'm meeting with someone who goes off on a condescending lecture, and then I have to jump in and say that I know, and how I know, which often leaves them in embarrassed silence.

When I'm feeling magnanimous, I'll make a joke about it to charm them into thinking I won't hold it against them (but of course I'll make a mental note of it!).

And when I'm annoyed, I just let the silence linger.

***

So anyway.

I read something recently on the topic of job insecurity and how it affects the productivity and happiness of workers. It was yet another take on why we don't have more innovation in this country.

I was thinking about how this applies in academic labs, where the PI and sometimes staff have relative job security (tenure, etc.), compared to the grad students and especially postdocs, who are constantly in fear of being kicked out.

Basically the article (sorry, I don't remember where or I'd include the link) proposed that prolonged job insecurity essentially induces a perpetual state of panic, which impairs thinking and creativity.

Generalized panic, they said, makes it difficult to remain calm in relatively normal situations, like negotiating with a boss or collaborator. And it makes people avoid all but the most essential confrontations. They just can't handle the additional stress. So they're less likely to ask for respect or recognition, for example, but they're also less likely to report a coworker who is conducting dirty deeds, for example like stealing petty cash from a small business, or in science, the equivalent might be something like manipulating or fabricating data.

So clearly, if this proposal is correct, then perpetual job stress is terrible for scientific progress, and yet at least until recently, the thinking in academia was that keeping students and postdocs "on their toes", as it were, was actually better for productivity. I guess it's a kind of capitalist thinking about working hard.

And never mind about how creativity flourishes best in a state of relaxation, and is usually stifled under prolonged stress.

Meanwhile, capitalism may not be my favorite thing, but clearly, communism is not the solution. The story about the Nobel Peace Prize continues to interest me. I love watching China pathetically begging people not to attend the ceremony.

We need an equivalent for science, some kind of ethics award for peaceful protests.

Nightmares

2010-10-26T10:03:00.000-07:00

Last night I dreamt that my advisor was furious with me for missing a really important finding (in my dream, this manifested as a glowing egg). He was really excited about it and had based his entire grant on it and at least five papers.

I had to tell him that

a) I knew about the observation, because I had seen the same thing years earlier

b) I never mentioned it to him because I knew it was an artifact, which would have been obvious if he had done the control experiment.

Note that, in this dream, he was working in the lab himself, and the lab looked sort of like a classroom I had in high school.

I think the setting means that at some level, I believe he's to blame for a lot of the stuff that his trainees have done, even if it was never entirely clear to me whether he came up with it himself, or if he encouraged it without knowing any better, or just chose to be in denial.

I think my fear in this dream was multi-layered:

1. It scared me that my advisor was too optimistic and not thinking clearly
2. No one else seemed aware of the major caveats, so I felt like I was alone and going out on a limb
3. I was afraid I wouldn't be able to get him to believe me that it was an artifact, and he would continue to publish on it and get grants and no one would be the wiser

Sort of reminds me of a real event a while back, when one of his postdocs got mad at me when I pointed out that her result was not above background. I said she hadn't run one of the essential controls I had suggested.

It was crazy-making because I had been trying to tell her for a while, and she kept saying she didn't need to do it.

Except then she accused me (in front of our advisor) of not having told her to do it.

Nice, huh? Why would I do that? I don't like watching people throw good money after stupid, poorly designed experiments.

On some level, I know this is also my fear of actually being a supervisor. I've had students and peers who ignored my suggestions, and I think it's really scary that we have so many scientists who come up with excuses not to do controls. The excuses include things like:

1. You're not my advisor
2. You're just a postdoc
3. You're just a girl
4. It's too much work
5. I'm not going to do the whole experiment over again
6. It would take too long
7. Someone else said I don't have to do it

And I know, we've all said #4-7 at some point in our lives (usually as grad students). Because we were tired. Or afraid of getting scooped. Or just unaware that the reviewers might ask for you to do it anyway so you might as well do it now.

What's really baffling to me is, there is only a small percentage of scientists who will take a suggestion, no matter who it comes from, and really think it over.

And they will say, "Hmm, well, I don't know, but I haven't tried that. I should look it up and see what she is getting at, or maybe just ask her to explain more because I'm not sure I understand why she thinks this is important. And then maybe I will try that, because even if she is just a girl-postdoc, I haven't tried that before."

I guess it's because everyone is too tired and stressed out from racing around the rat-maze all day.

Grab bag of atrocities & wonderment

2010-10-12T09:27:00.001-07:00

Lots of stuff I've been meaning to write about. Yesterday I was overjoyed to see this fantastic post over at FSP about the concept of "selective sexism". This is when a guy seems to be okay with some women but when threatened by others, resorts to harassment tactics.

I was thrilled to see the FSP finally gets it, that a seemingly respectful young male postdoc (to her) could actually be a complete asshat to his peers (female postdocs). Of course, it's not clear that anyone is prepared to do the right thing in this situation, but I was glad to see FSP noticing the disparity and blogging about it.

This week I've mostly been catching up on some classic pieces in science journalism. One is this wonderful piece by Kendall Powell in Nature News.

The article points out, though understates, how much worse funding is now than it was 10 years ago (when I was in grad school). Funding back then was at the 32% level, which didn't seem so bad, if you really believed that about one-third of applications got funded back when I was struggling to get my PhD. It's now down to 21%.

To most non-scientists, that may sound like a 10% difference. But you could think of it as a 35% decrease, in the sense that those who would previously have been funded now won't be.

But it's a bit more complicated than that anyway, since the percentage points don't mean 32 out of 100 grants will be funded. It's not clear, but I think they're really citing the percentiles, which is a weighted ranking number based on past years and the distribution of all the grants this year.

Isn't that clever, how they hide the degree to which funding has become increasingly more competitive? It was never 1 in 3 to begin with, but they don't like you to know that when you're choosing your undergraduate science major!

Here is the paragraph everyone should read. If you're considering becoming a cancer researcher, if you're donating a dollar at your grocery store (as mine has been harassing me to do multiple times per unavoidable visit to buy food), this is how scientifically your money gets distributed [comments in brackets are my snide remarks]:

All of this puts immense pressure on the grant-review panels. [poor grant review panels!] Senior reviewers say that when the top one-third of proposals can be funded, the review process works well at identifying the best science. But when the success rate drops, they see the process start to fall apart. [BECAUSE IT'S NOT A VERY ROBUST SYSTEM TO BEGIN WITH.]

Let me pause here and emphasize this point before going on. How is this a great system when it works at 32% but FALLS APART at 21%? If this were a building, it would fall down.

But next comes my favorite part of the entire article:

Conversations turn nit-picky and negative, with reviewers looking for any excuse not to fund a project, rather than focusing on its merits. Reviewers say that they feel forced into making impossible choices between equally worthy proposals, especially when success rates are less than 20%. "That's in a range where you have lost discrimination," says Dick McIntosh, professor emeritus of cell biology at the University of Colorado in Boulder. "That's a situation where you are grading exam papers by throwing them down the stairs." The chairman of the ACS panel agrees. "Deciding between the top grants, I don't want to say it's arbitrary, but it's not really based on strong criteria," he says. "It's subtle things." [emphasis mine]

There are tons of other gems in this article, so you should absolutely read the whole thing. I applaud Kendall Powell for giving a fly-on-the-wall view of the grant review process. Although I have to admit, many of the subtleties would have been lost on me when I was in college or even grad school, because she mostly just reports observations without really spelling out what it all means.

The next to last paragraph includes advice from the ACS vice-chair(wo)man [I guess it's a Britishism to call everyone chairman regardless of gender?]:

She also says applicants should use their contacts to sniff out the personality of the panel and the nature of the competition.

Just read that sentence over a few more times.

Yeah, you idealistic types out there. I'm talking to you. It's not about the quality of your work.

****

Speaking of quality of work, I know some of you saw this story about the postdoc who sabotaged a labmate's cell cultures with alcohol.

Whew.

I hate to say it, but this article actually made me feel better.

I had a couple of situations myself where people threw out my samples or reagents that I think might qualify.

Despite all this, there is little to prevent perpetrators re-entering science. In the United States, federal bodies that provide research funding have limited ability and inclination to take action in sabotage cases because they aren't interpreted as fitting the federal definition of research misconduct, which is limited to plagiarism, fabrication and falsification of research data.

I was deeply impressed, both by the grad student for pursuing the complaint, and the PI for listening to her and starting an investigation without first confronting the postdoc, which would have made the hidden camera approach impossible to pursue.

When it happened to me, I approached my PI (two different PIs, actually), and in both cases the PI confronted the person in question, alerting them and giving them a chance to defend themselves (and/or switch tactics).

The PI in this article did everything right, or this wouldn't have been resolved.

Here again, the entire article is worth reading, although many subtleties would have been lost on me when I was younger and less experienced, it includes some useful tidbits, especially if you might have missed earlier posts on these topics.

Daniele Fanelli at the University of Edinburgh, UK, who studies research misconduct, says that overtly malicious offences such as Bhrigu's are probably infrequent, but other forms of indecency and sabotage are likely to be more common. "A lot more would be the kind of thing you couldn't capture on camera," he says. Vindictive peer review, dishonest reference letters and withholding key aspects of protocols from colleagues or competitors can do just as much to derail a career or a research project as vandalizing experiments. These are just a few of the questionable practices that seem quite widespread in science, but are not technically considered misconduct. In a meta-analysis of misconduct surveys, published last year (D. Fanelli PLoS ONE 4, e5738; 2009), Fanelli found that up to one-third of scientists admit to offences that fall into this grey area, and up to 70% say that they have observed them.

[emphasis mine]

Now that Bhrigu is in India, there is little to prevent him from getting back into science. And even if he were in the United States, there wouldn't be much to stop him. The National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, through its Office of Research Integrity, will sometimes bar an individual from receiving federal research funds for a time if they are found guilty of misconduct. But Bhigru probably won't face that prospect because his actions don't fit the federal definition of misconduct, a situation Ross finds strange. "All scientists will tell you that it's scientific misconduct because it's tampering with data," she says.

Still, more immediate concerns are keeping Ross busy. Bhrigu was in her lab for about a year, and everything he did will have to be repeated.

Perhaps the best part of the article is written in such a way as to not really stand on its own. Here's the actual text:

After Bhrigu pleaded guilty in June, Ross called Trempe at the University of Toledo. He was shocked, of course, and for more than one reason. His department at Toledo had actually re-hired Bhrigu. Bhrigu says that he lied about the reason he left Michigan, blaming it on disagreements with Ross.

Allow me to translate. The cheating postdoc went back to his former lab, lied about why he needed a job, and the former PI had no idea about the sabotage investigation. The only way anyone knew was because the PI who caught him actually called the former advisor and related the story.

There was nothing posted to Google or twitter, nothing circulated by NIH Feedback Loop email. NOBODY KNEW.

Oh and another funny thing happened on the way to my reading this article. It was forwarded to me by two people, both of whom said they witnessed or heard rumors about similar things happening in their former labs. Neither of those cases were investigated.

Ethics in publishing: the recurring case of the dishonest collaborator

2010-10-08T09:58:00.000-07:00

So this is one of those quandaries, it came up twice this week and I thought I would just ask the blogosphere because I'm not sure how best to advise.

I have more than one friend in the same situation: powerful collaborator has repeatedly finagled scoopings by other collaborators.

So here's the scenario:

Junior prof or postdoc working with Big Famous D00d on somewhat controversial project.

Big Famous D00d is also working with other people on competing projects (other side of the controversy, or tangential with some overlap).

Junior person has to get approval from D00d to send the manuscript out, or at least let him know that it's being submitted.

D00d pulls some kind of shenanigans, either suggesting back-to-back publications, or otherwise delaying, or pulling strings behind the scenes (like notifying the other team). Regardless of the method, in the end he is going out of his way to make sure the other team's paper gets submitted ASAP.

What do you do, as the junior person in this scenario?

Do you:

a) Suck it up and get scooped one last time, then cut off the collaboration (inevitably wrecking all chances of getting any funding ever again, inevitably leading to the end of your career)?

b) Suck it up and pretend like you don't care, inevitably leading to a serious drinking problem?

c) Pick a fight with Dood, with a lawyer, and quit science because you'll be spending the rest of your life in court?

d) Quit science and then publish whatever you have left on your own in Questionable Journal(s), sit quietly and wait to see what happens?

e) Any other possible scenarios you can think of?

Keep in mind, most people I know of who have been in similar situations went with (a) or (b). While (a) might seem noble, it sounds a bit like shooting yourself in the foot, to me. This is how we lose a lot of great people.

The only other way to go, I'm thinking, is to try to persuade Big D00d to put you on top, and let the other guy get scooped instead. This may require enormous amounts of money spent on alcohol, sexual favors, etc. and my friends are not the kind of people who want to do that. They're just frustrated and appalled, even though we all know this goes on regularly in business and science.

Maybe the business types can advise? I feel like this is the kind of situation a Michael J. Fox or Will Smith or Melanie Griffith might be able to charm their way out of.

I'm more of a Meg Ryan myself, as regular blog readers already know. Except that the D00d in science is never the one who writes great emails and brings you flowers when you're sick.

Response to comments & Mad Men

2010-09-14T10:57:00.001-07:00

Kea, you're right. I tried it both ways. I did tell them my funding was running out. They either didn't care, didn't believe me, or just plain rejoiced.

FrauTech, you're also right. Older women think that because we're ungrateful, they're not obliged to be sympathetic or helpful at all.

***

As an aside- did any of you see Mad Men this week? (warning: I'm trying not to spoil it for those who haven't seen it yet, but I don't know if I achieved sufficient ambiguity)

I just love how Peggy deals with a situation and then Joan gives her an earful about how that didn't really fix anything and maybe made things worse for both of them. For all of them.

I love how the show illustrates the multiple layers of catch-22: that women have had to resort to these convoluted sneaky machinations to get back at men who screwed them over, because taking the high road (and taking advice from their male bosses) only seems to dig a deeper hole.

But that reduces them, essentially, to backstabbing manipulation. Also, it requires a lot of access, pre-existing organizational knowledge, and ingenuity.

And Joan isn't mentoring Peggy. Don Draper is mentoring Peggy.

***

Anyway, yes of course when there are multiple available benches, someone as proactive and assertive as me would certainly just pick one out and start using it.

But haven't you ever joined a lab only to find they hadn't made room for you to work? Or told you to "sit tight"?

I thought that science was so overcrowded that by now that had happened to everyone at some point in their career!

Anon 2:35, Just reading your comment makes me feel like blogging is worth continuing even when sometimes from day to day I think it's just too hard to keep it up.

I'm always stunned when people say shit like that to me, at work or otherwise. Wish I had a way to instantly generate witty or cutting comeback remarks to turn the tables on those jerks!

Bee, I'm not sure I understood your comment. You mean women have this problem all over? Or getting crappy advice has nothing to do with being in a male-dominated field? Because that was sort of my point. I think women in women-dominated fields have a totally different experience (and I know a few areas of science where all the bigwigs are women).

Anon 7:37, thanks! Glad you liked it.

Advice well-meant

2010-09-13T13:42:00.000-07:00

A comment on the last post gave me the idea that maybe I should say something explicitly here, since I'm not sure I've said it before.

When does it make sense for young female scientists to take advice from young or old men?

I ask this question because the answer is unequivocally: NOT ALWAYS.

But I think this question deserves more dissection.

Coming from a field that is almost exclusively men, I had two choices when I needed mentoring:

1. Ask men in my field
2. Ask anyone outside my field

Now, obviously, if it's a field-specific thing, you have to look harder to find outsiders who have parallel problems in their own field.

For example, smaller fields have different problems than bigger fields. Younger disciplines have different problems from older disciplines.

I've written about this recently, using computer/tech as an example of a younger discipline that may come to experience some of the same issues that much older disciplines, like Biology, have long held deeply entrenched as part of the traditional hazing.

So you might meet someone who seems older and wiser yet similar to you in important ways, like personality type or country of origin or gender. You might try to ask them for advice, thinking they might be a good mentor.

And you might still feel like you're trying to have a conversation with a wire stretched between couple of tin cans. Where yours is located on the moon.

For example, I tried to ask an older woman from a different field for advice on how to handle sexual harassment from my advisor. I didn't feel comfortable talking to any of my male mentors or colleagues about this issue. I told MrPhD and he didn't know what to say, so he just said something like, "Oh my god. That sucks." So I thought maybe I needed a female mentor in this case.

MsPhD: I don't know what to do. I've tried dressing conservatively but he still doesn't take me seriously.

LadyProf: Oh, just play along.

MsPhD: You're kidding, right?

LadyProf: Aren't you? He's not really that bad, is he?

MsPhD: Um, yeah, he really is. That's why I was asking.

LadyProf (stunned): Um, have you been to the Office of Sexual Harrassment?

MsPhD: Yeah, they were no help. They said I could file a complaint but they can't protect me from any backlash.

LadyProf: That's true. They can't do anything about that.

***

Did that conversation make me feel better? No.

Did she give me any concrete advice or support? No.

Did I feel like I could approach her again about similar problems or if things escalated? No.

Did I have this identical conversation over and over again with many older women professors before I finally gave up? Yes.

Did some of them share their own horrifying anecdotes, as if commiseration was going to make me somehow feel better? Yes.

Did it make me feel better? No. It made me feel worse.

***

It's often hard to get to know people well enough, and build enough trust, to find out whether there are similar problems across fields. It can take a long time, and some scientists find it too painful to even think about these issues. Those kinds of people, even if they're friends, aren't going to be much help when you're deep in the mire.

But asking men in your own field, when you're a woman, can yield little or bad advice.

I recall one conversation I had with a male colleague when I started in a new lab.

MsPhD: Hey, did you get a bench assigned to you when you first started? Or did you have to ask?

Dude: Um, I didn't have to ask.

MsPhD: Well, I don't have a bench and I still don't have one, even though I asked. Any suggestions for what I should do about that?

Dude (baffled): I don't know. I didn't have to ask.

***

Now, was this an oversight on my advisor's part? Maybe.

Just bad luck on my part? Maybe.

Was my colleague particularly unsupportive? Not really. He had his own shit to worry about.

Were there any women I could ask if anything similar had happened to them? No.

*****

Here's another little story that I think also illustrates how confusing things can be. I consulted several male assistant professor friends for advice.

MsPhD: Well, my grant got rejected.

NiceGuy: Welcome to the club. Want me to read the reviews and tell you what I think?

MsPhD: That would be really helpful, thanks!

NiceGuy: Oh wow, these reviews are really good. I'm sure you'll get it next time. You're really close. You just need a better letter of support from your advisor.

MsPhD: But he's refusing to write me one.

NiceGuy: Oh. Well I guess you should move and get a new advisor then.

MsPhD: Okay. I'll think about it.

I had this same conversation with several different assistant professor guys. I mentioned this to a woman who sits on search committees regularly, because she asked what happened with my grant.

MsPhD: So I've been told that I should revise and resubmit, but I have to get someone to sign on as Co-PI.

MentorLady: Oh, you can't do that.

MsPhD: Why not? At least two of my male mentors told me to do that. Actually maybe three or four.

MentorLady: Yeah, that will help you but only in the short term. But you'll never be able to get another grant after that so it won't help you in the long run. I mean, you can ask. But you'll never get another grant.

MsPhD: Really? Why not?

MentorLady: Because you're a woman. No one will see you as independent. I see this happen all the time. You'll never be able to get a faculty position and you won't be able to take the money with you anyway. Besides, if you switch labs, they'll want you to work on their projects. They won't sign onto yours.

MsPhD: I'm sure you're right. What else am I supposed to do?

MentorLady: Apply for jobs and hope for the best.

MsPhD: What if that doesn't work? My fellowship is running out. And I'm not eligible for anything else.

MentorLady: You'll think of something. You're smart.

MsPhD: Um, thanks.

****

These are rather trite examples and may not best illustrate the point I was trying to make here. There are many others, like asking my male colleagues at a meeting whether they ever felt left out of the loop when the senior boys' club discusses things over beer.

Guys: Yeah, you missed a great time last night. It was so cool, Drs. So and So and So were all there...

MsPhD: But I wasn't invited. I didn't even know you were going.

Guys: Oh, well you'll have to go with us next time. You're always welcome to join us. You know that!

MsPhD: Actually, I didn't know that. And now the meeting is over.

Guys: Well there's always next year.

MsPhD (silently): Not really. I won't be here next year. I don't have any more funding.

My point is, while there are all kinds of problems and all kinds of people you could ask, it's not just as simple as finding other women or asking people in your field.

If you're the only data point, you can't draw a line. You can't know if you're being treated differently because of your gender, or what you might be missing out on, or whether any of that is deliberate.

You can't know what tactics to use to approach solving these new problems, because it's uncharted territory. Especially if you're one of the only women in your field.

Sure, you can rely on anecdata from other model systems where similar things have been reported, but there's no placebo-controlled phase III spreadsheet you can reference for potential side-effects that occurred in a small percent of patients.

And meanwhile, you're staying up nights worrying about this, when really supposed to be putting your time and mental energy into analyzing data for your.... science.

When navigating your career becomes a full-time project in and of itself, and your data all seem to be garbage in/garbage out, it's no wonder women working in male-dominated fields are more likely to drop out. This happened to me over and over and over again, where I got advice from my junior prof male role models, only to have my female mentors point out why it would never work for me to follow in their footsteps because of hidden bear traps I didn't even know about.

There is something to be said for critical mass and safety in numbers.

At least with numbers, you know where you stand.

Harsh reality

2010-09-08T11:35:00.000-07:00

I'm having one of those weeks. And it's only Wednesday.

A well-meaning former colleague sent me an ad for a faculty position in another city, at a school where I don't know anyone.

Sigh.

I said thank you. What's the point in explaining that I'm not going to waste my time and energy applying? I took it as a compliment that she seems to think I deserve a faculty position.

Okay, if that were the worst thing that happened all week, that would be fine. But it's death by a thousand pinpricks, so of course it wasn't the only thing.

Also, a evil former colleague has a paper coming out soon in Nature.

I knew this was coming, but it still pissed me off. Because it's the definition of incremental. Still, somehow the evil boys club got it accepted for publication in a top journal. I'm pretty sure some kind of voodoo sacrifices were involved.

There's also this hullabaloo going on about women in tech, which is just kind of pissing me off because somehow computer science gets to make a big deal about it, as if they invented the concept, while scientific workforce imbalances continue to languish in obscurity??

Thanks to people like this guy bitching about how women get more attention in tech, from the media and for funding.

Read a little about this, and you'll be smacked in the face with offensive accusations that women just "aren't interested" and the idea that it's too late to do anything about it with adult women coming from other careers. Instead, some women are proposing we have to go to the source and make sure little girls aren't playing with Barbies?

Which isn't exactly going to help those of us who did in fact choose other tech-related careers, only to find there are no jobs for us womenfolk once we're done giving ourselves concussions on the thick glass ceiling between postdoc and faculty position.

Anyway, that Techcrunch article ignited some backlash, which opened the discussion again, although nobody seems to have any new solutions. Echoes of Larry Summers, sort of.

Personally, I think this whole discussion is just a sign that tech is starting to suffer from the same thing academia has had for a long time: a bad case of too many wannabes and too little funding.

My compsci friends have been telling me for years that my field is unusually bad, that compsci doesn't see any of these kinds of backstabbing maneuvers, or discrimination, etc. And I wondered for a while if it was because compsci is newer, or because they don't need much money to do what they do.

I thought maybe it will take another couple hundred years for the tech sector to evolve to a higher level of backstabbiness?

But now I think they might be well on their way.

I don't know which is worse. The guys saying it's not their fault, or the women saying it's not a problem and nobody should rush to fix it.

Meanwhile, this post and several comments over at FSP further confirm that so-called "subtle" discrimination continues to hold back women at the faculty level by overwhelming them with heavy teaching loads, while limiting their access to influential committees.

FSP is nothing short of disappointing in her response that in FSP's case, everything turned out to be fine, as if that makes it okay that these kinds of occurrences are still rampant now . Or something.

I think this just illustrates that nobody who is content with their situation is going to be really active in changing the system. FSP seems to be the picture of peaceably complacent.

I've seen this same attitude all the time in lab. It's a kind of protectionist, "not in my backyard" denial. Like it's fine to have a radioactive spill... as long as it's not near my bench. It's fine that your experiments with the shared reagents are failing, as long as mine are still working (or I have my own stock! hahahaha!).

I think what we're going to need are a few good martyrs. Because there's no kindness in complacency.

The news of the day

2010-09-07T10:22:00.000-07:00

Today's New York Times had several interesting articles:

First up, I was very amused to see that the French are freaking out over Sarkozy's proposal to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62.

If two years really is a big deal, why does anyone act like doing two more years of postdoc should just fly by? Here's a whole country of people who agree that life is short, and two years longer than you planned is a very long time.

Meanwhile, I wonder if I could have gotten into a better college if my parents had known that I would have been better off studying somewhere other than my bedroom. Maybe that would have changed the entire course of my life? At the time when I was getting ready to apply, my parents seemed to think I should live and die by every single grade - especially if it wasn't an A.

Still, there are apparently federal programs for retraining those in the tech sector whose jobs have been outsourced overseas (this is mentioned briefly at the end of the article). What programs, I wonder? And why is it important to fund retraining for people who didn't keep their skills current and competitive? And why would we have programs for people whose jobs got outsourced when we don't have hiring programs that favor citizens over non-citizens?

Speaking of, I recently learned that there are services to help overeducated immigrants find jobs in the US. Of course, I'm not eligible for these, because I'm a citizen. I'm not aware of similar programs to help underemployed, overeducated non-immigrants find jobs in the US.

And because it's almost 9/11, I couldn't help reading this article about a girl who was killed that day and her family's efforts to make the world a better place in her stead. But I couldn't help thinking what a waste it was, that she apparently disliked the job that took her to the WTC every day, and had phoned her mother on 9/10 to say she planned to quit. The story implies there must have been some family pressure for her to work there in the first place, and she only worked there a few months before realizing she hated it. Sure, only a few months, but you never know when tragedy might hit.

In other news, I found this series of essays written by a mother who is treating her autistic son with marijuana very interesting. I think it's a perfect illustration of how most Americans come to find out about "alternative" treatments and how the medical establishment is often less helpful than anecdata from other patients.

Don't fuck with me today, people

2010-09-01T11:29:00.000-07:00

I'm having one of those days where there is a good chance I may punch a complete stranger if they get in my way.

Yeah, that kind of day.

Not sure what to do about it. Going to the gym involves lots of strangers and a potentially higher chance that something will set me off.

Staying home means stewing and trying to breathe deeply but not really feeling any better.

ARGH.

The purpose of posters

2010-08-30T12:22:00.000-07:00

Poster sessions have always reminded me that Everything I Needed To Know I Should Have Learned in Kindergarden.

But didn't. I always really sucked at that stuff. That's why I was in science. If I had been good at cutting, pasting, drawing, etc. I would have majored in art.

I always got the impression that girls were supposed to be good at that stuff. I had more than one male advisor tell me they were surprised at my complete lack of skills in artistic pursuits. I told them I was in science because I got kicked out of girl school.

Towards the end of my postdoc, I finally started getting compliments on some of my posters, just as I was starting to be chosen to give talks at major meetings. So of course by then it didn't help or matter anyway.

I think the culture has changed somewhat, at least in my field. Posters are only useful for

• beginners

• those working on the truly obscure

• those whose work is already in press but who hate public speaking

• chumps who want to get scooped.

Anyone who wants to get anywhere had better be invited to give a talk, or stay at the bench.

But I have been thinking a lot lately about whether I stayed in science longer than I should have, and why I stayed despite multiple setbacks.

One of the first things that should have been a clue that I did not fit the existing science mold was my graduate program's annual retreat. There, the students were required to submit an abstract, do a poster, and if we were lucky, present a talk.

From the very first one, it was obvious to some of us that:

a) Prizes were awarded based on publication, not on the quality of the poster or talk

b) Publications were largely a matter of

• timing (picking up the end of a project that had already burned out several postdocs and completing it during a summer rotation)

• politics (working for someone who happened to be on the editorial board of a Major Journal, for example)

• isms (it was probably not a coincidence that males seemed to have more opportunities to get on the perfectly timed, high-impact project in the highly connected lab than did females)

c) The best way to get through these events was to bring alcohol, start drinking early in the day, and escape as soon as the Administrative Psycho had finished noting our attendance.

Our program was very secretive about how this all went down. We didn't know which faculty were judging the posters, so we had to try to be standing there talking to any and all of them if we wanted a chance to win the coveted $500 prize, to be spent on travel or supplies. We had to at least pretend to laugh at their lame jokes.

Of course, the irony was that those of us who were most desperately in need of money for supplies or travel were also the least likely to have completed and published our rotation projects, much less working for a politically influential PI.

So in that sense, I should have known. It was really kind of a hopeless feedback loop, and hard work alone would never get me unstuck.

But this post was inspired by a comment, which described an anecdote where a highly accomplished female student was initially overlooked for a poster award in favor of less productive male students, until our local hero App spoke up on her behalf, noting that her work was published.

Two things about this anecdote gave me a visceral reminder of what I hated about those fucking poster sessions in grad school.

1. The inherent bias in the "whoever comes to mind" process of giving awards

I've witnessed this firsthand, and most anyone who has served on an awards committee probably knows exactly how it works. Some people sit in a room, and maybe call out names of people. Other people say yay or nay.

The main problem with this approach is that, more often than not, many otherwise eligible participants are ignored. Because not everyone's work is scored based on defined criteria, it usually comes down to whether they like the person enough to remember who they are, much less their work.

In other words, it's inherently biased towards charisma, and whatever else appeals to the judges.

It's terribly subjective, but most science faculty will deny that it's unfair. They believe themselves to be ultimately objective in all things. They get very defensive if you tell them they might have implicit biases without even being aware of it.

2. The implication that peer-reviewed, published work is more worthy or "better" than the earliest stages of unpublished but groundbreaking research

And truthfully, it's not. Not at all. But at my school, peer review was always viewed as validation.

Really? Three random people say it's okay, so it must be wonderful? Try again, guys. It just means it was deemed complete enough to publish. That's all it means.

In fact, if I were in charge of a graduate program, I would insist that published work be disqualified from departmental poster sessions. I think it's only fair that everyone present work-in-progress.

Isn't that the point of grad school? To shelter students for a few years so they can actually focus on doing something useful, instead of being distracted by all the unfairness inherent in peer-reviewed competition?

Moreover, if I were in charge of a graduate program, I would disqualify projects on which the grad student in question is not first author. Which is usually the case when it's a new graduate student whose work is somehow miraculously already published. And no co-first author nonsense, either, unless the other first author is also a grad student. Fuck that.

But when we're talking about contests that don't include separate categories for new students vs. senior students, this is just kind of stupid. Why make students waste their time worrying about layout when they don't even have a defined project yet?

All those years of practicing making posters (montage!) did not lead me to a moment of victorious poster-making. It was not a cumulative gain: it was a waste. What changed was the technology. I was never going to have patience with cutting and pasting on cardboard, but I do okay when I can make my poster using Adobe Creative Suite. I think the new era won't be posters at all, just walls of video presentations with animated models and raw movie data. And hopefully, publications will be that way, too.

Seems to me that poster sessions should be more about discussion and feedback, and less about prancing about like puppies at Best in Show. If the project is finished and published in a peer-reviewed journal already, you don't really care what we think, do you? You already have the stamp of approval from your so-called "peers". Now you want money, too? Who do you think you are?! I mean, puh-leeze.

My field became very secretive very quickly, in the last 5-10 years, everyone started holding their cards very close and lying to each other about how far along they were or what they were planning to do next.

If that's all we're doing, then poster sessions are just about competitively bragging about work that's already finished, and I'd rather stay home and practice drawing futuristic cartoons with crayons.

In my imaginary future I'm the head of a graduate program where there is only open publication. No anonymous peer review nonsense, and no poster sessions. Also, naptime is mandatory.

Thank commenters it's friday

2010-08-27T15:25:00.000-07:00

Just want to send a big e-hug to those of you who occasionally drop in a comment just to say you liked a post, or that something similar happened to you, or that you've witnessed similar horrors, or want to correct the trolls.

Yesterday I got overwhelmed with a strong feeling of wanting to be told I was doing a good job on something, ANYTHING. Sometimes blogging is the only thing that seems to be going well.

Thanks for the e-pat on the head, ya'll. I'm glad I still have the blog as a way to touch base and hopefully help those in need.

Next post will be soonish, I promise... hang in there.

Potholes in progress

2010-08-26T11:49:00.001-07:00

Saw this article today in the NY Times about the shortage of civil engineers in India.

To summarize briefly:

1. Civil engineering entry-level positions in India used to pay really poorly.
2. Most Indian civil engineering majors now work for foreign (read: Silicon Valley) software companies, because it pays better.
3. India has a lot of potholes.
4. India put a lot of money aside to fix the potholes.
5. India can't find enough civil engineers to do the work.
6. Pay for entry-level civil engineering jobs in India has doubled in the last 5 years, but it's still kind of crappy.
7. India's solution to their current (immediate!) problem: putting more money into universities to encourage more students to major in civil engineering.

I read this whole article thinking only two things:

1) Why aren't they recruiting from overseas, like we do? Is there an international shortage of civil engineers?
2) Don't they realize that it's going to take at least 4 years to graduate new batches of civil engineers from college?

Anyway it reminded me of the periodic Chicken Little reports from NSF claiming that there's a shortage of scientists. Except here, we just import them.

And no one seems to understand that all they have to do is raise the salary to an attractive level, or provide some other benefits, like housing for immigrants*. The problem will fix itself if they just provide some incentive to the people who would actually be doing the work.

*Sort of like we do for foreign graduate students in the sciences

Type-Ohs

2010-08-25T18:14:00.000-07:00

Saw a comic in the newspaper about a mythical food called Type-Os as a knockoff of Alpha-Bits cereal. This post is about Type and Oh.

This week I went shopping with a friend for a Large Purcha$e. I don't think either of us believed I'd be particularly useful or supportive. I think she just didn't want to go alone.

Which is okay. I didn't have to go, but I didn't have anything better to do, either.

This friend reminds me a bit of my old neighbor crossed with a Sex In the City character. In a good way. She's cute, smart, knows what she likes, has expensive taste and ambition. A little materialistic, maybe. Maybe a little shallow, maybe a little sheltered, I can't be sure because she's very worldly in some ways. Anyway, she's fairly entertaining. We'll call her Carranda.

We show up at the place and Carranda admits to me that she's nervous. The guy we're dealing with reminds me of a friend of a friend, someone who always annoyed me because he's a smartypants. We'll call him Snob. You know the type, he's usually the smartest person in the room in his social and professional circles. In fact, he thinks he's a freakin' genius.

Snob's the one who, upon learning that I was going to teach a class, immediately began lecturing me on how to conduct the homework policies and exams. He's never taught anything, and he only knows about the one college he attended, which wasn't challenging at all for him, and which he didn't like. So naturally, he wanted to make sure I wouldn't teach like that.

I had a hard time controlling my rage and telling him I appreciated his input and no, I wasn't planning to do any of the idiotic things he was complaining about.

Anyway so Salesguy starts using all the tricks on Carranda, who is smart enough to see through it. But she was torn enough about her purchase to patiently let him go on saying things like:

"You're a smart girl, you know..."

"I gotta be honest, I can't give it to you for less than... I wish I could but..."

"Let me go talk to my manager."

You know, the usual bullshit. Calling her "girl" instead of woman is supposed to be flattering, I guess, and it gets her feeling young and helpless. Then listing all the positives of the product, reiterating the pitch about why it's the best and so special, etc.

Saying you're honest raises all my red flags, because only dishonest people ever say that.

And of course the manager is fictional. There is no manager.

Anyway I asked some questions, because I was getting annoyed and Carranda was floundering. I wasn't sure if she needed more time to think or what, but I figured I would distract the guy.

Salesguy didn't like that.

I started thinking about why this type of guy is so uncomfortable with someone like me. This guy was clearly good at reading people. He had my friend pegged in a matter of moments. He even told her she would have buyer's remorse no matter what she chose to do.

Now, I thought that was crap. I told her: "If you get the right thing, you won't think twice about it. You'll just be glad you got it. In fact, you might wonder why you didn't get it sooner!"

But she said: "No, he's right. I will. No matter what. That's just the kind of person I am."

So he had figured out exactly where all her buttons are. And how to push them.

Personally, I wasn't buying any of it, but I wasn't his target. His sales techniques seemed ham-handed to me, as the Observer. Even if he had sized her up correctly and pushed some of the right buttons, it was obvious when he was trying the different techniques of Persuasion, such as Flattery, Guilt, Scarcity, etc.

And I had the feeling he was quite baffled by me.

As one of my other friends put it, "They're surprised by the contrast between how you look and what comes out of your mouth. I don't think you'd have a problem if you didn't look cute and harmless. Or if you were a guy."

And it's true, I look pretty unthreatening. But my questions really got his hackles up. And I wasn't being aggressive about it, I was just puzzled because I could tell there were inconsistencies (LIES!) in his stories and rationales. I hate that, I can smell it ten miles away. So I ask. As simply and calmly as I can.

Even though I knew that in this case it didn't matter why. All that mattered, really, was whether Carranda was sure she wanted to buy this thing. And she wasn't sure at all.

Of course, I couldn't help thinking it over afterward. That's just the type of person I am.

Maybe there are two kinds of people in life. Most people cope with the fear of meeting new people by learning to categorize. It's simpler. Almost makes strangers seem familiar, so you know how to handle them. What to say, how to react, how to interpret. We all do this to some extent.

Some do it instantly and refuse to budge from their initial impression.

But there are those of us who go in with fewer expectations. We just observe. We adjust quickly and take note of exceptions. And we most appreciate those people who don't fit the categories. We like to collect characters full of contradictions.

My friend, for instance. I don't know her that well, but I have been enjoying getting to know her. I refuse to jump to conclusions about who she is, although I can make observations and correlate those with my existing database on other types of people, and honestly say I've never met anyone quite like her.

The Salesguy Type usually doesn't like me. Or maybe he would if it were to his advantage, but I won't give him a chance because I don't like his approach. And maybe he can tell that.

I actually am sort of friends with Snob, because although we've argued on more than one occasion about his stubborn sexism, I think he genuinely wants me to like him. That's the thing about this type. He wants to be smart, but he's ultimately a big softie, and he's lonely. In Snob's case, he's lonely because while he wants to be smart, he isn't yet wise. He hasn't learned to open his mind to the possibility that deep down, he's rationalizing his sexism and relying on it as a form of denial.

I suspect that Salesguy does the same, based on his experience in his job, where he deals with people all the time. It's most efficient to try to size people up right away, and rely on Types to choose an approach when your job is to manipulate them as much and as quickly as possible. And sexism is one of the easiest tricks to fall back on. Most women go along with it out of habit, or because sometimes you just have to pick your battles.

In a happy end to this story, Carranda ended up walking away from the deal with Salesguy and getting something else at a different place.

I hope she doesn't end up having buyer's remorse. Because that's just the type of person I am.

The gender blender

2010-08-24T10:51:00.000-07:00

This morning I read a provocative review of a new book called, aptly, Delusions of Gender. In it, the author throws down a gauntlet, taking particular aim at studies claiming that gender differences in ability are primarily biological.

I'm glad to see books like this, in the sense that I think there are far too many people (okay, mostly men) out there who need convincing. However, I'm not sure that they'll be convinced by anything like this. Will that stop me from reading the book and possibly sending copies to all my friends with daughters? Probably not.

Especially the ones who have one of each: the boy who likes robot toys, and the girl who likes the easy-bake oven. Do they accept any responsibility for this? Of course not. How could parents possibly be biased?

But for those who don't have an open mind about the question, I'm not convinced that battling it out is going to help anyone.

I'm so tired of fighting all the time, I actually passed up a coupon for super-cheap martial arts lessons. There was a time when I would have (and did) jump on these kinds of opportunities, but lately I just feel like I'm shadowboxing all the time. I'm making myself tired, but I'm not landing any hits on my opponent. And I'm not really any more prepared when I find myself on a dark street at night.

I'm still encountering these gender-biased assumptions regularly in real life.

In a rather heated example, I had a long argument with a "friend" over Facebook chat, who was arguing about gay marriage and how it's not just important but also easier for women to take care of children than for men to take half the responsibility, and how this is why the traditional formula of one man + one woman is better.

I was trying to tell him that being a woman does not, by default, make you a better parent. At all. And that breastfeeding does not, by default, prevent all possible health problems later in life, or anything remotely like that. I was breastfed, and I have terrible allergies, and I still kind of hate my mother. Yet I still hear, on a regular basis, that allergies and "bonding" are two of the biggest reasons why breastfeeding is so important.

I also try to point out that there are just as many studies showing that it doesn't matter as there are studies claiming that it's absolutely essential.

And when I see both men and women using breastfeeding as their default, fallback excuse for a) whining all the time about their kids and b) making excuses for why they don't try harder to share the parenting responsibilities equally, it makes me want to bean them on their heads with dirty diapers.

In a more subtle example, more than one friend has suggested I should really consider a Perma-doc type of position, just to stay in academia. It's usually a guy who uses his own wife, or another friend's wife, to illustrate his point, which usually goes something like this:

"She's really happy, she's the right-hand person of this PI, the lab is all women, she's the senior person who oversees all the benchwork and he writes all the grants, so she doesn't have to worry about funding. He's such a great mentor, great boss. He offered to help her get her own lab and funding but she didn't want to. I mean, you've never had a great mentor like that, it would be so good for you."

So I say, Uh, I'm gonna have to stop you right there, buddy.

I have to point out that I have, indeed, had "great mentors" who would have been happy to keep me as their right-hand person. The problem was that none of them did more than offer to help me get my own lab or funding. When I tried to take them up on it, the offer somehow dematerialized.

Or, it turned out they didn't really know how to help, or the offer was actually to help me help them get more funding for their projects, with some nebulous offer to eventually help me get my own projects funded independently.

Yeah, right.

I mean, what?

As in, what rock are you living under?

Because at the end of the day, I sincerely doubt anyone would be pushing me in the direction of aspiring to be the Perma-doc version of the lab harem's best wife if I were a guy.

Historically speaking, that is where women have always been welcome in science. In the supporting roles. Not leading.

But somehow, maybe because I happen to be female, nobody seems to hear me when I say I think I'd be best utilized in a leadership role.

And yet, the younger women seem to see it. They say how discouraging it is that they won't be able to join my lab someday.

And then I have to read these idiotic emails from various women in science groups lamenting how they can't figure out why more younger women don't want to go into science. And how we need to do more outreach with little girls to get them interested.

I keep trying to tell them, there's no inherent difference in girls vs. boys at the level of interest. All kids, when shown cool science demos, think it's fucking cool. Because it is. And only some kids want to know how it works. And only some kids are encouraged to pursue finding out how stuff works. Probably, in our culture, we do encourage boys more, but I think that difference happens more at home than it does at school.

The real problems come later. The glass ceiling is still there. And it just cuts deeper the farther you go up.

At the end of the day, it always comes back to this. Somebody wants to know why it's not fair, why it seems like we're not treated equally.

And some jackass will try to console us by saying it's because our brains are different. Or because we have boobs.

Meh and you too.

2010-08-16T09:49:00.000-07:00

The request was to expand on the 5 big W questions + 1: what, who, where, when, why and how.

So I'll start with a secret: this is the seed of all writing. So I could write something for this topic over and over and write something different each time.

1. What

"What do I do now?" I've been struggling a lot with this question about what do I want to do. I've been through this once before, and that's how I ended up doing science.

So I think I've covered heart and head. What's next? Gut feeling?

I feel like doing science for so long has had two contrasting effects on me:

1) It made me braver, and made me realize courage is not really an area where I'm lacking
2) It put me relatively out of touch with my own gut feelings.

The thing about science is that you're taught not to be superstitious, that hunches don't count unless you can explain them with data, and that you should often ignore your gut feeling, especially if your gut is telling you to run away from public speaking or doing animal work.

Right?

Truthfully, I think my best weapons in science were my gut feelings. But I was told to ignore them, that I was being paranoid about the people I worked with (who were every bit as crazy and back-stabbing as I feared), and that I was making logical leaps (all of which turned out to be right once I had the evidence to demonstrate my hunches were good).

And I wouldn't have done science at all if I had listened to my gut feelings way back when I interviewed for graduate schools.

Regardless, my goal now is to spend a lot of quality time focusing on my gut feelings.

2. Who

"Who is going to help me?"

At this point I'm not sure if anyone can help me figure out what I want to do, but once I figure that out, I will probably need help to do it.

One thing I fucked up royally in my science "career" (according to the blamers) was not getting the right help from the right people. I realized too late that I needed help from different people, but I couldn't figure out

a) who were the people with both the interest and the power to help me, and
b) how to get them to be interested in helping me

Also, "Who are the people I want to work with?"

This is something I'm focused on right now. I really hated most of my coworkers for a long time in science, maybe because we weren't really coworkers at all, just competitors pretending to be polite. The whole system was set up so that there was never enough to go around, and we were basically trying to climb over each other to get to the good stuff: the money, the attention from our advisor, the jobs.

So I'm wondering who are the kinds of people I can work with? Would I be better off with more creative types? Should I just steer clear of male-dominated careers? Am I better off doing the kinds of things where everyone works independently but in parallel? Are there any careers anymore where there's plenty to go around? Or does this economy pretty much preclude that from happening at all?

3. Where

Also known as, "Will I have to relocate?"

I like where I am now. I am learning new things, slowly, and the pace is more or less up to me. But what if I decide the thing I most want to do in life is something I can only learn in a city far away? Am I going to make MrPhD go with me? Is there anything I want to do so badly that I'd make him quit a job he loves to follow me on a hunch about my next big thing?

4. When

Yes, when. When will I figure this out. When will I feel better. When will the bolt of lightning strike me down, or give me that aha! moment I could use right about now?

One thing I'm certain I'll miss about science are the aha! moments. I loved that. I loved problem solving, I loved getting new data, I loved finding something unexpected in the middle of an experiment designed to look at something else, I loved reading a paper and having so many ideas I had to scribble them all down excitedly.

The good news is there are other kinds of aha! moments, and I wish I had the perspective to realize that years ago. They are there when I cook, and when I shop for gifts, and when I read good books. When I listen to really good music. And when I write.

But mostly I want to know when I will stop having dreams about the bastards who fucked me over in science. I am so tired of the nightmares where I have to go back and work with them again, or I find out one of them is taking credit for everything I did in his lab, even though it was my idea, etc.

5. Why

The one I'm doing the most lately is "Why is this happening to me? Why do people say I chose this? Did I choose this, really? Why would I do that to me?"

Also known as,

6. How

"How did I end up here?"

I keep retracing my steps and saying "No, I couldn't possibly have known any better at the time, I actually got a lot of bad advice, or people seemed to think I could figure it out from obscure hints, and I didn't. I didn't figure it out until it was too late."

I made a lot of mis-steps. One foot in front of the other, right?

But it's pretty much impossible for me to see how I could have known to do any differently, given where I came from, my family, and a general lack of good advice.

Does that make me feel any better? Only slightly.

Also, "How do I move forward and get on with my life?"

Interviewing myself

2010-08-10T09:55:00.000-07:00

On the last post, Bee wrote: what's important to you in life? Wisdom? Serenity? Integrity? Popularity?

Yes three times, and no. Sort of like telling the LOGO turtle to draw part of a box, and then stop.

Wisdom

I want to be surrounded by people who really have perspective on what matters and what doesn't. I don't really presume to ever acquire or wield wisdom myself, but I hope to be in its presence as much as possible. Or others with a similar goal of aiming ourselves in the direction of finding more of it.

One thing I've learned though, wisdom is not something you gain just by thinking about it. I didn't know that when I was a kid. I thought if I read enough books, it would make me both smarter and wiser.

It did make me more of a wise-ass, but so far I haven't fully capitalized on that...

Now I think it's sort of a fancy word for learning through experience, but doesn't necessarily equate with age or visible hardship.

Serenity

Ever since the Joss Whedon Firefly series, I associate this word with two things: a) yogis floating in midair doing the lotus pose (my old image) and b) a creaky old POS-looking spaceship pushed to her limits, who just might fall out of the air at any moment. The way I think about it now sort of superimposes these concepts.

I identify with several of the characters on Firefly: Mal, the scrappy embattled bitter renegade loser leader; Zoe, the mysterious no-bullshit fighter who just keeps keepin' on no matter how much shit she's been through; Inara, the ultimate combination of feminine grace and business sense; Kaylee, the mechanic who is passionate about her work, but also utilitarian and romantic; River, the somewhat psychic nutjob; Shepherd Book, the mysterious ninja priest.

There's two things I've learned.

1. Serenity is worth striving for, but I don't ever expect to get there.
2. It's about the journey, not the destination.

In other words, I'd rather be sailing along and steering with the wind, rather than clawing my way up and icy mountain.

Integrity

Still, despite all I've seen, one of the most important things to me. Above almost all else.

Case in point: I've had mentors, on more than one occasion, who encouraged me to lie or otherwise break rules for their own or my benefit. But I just can't do it. And I don't mean I can't do it effectively (although I can't, really). I mean it actually hurts me, physically and emotionally, it just goes against the fibrous grain of my being.

Blogging pseudonym-ominously (pun intended) is about as close as I've ever gotten to keeping up a big fat lie. But I've done it so I can tell more truth than I could otherwise.

I don't know if that makes it okay. But I'll defend it as a choice I made, given where I was at the time, and I make it again every day. Is that the same as integrity? Or is that just living as a human being?

Popularity

Do I care? Don't I? I don't know.

For example, I like having people read this blog. It's not popular, I don't think. But I like that enough people read it and comment on it from time to time that I don't feel like I'm writing in the void.

Would I rather be popular or have fewer, more devoted fans? Devoted fans, definitely. Kindred spirits are worth more to me than schools of fad-following fish.

Would I rather have more followers on twitter? Sure. Am I sick of people who compare stats of how many thousands of followers they have, like it means something? Hell yeah.

When I was a kid, for a while I desperately wanted to be popular. In high school, I had lots of friends, but I wasn't one of The Popular Kids. And in college I always felt like an invisible loner, but it was mostly by choice. I didn't really like the pond I found myself in. I kept to the edges.

So somewhere in there I let go of the idea. I think I equated popularity with feeling loved, naively, and it didn't take me too long to figure out they're not the same at all.

And in case it's really still not clear to you what the difference is, I recommend the movie Mean Girls, because I think it's one of the most clever depictions I've seen.

Meh. And you.

2010-08-09T19:40:00.001-07:00

I am grouchy. This is not news to anyone who knows me here or IRL. But I don't have a lot of fresh ideas for blog posts right now. The new Scientiae topic for September looks good, so I might write something for that. But otherwise...

In the meantime, my other writing projects are progressing in fits and stalls, which is contributing to the big pot of grouchy.

If I had to pick two of the five to put in a tattoo, I'd pick "When?" and "Why?"

As in, "When will this feel better?" and "Why am I doing this again?" Which seem to be the two questions around which I have framed all my major life decisions.

What about you? Would you pick "what?" "where?" or "who?"?

Science and premeds, continued.

2010-08-03T10:03:00.000-07:00

In response to comments on last post:

anon,

you'll just have to wait and see! Or, you know, lurk more often.

lost academic,

actually I think it's an interesting question, because I really had to think back on what my reasoning was at the time. It's funny to think about now only I could have known back then what would end up happening.

I have students ask me from time to time, "should i major in this or that?" or worse, tell me they want to go to grad school in my field. I always tell them to do the engineering version of what I do, because at least then they MIGHT be able to find work. Full stop. Without grad school or postdoc.

Usually the ones interested in med school are just really gung-ho, so they're not asking. OR, their parents are insisting that they have to go to med school, so they have no choice in the matter. Those two groups are more likely to pick majors where they're sure they can get straight A's and still have time to volunteer as candy-stripers or EMTs.

My parents would have loved for me to go to med school, but they didn't know that the science track was a careerless wasteland, or they never would have let me do it. Part of my reasoning with them was that I could get paid to go to grad school, but I'd have to go into debt to go to med school.

Still, I wouldn't have done it if I had known there would be no jobs after all this "training".

I thought med school + internship + residency was too long to wait to have a Real Job!

Okay I can kind of laugh about it now...

Namnezia,

I hate to say this, but I think you're right that med students don't get enough training in how to reason through evidence in support of newer or alternative treatments. Although, I think younger doctors coming out of school now are much more prepared than older doctors.

However, I don't think most undergraduate programs provide this kind of training, either. I'm not sure that requiring lab experience at the undergraduate level provides enough exposure, either. Most of those kinds of internships are in advanced dishwashing and basic pipetting. A good way to get your hands wet, maybe, if you want to see what the research life is like. But it doesn't really show you more than a glimpse.

Instead, I think that perhaps some of the classroom time that med students currently spend memorizing and being tested on out of date material would be better invested in laboratory time learning how research is done and how to evaluate new information with critical thinking skills.

But hey, that's a crazy idea and nobody would ever do it, right?

No, I'm kidding of course. (Some? Or most?) med schools already do lab rotations even with their regular MD students. Sometimes it's just an elective over the summer, or whatever, but it's there for the students who want it.

My beef with this is two-fold, but this is an important point so I'm going to break it down:

1) it's too short
2) it has no consequences.

It's too short

It's usually not long enough for the students to become really invested in their research projects and go through the publication process that basic scientists go through.

In fact, I was astounded to learn how relatively easy it is for MDs to publish their research. Essentially, they just write it up, send it out, and voila! It's accepted.

it has no consequences

Totally bizarre, right? Where's the long wait? Where's the nasty reviews? Where's the arguing with the editor? Where's the political dance you do with your collaborators to avoid citing their boys' club friends just to help cover their asses?

Why no teeth-gnashing, hair-pulling, heavy drinking, suicidal thoughts? Why no threatening fights where your PI says he won't renew your fellowship if you don't make this experiment work the way he wants it to?

No I mean, seriously. They don't even have to have someone sponsor them as a PI. They can just, uh, write it up and publish it. Totally bizarre.

Which I think is probably part of why MDs often don't seem to realize how flawed the basic science literature is, how corrupt, how painstaking the process can be just to get a few years' worth of work out the door.

It's really surprising, in some ways, how some MDs assume, like my parents and probably most laypeople, that basic science is somehow really honest or just slow and that's why it takes so long.

It's not slow at all. Academic basic research is just really really fucked up. That is why publishing takes so long.

In other, better news, there's this new thing that I've been clamoring about for years.

So maybe there's hope for us after all.

On science and pre-meds

2010-08-02T19:28:00.001-07:00

In one of the comments on my last post, lost academic wrote:

why MAJOR in science if you really just want to be a doctor and don't want to screw your chances?

I can only tell you from my point of view, what I did and why.

1) why major in science

Because science is quantifiable.

I loved writing. I loved my humanities classes. I loved that my homework was curling up with a book and underlining my favorite parts, making notes in the margins.

I loved getting writing assignments. It never felt like work. It made college feel like summer camp.

But I hated grades. Getting graded on my writing always felt personal. It was all so subjective. What seemed to appeal to one professor was hated by another.

When I got a B+ or an A- in my humanities classes, or god forbid even a B-, on a paper I wrote, it wasn't always clear why. Even to the person who gave me the grade. I was baffled when I asked a professor or TA what I could do to improve my writing. They always hesitated, rarely gave useful feedback.

They said my writing was fine.

Sometimes, if I pushed hard for suggestions, they said they didn't like the premise (my hypothesis offended them somehow) or felt I was making "wild claims" (ha! and now I'm a blogger!).

I couldn't figure out what they wanted me to do differently when the assignments were vague and the feedback even more so.

Ironically, this is also where I got stuck in my wannabe career in science.

I wanted to improve. To me, the fun in school was improving, mastering, making progress. That was also the fun in research.

Nobody told me what I was missing. I'm still not sure. The subjective part, somehow. The likability, whatever that is.

Science classes were fine. They were predictable, formulaic. I knew how to do science. I knew how to study for it. It was fascinating in its own way, and some classes were better than others, but the format was always the same: sometimes graded homework, sometimes quizzes, always exams.

I read the books, I took notes, I did the problems in the books, I reviewed my notes, I took the exams.

Rinse, repeat. It was fine. I was learning. I enjoyed the stuff I was learning. Knowledge was power.

But I have to admit, I look back at the stuff I wrote in college and think it sounds somehow smarter than anything I write now. Probably because of what I was reading at the time. In my humanities classes.

if you really just want to be a doctor

Because I didn't just want to be a doctor. I wanted to study human disease. Grad school was one option; med school was another. I also considered trying to do an MD/PhD.

What if I didn't get into med school? Grad school seemed like a viable backup option.

I was interested in anatomy, in diseases of all kinds: genetic, aging, communicable.

But I wasn't interested so much in working directly with patients. I thought about studying pathology. I did not consider being an EMT or a nurse as a viable option.

There didn't seem to be much work for humanities majors. Everyone I knew who majored in the humanities was determined to get into med school or law school or grad school or business school.

Here's the thing: not all of them got into med school or law school or grad school

In the end, I decided I'd rather go to grad school. And I got in. Pretty easily. So I went.

I was actually kind of baffled when people didn't get in. I knew my grades were not spectacular, and neither were my GREs. I didn't win a lot of awards or fellowships.

All I had was some lab experience. And I did that mostly to keep from dying of boredom.

and don't want to screw your chances

And therein lies the rub. Most of the students I knew who obsessed about grades did not obsess about learning. I didn't want to be one of them.

I had already spent four, no five, years being harassed about my grades so I could get into a college deemed worthy enough by my parents to ensure my future success.

And look where that got me!

I just hated the idea that school was about report cards, just like I hate the idea that science is about impact factor. It never made sense to me, and you'll never convince me that it's a better reflection of quality or productive output than taking the time to actually read the fucking papers.

I also felt like med school was the military. Like I would have to fit a mold more tightly than I would ever have to fit if I went to grad school instead. The culture of it turned me off.

Ironically, some of my favorite people in the world went to med school and came out... still themselves. But now they're MDs. Then again, they always had better grades than me.

And, I was always secretly really rebellious. I think it's just been building up over the years. Lately I feel more rebellious than ever before. Like, fuck it all, it's all a bunch of bullshit.

This was years before Fight Club came out, but even by the time I was finishing college I had already figured out that I am not my report card. I am not my job. I am not how much money I have in the bank. I'm not the car I drive. I'm not the contents of my wallet. I am not your fucking khakis

Are you sure you want to be a professor?

2010-08-02T12:00:00.000-07:00

Saw this article by Kerry Ann Rockquemore in my Monday Motivator feed this morning.

I learned of Kerry Ann Rockquemore at one of those so-called "diversity workshops" where she was one of the few speakers who even MENTIONED sexism as a factor. The actual purpose of the workshop was unclear, since it seemed to be chock-full of general career advice that I'd already heard, none of which had helped me at all.

She was probably the best speaker there, because she really gave concrete advice. So I have to laugh a little at getting her stuff in my feed. It's intended for people who are already tenured or tenure-track faculty.

I probably should unsubscribe.

She's the kind of person I desperately want to ask for help, except that by the time I found out about her I realized it was a) too late and that she was b) too busy to help someone like me c) unless I could pay her workshop fee. And even then, like for most things designated for faculty, as a postdoc I wouldn't have been considered eligible. Probably.

Anyway the part that struck me in this column was where she wrote

The trick is to determine the difference between escape fantasies that result from feeling overwhelmed and the genuine, gut-level resistance that occurs when you REALLY know you're on the wrong path. Below I'm going to suggest a few things you might try as ways to differentiate between momentary frustration and the need to create an exit strategy.

Yes, that really is the trick, isn't it? My therapist seemed to think I was on the wrong path, that I was exhibiting signs of gut-level resistance to the career in general.

In truth, I thought then and I still think now that I was experiencing gut-level resistance to my advisor, maybe, but not necessarily to the career itself.

Some days, I still have trouble extrapolating the concept that my evil advisor represents the evil inherent in the entire profession. And yet, clearly I think that all of our horror story examples are representative. Blogging has certainly taught me that. You can run, but you can't hide forever.

Still, I went with the exit strategy only moments before I might have made it, finally, or been kicked out anyway. Was it self-sabotage? Was I delusional? I still don't know. Maybe I couldn't have survived another year of that, but why did I stick around that long in the first place? Could I have just taken a left turn instead of jumping off?

Had an interesting chat with a religious friend the other day about knowing whether you're on the right path. I told him I'm not sure I believe in the concept of having a path. He said something vague like you'll know you're on the right path when you're on it.

Uh, ok. Thanks.

There's that and then I saw this article in the Chronicle written by a guy who left academia for 20 years, and then came back, only to find it had gotten even worse.

He tells a particularly familiar story about advising a grad student on just how impossibly dismal her career chances are.

And how she ignores him.

****

Elsewhere on the internets, people are talking about this article in the NY Times about med schools who allow some students to major in the humanities and still become MDs.

Oh, the horror! MDs are not scientists? They don't have to be?

And this is news?

And yet, the fact that it is news has some interesting implications. Maybe not yet, but for the future. For whole generations of patients and students.

One friend remarked to me that it's too bad they weren't doing this when we were in college, how I probably should have majored in English and gone to med school, instead of majoring in science and going to grad school.

It occurred to me that this may be one of the unique facets of our transitional generation. We may be among the few whose doctors who lack creativity for the simple reason that they had it beaten or selected out of them earlier on in their education.

****
I was also reading about how our generation is composed of control-freaks who are ruining our children, while the generation after us is full of the new flower-kids, who will certainly use creativity to change the world.

What does it matter if I change the world at all?

Sometimes I feel like i was born just a few years too early. Maybe this is why I like Futurama so much.

And just think, if I were a professor right now, I wouldn't have time to sleep or eat, much less watch several episodes of animated sarcasm.

Oh where is that cryogenic accident when I need one? Perhaps my path lies in delivering pizza. Pretty sure somebody is actually hiring people to do that.

Witnessing idiocy

2010-07-30T12:35:00.001-07:00

It seems to be part of human nature that we all think we're smarter than somebody else at least once in our lives.

Some of us feel that way all the time. Some will argue ceaselessly even when they're wrong.

Some days I feel particularly stubborn and irritated by stupidity.

One of the things that drives me nuts, especially common among academic types, are people who take things too literally or will argue over mechanics when they're missing the larger point I was trying to make. And they're not patient or open-minded enough to try to see where I was going, they just start nit-picking in a way that doesn't get anybody anywhere nearer to enlightenment.

Sometimes I get really frustrated at my own inability to communicate what I think, or just not being in the right position to say what I think at any given moment.

For example: replying to comments on my blog, not being able to come up with the right way to illustrate a concept in a persuasive way and being told I'm doing it all wrong, when that really wasn't the point in the first place

Or, seeing people stretching the wrong way at the gym. It drives me crazy knowing they're getting nothing out of it and will probably injure themselves, and here I could totally prevent that but it's not my job, I shouldn't butt in

Dealing with stupid self-checkout at the grocery store that is designed really poorly and doesn't work very well or make any sense. Wondering if I'm taking it all too literally. But then seeing that not only am I frustrated, but also overhearing the guy next to me asking the supervising cashier perfectly reasonable questions about things we've seen real cashiers do at their stations but the machines won't let us do at the self-checkout station

Getting home and realizing I forgot something I needed at the grocery store

Isn't it funny how some of us are expected to remind everybody else of everything they're supposed to do, but nobody reminds us? And I'm probably only that way because my mother always reminded me of everything and it drove me nuts when I was growing up, but now I do it and people take it for granted that I'll be the reminder? The rememberer? So if I actually do forget something, they assume it's deliberate and I'm mad at them?

I don't really want to remember everything all the time. I really don't.

Some days I can't stand even witnessing personal conflict from afar, like watching friends ranting on Facebook and realizing that while they have a point, the person they're mad at might be crazy or uncomprehending and I just feel so bad for how hurt they are but there's nothing I can do. And knowing at the same time that ranting on Facebook isn't going to help their case at all, but I can't say that, I shouldn't butt in

One of the things I hated most about being a postdoc was watching people fuck things up on a daily basis, but knowing they didn't want my advice and wouldn't follow my protocols even when they asked me for them

And yet, it seems to be an inescapable feature of adult life. I put all this effort into learning how to do things, and I would dearly love to save other people the trouble of learning the hard way. But that knowledge and experience is essentially useless because nobody wants to hear it from me

Which is another reason I wouldn't want to have children. My parents thought they knew everything, and even though I frequently suspected they were wrong, what choice did I have as a minor? To run away? I had to live by their rules, their expectations, their advice and their control

Another thing I see on Facebook, and that I'm seeing more of lately, is my friends having children. And realizing that some of them are really great parents, and some are not. And it is hard to watch people I dearly love, as friends, fucking up their children's lives almost from day 1. And I don't know how to respect that, how to be accepting, or how to say to them gently "Um, you know, maybe it's not fair to be such a controlling perfectionist about your kid, even if that's how you do everything else in your life and that's okay because it's your life"? And knowing that it's not my place to butt in

But wishing there were something I could do to save those poor kids from growing up the way I did, just wishing somebody would please butt in

and stand up for me because we can't always stand up for ourselves

And how modern psychology would probably say this is what I kept hoping for in my career, for somebody to hear me say I needed help and butt in

But our culture seems to think that's somehow impolite, that you should keep to yourself, even when you see things that are unfair or unethical or inhumane, you should just remember it's not your place to butt in

Response to comments on last post

2010-07-29T10:48:00.000-07:00

This time, when I tried to reply, google said "comment is too large to process".

Ha! Maybe that's why my replies get eaten so often! I am too verbose.

Oh well, at least this way I can spread out and relax... plenty of space to be as large as I want!

J,

I totally get what you're saying. There was a time, when I was a bit younger, when I would have given anything to be surrounded assholes if it meant competition was out in the open and I could be my own assholish self too.

I was just so sick of the gossipy back-stabbing passive-aggressive nonsense.

I wanted the risky, exciting, moving things forward as fast as possible. I didn't care if we were a pack of snarling, barking dogs. I wanted to run with the pack if it was going somewhere. I was tired of waiting for my slothful companions to get off their lazy asses.

But I'm a little older now, and I'm tired. I wasted my youthful energy letting science crush my creativity into minimal publishable units.

I regret it, and no I wouldn't do it over again if I could.

I would do something else if I could go back and be 21 again.

But not now. I'm not going to run off now and join the dog army. I really don't have the energy to fight any more of that kind of fighting.

And I'm not convinced it's the best way to be creative, either. Maybe for a different age group, it works. But I think I grew out of it.

Anon 9:50,

I think you're missing the point. We're not saying it's a conspiracy- that's a different concept.

What we're saying is that it's the sum of accumulated unconscious biases of many individuals.

That it's true that because of these commonly held unconscious biases, men get more help getting their work done, and getting their papers submitted, and have an easier time getting their papers accepted.

We're not saying it's a lot different. We're saying it's a little bit different.

But consistently, it's different.

Even if it's only a tiny bit of help, and a tiny bit easier, those 1% here and 3% there.. those amounts add up to a big advantage when it comes to "well his CV looks better than hers".

Just think, if every time you went to submit a paper, and you were within the 3% range of it getting accepted, and somebody handed you a "3% off free" coupon. How many more papers would you have? If that saved you a round of resubmitting each time? A round of fighting with your advisor about which journal to send it to? Each time?

What would that save you? Six months? A year? Each time?

Over the course of a career, that's going to add up to a whole lot of CV lines.

And nobody seems to really get it at the hiring level that we're talking about apples and oranges. That for us to come up through these ranks is different than it was for him.

That even if nobody means to have these biases, they exist, and it makes it harder than it needs to be.

That when we do have a good CV, we get criticism amounting to the simple doubt that a women couldn't possibly have done that well on her own - AS IF THE MEN EVER DID IT ALL ON THEIR OWN!

Because nobody who gets to that level did all on their own. Everybody had student help, and technical help, and PI's who helped get them fellowships and invitations to give talks and had them lecture for classes. Men get that kind of help and it's considered par for the course.

Why is it unfair if women ever ask get any help at all?

The point is that we're never going to be able to overcome these biases without more help and without forcing people to notice what we've seen. That we're not making it up, it's not imaginary. It's real.

My point is, I know it's a pyramid scheme. I'm just saying that for women it's a tiny bit sharper, just a tiny bit steeper to climb. And maybe that tiny bit makes all the difference when it's barely scalable in the first place.

I read an article this week that said the next big hurdle for equality can only be cleared by getting men on board to help change things.

Denying that there's a problem doesn't help. You, sir, may think that you are not sexist.

But you are not helping.

What I talk about when I talk about science

2010-07-27T12:56:00.000-07:00

One of the comments on the last post raised the question of whether scientists mostly sit around talking about:

1) technical problems
2) asshole colleagues/advisors
3) publishing & competing
4) big ideas.

Technical problems: the good and bad of talking about it constantly

the good

Talking about it usually means you'll get advice & commiseration. This might make you feel like less of a loser, and you might learn something that fixes your problem.

It might give you the break you need to head back into the lab and try again.

I love giving advice to others when I know enough to be helpful. I find it satisfying to pass one what I've learned and save other people the trouble of learning the hard way.

I try to be supportive when I can't be useful.

I think if you don't like talking and hearing about technical issues, you shouldn't be in science. Period. This is the bread and butter, day-to-day, one foot in the front of the other. It's how research gets done.

The devil really is in the details.

the bad

Sometimes you get conflicting advice, and that can be confusing.

Sometimes people will be judgmental and it will make you insecure about asking for help again.

Sometimes people are no help, and then you wonder whether you're working in the wrong place, surrounded by people who don't care or don't know anything useful and won't teach you much, or if you're attempting something impossible and wasting your time on a dead-end.

Sometimes I give advice and people don't listen. I've blogged about this before because it's one of my pet peeves. The people who whine and want shortcuts and think it's easier to do it the "easy way" but that doesn't work and then they have to go back and do it all over again. My way might seem "harder" at first but it works, and in the long run that's actually faster. But sometimes I get tired of people asking me and not respecting what I have to say enough to talk to me about why they think it might not work or to just admit they're too lazy.

Assholes in science

I was talking to a grad student the other day about whether there are more assholes in academic science than in other careers. I think there are. She says there are assholes everywhere. I told her I used to believe that, actually had someone tell me that, back when I was in college and debating about whether to pursue a science career.

Now I'm not so sure. I think academic science selects for assholes and cultivates assholishness in otherwise decent people. I've watched it happen. Otherwise decent people, put under enough pressure, become angry starving dogs backed into a corner. They will bite you.

I'm not sure it was always this bad, but it's how it is now.

So yeah, we complain about it. All. The. Time. On blogs especially.

And I've reached a point where I'm just sick of it. I'm sick of working with jerks and I'm sick of hearing about other people being trapped working with jerks. I'm sick of lacking for constructive solutions.

At first, you treat it like just another type of problem-solving. You read all the books on communication and negotiating and you try to out-manipulate the manipulators. For some people, this works, usually in combination with other approaches like mentoring and string-pulling from family & friends.

But I get the feeling that if you need to read books about it (like I do), you're not going to make it through.

After a while, it's boring. It's frustrating being completely powerless and not knowing how to marshall enough support to stand up to these people or maneuver around them (notice the root of these words, man-ipulate and man-euver.).

And then it's like, well I can advise you up to a point but after that, don't ask me. I couldn't figure it out. Just for the love of god, please quit whining to me about it. I tried every iteration I could think of, but it just wasn't working out for me.

Publishing and competition

Truthfully, when I was just a new student who had never done anything myself worth publishing, I never cared about which journal, which author, which institution, or who did what first.

In school, I met people who cared a lot about which journal. My thesis advisor had ideas about which journals were "appropriate" for my work when we went to publish. I had ideas about which journals handled figures well and which ones tended to make them small and unreadable. That was my biggest criterion. Did they present the material well? No? Then I don't care how famous they are. It's not a journal I'd want to be reading.

Then there was the whole authorship thing. Like the collaborators who let us do all the work and then demanded at the end that their student be made co-first author after I had already written the entire manuscript. How was that fair? I realized I wanted people to be citing ME and not her. I did not want someone else to put their name on my writing.

Not having worked at too many different places, I still don't know what I think about the "which institution" question, but it does affect things. I remember sitting in one journal club, listening to the spoiled brats from the richest labs complaining that the authors of a paper from a third-world country hadn't done enough expensive controls. I tried to explain to them what it's like to work in a poor lab. That you have to choose carefully the most important controls that will tell you the most, because you simply can't afford to do them all.

And I remember slowly realizing how much money matters for how much you can do. That it costs about a million dollars to do a Cell paper's worth of work, by the time you pay for everything and everybody's salary who worked on it. And realizing that most labs simply can't afford to do that. And sometimes even the richest labs go through periods when they can't afford to do it for more than one paper at a time. And that paper might not be yours. And it might have nothing to do with which project is the better project. It might have everything to do with who the first authors are and whether the PI likes them more than anyone else.

And realizing how the competition aspect of everything just poisons the atmosphere. Turns people into dogs trying to eat other people they view as competing dogs.

Yeah, I talk about all of that a lot with my science friends. How it's too bad so much good science never sees the light of day because someone else did it first and that supposedly means it's better, when in fact the better stuff often just takes longer. How timing has superceded quality on the list of priorities and how I think that's a terrible thing for science. How timing often comes down to who gossips the most, who fakes or manipulates data, and which famous authors are on their paper. How perhaps it's the famous authors who fake and manipulate and gossip the most. How we all thought science would be less about fame and more about ideas. How we wonder if it was always this way and whether it always will be. Or whether science might implode if things continue on this way.

big ideas

So do we talk about big ideas? Sure.

As much as I'd like? No, not at all.

For quite a while now, I've been very isolated from other people who had similar interests. I talked more about big ideas at meetings than I ever did at my home institution. That was part of why, in the last few years, meetings were the most fun for me. My department was full of people who worked on different big ideas, or who debated endlessly about useless minutiae instead of coming up with ways to test their pet hypotheses. Or who did exclusively "me-too" science. One trick ponies.

At first, I tried to interject. And then I gave up. I would just sit back and let them debate amongst themselves. Sometimes I would try to redirect the conversation to the larger point, to ask, like a broken record, "Yes but how would you TEST that?" But often they would turn to look at me and then go right back to obsessing about which famous guy was right about their ugly cartoon model of their favorite mechanism.

It was hard for me to articulate why I thought even the best cartoon model of their favorite question wouldn't really clarify anything, much as they wanted to know, it wasn't going to move the field forward in any significant way if they weren't doing the right experiments.

But I couldn't figure out how to tell them that productively and have them really hear me. I knew it would just hurt their tiny, insecure feelings.

Also, if I viewed them as my competition, it was easy to see how it was better to let them obsess about something insignificant. Like the Princess and the Pea. If they wanted to think the pea was important, that was fine by me. I would rather that they were exhausted and unable to focus.

Meanwhile, I was sleeping soundly and thinking clearly.

But in general, I always liked the idea that we need both kinds. We need people who care about ideas and people who care about details. I want someone else to do some kinds of nitty gritty and I'll take care of the parts they can't see. That's fine. Ideally, there would be room for everybody.

Yes, when I talk to my friends who are scientists, we talk about the future of science and what the next big discoveries might mean for what we can do sooner or later, and how much later. And why do we have to wait. And can we get our hands on some of that new stuff, can we collaborate.

We talk about what we would do differently if we were in charge of everything. We talk about whether we're helping patients and how can we get our colleagues to think differently, to see what we're saying. How to deal with our own doubts by testing, testing, testing. And how to anticipate our colleagues' skepticisms and be most persuasive.

But mostly, we talk about how tired we are of all the nonsense that gets in the way. How much more we could be getting done if only we had the resources. How un-scientific the academic science hierarchy is. And why nobody seems to want to make the radical changes that would be needed to fix everything that needs fixing.

Feeling old and overeducated

2010-07-24T11:26:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while, I make an attempt to hang out with non-scientist friends.

Even when these people are my age, sometimes it just makes me feel really old. Like having gone to grad school and doing a long postdoc gave me the equivalent of the world-weary, veteran, thousand-yard stare.

I feel like these people are making the most banal observations, things I figured out years ago. Things I read in books when I was in elementary school. Of course, they also don't know how to listen, so they dominate the conversation and I can't get a word in edgewise to change the subject from their endless monologues.

I do have non-scientist friends who are not like this. Who are older, and wiser, or maybe they were just born with enough wisdom to know not to do science in the first place. We talk about life. We have real conversations.

And then sometimes I hang out with friends who are actually younger AND not scientists. Some of them are really entertaining. But there are some people, I'm not sure why I ever hang out with them at all. Talking to them just kinda makes me want to shoot myself in the head.

In the worst case, I feel like I'm babysitting kids who won't listen to a word I say. I keep wanting to yell, "It's time to go to sleep! Stop jumping on the bed!"

Like that one time I babysat for a couple of incredibly spoiled brats and actually let them jump in the beds until I saw their parents' car drive up. Just because I knew it would tire the kids out enough that they would actually submit to laying down and closing their eyes. I spent the whole evening with one eye on the kids, and one eye out the window, waiting for it to end.

It was bad enough feeling un-heard and disrespected at work, but at least there everybody knew I was a senior postdoc, and they knew what that meant. I don't think anybody ever treated me like I hadn't worked hard, even if they might have claimed I still needed to pay more dues, or that I didn't know what I was talking about.

Even if they never came back later to admit I was right, or apologize for ignoring me. I figured eventually they would learn the hard way, even if I couldn't make them see what I had already seen.

Out in The Real World, I'm judged entirely on my appearance, which is young and female. And people tend to talk to me based on that alone, without having ever asked me what I do.

They just assume they are smarter or more educated or more well-read than I am. But usually they aren't.

So, yes, I got carded again last night. I glared at the bartender when he asked, but I knew it was just his job and at least he was nice enough.

And I'm trying to cultivate a sense of humor about all of it.

The last few people I met who did ask what i do, I said I was trained as a scientist and got my PhD X # of years ago, they said, "Oh really?" and did a tiny double-take, like they seriously had no idea what to say to that. Like they thought I was fucking with them just to see what they would do.

My favorite comment of the week from someone who clearly wasn't sure whether to believe me not: "Well you seem like a pretty smart person."

This amused me because of the way he said it, like he was actually thinking I'm not sure if you're lying or not, but you seem like a pretty good actress and I wouldn't know a real scientist from a liar anyway...?

I also had a moment of schadenfraude this week when I spoke to a friend who works in Big Pharma. For the last three years or so, I told her I was having problems with my advisor, how frustrating it was to have a sexist boss who wouldn't listen to me, took credit for my work, etc. And she was always sanctimoniously bragging about how she loved her job and was so glad not to have those kinds of problems. And I always thought Wow, she is either way smarter than me about picking places to work, or just really lucky.

Well, let's just say her luck has run out. This week we talked about how her boss does nothing, takes credit for her work, and then privately thanks her later "LIke I'm his fucking secretary!"

And because the new season starts tomorrow, I have to add the obligatory reference. Yes, it sounded like something out of Mad Men.

I'm sorry to hear that she's having a Peggy Olson problem, but part of me kinda wanted to say, "See? Now you know."

Except I'm not really sure if she gets it, yet. That it's not just this guy and it's not just happening to her.

It's not really until you realize that it's rampant, that everyone everywhere will at some point experience it. Only then will you really see what's going on and start looking at it with one eye out the window.

Maybe in a few more years of this Big Pharma, she'll have the equivalent of the thousand-yard stare. In the meantime, at least she's capable of carrying on an intelligent two-way conversation. And she knows I've paid more than my fair share of dues.

Or maybe I'm not feminist enough?

2010-07-19T12:17:00.000-07:00

I was talking to a friend last week about the idea that young girls are discouraged from doing science because they're literally afraid it will make them ugly.

In her mind, we should be practical. Mercenaries. Simply put, young girls are focused on being attractive. While we agree that the pressure on girls to be pretty and thin tends to lead to extremely unhealthy eating disorders, etc., it is nevertheless how many young girls' priorities are arranged. Even if the list goes 1. Pretty, 2. Smart, 3. Rich...

My friend was saying she thought that showing that women scientists are not all unattractive nobodies could be a good thing for helping to recruit more girls to be scientists.

Now, you all know what I think. I think NOBODY should be a scientist. I think we have TOO MANY scientists already. And not enough jobs.

But on the issue of whether images of attractive women scientists would help or hurt recruitment efforts, I said I don't know.

I said maybe it would help get everyone to realize that not all scientists are male uber-dorks who only wear graph-paper button-down shirts. Personally, I am tired of being laughed at when I meet new people. They ask what I do, and when I tell them, they think I'm kidding. It has happened so many times, I started wondering if I should have been a comedian.

So then I saw this blogpost today, and I don't get it. Isn't this something we've all talked about maybe doing ourselves?

Will this sort of Hot Scientist Babes webpage help? Maybe not. Will it hurt? I can't really see how it could make things much worse than they already are.

None of these women were depicted doing anything demeaning (except the first girl, and I suspect she's a model?).

Would I feel differently if I were listed there? Maybe. Especially if it were a bad headshot.

But right now, I just can't bring myself to care that much.

Meanwhile, the commenters at PhysioProf all agreed that it was egregiously offensive, but I'm not entirely sure why. Plenty of women complained about the Rock Stars of Science ad campaign because it was all men.

Isn't this sort of the same? We wanted to be included in that effort to make science look sexy then, so why not now?

After all, sex sells. Science.... doesn't.

Disenfranchised

2010-07-13T09:37:00.000-07:00

I read an article the other day that made me really sad. It said young women are the biggest users of Facebook. That the first thing many young women do every morning, is log into Facebook.

The article said the survey-takers weren't sure why, and maybe it has something to do with young women feeling particularly disconnected, and Facebook is a way of trying to feel less disconnected.

But they didn't pursue why that would be.

Is it possible that there are a lot of women who are being deprived of careers now? I read another article that said most people in the world, including the US, believe that when jobs are scarce, it's more important for men to have them.

Among the many books I've been reading lately, one is a compendium of interviews that Bill Moyers did with a bunch of poets. Every once in a while, I happen upon something in there that really strikes a chord.

So I'm about halfway through the book and got to this interview with a Japanese American poet named Garrett Kaoru Hongo.

Bill asks him why he decided to write poetry and he says

I was experiencing a social and historical sadness

He says he wanted to connect with the history that was repressed.

Bill says "Repressed in what sense?"

He says I wanted the words I was reading to belong to me, but there were no words for me. He talks about how there wasn't anything in his high school textbooks about Japanese in America. That they weren't there when the US gained independence from Britain or during the Civil War.

This is something that always bothered me. Somehow we were supposed to be thrilled that Martha Washington sewed the flag? I never enjoyed history class until college. Before that, it was always taught as if the women weren't even around. The men were off having important conventions and signing important paperwork and the women were at home making butter. Anybody see John Adams?

Hongo says: I felt I didn't have an identity

Then there's this long story about how Hongo's grandfather told him about how he was treated by the American government and how angry he was. And so he was basically charged with telling his grandfather's story. Somehow, to speak for him.

I don't know about you, but my mother and my grandmother and great-grandmother always expressed disappointment that they didn't get to pursue their career dreams. That they were held back by their families, by society's expectations, by the men coming back from the war and taking all the jobs.

Hongo says: I was basically indoctrinated in a Western vision of articulation, of speaking to emotional and historical issues, but my experience was one of repression.

Lately I feel like even when I'm just expressing an opinion, just telling the story of my personal experience, I'm being told to shut up. That it's my imagination. That it can't be true. That it's dangerous to say what I think. Or that things will change on their own (!). Or that I'm just being too negative. Or that I'm discriminating against men if I say anything that implies women don't actually have equality.

It makes me sad.

For example, I know this guy who really feels a lot of frustration about being a white man these days. He feels like all the women and minorities get all these fellowships and clubs and opportunities and he's left out. He thinks his career is in jeopardy because of that.

So when he had a daughter I thought, "Oh good, maybe now he'll learn what it's like."

But I don't think so. He's a big fan of John Tierney's.

Now I'm just worried for that little girl. Even though she's not old enough for Facebook yet.

July Scientiae: Fantasy Institute

2010-06-29T10:55:00.000-07:00

Scientists in Fantasy Land have announced the opening of a new Research Institute, to be located in Far Far Away. This Institute will be funded by grants from Bill Gates, Oprah, and Donald Trump, and will be dedicated to curing human disease because the drug companies won't do it and the Obamacare plan stalled and never helped anybody.

Fantasy Institute will be open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with round-the-clock ordering, deliveries, and support staff for completely state-of-the-art equipment. Because of this 24-7 policy, FI will be able to employ 3 full shifts of researchers, all of whom can come and go as their experiments require. Equipment will be sufficiently available, maintained, and cutting-edge that all researchers can use any piece of equipment at any time, without having to sign up or worry that the person before them might have broken the instrument and forgot to tell anyone, or that the software is no longer compatible, or that the old Windows box it ran on died because someone spilled radioactivity on it.

Employees will be judged on only two criteria:

(1) Data points. All data will be uploaded to the Institute Wiki and shared worldwide in real time. Continued employment will depend on deposition of data points and pointers to said data points indicating usefulness to others.

(2) Training each other. Time spent instructing or helping other researchers will be logged, regardless of outcome, but a minimum amount of time must be spent each year helping at least 5 different people. No overlap is allowed from year to year for that minimum of 5 people. This requirement will prevent groups from weaseling out of it by helping only their buddies.

All employees will be hired at the same level and will be treated, paid, and funded as equals, regardless of length or level of previous employment or funding. There will be no internal competition among researchers, and no promotions. Helping each other is thus entirely voluntary, except for the training-each-other requirement as stated above.

Catering will be gourmet and on demand at all hours; the gym and outdoor recreational facilities will be similarly available 24-7, including the indoor swimming pool and ski slopes. Housing will be available within walking distance, and rapid public transportation is available every 5 minutes in all directions from FI to the surrounding neighborhoods.

24-7 daycare for children or pets is provided onsite. Emergency leave for either/both partners is paid for up to 2 years for any reason, including birth, death, or illness of family, friends, or pets. Healthcare for all workers, their families, and their pets will be given as lifetime contracts, such that any service longer than 1 year at FI guarantees lifetime top-notch healthcare for all its researchers, regardless of where they end up living later. Similarly, salary and retirement packages will be generous, including enforced vacation and sick days.

All restrooms will be unisex, include private showers with private changing areas, and will be stocked with any and all personal hygiene supplies that might be needed by anyone.

Sexual, religious, or ethical harassment will not be tolerated. Any discomfort on the part of any employees will result in the offender being voted off the island.

Researchers at FI anticipate cures for all known human diseases in the next 10 years. FI publicly thanks its insanely rich sponsors for finally getting together to spend all that money in one place, and is extremely grateful to its cadre of scientists who finally grew up enough to realize that they were wasting all their energy arguing about who was smarter instead of actually getting anything done.

Are lawsuits really the only way?

2010-06-23T10:44:00.000-07:00

Sorry to say I've been so far off the radar that I missed this essential post by Dr. Isis about how women went from 1.4% to 20% of NIH study section members in 1971, thanks to AWIS.

Too bad AWIS didn't have anything remotely so revolutionary brewing in my scientific lifetime.

Oh Mr. Tierney

2010-06-15T08:03:00.000-07:00

I generally ignore this guy at the NY Times, because he clearly doesn't understand the data.

For example, the supposedly innate difference between women and men in math. He loves to cite the studies that say men are at either end of the bell curve for math, but rarely cites the accompanying evidence that on average men and women are equally good at math and science.

I'll admit, his last article on June 7th (linked above) was not that bad. I actually agree that legislating awareness workshops doesn't really fix anything. Although, who knows, they did help for drastically reducing sexual harassment (he doesn't mention that).

Yesterday's column by Mr. Tierney, on the other hand, was downright offensive.

Mr. Tierney deliberately mis-cites this National Academy study that came out last year as claiming that women and men "enjoy comparable opportunities" in grants and promotion at universities.

One of the things that infuriates me about that study and this article is basically the point of this blog: the problems are in publishing and hiring. The reason those are still the two biggest problems is because they're entirely "confidential" which means THERE ARE NO STUDIES EXAMINING WHETHER THEY ARE FAIR OR NOT.

Of course, he also cites the most anti-feminist female writer Christina Hoff Sommers.

However, we can't just ignore these people, because too many readers get their only information about science from places like the New York Times, and they don't know that Sommers and Tierney are far from representative, and far from being scientists themselves.

Tierney cites the famous Wenneras and Wold paper from 1997 castigating a Swedish postdoctoral grant review panel for being sexist. And then promptly dismisses it as an aberration.

(note that the same newspaper has an article today entitled Oil Executives Tell Committee That BP Spill Is an Aberration.)

Seriously though, I've been thinking long and hard about how to get gray-haired white guys like Mr. Tierney, and crazy anti-feminists like Sommers (okay let's face it, I'd have an easier time with Tierney) to understand how I feel after experiencing gender bias in all its subtle crazymaking persistence on a daily basis for years as a scientist.

Tierney clearly doesn't get it. But he is smart enough to tap into the growing furor over women in science, and he's right that the workshops won't solve our problems. And the controversial style he uses also brings more attention to our cause, even if he's defending Larry Summers while he does it. I'm beginning to think Larry Summers is one of the more open-minded folks out there, if people like Mr. Tierney are any indication.

Tierney is defensive and scared now that women outnumber men in college (an issue that Sommers loves to write about), while again emphasizing that women and men struggle with having children as as academic tenure-track faculty.

It's true that there are more women than men applying to and qualifying for college, but it's not true that they're all admitted. In fact, most colleges actively discriminate against women now, in an effort to maintain near-gender parity and avoid the disdain they would receive upon becoming a "hen house".

Tierney is also completely missing the point that women of child-bearing age routinely experience hiring and discrimination at the postdoc level on the basis of the assumptions that women

a) all want children
b) all lie about wanting children
c) won't do as much work after having children as men do.

At least, that's the type of discrimination I experienced. Repeatedly. Despite my vocal reminders that I don't want children, and that what I wanted was a career in the science field for which I have spent my entire adult life training.

But Mr. Tierney couldn't possibly understand what it's been like to be me.

Bonus Post on "shifting" rationale

2010-05-26T09:20:00.000-07:00

From the mentornet website:

I got this in an email. I really appreciate how the author summarizes the phenomenon so succinctly.

Subconscious Bias Perpetuates Gender Gap

Last week we were invited to attend the 2010 NCWIT summit in Portland, Oregon, with its impressive array of presentations. One in particular, "The role of implicit bias in perpetuation of the gender gap in science and technology" by Dr. Brian Nosek, Department of Psychology at University of Virginia, made me wonder how much we are at the mercy of subconscious factors when we make decisions, even when we have the best of intentions.

One of the studies cited found that when asked which firefighter had the best credentials for promotion, the percentage was always higher for the male candidate, no matter which credentials were attached. And when the participants were asked why they had chosen this candidate, they did not say that it was because of his gender. They were convinced that it was the credentials that influenced their decision. According to the researcher, this phenomenon is called "shifting": when the criterion moves in order to accommodate a subconscious prejudice. The difficulty in fighting this phenomenon is that the person making the decision is not conscious at all that it was gender that determined the final outcome and not the credentials.

-Alejandra Velásquez, Director of Media and Communications

Journal of unpublication

2010-05-26T09:06:00.001-07:00

This is just getting embarrassing. I missed it when Drugmonkey blogged about it, but at least The Scientist did credit him (yo!).

Two highlights from this article that really stuck out to me:

investigation at the Mayo Clinic concluded that one of the lab's researchers, Suresh Radhakrishnan, "tampered with another investigator's experiment with the intent to mislead"

Um, seriously? This is like something out of a premed organic chem lab! Scary!! Can't leave that shit unattended for even one minute!!

But if you got a weird result, wouldn't you, um, at least, do it, like, OVER AGAIN? Or have someone else try to reproduce it, just in case you were doing something weird?

Does that mean these authors either

a) didn't reproduce the results multiple times or
b) he tampered with the results MULTIPLE TIMES??

Gah! That's one of my worst nightmares. That somebody (let's say for example, my PI) might tamper with my samples! But that's why I try to do everything several times several ways to make sure I'm not imagining it. Still, I don't know if I would be able to detect it if someone were sneaky and consistently screwing around with my stuff.

And as Drugmonkey quoted from the PNAS article, I guess this is the problem:

"..In no case did these repeat studies reveal any evidence that the B7-DCXAb reagent had the previously reported activity."

The missing ingredient was the tamperer!

The other thing from The Scientist article was a point I keep hammering like a very dead horse:

I was surprised about this retraction from [Journal of Experimental Biology]" -- the lab's first publication about B7-DCXAb -- "because the groups involved enjoy an excellent reputation in the field," said Melero of the University of Navarra.

Yeah, because reputation determines the OUTCOME of your experiments.

Hmph.

Exodus to marketing?

2010-05-25T17:49:00.000-07:00

Is it just me? I can name about 15 female friends with PhDs who all left bench science for policy, writing, marketing, sales, and public relations jobs despite being very good at the bench. Not all of them loved the bench, but some did.

Seems like a lot of women think they'll have an easier time, for at least three major reasons:

1. Gender ratio - more women in these other positions means less sexism than in a "wet lab" position
2. More flexible hours/shorter hours than research positions (easier to balance with family)
3. More jobs available (especially now)
4. They're encouraged by women already in these jobs (the network is already in place)

It's really sad to me because most of them say they don't really use their PhD or bench experience at all. A few say bitterly that they could have left after a year or two of grad school and that should have been enough, but they felt like they needed the PhD stamp of approval.

I think this is what the hole in the postdoc pipeline looks like. A giant arrow pointing from PhD ---> sales.

public service message

2010-05-22T21:56:00.001-07:00

PLEASE DON'T FEED TEH TROLL(S).

THAT IS ALL.

K THX.

oscillating popularity

2010-05-21T11:32:00.000-07:00

this is kinda weird. Why the cycling up and down, I wonder?

Response to comments on last post

2010-05-19T15:48:00.000-07:00

Sorry to have to do this in a separate post, but Blogger ate my last attempt and now there are even more comments here...

Becca wrote: Oh the horror! He offered you a job- how very offensive. ;-)
Mind you, it sounds like this particular fellow was a jerk and managed to blow the communication badly. Maybe there was some body-language

Becca, it wasn't a tenure-track job. And I have it in writing.

Kea wrote:the MAJORITY of women with jobs have partners in the field, or a closely related one

which also kind of answers profgrrrl's question about how common it is. This is also the case in my field (and Kea and I are in different fields).

geekmommy prof: I misunderstood. I thought your comment implied that you both have tenure-track jobs. That is what I mean when I'm talking about couple hires.

you also wrote:

you present your advisor as a spineless, gutless, completely uncreative shmuck. Yet he must have had some redeeming qualities at least when he was young, otherwise he would not have been hired

He had pedigree. And he does have some skillz.

He is also uncreative, extremely clueless in many ways, and a big fat liar. But I never said spineless or gutless. In fact I think it takes great courage (or arrogance?) to be a brazen, self-serving liar.

Good luck to you and your group.

Anon 6 pm wrote: Another implicit assumption you are making is that anytime someone makes a spousal hire, someone else does not get hired. Being on the other side of the hiring committee, I can assure you that this is not true. I have seen several occasions when deans have opened up specific slots for spousal hires from some sort of faculty-retention fund, and these positions are positions the department would have never gotten otherwise; the money would have simply been lying around in the university

This may be so at very rich places, but in the current climate, and at most universities, it is either/or, not both.

Very few schools have a lot of money "lying around" with which to hire tenure-track faculty and give them startup.

Lou Dobbs: you bring up the important aspect that being a woman in any department can be crazymaking. I already had that as a postdoc. I think this is a MAJOR reason why a lot of talented women leave academic science. On top of having to defend your research to peers both internally and externally, women have to fight an extra battle for credibility in the career path just because we're women.

I lost.

Anon 6:02, thanks for commiserating! sorry you are getting this too. congrats on the job! you're one of the lucky few. Very few.

prodigal academic wrote: The employer doesn't care about sampling the whole wide world of available employees.

This is a major point for women and minorities and why our numbers in the tenure-track are not representative of our numbers coming into the pipeline.

particularly in regions where professional jobs are difficult to find.

This is actually a believable argument, and it makes sense to me. But I've seen a lot of spousal hires in major, multi-institution cities with a high density of job opportunities.

Anon 3:47 wrote: In addition to dealing with male scientists in her department with super-egos, now she even has to deal with people like you!

Um, no, she doesn't. I'm not there.

Don't you think you are being hypocritical here by assuming that just because a woman was hired as a spousal hire, she has no merit?

I never said that, actually. I've been talking more in general about whether this women are a) willing or b) able to act as mentors to younger women, given that they got their jobs via a rather specialized route that may not apply to their mentees.

In my field, when I went looking for women mentors to help me with my applications for faculty positions, I realized that almost none of them had gotten their jobs by applying on their own. I asked anyway; they had no idea how to advise me.

And actually I also want to point out that all of my spousal hire complaints apply to men, too. It's just that in my field it's still mostly the husbands being recruited and the wives following; others have posted here (and on previous posts) that they know of several examples in other disciplines where the wife was recruited and the husband followed (as in geekmommyprof's case, except that her spouse took a non-tenure track position).

I've read FSP's blog for a long time, as have most of my readers (I think). I often find her posts inspirational, but she's coming from a slightly(?) older generation, a very different discipline, and she's just one person. She has been highly successful, I think, and may not be representative of the average experience of most women in science. Neither would I say that I am representative of the "average experience". But on the spectrum from me to her, I think we both have valid points to make, and deserve to be heard.

more on spousal hiring

2010-05-18T11:44:00.001-07:00

I'm not really in the mood to read this and all the links therein, but you might be.

We definitely had an interesting discussion here when I wrote about some ramifications of spousal hiring in a previous post.

I'm glad to see people are talking about it, even if it won't make one bit of difference to my career.

I really do think some people don't realize how potentially complicated and offensive the subject can be.

I recently had a professor tell me he could have gotten me a job as an addendum to hiring MrPhD.

I was disgusted that he actually implied I wasn't worth hiring otherwise, and didn't invite me to apply on my own, if there really were openings (and I'm not sure there are, this guy has a reputation for lies, damn lies, and politics).

MrPhD didn't want the job anyway. The whole exchange was so smarmy that I decided I wouldn't want to apply.

But it was pretty upsetting. I sometimes wonder if these kinds of things are technically (borderline?) illegal?

Say it ain't so.

2010-05-15T12:05:00.000-07:00

Recently heard another story about a postdoc whose NIH fellowship application was triaged. No score, no rank, it really was that bad.

This person got a named fellowship.

The thing about named fellowships is, they are very prestigious.

Why? I don't really know. Because there are fewer of them, I guess, it is assumed that they are more competitive, and therefore reflective of more ability, more hard work, or more achievement.

But it seems like hard work and achievement have nothing to do with it. It seems like these awards are very political. From what I can tell, they are based entirely on pedigree.

It's almost like they're awarded more to the PI than to the postdoc.

Now, we can debate the wisdom of awarding "training" funds to the PI vs. the postdoc, but I like the way the NIH and some other agencies treat postdocs as almost-independent investigators.

The NIH fellowship application is about as close as you can get to writing a mini-R01 at the postdoc level (before the K-grants, which most people don't apply for initially anyway). The NIH application is pretty involved, and it's great practice for writing a K or an R01.

So here's my thinking: if you can't sit down and put in the time and effort and come up with a passable NIH fellowship, how are you going to do with writing R01s?

I'm guessing you'll do pretty badly.

Then again, with an expected 5+ years of postdoc experience, you should have plenty of time to take workshops on grantwriting, and practice by writing grants in your PIs name. Right? After all, you're there for the training (ha ha ha).

I'm not saying that government funding is necessarily better, or that we shouldn't also have private funding agencies.

I'm just wondering why we still revere these private fellowships as if they reflect more ability, hard work or achievement in science, when in reality they're really only reflective of pedigree and politics.

I was talking to MrPhD about how I was writing this post and he asked, "Does anybody even track whether the people who get those named fellowships are more likely to succeed in academia?"

Does anybody track that, indeed. (I don't think so?)

Most of the people I know who got named fellowships have since dropped out of academia to go to industry.

I'm wondering if this phenomenon of placing too much emphasis on named fellowships also contributes to the stories I've been hearing about junior faculty not being able to get grants.

Some departments have been taking extreme measures to try to protect themselves from making the mistake of hiring people who have no chance of succeeding at getting R01s.

Here's what I think has happened in the past. Let's say we have a person called Person A.

1. Gets pedigree - famous grad school, famous advisor, etc.
2. Gets named postdoc fellowship based on pedigree
3. Gets interviews for faculty positions based on prestige of named fellowship
4. Gets large startup package
5. Can't get grants funded
6. Doesn't get papers published
7. Doesn't get tenure/leaves academia

Here's a different scenario, one that seems to happen more often. Person B:

1. Gets an NIH fellowship
2. Fellowship runs out
3. Does not get interviews for faculty positions
4. Quits science.

Nowhere in here are we comparing scientific achievement. I'm assuming these people have equivalent publication records. Things have become so competitive now, and departments so wary, that it seems to be all about funding.

If anything, it seems like named fellowships are great in the short term for the people who get them, but dangerous for everyone in the long term. These funding mechanisms seem to encourage political games and contribute to the devaluation of grantwriting skills - supposedly one of the most important parts of being a PI and having your own lab. It's bad for the awardees, and it's bad for the departments who want to hire them. They haven't completed the training!

Nowadays, of course, we have to insert an additional step: applying for career transition/pseudo-independent funding.

Who do you think is more competitive for that? In theory, if the money is coming from an NIH K-grant, it should be a pretty level playing field, between the named fellowship person As who can't write grants, and the non-pedigreed person Bs who write grants really well.

Still, from what I can tell, career transition awards are a minefield with the worst of all worlds. They require recommendation letters and career development plans with all the right catchwords. And they require an entire grant in the format of an R01.

In that sense, a named fellowship is just one step on a long ladder, and I'm not sure if it provides the same kind of boost than it once did. But usually they pay more, and they still have more prestige, which still looks better on a CV at the job application stage.

wall of shame.

2010-05-12T14:14:00.000-07:00

15 findings of misconduct for one guy: Scott Brodie knowingly and intentionally falsified data at the University of Washington.

Incredibly, this includes multiple examples of fake or manipulated data included in a long list of peer reviewed grants, i.e.

1 P01 HD40540-01 (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [NICHD], National Institutes of Health [NIH])
5 P01 HD40540-02 (NICHD, NIH)
1 P01 AI057005-01 (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases [NIAID], NIH)
1 R01 DE014149-01 (National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research [NIDCR], NIH)
2 U01 AI41535-05 (NIAID, NIH)
1 R01 HL072631-01 (National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute [NHLBI], NIH)
1 R01 (U01) AI054334-01 (NIAID, NIH)
1 R01 DE014827-01 (NIDCR, NIH)
1 R01 AI051954-01 (NIAID, NIH)

and a couple of published manuscripts in peer-reviewed journals.

I'm always amazed at how long this stuff goes on before anybody notices or does anything about it. We're always taught to give our peers the benefit of the doubt, and even when we suspect fraud, it's rare that anyone pursues filing a complaint or requesting an investigation.

In this case, the punishment is described as such:

1) Dr. Brodie has been debarred from any contracting or subcontracting with any agency of the United States Government and from eligibility or involvement in nonprocurement programs of the United States Government referred to as "covered transactions" pursuant to the Department of Health and Human Service's Implementation (2 CFR part 376 et seq.) of OMB Guidelines to Agencies on Governmentwide Debarment and Suspension, 2 CFR part 180; and

(2) Dr. Brodie is prohibited from serving in any advisory capacity to PHS including but not limited to service on any PHS advisory committee, board, and/or peer review committee, or as consultant.

I think this means that he can still go work at any privately funded institute or company that will take him, and continue to do research, see patients, or consult for industry (?).

There were also more widely reported (at least so far as I already knew about) findings of misconduct by Boris Cheskis and Emily Horvath.

Smartening up: who would ever wanna be king?

2010-05-07T05:16:00.000-07:00

Got this Coldplay song stuck in my head. Seriously though, it's relevant.

Random tidbits from the trenches: Special Quitting Research Edition!

• Friend is leaving her postdoc, early on. I think it's very smart to get out now. I hope she can find something that pays well, but at least she likes her parents enough that she wouldn't mind living with them if she had to.

• Another friend is planning her escape from grad school, and debating what to do next. Not research, she says. I don't blame her at all, but it's really a waste. She's one of the most talented people I ever worked with.

• Another friend is graduating, and his wife is planning to leave grad school when he defends. They're both planning to look for non-science careers. The husband has been reasonably successful with a supportive advisor, but disheartened nonetheless by some of the things he witnessed going on in the lab (data faking, among other things). The wife has been struggling pretty much from the beginning, with an unsupportive advisor, in an unsupportive graduate program.

• Another friend says she's ready to try applying for industry positions again, but this time plans to go for sales rather than science. She's gotten the impression that despite her PhD and postdoctoral work experience, she can't get a position as a scientist, but she might be able to get something that capitalizes on her science background on paper while mostly utilizing her social skills to do the actual work.

• Wife of another friend is leaving her assistant professor position. Rationalizations include that her husband can make more money in his non-science career, but they'll have to move. Also, she wants to spend more time with their baby. She already took maternity leave; the husband stayed home for a year because he could work from home, but she does lab research. Seems to me that the countries with 9 months-2 years paid maternity leave (e.g. Sweden, Canada) should have a better chance of hanging onto women's careers, but I don't know if that's actually true.

• Another friend just quit a postdoc to take a higher-paying non-science job. Ironically, that same day we learned that a coworker in the same lab was making 20% more salary all along. Why? No particular reason. No fellowships of any kind involved. Just the usual nonsense: nobody checking, nobody talking to each other, nobody negotiating, and nobody getting paid what they're worth.

• Another friend quit a tenure-track position, again due to a two-body problem, and left to go back to school for something different.

Note that this list includes 5 women and 3 men, all with more or less the same number of years in grad school, plus or minus postdoctoral experience.

Anyway it's sad to me because in all of these cases, these are smart, talented people who just feel like it's a dead-end: that no matter how hard they work, achievement is not rewarded, and there's no work-life balance at all.

And this is all happening right now. In a way, it's encouraging to see that people are wising up (yay, wisdom!).

Can't wait to see what happens next month. Tune in to see if we have another edition of Smartening Up!

Or, remind me. Who knows what I'll be doing next month.

Denial is a bitch

2010-05-03T11:09:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while, I write a post because I read something that makes my blood boil. This particular piece was written by Eileen Burbidge (@eileentso), an early-stage tech angel-investor, and as you'll see, there's nothing angelic about her.

In this case, she writes as a woman who contradicts herself by arguing that offering opportunities specifically for women is "patronizing", even while admitting that It’s not pleasant (or wise) if someone shuts a door on me strictly because I’m a woman.

And yet, she writes an entire post as if this never happens. And she writes as if, when it does, it means the women are not qualified.

Lady, you can't have it both ways. And I think you're in a denier.

By her own admission, she works in a male-dominated atmosphere, and yet she seems to completely miss the point. She writes,

I currently work in the @whitebearyard office space with a lot of men over 2 floors. I’m quite certain that each one of them (or at least most of them) are acutely aware whenever there is a woman in the office. Full stop. They know if a woman enters the office, steps into the floor or is here for a meeting. In this setting, women get a lot more attention than “just another guy”. And if a woman in this setting cannot make a positive impression or assert her value as a prospective vendor, partner, employee/consultant, then maybe she’s actually not qualified or capable enough – or not wanting it.

What really makes me angry is exactly this atmosphere. Full stop.

The sheer inability to understand what it's like for women who have been harassed and abused to the point where even just walking into a situation where all the men suddenly perk up and look you over, head to toe, is enough to make you want to turn around and go home.

The feeling that, no matter what you wear, or how articulate you are, everyone is too obsessed with your female dog-suit to really hear what you're saying.

And by everyone, this can include women. This woman in particular, sounds like the type who thinks no women are ever as good as she is.

My last job had this all-men, all-the-time atmosphere. I hated just walking to my office.

And the feeling never wore off, because there weren't enough other women around. The men never got tired of staring at me like I was a chunk of meat.

Now, they may not have had any intentions of making me uncomfortable, but nobody told them not to do it, or introduced me as an equal, either.

When you go on a job interview, when you're going to be nervous already, and this is the atmosphere, how would you feel?

How about if you're already highly sensitized to it after an entire career of being treated like an unworthy object? Do you think you're likely to do your best?

Of course not.

Does that mean you're not qualified? Not capable?

Of course not.

Does that mean you're not wanting it badly enough?

Fuck you, lady, for even insinuating that "badly enough" means we should be happy to put up with being treated like meat.

You have no fucking idea what you're talking about. I resent the idea that you get to speak for women in any field remotely related to technology.

You're the last kind of person I would want as an advisor to my career, or anyone else's.

***

Having said all that, reading the comments on this post, I get a completely different impression.

For example, there was this exchange:

“I have never heard a woman in tech say she did not receive something because she is a woman. Can you provide some examples of this, as it seems to be your primary reason for the dearth of women in tech?”

While I have heard of women saying this, I agree with you that I’ve never heard it firsthand (and it doesn’t represent my experience nor that of female friends and colleagues) — which is *precisely* the point of my post! I wrote this in response to quite a few other articles I’ve read over the past month or so “blaming” the issue on a systemic issue or bias against women, men who weren’t paying enough attention to hiring women or other such reasons — blaming and in my view complaining about things.

She also writes in response to a comment that tech is better than most industries (more on this in Part II)

So now I'm curious to see what she writes about in Part II. Which fields is she referring to? Business? And whether she might be right that guys in the Tech sector are better than in other fields.

My impression of guys in Tech is twofold:

(1) They tend to be relentlessly logical, which I like, because it means I can often convince them of my point of view more easily than the men in my field

(2) They have never worked with women, so they tend to have many misconceptions about what women are like, based on what they see in videogames and movies. In other words, we might kick ass, but we're still sex objects.

However, (2) can be overcome with (1).

Which is more than I can say for my field, or for the women who also contribute to the culture of denial.

Science is great: Just don't major in it

2010-05-02T11:48:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I read an article about the layoffs at ABC. The author wrote that about 400 people were laid off, and interviewed one guy in particular who said he was 58 years old, had a family and "a dog who likes to be fed" and no idea how he was going to be able to get a job at his age, at a time when journalism is disappearing and the economy is still pretty shitty.

This got me thinking about how journalism, such as it used to be, is dying. I recommend checking out this blog if you don't know what I'm talking about.

Why does it matter that journalism is dying?

For one thing, I see universities going the same way: to be replaced by the internet. We should be paying attention to what is happening to journalists, because the same thing will happen to academic faculty.

Another reason to pay attention is that among the many so-called Alternative Careers science graduate programs love to tout, Science Journalism is usually listed as one of the top options.

But clearly, that's not going to absorb all the scientists leaving with masters degrees and PhDs.

I regularly receive articles about pharmaceutical and biotech layoffs. Yesterday I read one that said no one is really sure how many scientists are out of work right now, or whether it's better or worse than it was two years ago.

Really? No one is tracking this?

I regularly hear NIH and NSF saying that PhD-holding scientists supposedly have among the lowest unemployment rates, but that may be completely apocryphal, and it sounds like nobody actually has the numbers to back it up.

Which would not surprise me, considering that no one was tracking postdocs at all until about 5 years ago. How could they possibly know? There isn't exactly a strong biotech-wide union.

What else is among the top "alternative careers" touted so widely as a solution for the overflow of PhDs who can't get academic tenure-track positions?

Teaching in public or charter schools, maybe. Sure, we need more science teachers. But where is the money for that going to come from? I read an article today about how education specialists can't decide whether charter schools are working better than public schools or not. I found many of the lessons (pun intended) quite relevant to higher education: that schools with the highest accountability showed improvement, while those that tolerated mediocrity stayed in business despite showing no progress.

What about science policy work? How many jobs can that really provide? My guess would be in the hundreds, maybe the low thousands, at most?

But we have tens of thousands of science PhDs in this country. And nobody seems to know how many are doing anything related to science within, let's say, 15 years of leaving their PhD program. Let's say you do 5-10 years of postdoc after you graduate. Then what? Where do you end up?

And sure, you can always go back to school for patent law. How many science PhDs are going into debt to attend, of all things, more school??

At some extreme, if we're really being hyperbolic and facetious, we can see how not all scientists (with degrees or otherwise) can be patent lawyers. There would be nobody left to invent or find anything worth patenting.

The article I cited in my last post talks about how undergraduate education now yields only about 8% of students majoring in the humanities. It cites a large percentage as majoring in business, but fails to mention science and engineering. I have to assume they account for the majority, which seems to be supported by data such as these.

Parents don't check these data, either. Mine didn't; others are just misled. I had a conversation with a woman recently about how she felt her daughter should major in science rather than engineering, and get a PhD so she could have more possibilities for finding work. I had to control myself to say, as calmly as possible, that she had it all backwards and wrong.

I understand that universities budget for faculty positions and building space according to student enrollment numbers in the classes. In that sense, faculty in every department want more students to choose their discipline to major in, or at least they should, because it means their department will get more money and resources. Universities are a business, and at some schools, students are treated as consumers. It is the faculty's job to woo the students. It is the students' job to choose.

Personally, I agree that humanities are a necessary ingredient to teaching critical thinking in high education. I think humanities classes should be required; I think science requirements are less than they should be. To educate the public on science and technology-related issues, we need to start by turning out students who at least understand the basics.

Having said that, I think we've duped far too many students into majoring in science.

Then they find they can't get a job, or can't move up, without a PhD.

Then they're duped into grad school.

Then the cycle repeats, so they do a postdoc.

Then what? Cut them loose and absolve everyone of any guilt? Tell the student "you chose to do this"?

The least we could do is collect the data and tell the truth.

Students: you'd be better off choosing an alternative that will guarantee you can find work.

In the interest of full disclosure, I don't know what the best alternative is now; I don't know what it will be 15 years from now, but I can almost certainly guarantee that it will keep changing every few years. It's no secret that people tend to run in herds. Baby names are trendy; so are majors and careers.

Some disciplines seem to have it all figured out. I've heard of some departments choosing to be exclusive, admitting fewer majors and building up their reputation as a great department by taking only the best students they can get, rather than trying to earn strength by numbers. Those people seem to have no trouble finding jobs when they get out.

I don't know if the secret is in top-down regulation of earlier specialization, having more but smaller departments, or more options for specialized majors, but it might help control and direct the pipeline. It would be a way to potentially combat the common misconception that there are plenty of jobs for everyone who majors in science.

One final thought from this particular soap-box: I still think one of the major problems with the approach to careers in science is the overly long incubation time. Part of the disconnect between input of students majoring in science, and output into an actual job, is the lag time.

I often think if I had gone to a vocational school or majored in engineering that at least I could have gotten a "real job" after just 4 years (or less) of classes.

Nobody can see 4 years into the future, whether the oil spill in the Gulf will completely kill the fishing industry, or whether in another 4 years after that, it might come back.

Even fewer people can say that in 10 years, there will be jobs for people with PhDs in X sub-speciality of biotech.

Fewer still can say that in 15 years, there will be jobs only for people who did a PhD in X and a postdoc in Y and published papers on L, M, N, O and P.

But that's how it actually is right now. Does that sound very scientific?

So spin your dice. You either have to be psychic, or very, very lucky.

what I'm reading

2010-04-29T13:12:00.000-07:00

Poison Pills On Hiring from the Chronicle, an interesting post and interesting discussion.

And very relevant to that, a couple of interesting links from Alternet, both of which left me breathless:

Higher Education Gone Wrong, which lobs many accusations that could also apply to academic scientists.

Drugs causing mental illness, which goes back to an old post where I was saying that many people I worked with were taking anti-depressants, but it didn't seem to be helping any of them.

At the time, I wondered if it was a sign of the toxic atmosphere warping everyone's brains: rather than improve the working conditions, it seemed like everyone wanted the easy denial of taking a pill and pretending like everything was okay.

This article talks about the possibility, laid out in a new book, that long-term administrations of these kinds of drugs are actually making people less functional (although short-term use can be very helpful, they said). That has certainly been my anecdotal observation.

Ethics of anonymous silence

2010-04-28T13:18:00.000-07:00

This week in Nature there's an article titled "Under suspicion", discussing how Nature investigates allegations about data or author conduct.

This got me thinking again about one of my favorite topics: how many things have to go wrong before someone gets caught doing something really egregious and is actually forced to retract the paper.

More often I suspect truth dies by a thousand pinpricks, and the paper is published anyway, and even though many grad students and postdocs suspect entire fields are based on contaminated publications, and suspect we know why, those papers are never retracted.

Here are a couple of examples I know about peripherally, which, to my knowledge, have never been investigated or enforced in any way:

1. Author makes outrageous claim, paper gets reviewed by high-impact journal because the result is so "surprising". Turns out the crux of the claim is based on an extremely high sample number and/or vastly overstated statistical power. Reviewer suggests politely that the number in question is either a lie or a typo. Author revises the text to remove the "typo" but keeps the figures and conclusions the same. Paper is accepted.

Scary, part a: Nobody tries to verify that these authors actually tested even the revised, smaller number of samples (which is still way too many to be believable).

Scary, part b: Nobody can publish anything conflicting with the model based on these published claims, without reproducing the original results in at least as many samples, and no one can afford to do that because it's so outrageously expensive. And actually, if you calculate out the cost, it's clear that the original group couldn't possibly have afforded to do that many samples themselves, either. Suggesting that the only rational answer is that they... didn't.

I wonder if requiring some kind of accounting procedure for papers would help catch these kinds of exaggerations? Not that I'm favoring extensive bean-counting, but sometimes all it takes is the blank space on the back of an envelope.

2. Authors submit paper to high-impact journal with data that have clearly been processed incorrectly. Reviewer points this out. Paper is rejected. Authors submit same paper, with no revisions, to different high-impact journal. Paper is accepted.

Scary, part a: Reviewers at second journal apparently didn't notice? Or did the authors actually fix the problem and magically get the same results? Really? Magically?

Scary, part b: No one involved in the original anonymous reviewing process, neither the reviewers themselves nor the editor, is ethically (or, um, legally?) required to come forward and say anything? So they don't? It's like it never happened? Because it's anonymous, even though it's in the first journal's database, presumably, somewhere? Does that information just get deleted? What would people think if that information got out? Would we finally know which reviewers were completely spineless kowtowers?

Sometimes I wonder how often these kinds of things are happening. More often I wonder why everyone puts up with it.

I like to think we'd learn a heckuva lot if somebody would hack into those computers and find out the extent of all this nonsense. It would certainly be a fun data mining project, tracking the reviews and the papers across journals to see where they end up and how many accusations are made, investigated, or just lost in the shuffle from journal to journal.

On little boys and science

2010-04-27T12:27:00.000-07:00

One of the commenters took offense by misreading an earlier comment, and said that women in science might be like "stupid little boys".

I think what started this confusion was when Dr. Girlfriend said

I feel like my inner 11 yr old boy is being forced to wear a dress again.

That comment actually really resonated with me. She didn't say anything about little boys being stupid.

Far from it- I think many scientists wanted to do this for a living because in theory you get to be a little boy forever. You get to be curious; you get to make things and make messes; you get to play. And get paid! What could be better?

I think for some girls it is really difficult being socialized into our expected (and dare I say, outdated?) roles - we don't want it, we resist, and maybe we just say FUCK NO.

Dear men of all ages, please try, if you can be so brave, to put yourself in our place. Try to imagine this crazy scenario: through the sex chromosome lottery, the 50-50 flip of a sperm coin, you had the opposite luck.

Try to imagine that you woke up one day and realized you were a girl.

For me, it started when I was about 4 years old.

There were huge fights about what I was supposed to be wearing.

At that age, maybe some kids have a very clear sense of what gender roles mean, maybe some boys like trucks and some girls like dolls already, but I wasn't one of them. I liked both; I liked neither. Toys of all kinds were equally fun or boring; I didn't care. I played with whatever was around me.

So here's an example. I remember one fight before a special event and I was supposed to wear a dress. The conversation with my mother went something like this.

YFS: What do you mean I can't just wear what I usually wear?

Mom: Because you're a little girl. This is what little girls wear.

YFS: Why? I don't want to! It's not comfortable! The lace is itchy!

Mom: I know sweetie, but it's what people do. Besides, you look so cute.

YFS: But I don't want to! I don't care if I'm cute! I hate being itchy!

And so on and so forth.

But the shit really hits the fan when you're about 11 years old. All of a sudden, you're bleeding, you're supposed to wear a bra, and for some of us, it's like

What is this shit? What did I do to deserve this? This is NOT FUN! I didn't sign up for this! Nobody warned me this was happening! Oh god my life will never be the same! This is so not fair!

It's not that we want to be boys, necessarily, it's just that it all seems so... extraneous. Bodies seem overly complicated; bodily functions just seem messy and pointless and it all seems to be so disproportionate and unfair.
Boys do seem to have it easier.

But up until about age 11, we could be more or less just like the boys, so far as we can tell. We could wear jeans every day, or we put shorts on under our skirts and climbed trees.

Now we have to worry, at least some days, about what we're wearing. About making sure we have supplies. It's messy, and it's distracting, and it's immediately apparent that we don't really have control over our bodies, much less our lives. What else have our parents been hiding? Is everything just a big lie?

Age 11 is also when, for many of us, the gender roles about careers start to become insistent. We start hearing:

Girls don't do that. It becomes a catchphrase, from our teachers, our classmates, and our relatives of all ages. And it applies to everything, from wanting to grow up to be President of our country to whether you're allowed to have your elbows on the table at dinner. Or the reminder that when you're wearing a dress, that you have to make sure to cross your legs.

My sister, for example, embraced all of what girls were supposed to do, and was forever trying to force me to "behave".

Little did I know, some aspects of my life would always be this way. That even if women like my sister would never be my first choice for friends, they would be my peers, my colleagues, and my supervisors. They would enforce conformity in all things, starting with all the outward feminine appearances.

And sure, it's easy to learn how to look like you care. You can wear a skirt, and cross your legs, and keep your head down. But it doesn't mean it makes any more sense than it ever did. It's still not fair.

So yeah, some of us pine for the 11-year-old boy days. We didn't understand that having to grow up and wear a dress meant people would be constantly ogling our breasts. That we would be assumed to not only want children, but that we would be accused of making our careers secondary, as if that were a weakness (!), and therefore falling behind in our careers, if we did.

And we had no idea how much information we wouldn't be getting. That not just little boys, but also old boys have a club. And that we wouldn't be allowed in it. Just because we got the girl card in the sex chromosome lottery game. I mean, seriously. What???

I guess my point in having this blog, and in criticizing the post by Greenspun from 2006, is that it's fine and good to talk about how fucked up science is, but for women it's especially heinous.

It's as much about our misguided expectations being even farther off the mark than for other careers.

The chasm between "inner little boy" playing with science for a living and the reality of being sexually harassed and discriminated against makes it that much harder to take.

I really did think that scientists, of both genders, would be more aware, more educated, more observant, more rational, more willing to embrace new ideas and change, than most other people in other careers.

But my inner little boy could be really naive like that.

He says hi, by the way.

May Scientiae: Humps and Bumps

2010-04-26T12:30:00.000-07:00

For better or worse, this topic makes me think of a book called The Dip.

I was talking to a friend about this book recently, because she said she favors listening to motivational tapes to keep herself going. She said she especially likes advice for getting past failure, that tell you "yeah, things suck now but you'll get through it". Or something to that effect.

The Dip isn't like that. The Dip is about knowing when to quit.

The main point I got from this book is that if you quit when you're down, you'll always have some regrets. He suggests you should only quit when you're at the top of your game, because then you know you're quitting for the right reasons: because you want to do something else, not because you're just discouraged. Because everyone knows it's hard to make the right choices for the right reasons when you're upset.

What's interesting to me about dealing with setbacks is how much I've learned and yet, I still don't know anything. Sometimes I think that, the more I think about it, the worse my decisions get.

Sure, I've surprised myself over and over. The first time I had a major setback, I was fatalistic and depressed. Then I rationalized, found other things I loved to do, and rationalized some more.

I was surprised to find I could love to do so many different kinds of things.

Looking back now, I never really gave up, but I didn't really keep going, either. I just kind of held onto the dream and put it in my jewelry box. Sometimes I take it out and look at it, but mostly it's just nostalgia for something old and tarnished.

That was before I started doing science.

***

My first major setback in science wasn't about science so much as it was about politics. I went with my gut reaction; I put my nose to the grindstone; I got mad and used my anger.

And that more or less worked out just fine.

Not exactly ideal or a fun time, but I had a clear goal in mind, I set my sights on it, ate my power bars and worked around the clock to show that no matter what anybody said about me, they couldn't sneeze at my science.

I was surprised at how angry I could get, and how I could use that as fuel.

***

The next setback was harder because I felt that my life as a scientist was being shortchanged; I was being treated badly. I said Oh no, Not Again, and I left. I rationalized it as being equal parts about me and the science I was doing. I was very invested in it. I've always found it's easier to stand up for something or someone other than myself. So that helped get me out of an abusive situation, but really I was able to do it because I rationalized that I was shepherding what I thought was an important finding. I rationalized it as not really being just about me, but in reality, I was watching myself get beaten down, and I needed an excuse to get out.

Then I had really serious scientific setbacks in the sense that I had gone out on a limb with a telescope and I was trying to point and wave and say Hey, you've gotta come look at this! but everyone was too busy looking at the tree and they didn't want to see where I was pointing. They weren't mean about it, they just ignored me or said I seemed a little bit crazy.

But still, I kept on fighting. I started blogging and I was very philosophical about all of it. I focused on people I admired, both scientists and non-scientists, and how they had all gotten through setbacks and succeeded anyway.

The idea being to view every hump, no matter how tall, as just a bump in a very long road.

So I got past that bump and then there was another bump and it looked exactly the same and I felt like I had taken a wrong turn somewhere. I thought whoa, am I trapped in some kind of loop here? Didn't I just do this bump?

And then I started to realize that you can keep powering through, up and over, and you can get people to help you, etc. but it does make you tired. And it's actually kind of boring.

Persevering seems glamourous at first (Cue the Montage!). But then, it's really not. It's actually just really tedious. And unlike a montage getting ready for the big fight or the dance recital or the romantic speech in the rain, persevering is infinite. Nobody can tell you when it will be over.

Then I learned that some people will think you're lazy or pessimistic if you say "Hey, I need a rest".

But if you don't take a break when you need one, it's basically impossible to climb up anything for a while. You start looking for a way to go around the hump, and maybe it takes longer but it will eventually get you to the other side.

So now I'm on the other side of the latest big hump, but I don't really feel any better because there's no celebration ticker-tape parade. And I know there's more where humps where that came from.

***

What's sad to me is how our culture views setbacks: it's all about the end.

We seem to see everything through a movie lens: if it has a happy ending, then you made the right choice. But, if the ending is just "okay", then, my friend, you can expect to be second-guessed. It couldn't have been that big of a deal, they say, because you're still here! You must be exaggerating.

So here you are, panting on other side of the biggest hump in your life, and the important thing is that you're still in one piece.

But nobody cares about that. Or maybe they just can't identify? Your friends will pat you on the back and then get on with their lives.

What our culture really cares about is the photo-finish: you're supposed to die trying, or at least be wiling to die. But mostly you're supposed to grasp that trophy and hold it high! Smile pretty!

Except there's no trophy besides being able to say you survived.

What I still don't understand is that while science is all about the journey, getting a job is not about the journey. Getting a job is about the end. The end of being a postdoc. The long-awaited, much-coveted, highly unlikely victory. And if your work isn't published, if you don't get the tenure-track faculty position, it's like you never did anything. You might as well be dead.

I don't know of a way to point and wave and say, Hey! Look at what I did! See how I came, that route there? See all the cool things I learned? ... And shouldn't the journey itself count for something? Wouldn't you rather have ideas and experience than the perfect pedigree?

But everyone is too busy looking at the trees.

So am I on top of the hump, quitting for the right reasons? A month ago, I would have said yes, definitely.

But some days I wonder if I'm still in a Dip.

Then again, I read a statistic the other day that the odds of becoming tenure-track faculty in the biosciences now are pretty much on par with the odds of becoming a successful rock star. Seriously, if someone had told me it was that much of a long shot, I would never have made it this far.

There was an episode of Grey's Anatomy recently that has been haunting me. It's a cancer patient who explains how, past a certain point, hope is scary. It's so true. And ironic, because I've been accused of everything: being too pessimistic, being too naive, being too stubborn, quitting too easily.

Hope is the scariest thing, because it's very hard to learn how to let it go.

A link from a comment I received today

2010-04-24T12:38:00.000-07:00

A commenter wrote to ask why I don't discuss this old post, instead of all these ridiculous sexism theories.

So, I (re-)read the post in question. I think the author is an asshole, though a deceptively thoughtful one. I think in many ways his commentary on science in general is exactly right (nobody ever said all assholes are idiots).

However, regarding why there are fewer women, and why sexism is still a major problem, he is missing the point.

Is sexism just another facet of the abuse heaped on junior scientists? Is it just another way of abusing idealists, and if we are minorities they insult our race, and if we are women they call us bitches, and if we speak up for ourselves we are pessimists? Are they just pushing our buttons?

Or is it a larger cultural problem we unfairly have to shoulder ON TOP OF all the existing problems in the academic science hierarchical mess?

Didn't we choose science in part because it was supposed to be different from all the other career trajectories where you're taught to expect sexual harassment, where you're expected to sleep your way to the top?

Don't we have as much right as stupid little boys do, to pursue research if that's what we want?

Or are we supposed to know better, the way little girls are not allowed to play in the dirt but boys are? Because we're supposed to be in training to wear frilly dresses and soon enough we'll have to be somebody's responsible mommy? Women are supposed to care only about money and security, is that it?

Would we be stupid masochists for saying but we wanted to do science anyway, despite all the bullshit?

Well, yes.

But do we have any less right to it than men? Really? Since when does being a woman take away my right to choose?

Oh, well, yeah, there's that whole crazy thing about it being my body. But I really did think my choice of career would be my own.

Have at it, Dr. (and soon-to-be-Dr.) Chickadees!

More NIH anti-postdoc shenanigans: WTF is this?

2010-04-18T12:12:00.000-07:00

While struggling to find bridge funding to "finish" my postdoc and get a faculty position, several people suggested I look into career re-entry funding sources.

There are several options for these, mostly tiny grants geared toward women who took very extended maternity leave, aka several years off to take care of her husband's career and raise children.

But, there is almost always exclusionary language that makes it impossible for a postdoc to apply if she hasn't had children or doesn't meet the extremely specific requirements.

Take for example this funding mechanism, which is much less restrictive in that it's not limited to women or for having children, and it also sounds like it would cover your entire salary (!). This grant claims to support individuals with high potential to reenter an active research career after taking time off to care for children or parents or to attend to other family responsibilities.

Does attending to sexism count?

No, of course not, I'm just kidding!

Seriously though, what about divorce? Extended international custody battle? What are "other family responsibilities"? Sounds fishy to me. What would count, short of taking care of a sibling or spouse or uncle or aunt with a fatal disease?

Point being, I think there should be grants like this. I'm sure there are people who really have had to deal with these kinds of things (I have a couple of very close friends who have had to).

Still, they wouldn't qualify. Because it looks like NIGMS figured out a ridiculous way to make it virtually impossible for almost anyone to be eligible.

To me, it sounds like they want this grant to be for a minuscule number of people who interviewed for a tenure-track position, got an offer, and signed on the dotted line:

must have qualified for a faculty appointment at the assistant professor or equivalent level at the time of leaving active research.

What's "qualified"? How do you prove that? An offer letter? And what's equivalent to assistant professor level? Research track? Give me a break.

And then you would have had to suddenly leave with a major emergency - for a while?

The duration of the career interruption should be for at least 2 and no more than 8 years

I mean really. How many of these are they going to fund? This grant reads like something created by a program director for his now-dead brother's wife.

A teeny bit too specific to make much of a dent in the hordes of women who have "chosen" to leave sometime during the postdoc, or who have been openly forced out.

On the ups and downs

2010-04-18T00:01:00.000-07:00

In preparing this month's Scientiae on the theme of "bumps and humps", I wrote a whole long post about the ups and downs of research (you'll see it in a few more days).

But today I've been feeling out-of-sorts in other ways. Felt okay when I woke up. Suffered through exercise, hated every freaking minute of it, but felt better afterwards. On a graph that would probably look like flat - down - up.

Got some work-related email that made me happy and angry at the same time, a combination I never would have imagined I would experience so frequently that I'm starting to need a word for it. Kind of like "frienemy", what could I call it?

Hangry sounds like I need something to eat.

Happry sounds like my hubby came home and I'm no longer ronery.

Anppy sounds like bad hair.

I'm sure there's some better combination of synonyms that would work, like happy + furious? I'm accepting submissions for how to describe this emotion.

Anyway. I digress, but at least I find it amusing!

Did some relaxing things during the day, but I couldn't get as much work done as I wanted to, and then this evening I found myself getting increasingly furious about things over which I don't have much control.

I can't help wondering what I could do and whether I should try it. That's just the kind of person I am. I always want to get in there and break things, make a mess. It's what I do best.

But mostly I think I'm mad because this particular infuriating thing is a symptom of other, bigger problems (as most infuriating things usually are).

I'm mad because I know that if I can make it through another day, tomorrow will be better, and the day after that will be even more of an improvement.

But I'm impatient. And I'm so neurotic that I'm even impatient about trying to learn to be more patient! Aagh!

And I know that for every small step forward, there's every reason to expect all the same shit to happen again.

So then I go back to wondering how I can avoid having all the same shit happening over and over and over. What am I supposed to learn here? Am I being punished for something I did (probably)? Is this something I can fix, or am I just supposed to suffer through it?

Whenever things are looking up, I know that eventually I will trip and fall on my face.

And that, my blog-friends, is why I'm the kind of person who thinks that if the glass is half full, somebody is bound to spill it. And the glass will probably get stuck in my bare feet just because I'm nearby when it shatters.

How to fix your advisor

2010-04-13T17:55:00.000-07:00

I would suggest the solution proposed in this post and/or let them eat oxytocin.

Eventually, we will have a protocol.

"we are career trainees"

2010-04-12T11:34:00.000-07:00

The title of this post comes from a comment because I think it should be our new battle cry.

I also think that if things are going to continue as they are, in the meantime, NIH-funded postdoc fellowships should be adjusted upwards.

For once, the NPA is trying to put the collective postdoc mouth where the money needs to be. Click on the link above and follow the instructions to send a message arguing that this is important! It's really easy and only takes a few minutes, but it might be the most useful thing we can do this week.

well that explains a lot.

2010-04-12T01:20:00.001-07:00

So can we use the converse of this to literally reset everyone's moral compass? I so wanna go around zapping scientists in the head.

Nuke the system: response to Hope

2010-04-11T12:33:00.000-07:00

If you've been reading this blog for a while, then you know I think that science is currently trapped in a system that assumes mentoring is the best of all possible worlds, which tells us that doing a long postdoc is a privilege, where even while data fraud goes unreported and unpunished, we keep having to reinvent the wheel because what we used to know is quickly forgotten, where publishing is governed by unspoken rules and and fraught with corruption not to mention sexism and hiring is dependent on funding which is also completely misguided and broken not to mention publishing requirements that have never been shown to correlate with future success. There also seems to be a general trend of preference for hiring foreign men over American women.

There are some potential things that could force change. These include crazy things like a nationwide postdoc strike .

And I have made numerous suggestions for how we could reform science, if universities and funding agencies actually wanted to get together and do it.

I have proposed repeatedly that younger scientists should be given more credit and resources for working independently.

I have also proposed repeatedly that it's bad for science that we have too much turnover among young scientists who are forced to leave or shut down their labs. We waste money training scientists who can't put the training to work.

Conversely, there is not enough turnover among the oldest tenured scientists, although I have discussed some creative suggestions for

incentives to regulate turnover of senior scientists because some of us as senior postdocs already have as much experience as the old guys had when they got tenure.

I've talked about the proposals to replace or augment the publishing system by promoting open data exchange.

And yeah, the whole dual-career couple hiring thing is a problem, both for those searching and for those doing the searches. But do I think it's the most important problem? Not even close. Would I feel differently if I were in a dual-career job search? Maybe.

I think you're kidding yourselves. It's like saying sexism is the only thing wrong with science. It's not the only thing, and it's not the worst thing. Do I write about it a lot? Yes. Because I think it's important and under-discussed. Should it be our top priority? No.

I think we have much bigger fish to fry first.

Response to comments on last post

2010-04-08T13:53:00.000-07:00

Kea -

I hoped this problem of "who really did what" would be solved by some journals' new policies offering some kind of statement of "author contributions", but it turns out that most of them don't allow for realistic categories.

For example, my advisor insisted on being listed as having helped in all areas, despite having actually FOUGHT ME EVERY STEP OF THE WAY and really only contributed to one aspect (editing the manuscript). But the reading audience won't know that. That includes the funding committees who award grants to my advisor based on my ideas and my persistence in making sure it got published.

Anon -

Personally, I think that kind of behavior would have to be really extreme before it would hurt you. Presumably you were being asked about this DURING INTERVIEWS? (in other words - CRY ME A RIVER?!)

We're all penalized by our advisor's bad publishing habits.

That was exactly my point.

SamanthaScientist -

This is the biggest trap with holding out for "kitchen sink" publications. MOST science has ambiguities that seem to occur in waves. The trick is publishing at the peak of the curve before you fall down into another confusion well, and the you climb back out and publish another paper with the next piece of the puzzle. There's a rhythm to it, if you know what you're doing and you can figure out how to break off story-sized pieces. That's how we make progress. The problem I see all the time is that you really need both sides: the person on the ground has one perspective on where the project is, and in the ideal situation, the person in the office (the PI) has a bird's-eye view of where the project begins and ends.

In practice, though, there are two major problems that I can see.

1. Conflict of interest

You want to publish and GTFO.

Your PI wants high-impact papers.

2. Poor Vision and Distrust

You don't have (much) experience with publishing, so you lack the vision and confidence to know how that's going to go. On the other hand, you probably read a lot, so you have some ideas about formats and journals based on what you've seen other people doing in your field. Still, you're supposed to trust your PI - even when your PI lets you down.

Your PI, on the other hand, probably can't stay on top of all the literature anymore, and probably doesn't even try. However, your PI also doesn't really feel comfortable trusting your opinion, either. After all, you are a junior trainee and WTF could you possibly know. Nothing, right?

This tends to lead to delays and, in the worst cases, stalemates that result in zero publications.

Meanwhile, you're waiting or trying to prove your point so you do more experiments. Or your PI doesn't trust you so you're told to do more experiments, presumably with the hope of clarifying some things (but as we all know, more experiments does not always mean immediate clarity!).

This just ends up muddying the waters.

Personally, what I've learned to do is go a little farther than I think I need to, and test the waters. If it's muddier down there, I pull my toe out and publish, knowing I will come back and wade through the mud later when I have my hip-boots on.

If it's getting clearer and I can see lots of pretty fishies, I keep going and catch as many fish as I think I can fit in the paper. (assuming I have the resources I need, etc. which I don't anyway but that's a different rant!)

There are all kinds of tricks to writing good manuscripts, too, and I can't say I've learned how to do this. But the most successful scientists seem to know how to lead their reviewers in the direction of the pretty fishies so that the reviewers will say, "Hey! Fishies!" which is exactly what you want them to do.

Those of us who are less adept at leading the reviewer (and our advisors) tend to try to point at the fishies and end up with reviewers and advisors who love pointing at the muddy snake-pit and saying:

"Why don't you take off all your clothes and flail around in there for a while?"

Ethics of publishing

2010-04-07T17:50:00.000-07:00

Sigh. Just read this post and the related comments over at FSP.

Poor FSP. Again, she is so naive.

So let me give you a little bit of my perspective on this.

FSP is writing about having to take ethics courses and how stupid it is to be forced to take something related to human subjects when you don't even work in the biosciences.

Fair enough. Human subjects are hardly the major issue of ethics in science these days, because studies involving human subjects are governed by rules and reviewed by committees.

And, they can sue.

I would argue instead that the ethics of publishing and the pressure of citation indices, as FSP mentions, are much more dangerous for science as a whole.

I didn't really appreciate the extent of this problem when I started out. I knew it was bad, I heard horror stories. But like FSP, initially I thought they were "bizarre" - as in, outliers. Exceptions. Unlikely. Uncommon.

Now I think otherwise.

1. MPU: minimal publishable unit

Definition: Breaking scientific studies down maximize the number of publications

Pro: More publications in less time

Obvious Con: Usually lower-impact papers

Less Obvious Con: You already have data that contradicts your pet hypothesis, but you leave this out of the first paper and plan instead to publish it in the second paper. It won't fit anyway! Besides, it's okay if you're wrong so long as you're the one who reports it, right?

Advantage: One paper becomes two, potentially both high-impact, and soon!

Disadvantage:

• Knowingly misleading the field during the time between the first and second publications.

• Temptation to never publish the second paper. Especially if the student defends or the postdoc gets a job based on the first paper.

• The next grad student or postdoc in your lab, or another lab, can't publish their work because it contradicts your paper and you never published the second.

2. Kitchen sink publication

Definition: Cramming tons of data into one big paper, in order to increase chances of overwhelming the reviewer

Pro:

• This often works, especially at high-impact journals

• Makes use of data that would otherwise never be published

• Makes a non-story look like a really big deal

Obvious Con:

• Often much of the data that is crammed into the paper does not contribute to the story

• Many middle-authors

• Can only be done with projects that are relatively mature, and/or in larger labs where multiple people contribute parts of figures

Less Obvious Con: Can be used as a way of burying data in supplemental figures that actually contradict the main claim of the paper, while still garnering the credibility of being able to say that all the appropriate experiments and techniques were done

Advantage: High impact paper!

Disadvantage:

• Misleads the field. It's in a high-impact journal, so it must be true, right?

• Supplemental figures are often not reviewed at all, and generally not held to the same standard as figures in the main text.

• Contradictory data that should have been, at a minimum, an MPU for a student or postdoc, and important for the field, gets eaten by the career (and ego) of the first and last author.

I could go on, but I'll stop there for now. Might write more another time if these don't seem sufficiently scary already.

Response to an important question for women in science

2010-04-06T14:21:00.000-07:00

At 12:54 PM, Anonymous said...

I have something to ask the feminists.

What do they think about those female PIs that are married to bigshot PIs ? I have seen many, many times where a professor was signed up be faculty only on the condition that his wife is given a professorship as well. I have also seen politics at Harvard, where a big shot professor, upon learning that his wife would not get tenure, threatened to move to another university. Then the wifey got tenure, and he stayed.

Is that merit? I have seen this happen 10+ times already.

Dear Anonymous,

This is a very timely question. There are two sides to the answer.

A Side: We need women role models, and we just want them to get a foot in the door. Then these women can make the most of the opportunity to move up and help bring other women through the pipeline.

There are three important aspects to this first interpretation.

Assumption 1: Women are just as smart and hard-working as men, but we unfairly face a lot of prejudice, both overt and covert, that ultimately adds up to our looking worse on paper than we really are.

True! It has been well documented in many biological, physical and mathematical systems that even minor discrepancies will add up to huge differences over time, especially where there are positive feedback loops. In this case, even slight and unconscious bias against women adds up to huge advantages for men in terms of publishing and ultimately interviews and job offers.

Assumption 2: So really, women deserve more credit than we get, and it's perfectly okay for women to take advantage of whatever chances we might have - whether it is leveraging our husband's support of our careers, or affirmative action, how is that any different from membership in the Old Boys' Club? Anything that gets us ahead should be fair game. Because after all, men will step on anyone to get where they're going, why shouldn't we take whatever we can get?

Questionable! Is this ever okay for anyone? Should we do what the bad guys have done, even if we don't respect it? Where does anyone get off complaining about hiring spouses while continuing with practices that are totally unethical, reward back-room deals and discourage integrity?

Assumption 3: Having women as role models will, by the mere fact of their success, help remove prejudice. Once these women get a foot in the door, they will excel in their new positions, proving to the doubters that women are just as smart and hard-working as men. This will help reduce prejudice over time.

Questionable! In some sense, just working around women and learning that we're not all idiots can be educational. I have witnessed this myself.

I have also seen women succeed, and seeing that has helped me see it as possible for me. So in that sense, yes, I believe it helps to have role models.

This can help reduce prejudice, but no, it's not enough. The Superwoman Exception phenomenon can be misleading in this regard. Essentially it supports continuing sexist stereotypes by implying that only a handful of women could ever be good enough.

B Side: Women who are hired as spouses may not deserve it. Even if they did, they will face even more prejudice than women who are hired on their own merits. They lack the understanding of how to get hired, so they are unable and often unwilling to effectively mentor younger women who are trying to follow along in the tenure-track. Ultimately, hiring women as spouses actually undermines women's efforts at being seen as equally qualified and does nothing to further the cause of women in science.

Assumption 1: Women who are hired as spouses never could have gotten a job on their own merits.

True and false. Sometimes in dual-career couples, each partner has an offer in one place but not in the another. I don't know if anyone has done a statistical analysis of how often women follow their spouse vs. the other way around. Anecdotally, I know of several examples where the husband turned down an offer at a place that deemed his wife under-qualified, and went somewhere that seemed to value her abilities as much as his own.

Depending on your point of view, you could say that

a) The place that only wanted the husband had "higher standards"

b) The place that offered both partners positions was more open to the possibility that I mentioned above, that women are often much more accomplished and talented than we look on paper. They may have even been grateful to have found such a wonderful candidate, whom they might have otherwise overlooked without even offering her an interview.

c) The place that offered both partners positions just really wanted the husband and figured it was no big deal to hire the wife and let her sink or swim either way if that's what the husband demanded, because he was a big shot and he was worth it.

Now personally, among these I find option (c) to be the least plausible, at least in the current economic climate. But that's not to say it hasn't ever happened. I'm sure it probably has. But how recently? I can't answer that.

Assumption 2: Women who get hired as the "trailing spouse" will be treated badly and regret it, so they might as well not take the job.

Who knows? I think being a trailing spouse probably exacerbates the common phenomenon among junior faculty known as Impostor Syndrome. Are trailing spouses really treated worse than other junior women faculty? I don't know that anyone has statistics on this, either. Do many trailing spouses still manage to succeed in their own right? Hell yes.

Assumption 3: Women who are hired as the "trailing spouse" don't know how to mentor women who are trying to get hired on our own merits.

Probably true?. Based on my own, again, anecdotal investigations, I'd say yes. Having said that, though, I'd argue that MOST PIs don't know how to mentor women who are trying to get hired on our own merits.

What works for men does not always work for women, and often backfires on us. We have to be assertive while being careful to be nice and not come across as too aggressive. We have to be enthusiastic without coming across as lacking sufficient independence. We have to be independent without coming across as too ambitious. While many of these pitfalls also apply to men, I would argue that for women the margins are even more narrow. We have to walk a very fine line of fulfilling cultural gender expectations as well as conforming to academic and discipline-specific expectations, which is even more difficult if your research is, god forbid, interdisciplinary or very novel.

In fact, I would wager that most PIs who aren't trailing spouses don't know how they got their jobs. If they are really being honest with themselves and with you, they will say it was luck, and politics.

Assumption 4: Women hired as "trailing spouses" really don't help the cause of trying to get women hired as equals on our own merits.

Maybe so! But does that mean it should stop? I don't know if I can answer that. I've been advocating for a long time that science hiring needs to be made centralized and should be done by something more like the medical residency match system. Current academic hiring is way too haphazard, and, well, for lack of a better way of saying it, it's just really unscientific.

The way it is now, decisions can be made behind closed doors and based on rapidly changing variables that no one can predict ahead of time, and no one has to explain or defend afterwards. It's completely subject to all kinds of personal biases and politics. For a really vivid view of what that means, watch these videos.

The bloggysphere

2010-04-05T11:22:00.000-07:00

I just tried to leave a comment on a blog, and couldn't figure out why it wouldn't let me. I thought I was typing the word recognition thing wrong. Again.

Then I looked more carefully. Turns out that blog's comments are restricted to "team members". What the-?

Maybe if you want to have a blog and comments, but restrict who can write comments, and you're too lazy to moderate them, you shouldn't bother making your posts open to the public at all. Amirite?

In other words, Fuck me? No, Fuck you!

Or I could just write my little comments over here on my blog, with lots of links to their blog, in the hopes that they might let me join their little club if my insights are insightful enough?

WTF.

In other news, I had a good laugh reading a quote from a guy who trains suicide bombers. Either there's a lot of turnover in that job, or the people doing the training have, by definition, no experience in the vocation.

Most hypocritical job on the planet? I think we have a contender.

I like this.

2010-04-03T11:45:00.000-07:00

post from Dr.Freeride on peer review

Scienciae carnival post: Sustainability in science

2010-04-01T11:42:00.000-07:00

When I think of sustainability, I think of fairness, cost, burnout and all the potential wasted.

We can't sustain science if we keep treating women like this.

To wit:

private college tuition ~$100,000 and 4 years

grad school salary ~$100,000 and 4 years

postdoc fellowships ~$100,000 and 4 years (give or take)

publications >10

number of extra papers women postdoc candidates need to be seen as equal to men ~ 3 more high impact or 20 more in lesser-known journals

job offers = zero

unemployment benefits = zero

Taxpayers' investment in my "training"?

Priceless.

********

advisor horror stories re: publishing

2010-03-31T10:24:00.000-07:00

As per the latest post over at FSP, here are some relevant posts re: publishing troubles with unreasonable advisers.

Publishing Overview

Slightly less amusing version of publishing overview

Before submitting:

Credit where credit is due

Emphasis

After you get the reviews:

Rebuttal Letter

Minor Adjustments

Your work is not your own

The difference between respecting your mentors and BS-ing your way to the top

2010-03-28T11:52:00.000-07:00

One of my biggest pet peeves is people who can't see shades of gray.

These binary-brains think that lack of ass-kissing equates with disrespect.

It does not equate.

Personally, I think that you respect your mentors enough if you take most of their advice, discuss it with them, argue back occasionally, but mostly seek and take their advice (granted, everyone has a subjective impression of what it means when we say "most")....

I've been thinking about this from the perspective of being a mentor as well as having mentors. Mostly, I prefer mentors who see through bullshit, who don't want their asses kissed and rubbed and polished.

Sadly, you can't always pick the people who have power over your career. They may not be mentors, but they may need a good butt-rub to get moving on your behalf.

Maybe you didn't realize what you were getting into; maybe you just overestimated your own ability to put up with it.

Or maybe, as has happened to me more than a few times, your mentors just disappointed you. You took their advice; it failed. They say they don't like bullshit, but they fall for the brown-nosing from the guy at the bench next to yours (even when it's patently obvious to the objective observer that it's not sincere, just a well-acted manipulation tactic).

So I don't like it when my mentees, or anyone for that matter, give me false compliments in an effort to win my favor or recommendation. I say no, I won't write that letter for you, and please, stop trying to butter me up. I'm not a muffin, cupcake.

But sometimes I do wonder if my mentors know how much I genuinely appreciate their efforts, especially the ones who really gave me advice in good faith, tried to encourage me, and sure yeah, maybe none of it worked out like we hoped.

Every once in a while I'll send them a card or an email and just say Thanks, I appreciate it.

To suggest that doing more than that is actually necessary, even required, for success, just means the quality of people in science is rather low.

Seems to support the idea that science is full of insecure liars who can't tell the difference between a fake compliment and a real one.

And what does that say about their ability to evaluate any other kind of data?

think I'm gonna hurl

2010-03-25T12:15:00.000-07:00

Don't focus on demonstrating your own brilliance. Focus instead on expressing genuine interest in your mentor's brilliance

or as my blog women-tors would say, puke on their shoes.

poor turnout for NPA and Gender Summit

2010-03-18T19:09:00.000-07:00

This is really weak. For the so-called National Postdoc Association, attendance at the Annual Meeting was really, really low. Last I heard, we have something like 90,000 postdocs in this country, and about half are women. So tell me WTF is up with this?

The NPA's 8th Annual Meeting, held last week, was attended by a record crowd of more than 275 persons. Important discussions took place that will affect the work of the NPA and its members and friends for months to come. The first-ever National Summit on Gender and the Postdoctorate also took place and was attended by nearly 140 persons.

Also, am I the only one who thinks there might be a grammatical error in using "persons" in a clunky passive voice instead of just saying "275 people attended"?

I mean, seriously. That's like 0.3%, if we believe we know the total number of postdocs as the denominator. WEAK.

should I change the name of the blog?

2010-03-17T11:09:00.001-07:00

I've been thinking for a while about book titles. Something like Former Female Wannabe Scientist, PhD?

This post over at Drugmonkey seems to imply I've never been a science blogger, at least according to the people who commented there.

That pretty much sums up how I feel right now: marginalized, muffled, and invisible.

Funny how at one point I was so concerned about being outed! Maybe not something worth worrying about after all.

that fits - now I'll have to look her up

2010-03-06T18:47:00.000-08:00

took this silly quiz by way of GrrlScientist.

I am:

James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice B. Sheldon)

In the 1970s she was perhaps the most memorable, and one of the most popular, short story writers. Her real life was as fantastic as her fiction.

Which science fiction writer are you?

Go give NIGMS an earful on "training"

2010-03-02T10:53:00.000-08:00

Give Us Input for Our Strategic Plan on Training and Career Development

Posted by Jeremy Berg on Tuesday, Mar 2, 2010 10:29 AM EST

I’m proud of NIGMS’ long and strong commitment to research training and biomedical workforce development. As biomedical research and its workforce needs evolve, we want to be sure that our training and career development activities most effectively meet current demands, anticipate emerging opportunities and help build a highly capable, diverse biomedical research workforce.

To this end, we are beginning to develop a strategic plan focused on research training and career development, and we want your input.

Between March 2 and April 21, you can anonymously submit comments at http://www.nigms.nih.gov/Training/StrategicPlan/.

Why couldn't undergrads do research?

2010-02-27T12:44:00.000-08:00

A link via my last post led me to this article in the chronicle that says both the oversupply of PhDs and the shortage of scientists are myths.

And some really scary stuff about Bill Gates, H1B visas and Walmart. Definitely worth a read.

But there was one line in the article that caught my attention, because it implied that having students do research is a bad thing.

I'm not sure I agree. If anything, I felt like most of my structured education was inefficient at best, a huge waste of my young energy and time at worst.

Why couldn't we accelerate more students through required courses faster, and let them start doing research younger? Would that really be such a bad thing? They're curious, they have fresh ideas, and they ask good questions. Why not?

The idea that "casualization" of scientific jobs is okay is also lost on me. As I've written here before, I think it would make more sense to let younger people do scientific research like time in the Peace Corps, while they have the energy for the long hours, and before the creativity is beaten out of them by the conformity of too much school.

Having more older temporary staff is stupid. Have more adjunct/lecturer type positions is not the way to instruct students at the college level, and it's a complete waste of a PhD, not to mention postdoctoral research experience.

Between this kind of stuff, earthquakes, and generally crazy weather, it sure does seem like things are getting worse, not better.

But hey, Olympics, possibly healthcare of some kind.... oh whatever.

See? You don't need me anymore.

2010-02-26T14:06:00.001-08:00

Check out this post on the mythical scientific talent shortage.

I mean, clearly, there is no postdoc problem! No problem at all.

mixed bag

2010-02-24T14:46:00.000-08:00

I'm getting old: got called m'am twice in one day this week.

So much for my woulda coulda career: had a student say they wish they got to participate in search committees, because they would make sure I got hired. Awww. So touching, how little they understand about how things work.

Progress: got some writing done. realized I am writing the easy parts first. and probably over-writing lots of things that no one else will care about, at least not in such excruciating detail. anyway it's always easier to write more and then cut it, than the other way around.

still, the most emotionally difficult chapters are being put off for now. but things that were very upsetting or weird at the time really do lose their cutting edge if you wait long enough. usually. or get some kind of perspective somehow.

stupid computer problems: always seem to crop up at junctures when it makes no sense to buy a new one. and yet, always still poses a headache.

sexism is everywhere: spoke to someone who works in game testing for a living. he said a lot of the best testers are women, "Because they'll actually do the tests." he said women do all the work of checking to make sure everything is running the way it was designed to run. the guys don't do well in those kinds of jobs because they just want to play. I didn't say anything, because I couldn't think of a sufficiently witty response to his mansplaining. as if girls don't want to play. uh huh.

on exercising: and it really does seem to help. not as much as spending huge chunks of time away from evil people, though. it's amazing how much better it is not to have to deal with certain soul-sucking situations on a daily basis.

buffy: was pleased to find a reruns on MTV in the morning every day.

meh: occasionally have random thoughts that seem appropriate for the blog. will post them here, probably in this kind of very brief format, for now.

a good news/bad news scenario for my readers

2010-02-15T16:09:00.001-08:00

the book is coming along.

I started looking into Amazon digital publishing. It's either that or the sort of thing that FSP used. But I like the idea of having a Kindle book.

Have to figure out the legalities of using people's real names in a tell-all memoir. (read: I think I will need a lawyer)

don't know how much more blogging I'll be doing.

please continue sending your questions and comments and I will try to respond. I'll probably still see things on other blogs that inspire me to write here. For a while anyway.

the blog is not going anywhere. but I need to move on. when I can't even read that Dr. Brazen Hussy has job interviews without being jealous of her, or read the kind and encouraging comments from readers who say they hope I will get the job I want, it is time to stop torturing myself.

it's funny because one of the commenters asked why I don't have impostor syndrome about my ability to run a lab, like that was a bad thing. I thought that was weird and backwards.

but the truth is I am tired of living as a closeted blogger. Writing is one of the most rewarding things I do, I need it like air, but nobody knows I do it and nobody here knows this is me.

I kind of have impostor syndrome about being a writer, but it's backwards. It's closet fever.

so in the hopes of getting out of the writing closet, I am working on the book and plotting exit strategies.

thanks for your thoughtful input and continued participation over the years. it has been fun, and enlightening, and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have made it this far in science without blogging and the support of the blogging community.

unfortunately, it looks like none of the sacrificing has paid off, and tenacity can't fix a certain amount of cumulative career damage.

so here I'll write what I often feel: maybe the most useful thing I've ever done for science was writing this blog.

good luck to you all

- MsPhD