My First Conference - Teaching Institute

My First Conference is over, after four hectic days of commuting, socializing, eating out - and, of course, attending symposia and a little networking. This week we'll step through some of the highlights of the conference, starting with the pre-conference Teaching Institute.

The teaching institute was first of all interesting from both the teaching and research perspective. The first plenary talk was on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning ("SOTL"), and can be summed as follows: 1) At best, results on teaching methods from a lab setting can only create a hypothesis for classroom teaching, not a definitive guide for practice; 2) Pedagogy research needs to take into account the individual differences of teachers and students, because claims about the evil/effectiveness of PowerPoint and other teaching tools depend entirely on the teacher's teaching style.

The second plenary talk focused on the outcomes of our teaching, pointing out that one of the reasons that public policy makers are so resistant to listening to scientific study (such as in NPR's report about banning phthalates in toys despite scientific evidence that they aren't harmful) is that we aren't teaching science that well. We need to not just teach the facts we learn from science, but how we know, how what we know changes with new evidence, and what we do not know yet. Another talk on this topic pointed out that we often teach using nothing but confirmatory evidence, which is completely contrary to scientific thinking.

Beyond giving me some cachet in my claims to be a dedicated teacher, and ideas for future teaching, it was an excellent introduction to the conference. A tiny fraction of conference attendees were there - only about 170, according to the organizer - and I was able to ease into the crowds, get practice on a poster session, and chat with people. And, the people I spoke with were ridiculously nice and helpful. The round-table leader I ate lunch with started offering suggestions on how I could present myself when applying for jobs, and one poster presenter was willing to talk about teaching at liberal arts colleges and was just incredibly enthusiastic in wishing me well on my upcoming job search and dissertation. Those informal experiences alone would have been worth the extra registration fee.

The Dissertation Proposal

The talk I gave yesterday, that my advisor and I were both so proud of, was something of a precursor to my dissertation proposal. I presented on the only truly successful research of my graduate career, two experiments that are the first two experiments in my proposal. I also presented a conceptual summary of what I have planned for the next experiment.

The upside is that it was an incredibly successful talk. Two other members of my dissertation committee were there, asking questions and making suggestions, and both of them complimented me on the talk afterwards. I have a brief preview of what I might have to deal with in convincing them to approve my dissertation.

The downside is that there were lots of suggestions on what I should do instead of what I had planned to do, so I am revising my proposal, again. I consider myself extremely fortunate that two of the experiments have already been completed, so I only have to revamp two of the experiments at the fancy of my various committee members.

At least there's plenty of time to revise the proposal. One of my committee members could only be on my committee if the proposal were between May 7th and May 12th. This gives me a free pass to avoid the official "by [the end of] April" deadline, and several extra weeks to change the proposed experiments three or four time at my advisor's suggestion, before giving it to the committee so they can propose another three or four rounds of changes.

But I can't worry about all this now. Tomorrow marks the first day of the conference, in the "pre-conference" activities. Let four days of carefully controlled chaos commence...

Pride in Our Students

Two weeks ago, my honors student defended her thesis. A full year of working with her on designing the project, analyzing the data, revising draft after draft of the thesis proper, and revising several iterations of the thesis defense, all cumulated in a simple 20-minute presentation. It was without a doubt the highlight of my week, possibly my semester. I was glad to be kicked out of the room while the committee (technically, she's my advisor's student) made their decision, because I wanted to start bragging and applauding her right away. I suppose the politically correct term is pride, but I felt smug. That's right; that's my student. I helped her do that. I didn't do it for her, I just taught her how to do it, and that's even better.

Today I gave a similar feeling of pride to my own advisor. I know this because she came up and told me that she was beaming throughout my entire talk, my annual brown bag presentation to the department. My own pleasure at how well the talk went - I didn't talk too fast, I didn't botch any of the explanations, I only suffered a few misspoken moments - had already been intensified by the fact that the question-and-suggestions period extended into 15 minutes focused entirely on what I could do next, with only the expected minor questions about "does your research really do what you think it does?". I had several people stop me to say how good they thought the talk was. It was exactly the confidence booster I needed before the huge conference later this week.

Obviously, this is more evidence that practice makes perfect. Not that I practiced too much; I gave a sample presentation to my lab a few weeks ago, changed the talk wildly in response to their comments, and practiced twice yesterday. The first practice was abysmal; the second was exactly how I wanted to talk today, and I managed to pull it off. Obviously, all that mental practice reciting the talk (yes, I had every animation memorized) before I fell asleep at night paid off.

Now I just have to managed the same thing for my short and shorter summaries of the two posters I'll be presenting this week.

Productivity vs. The Blizzard

My plans to be productive over spring break worked great for the first three days: Data was (alright, were) collected, proposals and papers were written, lessons were planned. Then Thursday brought a blizzard. What I'd last heard of as 3-5 inches expected turned into 8 inches by the time I woke up Thursday morning, to a text message telling me that the university was closing at of 10 a.m. due to the further 8 inches expected that afternoon.

This is one of the few times that might make it worth it to shell out for internet access from my apartment. After all, severe weather doesn't mean a break to the grad students. There were certainly some things I could keep working on, but almost all of my plans for Thursday were tied to being on campus. So I gave up on work and read novels (yes, plural) all day. I can't decide if I should be frustrated at the loss of productivity or grateful to have an enforced day or two off. I might not decide until after the conference, when I find out whether I'm behind or still on top of everything.

My First Conference, and Networking

My first conference approaches. Yes, I'm at the tail end of my fourth year of grad school and I haven't been to a conference yet, due to a combination of no research results and an unwillingness to spend the money to travel if I'm not presenting. But I'm jumping in with both feet: I'm attending what I'm assured is a large and overwhelming conference (over 3,000 posters presented across 14 sessions), attending a pre-conference teaching institute, and presenting not one but two posters. I'm not usually of the rip-the-bandaid-off mentality, so I don't know what's gotten into me.

Yesterday's meeting with my advisor has me as prepared as I can get. I know what I should wear (more formal than anything worn in our jeans-and-sneakers department, but no need to worry about a suit) and what I should bring to my poster session (a short and shorter prepared spiel, a stack of handouts for those who are interested but don't want to be dragged into a conversation, and a sign-up sheet in case the handouts run out).

And I have a plan for networking. This started out as a discussion of my career interests, at which I was reluctantly forced to realize I should be actively asking people about their jobs (teaching and research requirements) during the teaching institute, to find out if the kind of job I want even exists anymore (is it possible to be at a college and not have publish-or-perish pressure?). It was extended into my advisor's suggestions for making the conference less overwhelming, trying to arrange individual meetings with relevant people. This morning I struggled over a 4-line email to a very relevant person, trying not to beg for 10 minutes of her time.

Now that I think about it, the real reason I haven't been attending conferences is that I'm just an insular type of person. I try, or it feels like I try, but it's all I can do to have the minimum number of reference letters - it's almost inconceivable to me how people can know more than three people well enough to even ask for a recommendation. The most stressful part of the conference may well be attempting to talk to people instead of sitting quietly and learning.

Time to Graduate

The best thing about PhD Comics is that sometimes there's a comic that perfectly encapsulates my feelings at the moment.The closer I get to graduation, or even the idea of scheduling graduation, the further away it really seems...

April Showers

April always showers me with work, not rain, and this year it's started raining all the way back in mid-March.

April is the end of the semester. Officially, the last day of classes is May 1st, and there's all that "final exam" stuff, but that doesn't mean anything to the graduate student. Only the run-up to the last day of class matters. It's always a combination of papers I need to turn as a student, papers I need to grade as a teacher, the yearly progress report, and whatever milestone has to be met by the end if the academic year - this time, my dissertation proposal. I foolishly offered to give my department presentation that first week of April. And to top it all off, this year I attend my very first conference ever, complete with two poster presentations, April 1-4th. It's almost enough to set off a mild panic.

On the bright side, my posters are beautiful (barring complications in the poster printing process), I've already gone several rounds of revisions on my dissertation proposal with my advisor, I don't care about my grade in my one class (I need a B- to get the Cognitive Science Certificate, and no paper is that hard anymore), and I gave myself two weeks to grade my student's final papers. Next week is Spring Break, and I will spend it here, at the office, using this as my last opportunity to prepare for the April deluge.

On the Job Market?

At various career workshops I've attended in the past few months, certain questions are standard: What do you intend to do once you have your PhD? How confident are you that you can get this job? The answers are just as standard: I want an academic job, and I'm not confident at all - because of the economy.

About a week or so ago, this despair made the New York Times. And the general sensation that the job market will be tough was laid out in stark statements.

Public universities are bracing for severe cuts as state legislatures grapple with yawning deficits. At the same time, even the wealthiest private colleges have seen their endowments sink and donations slacken since the financial crisis.

As much as I, personally, love the concept of a trim and balanced budget, I, as an academic, see it as cutting of my job prospects. I might apply for several dozen jobs and be lucky to get a single interview. And could I possibly handle the uncertainty of being given a job "pending funding approval"?

Staying in grad school isn't really an option either. First, because I want out; second, because my advisor's funding (and the department's) is just as tenuous. She may or may not be able to put up funding for one more year.

I'm certain I'll find some job - some of the people getting laid off are no doubt taking the change to finish some college degrees or take extra courses to bolster their resumes, and may be heading to community college to do it. But if I start teaching at a community college, could I ever advance away from there? It might be better than doing nothing for a year, or doing something completely unrelated to academia, but it might be hard to compete with people coming straight out of the more prestigious schools. I just have no idea.

Reprint Requests

This morning I found not one but two emails requesting reprints of my in-press article. This was at once incredibly exciting - I don't care if it's only two people, someone outside my lab is going to read about my research! - and incredibly surprising. How the heck did these complete strangers even find out about the paper?

It turns out that the corrected proof is now available online, and no-one told me. Again, this is incredibly exciting, and I will have to refrain from constantly prodding Google Scholar to see when I'm searchable research (with a specific title and author name; I'm not too ambitious here).

Now it's time to perfect the generic "thanks for your interest, here's a copy" email. I am new enough at this to be obsessed over every word and punctuation mark.

Passing Notes in Meetings

I was highly amused to have my advisor pass me a note during a meeting yesterday. It required a bit of acrobatics, and some assistance from an intermediary, since we weren't sitting that near each other. I accepted the note with some flashbacks to grade school, when such blatant note passing would have resulted in extreme teacher displeasure.

In this case, the professor started it, and the post-doc giving the talk wasn't about to call her on it. In fact, the note was extremely helpful - I knew the presentation should related to my research somehow, but it wasn't obvious, and her note explained it. And just to make it vastly entertaining, it was written on the back of her lunch receipt. I may just keep that for posterity.

Besides, NPR said just this morning that doodling can be useful during boring meetings. Note passing is a step up; maybe it's even more helpful.

Seeing Myself Teach

My university offers a teaching certificate - possibly to make you look good on the job market, possibly so you feel that all that effort you put into your teaching was worthwhile - which requires two videotape consultations. A lead TA, trained in the consultation process, comes to your class and videotapes you; then, within 24 hours, you watch a small chunk of the videotape and come up with a teaching "issue" that you can work on. Seeing yourself displayed on the TV, in the unflattering amateur camerawork, is a universally horrifying experience. Choosing to have the tape recorded to DVD for posterity is optional.

After my first videotaping, I didn't even considering getting the DVD. Why in the world would I want a record of that? It was my first semester teaching (my third as a TA, but the first two had involved nothing more intense than answering emails and proctoring exams), I had no idea what I was doing, and at the time half of my life was dedicated to finishing my master's thesis. The consultation was very constructive, but the class itself had not been pretty.

My second videotaping came almost two years later, with two more semesters' experience in teaching that particular lab. The consultation was still constructive - there's always something to work on - but I was more horrified by the sound of my voice (I hate the way it sounds recorded) than by my teaching. And if I succeed in my career plans, and become a full-time teaching professor, then someday I might want a record of what I was like "at the beginning". Not the absolute beginning - I will never regret not getting that first DVD - but with a minimum of experience and the carefree life of a graduate student.

Not that I have any intention of watching the DVD now. It'll be bad enough reading the student FCQs without throwing my own harsh opinion into the mix.

Begging the Outside Member

My life is too insular for this "outside committee member" nonsense. I have a hard enough time imagining two people from my own department who would be willing to write my reference/recommendation letters, so going outside the department is by definition approaching a (seemingly) random stranger and asking them to do me a favor. Perhaps it's just the impression my advisor gives of being completely unavailable to anyone outside my lab, but I don't have much hope for this process.

The first email request went out today. Now I will cringe every time I see that I have a new e-mail, wondering if it's the response. If/When the response does arrive, I will probably stare at the email in my inbox in mild terror, and avoid opening it for a day. This is exactly how I dealt with sending emails to prospective grad school mentors requesting information about their research. It's nice to know how much graduate school has changed me.

Turning It In Late

Even as a former undergrad myself, I am baffled by the approach some students take to their assignments, and whether they should be turned in on time.

I returned from teaching my lab this afternoon to find that a lab assignment had miraculously appeared on my desk. This assignment had been given back to the students today, and my first thought was that I'd somehow left one on my desk. Then I noticed it wasn't graded, and my office mate confirmed that someone had dropped it off while I was teaching. A week late, without any comment.

What baffles me is not that the student decided to turn it in without even a note, or even that she thought she could turn it in after the graded assignments had been passed back and still get credit. No, what really annoys me is that this student was in today's lab. She didn't even try to talk to me, or ask me if she could turn it in now. She just went down to my office and dropped it off without a word.

I have no idea why this would appear to be a good strategy. If I'm going to refuse to accept it in person, I'm not going to go ahead and read it if it just appears on my desk. I'm not a scary person to talk to; in fact, my "no late assignments" policy has caved several times into "as long as I have it first thing tomorrow morning". (This is the result of a slippery slope: Students have to keep track of three pieces of paper to turn in for each assignment, they keep forgetting one, and if I'm going to let them turn in one piece a day late I might as well let them turn in the entire thing a day late).

Asking permission wouldn't have changed the outcome in this case; I'm not going to accept an assignment turned in after the first lab got their grades back; there's too much potential for cheating. But at least I wouldn't be sitting here in stunned amazement and the audacity and/or idiocy of my student.

How To Write A Dissertation

Last Friday I attended a workshop on how to write the dissertation. It was very general, in attempts to reach a broad audience. The speaker was from the humanities, where dissertation research is primarily done by going to different libraries. Still, some of the general points are good to keep in mind.

• Choose your topic carefully. You will live with it for the rest of your life. It's possible to redefine yourself gradually over time, but as you go on the job market and prepare future research, your dissertation topic is going to determine your starting point, and thus your option.
• Choose your advisor carefully. Remember that after a year into your dissertation, you will know your topic better than your advisor, and your advisor's role will be general encouragement rather than specific content knowledge.
• Find out what dissertations look like. Look at one or two of the recent dissertations in your field, to get a feel for how long, how detailed, how close to a book they are.
• Do something for your dissertation every day. Even in the midst of a busy teaching schedule, you have to make time to read that one paper or chapter you know you have to read. Doing something every day, even if it's small, will keep you focused on your topic.
• Don't start writing too early. You have to have some idea of what you're going to say, or you're just wasting your time.
• Don't start writing too late. The dissertation is not going to write itself; even when you know what you want to say, the mechanics of writing will still take time.
• Don't start revising until you have a complete draft. You may find that sections you need to cut from an earlier chapter should just be moved to a later chapter. Having the big picture of what goes everywhere will help you figure out what needs to get tossed entirely and what just needs to be moved.
• Broadcast deadlines and keep them. Asking your advisor to clear time in a given week to review a chapter draft is a great motivating tool to stick to your timeline.
• Don't turn anything over to your advisor until you think you're done. Drafts where you know you need to work on a given paragraph or check for typos should not be handed out; the known problems will stick out to your advisor and you won't get feedback on the unknown problems.

Most of these instructions weren't particularly helpful at this point in my graduate school career; I'm very good at being organized and very practiced at revisions with my advisor. I do, however, take comfort in the instructions on not writing too early; that is now my excuse for not having actually written my dissertation proposal yet.

The Writing of Undergrads

Words cannot express how relieved and outright thrilled I was when I began reading the second of two summer research funding applications I had to comment on this morning. Discovering that one of my students could write, and write well, may well be the highlight of my week.

I have somewhat-accidentally acquired two undergrads to mentor in the coming. Undergrads are a bit like puppies; you give them a smile once, and you can never get rid of them. It started out just having them run a project for me, so I could devote time to my various writing projects; then, before we even got approval for the project, they both asked about summer projects, and summer funding.

In general, this works out very well for me. I was committed to two non-dissertation projects, and they're each taking over one, in what seems like naturally fits - they were already interested in the projects. So I can step back into a supervisory role on those projects, and focus on my dissertation. But first, in my incredibly hectic pre-sister-visit week, I had to help them write their summer funding applications.

One the one hand, we have a rising junior. I actually worked with her when she was a high school senior, on a related project. She's great as a research, but definitely not as a writer. I've struggled through several rounds of revisions with her already, getting frustrated at either her resistance to comments or inability to make use of Word's track changes features. Her writing is, well, what one expects of someone with only two years of college who is not an English major. It should be possible to work with her, and I'm dedicated to teaching writing skills, but it will be work.

On the other hand, we have a rising senior, who is hoping to do a senior thesis based on his project. I had never seen his writing before, and it was with great trepidation that I opened his draft. The level of expectations for senior thesis writing is a step above that of even student grant application writing. If his writing was terrible, I'd be in the position of wondering if a senior thesis was possible; if it was only passable, I'd have given myself two students who would need extensive help in that area. Which explains why I felt my heart lighten as I read a paper with organization, clear descriptions, even humor. Oh, there were plenty of typos, but those I can just fix, I don't have to teach.

The prospects of mentoring over the summer suddenly seem much better. I've lucked out for the second year in a row in getting a senior thesis student who is intelligent and knows how to write - meaning my job is to help them with the actual research, not understanding simple concepts or putting together a well-formed paragraph. It gives me something to look forward to about next year.

Knowing When To Quit

Slightly over a year ago, my advisor and her former post-doc realized that there was an error in a published paper. They insisted that the finding was valid, especially since the error was found in the process of replicating the results; I insisted that the statistical significance of the results had changed to the extent that the paper would never have gotten published, and the editor should be informed. This was incredibly stupid of me.

It wasn't stupid to think that the editor should be told; I stand by that bit of ethics. But it was definitely stupid to think that I could get two professors to admit they were wrong. We got a letter to the editor drafted - and then it had to be a brief report, so they could explain all the interesting reasons they were wrong. And then my advisor sat on the draft for five months, until I demanded to at least give the *#@%A thing a due date so it wouldn't always be the lowest priority. And the the due date came - and went. My advisor has a grant deadline. Our co-author has "a number of pressing deadlines". Having a due date doesn't even give them an artificial sense of urgency.

I find myself faced with the options of continuing to drag them, kicking and screaming, into telling the editor they made a mistake, or giving up. I chose to give up. The alternative is just too stressful; I've spent a year trying to convince them to do the right thing, and I don't have anything left to fight with. Their reputations matter more than their science, and there's nothing I can do to change that.

Frankly, I don't think our research is important enough that it matters, and we did replicate the results. My advisor and her former post-doc can survive with their reputations intact, in everyone's eyes but mine - and, after all, why should they care about the opinion of a lowly graduate student?

As for me, I have one more year here. Fighting with my advisor over this will only hurt my career prospects. I just need to get the dissertation done, get the PhD, and get out. If I have to publish my dissertation results - well, at least my advisor is likely to be interested in those. And then I'll never work with her again.

The Outside Member

Why are we required to have someone from a different department on our dissertation committee?

I decided it was to have someone on your committee unrelated to your field, so that you would keep your dissertation accessible to people outside the department. In that vein, I decided I should contact the one person from outside my department I've taken a class with, asking if he knew of anyone in his department who'd be interested in sitting on a committee in my topic.

My advisor seems to think the "outside" requirement is just a formality, and I should find someone with similar interests. This does not appear to be possible. I've cruised the faculty listings on various related departments, and it just so happens that my topic is really only investigated in my department. No outside expertise is really relevant. There was one person who looked like he was interested in the topic...but that turned out to be an old website from 2002; the person has moved on, and the department hasn't updated its website yet.

I'm thinking my plan will prevail. The only other student in my area who has a committee picked the outside member as the only person outside the department she'd taken a class with, which is more or less my plan (except I want to use that professor to network, instead of outright asking).

Choosing Your Dissertation Committee

Friday morning I attended an amazing talk on things to consider when picking a committee, for any thesis or dissertation. I left the talk actually enthused about the committee selection and my dissertation. Partly this was due to the speaker, an Anthropology professor (totally not my discipline) who came with few notes and 34 years of experience as a professor, and was just vastly entertaining to listen to. Mostly this was due to the points he made. I just have to share them, or at least my interpretation of them.

• Never forget that your committee is a means to an end. You have to have the ends in mind (perhaps the job you want to get after you get your PhD) to construct the means. If your end is getting your career to a good start, getting the job you want, then the best person to ask may be someone who is a great name in the field, and whose recommendation from them will open a lot of doors. If your end is just perfecting your research so your dissertation will be published quickly, then the best person to ask may be someone who has expertise your advisor doesn't have.
• Ask yourself "What is the purpose of having this person on my committee?". If you have the attitude "who can I get?" and are just trying to fill seats, you've already lost. Don't select committee members because they won't interfere; select them because they'll be helpful and committed to you and your goals.
• Your committee has to respect you as a young scholar. If they don't respect you, you can never argue with them.
• You cannot be afraid of your committee. Where there is power, there has to be trust. Your committee has power over you, and you have to trust them not to abuse that power.
• All catastrophes on a committee are caused by either lack of communication or forgetting that this is a means to an end.
  
• The worst catastrophe is breakdown of communication with a committee member. This is particularly true if that committee member is your advisor. If it gets to the point that you cannot or will not take the member's advice on your dissertation, you're screwed; either you have to get that person to step down from your committee, or find some way to restore communication.
• The second worst catastrophe is discord between committee members. Two members on your committee give you conflicting advice and requirements, or have irreconcilable views on your dissertation. Again, you either have to restore communication or get someone to step down. Never be part of a "triangle", where they're giving you competing instructions and not talking to each other; get both of them to sit down with your to resolve the conflicts.
• When picking your outside member, go for one of two extremes: Expertise your advisor doesn't have, or somebody completely unfamiliar with your area. If there's no department that can offer additional expertise, then use the outside member to show that you can speak to a broader audience.Offer to introduce the outside member to the rest of your committee, so they've all met before the defense. With the outside member, it can be okay if their role is just to read the work and show up with a few questions.
  
• You should never go into a defense without knowing the outcome. Meet with each committee member after they (should) have read the paper, and before the complete meeting, and ask "Is there a fundamental problem with this thesis, or a reason that this defense should not go forward?" Even if they haven't read the paper, and fake it, saying "No, it's fine" - that's a commitment of a sort.

The last point applies more to applying to graduate school and selecting an advisor, but was also good to have in mind when discussing the committee

• The quality of your relationship with your advisor/committee matters more than the quality of your program. Having people who will work with you, support you, and network for you will get you further than having graduated from the top program in your field with faculty who don't care about you one way or another. This is primarily excellent advice when applying to grad school or picking an advisor, but is important to keep in mind when selecting your committee members as well.

The World Revolves Around My Advisor

Most of the time my advisor and I get along fine. At grant deadline time, I swear, she turns into an ego monster. The first time we tried to submit a grant, her unrealistic demands - and attempts to lecture me on my "issues" when they were mostly caused by her - led us to the ombuds' office. I suppose I should look on the bright side; this time, she announced grant plans a mere 3 weeks in advance, so I only have to put up with it for 3 weeks.

There are four students in our lab preparing to defend a senior honors thesis. They are required to provide the thesis to their committee a week in advance of the defense, which is two weeks from now. They have started to give their theses to my advisor, in what will turn out to be one of two direct roles she has on their work (the other being comments on their practice defenses). She has known for weeks that she was going to start getting thesis drafts now. And she just sent out an email saying that it "makes more sense" for her to give comments back after the grant deadline. This gives the students a few days (no time, in one case) to incorporate her comments.

I understand the need for grant money. I want to get paid over the summer, instead of scraping by on loans and a possible TA. I will obligingly drop everything to get her seemingly insane requests done in a week, including a frantic round of pilot experiments to see if things might work. I'll even grant that it might not be possible for her to find a single hour for reading an honors thesis before the grant gets submitted. I just think it's the height of selfishness to say "it makes more sense" when it's really "it's more convenient for me". The world does not revolve around her, and her concerns are not the only ones that determine what makes sense.

Tips on a "Post-Academic" Career

The "So what are you going to do with that?" career seminar was very fancy. I expected your basic auditorium with a podium up front, and it turned out to be a bunch of circular tables with napkins, pitchers of water, and a full spread of cheese, crackers, fruit, and mascot-shaped cookies. Perhaps this is meant to give us a hint of the post-academic life.

Our speaker, Susan Basalla, gave us some insights into her own career choices, things she'd heard about while writing the book, and tips on how to proceed, including

• You don't have to explain why you didn't finish your dissertation. Your employer is one of the 99% of the population who would never have considered starting one, and so has an excellent built-in understanding of why you decided you didn't want to finish it.
• If turning your CV into a resume doesn't hurt, you aren't cutting enough information. Employers don't want to know about your publications and conferences you attended, they want to know what's relevant to their job.
• An academic job search is passive; a non-academic job search is active. For an academic job, you send out all your credentials and wait for the call. For the non-academic job, you tailor your arguments, follow-up with the potential employer, and are hunting throughout the year.

I think the biggest thing I took away from the seminar was that non-academic job searchers are lengthy processes. Networking is important - most people she spoke to had gotten their first job because of a contact, not a random application - and takes years to come to fruition. I'm not sure I'm cut out for that level of uncertainty.

What Are You Going To Do?

My advisor asked, in passing, what my post-dissertation plans were. Do I have any idea what I want to do? I was spared from having to answer then by the seminar she was on her way to attend. But I know I'll have to have an answer sooner rather than later. My advisor didn't blink at the notion of me doing 3 more studies and finishing up my dissertation in the next year, which means it would almost be time to start applying to academic jobs.

I know I don't want to be a "real" professor. The 2-hour lab meeting we had discussing the 3rd round of submissions to get the lab funded drove that home. I know I'm capable of pulling together diverse research ideas and connecting them into a fascinating series of questions someone will agree is worth funding - but I don't want to. I don't want to have to do it on demand, I don't want to feel the pressure of getting funded to continue my career.

The first alternative is teaching. I like designing presentations and activities and assignments; I even like grading them, somewhat. But as I was just reminded today, in reading "Charlie's" comments on ScienceWoman's blog about teaching, my experience of the teaching field is limited. My students know I'm a student myself, and that I'm not seeing much of their tuition money; I also only have to deal with two small sections of one class, not a real teaching load. I never considered it to be a glamorous job, but I'm not all that sure I can handle dealing with adolescents for a living.

The second alternative is the non-academic route. Here the challenge is that there are just too many options, and I have no idea how to go about finding them. I don't know; what else would you I with a PhD? And do I really want to 9-5 job with no semester breaks? Fortunately, I have a chance to get some more information. The author of "So what are you going to do with that?" is leading a seminar on non-academic careers, which I am about to go attend. Perhaps it will show me a new career path. Perhaps it will convince me that the hassles of teaching aren't as bad as the hassles of the corporate world.

Perhaps I will just move back in with my father after I graduate...

How Tough Can It Be?

Alice of ScienceWomen's post on advice for surviving the dissertation is having the opposite of intended effect on me. I felt quite on top of my dissertation up to a moment ago; there's a bunch of background reading, but I already survived that for my comps, and the rest of it is just do the experiment, write it up. Reminders to form support groups and pay close attention to signs of depression are making me apprehensive.

Different Worlds, Different Accomplishments

My sister's big achievement this week is getting married. I've known she was planning to elope for a few months now; Wednesday my dad called me to tell me the wedding was scheduled for today. I haven't heard confirmation of the wedding, but then I haven't heard anything about it going wrong either. All of my siblings have now been the principle in a wedding. I feel no pressure at being the unmarried/unattached one; I'm the youngest, and I don't want to give my dad a heart attack.

My big achievement this week wasn't really an achievement; it's just that I received the official letter declaring me a Ph.D. candidate yesterday. This changes almost nothing, just the fees I'll be charged next year, but the graduate school knows. I feel a great deal of pressure; suddenly there are looming questions about when I'll be able to defend my dissertation and what the heck I'm going to do afterwards.

Don't Be Afraid of the Staff

Perhaps it's all the fantasy novels I read as a teen, when "staff" was a blunt instrument wielded effectively to decimate an opponent. Perhaps it's the association with professors, the other "real adults" in my world. For whatever reason, I am always loathe to intrude upon the world of the administrative staff in my department. I avoid it at all costs.

In fact, I avoid it a bit too much. Several months ago, the teacher training program decided to advertise more, specifically by giving all the lead TAs big posters to put up in the department explaining the program and the workshops. That poster has been sitting, rolled up, in my office, for months. The "ask building manager for permission" task has been cycling through my daily to-do for weeks. It always seems that she's out of her office, or it's lunch time; the real answer is that I just didn't want to. Scary administrative staff, and all that.

In fact, she was incredibly cheerful and helpful, showing me the exact spot I had thought would be natural for the poster, joking around about the merits of sticky tape and tacks (as building manager, she is naturally concerned with whether there is peeling paint or tiny holes in the wall). It seems ridiculous to have put it off this long.

This does not necessarily mean I'll be eager to contact the staff in the future. I've also ready several non-fantasy stories featuring department secretaries as the best source of information, gossip, and the pulse of the department. That's scary in itself.

Proofs!

The proofs are here! Buried among the 23 emails waiting in my inbox after a weekend away (most of them written by my collaborators on a new project, on Saturday morning of all times) was the expected email from Elsevier with a copy proofs of my very first journal article!

My dad wasn't sure that electronic copies of the published article would have the impact of a print, of the journal itself. I wasn't sure myself. Speaking functionally, of course, the electronic copies are much preferred; I rarely stray from laptop reading these days. Speaking emotionally, from the ridiculously juvenile glee of seeing my name in print, the electronic copies have plenty of impact. There's the header reading "article in press" in big capital letters, and a small image of the journal cover above the title, and my name with the fancy footnote of university affiliation....

The most important thing is that it looks very much like a real article and not just yet another paper I've written. However much time the copy-editors had to spend on the formatting makes all the difference.

Sick Days

Graduate students don't get sick days. But, no one wants to catch whatever it is you've got, including your advisor, so we do get days where we can be off campus and skip meetings. I should consider myself fortunate that I haven't had to rely on sick days too often. I caught strep throat my second week of graduate school, and I was getting over a cold when I "defended" my first-year project, but my rare colds have all coincided with days I didn't have to be anywhere anyway. Until this week.

I should still count myself fortunate in the timing. I didn't get sick until I'd met my teaching obligations, the two group meetings I had to miss wouldn't miss me, and by the time I had to miss my class I was too tired to care about whether my professors noticed. I had two writing projects that let me feel productive when I was feeling okay, and nothing so high-priority I had to stress out when I was feeling drunk on decongestants.

And hey, I should be recovered just in time for the weekend....when the lovely warm weather is supposed to turn into snow.

No-Work Weekend, All-Work Week

Last weekend I took the entire weekend off guilt-free, because I had absolutely nothing to do; my e-mail inboxes were empty, any research tasks were in the hands of collaborators, and I was three weeks ahead in my lab planning. I had a normal life for two and a half days.

This weekend, I still kind of took the weekend off, but with plenty of guilt. There were any number of things I could have been doing, should have been doing, but I was seduced by a sale on the "Chuck" Season 1 DVD, and couldn't quite pry myself away from my TV. I still got something (one, tiny thing) done, and I'm not behind - but I'm not ahead any more, either.

Much as I said in my response to ScienceWoman's poll on taking time off between semesters, and in the graduate school survival kit I gave to a friend, I refuse to stress out about my failure to get work done. I have no home life, and can make up for it by just working 10- to 15-hour weekdays. And even if I don't make it up, there's no point fretting about it now.

Still, I do need to develop a strategy for getting work done on days when I have no meetings or classes or any reason to leave the apartment. That's the downside to a studio apartment; it's impossible to have one productivity area set aside.

The Dissertation Starts

I have (finally) officially passed comps. My advisor added her third and final signature to the comps form in our meeting this afternoon, and I have sent it off to the administrators. I've just realized that I forgot to make a copy before doing this, but I haven't had any paperwork problems before, so I refuse to be paranoid about it.

I also have a dissertation topic. This came down to deciding between my comps paper and my published paper. With the comps topic, I have extensive theoretical background but not so much as a single experiment design. With the published topic, I have 2 experiments with significant results, but only the barest awareness of the theoretical background. With either topic, I have a piece of my dissertation completed; the difference is which piece, introduction or "meat". Given that I am nearing the end of my fourth year, with department expectations about graduating in 5 and graduate school rules about graduating in 6, my advisor and I agreed that the safer option is to have some "meat" ready. It's easy enough to conduct lit searches and write an introduction on a deadline, and it's ridiculously optimistic to try to collect data and find significant results on a deadline.

Now we move into the last stage of graduate school: Dissertation. I have the rest of the semester to get up to speed on the theoretical background of my topic and design a plausible series of experiments that can continue to test these issues. And to find at least one person outside my department I can ask to be on my committee; that may be the worst chore of the next few months.

I think the hardest part of the proposal will not be convincing my committee it's meaningful and possible, but convincing myself that my one successful line of research won't turn out to be a complete dud once I start trying to get results. These two studies were just additions to my "real" research, because they could be done easily enough. Will they still be successful once I'm actually depending on getting meaningful results?

The Perils of Cool Research

A fellow graduate student thinks it's cool and begs for this analysis and that analysis as if I had any chance of understanding the task/data as well as he does (he's writing a review paper; I barely know how it works).

My advisor thinks it's cool and wants to write a brief report to get the results out fast, fast, fast.

Our collaborate thinks it's cool, and related to research his master's student is doing, and wants to combine the data set with *her* research to write a real paper on.

Everyone thinks it's so cool that I had a full dozen emails on this topic sitting in my inbox this morning. New emails, mind you; this count doesn't include the handful of emails left over from yesterday's post-presentation rush.

I sent my advisor a brief, slightly panicked email. When our paths crossed in a department meeting this afternoon, she offered comfort and assurance that we'd "sort it out". It sounds like a platitude, but it was actually very reassuring. I almost miss the days when I was embarrassed to discuss my research and its lack of significance.

I Am So Cool

Or at least my research is. In the eyes of one of the other graduate students in my lab. When that research involves an unexpected result with task he himself has been using heavily. But my presentations have rarely, if ever, inspired others to write emails talking about how awesome my research is and how I should try to publish it right away. I'll take what I can get.

My advisor has similar opinions. One brief report accepted, and now she wants to start on another - and neither have anything to do with my dissertation. When will that get done?

No Work Weekend

I did not work this weekend. I didn't do anything particularly exciting, either - the warm snap is over, so temperatures were well below freezing all day Sunday, and still are - but I didn't work. This wasn't even a choice; I was just out of things to do. There were exactly two things I could have done, both of which would have required my presence in the lab (see comment about weather, above), and neither of which was in any sense urgent. So, I tried out a new recipe for a chocolate custard, I listened to the Hitchhiker's Guide original radio series, I cleaned, I read most of a very interesting if not convincing book about the future of religion, I began writing a review of said book, I continued writing an essay I started last semester for the heck of it...In general, I lived the life of a normal person, assuming the normal person boring and snowbound and lives alone.

Such events do not occur often. There's usually something I should be doing. But the only thing I could possibly have been working on is my dissertation proposal, and since I haven't official passed comps yet that would be jumping the gun. My advisor has been sitting on the revisions for two weeks, and I have no intention of wasting this excellent excuse to take a break from the entire "progress towards the degree" idea. This is perhaps the last chance this semester or in my graduate school career when I will feel on top of things - the lab I teach is planned for weeks in advance, everything for research progress is pending e-mails from my collaborators, and there was just nothing that couldn't fit into the coming work week. Eventually I'll fall behind again, so I decided to enjoy it while it lasted.

How's My Teaching? FCQs

Today my FCQ scores arrived in my department mailbox. Almost exactly one year ago, after a semester teaching the same lab, I looked at the large envelopes with some mixture of anticipation and dread, and chose to stick them on my office bookshelf to go unexamined for some four months. This time, I rushed to my office to open the envelope.

It's not that I expected vast improvements in my scores, although I could certainly hope for them on the grounds that I had been more experienced, and had spent more time designing each section. It's more that the entire teaching experience had been more positive this time around. I was the senior TA, helping out a new grad student who hadn't even taught before; comps had its downsides, but my overall stress levels were definitely far less without a grant proposal to help with and a Master's thesis to complete; and teaching was something I knew I wanted to do, instead of something I should be trying. It would have been terrible to find that my FCQs were the same, of course (they weren't likely to get worse - that would require active dislike on the part of the students), but I'm feeling very optimistic about teaching this class for a third time, and would remain hopeful.

Fortunately, the scores are all a great deal better. Still near or slightly below department average, but a full point better on the six-point scale. My "instructor overall" rating has improved from 3.4 to 4.5. The score itself might not be much to brag about, but the improvement is. I could obsess over sampling size (only 13 of 22 students returned FCQs, and I only had one section instead of two), or I could focus on research showing that the best predictor of FCQ scores is whether your students like you as a person and would be willing to go on a long car drive with you. I don't really care either way. This has been the best possible start to my day.

Rise of the Machines

I have been stunned by the department copier. Not because of stapling and collating, which is simply how copiers have "always" functioned. Because the administrative assistant typed my email address into the copier, pushed a button, and by the time I was back at my desk across the hall, I had the .pdf of my form waiting in my inbox. The .pdf doesn't make the "foom" sound (and I missed the new-email "ding"), or look as impressive, but I found myself completely amazed nonetheless.

All this stands in complete counterpoint to my much-less-thrilled amazement that the journal publishing company, based in the Netherlands, of all places, requires a full-page document of refusal to pay $700 to have a figure published in color - a document that could not be modified on the computer, and had to be printed out. Perhaps they were aware that my department copier must be able to make new .pdfs in under 10 seconds. They couldn't really have wanted me to pay to snail-mail or fax something from midwest USA to the Netherlands.

Working the Fees System

I shell out almost $1K a semester in student fees and (admittedly, heavily subsidized) health insurance. The savings of the previous semester are entirely wiped out in one check to the Bursar's office, as the university recoups some of the money spent on my paycheck. Working the system is just one way of saving money in the current economic situation.

The tuition and fees system seems completely incomprehensible. For tuition, you pay an extra dollar amount per credit up to 9 credits, at which point you can add another 9 for no additional charge. For fees, you pay an amount determined by some combination of the number of classes as well as the number of credit hours, up to 7 credits, at which point you can add another 12 for no extra charge. It makes far less sense than the abacus or slide rule to me.

But, there is an obvious way to make the system work for you, at least when it comes to flexible things like dissertation hours. Say you need to take 28 credits in four semesters. The balanced approach would be to take 7 in each semester, but this would be foolish. Then you pay maximum fees in four semesters. Instead, you can spread them out 6, 6, 6, and 10. Then you pay maximum fees in one semester only, with no extra charge for those last three credits, and save over $300. A small sum by some standards, but massive savings to the graduate student budget.

This is one of those examples of how procrastination can be useful. Think of the money I would have given the university if I had instead felt compelled to actually do the work my advisor had sent me.

Let the Headache Begin

Of course, there had to be a downside to getting a paper accepted for publication. The headache of pre-publication paperwork turns out to be it.

There has been no training on how to handle the technicalities of being first author. Up until today, this has consisted entirely of keeping on top of who's turn it is to edit the manuscript, submitting the final documents, and forwarding emails; none of this is something I needed a great deal of training for. Now, however, the paperwork is rolling in.

Okay, it was only one email. But what an email! Do you want to pay $700 for your figure to be printed in color? Heck no, you have to be kidding me. Do you want a "marked PDF", or 25 free offprints? I don't know - I'll be able to get a regular PDF copy as soon as it's available online, so I can't see the point of a "marked" one, but (aside from my Dad's desire to hand out copies of my paper like Halloween candy), I'm not sure that there's a point to paper offprints either. (How cheap are these journals that they think throwing together a PDF negates the traditional cost of 25 copies of the article?)

I've been having a relaxed, stress-free, relatively productive week. There is no logical reason for this email to ruin my day. I think the problem is that it's just the start. The road to publication will continue as a long, drawn-out process with occasional tasks coming at unpredictable times. I hate getting emails I can't just deal with immediately and delete.

Why Research Professors Need to be Able to Teach

I have reached the point as a teacher that it is sometimes painful to be a student. Not because of any requirements of the class, but because some of the professors assigned to teach graduate courses are so clearly the stereotypical brilliant scientist who can't present to save a life.

One of the professors co-teaching my only class this semester clearly falls into this category. After slowly and awkwardly dispensing with the typical course announcements, he began his lecture with a long, sometimes convoluted story about the importance of Galileo's discovery of moons orbiting Jupiter. Registration to this course may be offered through five different departments, but not one of them has anything to do with astronomy. It wasn't until we moved on to the history of understanding the function of the heart (and in case you hadn't guessed, none of the departments has any interest in anatomy, either) that he finally managed a clear statement of the point, which is that humans use metaphors to understand complex ideas. At this point, about half my attention was devoted to wondering at what point in the lecture his apparent need to cling to the whiteboard shelf for support would result in the destruction of the dry-erase artwork behind him.

What seems so terrible about this is that it isn't just teaching. In fact, most of my teaching skills have been built by my advisor's insistence on decent presentations of our research in our lab meetings, defenses, and annual department presentations. Make sure they know the point you're going to make. Repeat the point so often even those dozing in the back of the room might pick it up. Explain how every piece of data you're throwing on the screen supports that point, and explain it explicitly. Professors at an R-I like my school are research scientists first, teachers only to keep the graduate students occupied, but by dint of research presentations you'd think they could pull together a decent lecture on automatic.

In this case, I distinctly remember being impressed by this professor's research presentation a year ago. In retrospect, however, I was no doubt impressed by the research despite the presentation, not because of it. This professor has a "cool" or "sexy" research topic, and he had cool toys with him to show off as demonstrations of that research. He can impress people with his research just by the nature of his research; he doesn't have to "sell" the importance or convince people that it's interesting. While he has obviously chosen a great field to be involved in, it has done him absolutely no good in terms of his presenting skills. Sooner or later, he's going to need to sell his research, and he won't be able to. It's not just for the students' sake that research professors should still be decent teachers, it's for the professors' sake as well.

Meanwhile, I will attempt not to wince in sympathy or zone out staring at birds outside the window while he lectures.

(And he never quite leaned back far enough to smudge the dry-erase artwork. It was actually quite fancy doodling, so I doubt it will have been erased in the past 48 hours. If it's still there, I might have to start taking mental bets on how long it lasts).

Accepted

Apparently "accepted pending minor revisions" really is meaningful. The first two rounds of submissions to this journal took just over three months each, first coming back "revise and resubmit" and then coming back "minor revisions". The final round lasted less than 24 hours, with the final, official acceptance hitting my inbox a full hour before my advisor's one-word email ("Great!") acknowledging that the final submission had been made.

So there we are. I have no idea what the backlog on brief reports is at this journal, but at some point in the coming year I will be a published author. It wasn't my idea or my design, but it was all my analysis and a great deal my writing. Even I can't be pessimistic at this stage. Now I can eagerly start anticipating the hectic proofs process, and hoping that in with the author reprints is at least one copy of the entire journal, with my name buried in the Contents list.

Yet Another First Day of Class

The final revisions (corrections of typos, revisions to awkward sentences, a handful of additional sentences explaining things in more detail) to my journal article have been sent. Seeing the official status of "Accept Pending Minor Revisions" did not make this any less of a stressful process; I'm still waiting for the editor to change her mind.

As of the first day of classes, I seem to be in pretty good shape for the coming semester. I have all the areas of research covered: old data to present (two different pieces of my master's thesis, at a conference in April), relatively new data to ponder (one set of data for me, one set for my honors student), impending data (an experiment that will begin in two weeks), and, assuming my advisor finds the comps revisions satisfactory, new studies to design for a dissertation proposal.

I could do with less of this work being focused on March and April, but obviously there has to be some trade-off to the semester system. I get an easy three weeks in December/January, to make up for the stress that comes with the end of the school year. It seems a fair trade now - we'll just have to see whether it still seems fair in April.

Holiday Grace Period

I was vastly amused by the latest PhD comic, on the holiday grace period. Possibly because I took advantage of this implicit grace period, skipping my weekly progress report the week after Christmas on the grounds that it was better to tell my advisor nothing than to tell her there was no change at all, not a single paper read in the previous week. I spent Monday morning in a whirlwind of email activity, so I would be able to say I had "followed up" with various people (mostly other graduate students who had obviously also been taking advantage of the grace period).

In my defense, I did have real progress to report on my comps paper. It's just that I had taken a slow, thoughtful process to the new sections, which involved reading a few papers and letting them germinate in the back of my mind for a week. This looks completely unproductive, but actually makes writing much easier, because the papers have had time to get to know each other before they must be connected on paper. So I spent Friday afternoon churning out the new section, and most of the past few days rearranging the entire comps paper to fit these new arguments. I swear, I don't think more than 3 paragraphs out of 35 pages have been left untouched.

It pains me to admit it, but the revisions are actually growing on me. I have become obsessed with the safety of my work, backing up changes to a flash drive every night and bring it to my bedside table. I am determined to find a way to make this a practical dissertation topic, just to make all this effort worthwhile. I've even, almost, begun to see how the topic could be considered interesting. This hasn't been the case since I proposed my comps some 9 months ago, and marks the real progress. All of which is only possible because I did very little work over the last few weeks, allowing my brain to recover from burnout.

Glad for Local Conferences

My first conference - first as both attendee and presenter - happens to be in the nearby major city. I won't be flying, or staying in a hotel, or doing any of those (I imagine) typical "conference" chores. I will be commuting by the free (with student ID) hourly bus.

At first this seemed pathetically anti-climactic. How am I supposed to feel accomplished if this conference is just a bus-ride away? Sure, it's better than the mini-conferences I've attended on campus, where it's less a conference and more a slight change of venue for the school day. But it hardly feels like an important step in the academic career. I'm sure this will change when I get there, and see how unbelievably huge the entire thing is as I man my posters in 2 of the 15 poster sessions. My advisor has promoted this conference to us as a chance to have the advantage of her "pointing people to our posters", since she no longer travels for conferences (and I'd better still not be her grad student by the time her kids are older enough for her to travel again).

The benefits of not having to travel only became apparent as I flew back from my winter vacation last night. The delay on the first leg of the trip didn't phase me; I had a 2-hour layover. The delay on the second phase was not pleasant, because I only had an hour and half to catch the shuttle away from the airport in the middle of nowhere. And after they got us on the plane a mere 45 minutes late, they left us sitting there for another 45 minutes while they sorted our luggage. This is a good reason never to fly through Atlanta, ever again. I cannot afford many $80 taxi rides home from the airport. It was only merest chance (and my moonlighting for my father's office over break) that I could afford one.

So when I think about my first conference being a local one, I will think less of the exotic travel I'm missing and more of the chaotic travel I'm missing. Nothing like a positive mood to start the new semester.

Searching for the Sense of Accomplishment

Alone at my father's house the day after Christmas, I had two choices between activity:

a) Read as many papers on the topic of my comps revisions as my brain would handle, possibly advancing far enough to start writing the new section, or

b) Attack my older sister's former bedroom, which has been used as a storage room for the past five or six years and was knee-deep in assorted junk with not even a clear path to wade through.

I didn't even debate the choice. I went straight to "b", and spent almost the entire day (minus a few hours of television watching during meal times) in physical labor. I didn't have to debate, because the choice was made purely on one criterion, of what I would achieve with my day:

a) A fraction of the reading list read, a page or so of notes on how they might be relevant, some rough attempts at revisions, and the ability to write "Read X papers on comps revision topic" in my upcoming weekly update to my advisor.

b) A disaster area turned into a clean room.

This decision epitomizes the problem I've been having with grad school, which is that it never really feels like I've accomplished anything. There are only ever incremental changes in papers (from the endless rounds to the "submitted pending minor revisions", the only time there is accomplishment is those first few days after a submission is made) and in research (a slow, laborious process whose "end" results are always "here are more questions we're going to be asking in the next research project). There is no sense of "I have taken on this project, I have worked hard for a certain period of time, and now it is done", because it is never done. And I find that I would rather tell my advisor that I got absolutely no research activity of any kind done in the week of Christmas, than tell myself that I managed nothing more than "making progress".

How Low-Priority Can Ethics Be?

My advisor has been sitting on revisions to a brief report for over four months now. Last February, we discovered a mistake in calculations in a published paper, that crossed the level of significance. Results that had been acceptably significant could now only be called "marginally" significant. We found the error in the process of replicating the results, so the effect is probably real, but the editor should still be informed.

First I had to argue my advisor and her co-author into agreeing that the mistake should be reported at all, on the grounds that it isn't up to us (them the original authors, me from the same lab). Then I dragged them through drafting a letter to the editor. Then my advisor decided that it should be a brief report instead, because the post-hoc explanation for why the results were only marginal was "interesting". And then she sat on the revisions for months. And then when I started pushing her to get me the draft back, she said that the delays weren't due to her new baby, but because she didn't consider the project a priority. This was right after she updated our lab's manuscripts page, with this revision right at the bottom, after even the revisions with a deadline in March.

I have said repeatedly that I want revisions by the end of December. I gave her several weeks' warning on this. I have explained that I will write my own letter to the editor if I don't get them, because her concerns about the ethics of cutting out the original authors on this are outweighed by my concerns about the ethics of going almost a year knowing that there is an error in the results without informing the editor, or anyone outside our lab.

I'm preparing to negotiate. I just can't sit back and have this always be the lowest priority, because new projects and manuscripts are always being added that will be higher priority, by virtue of having an actual deadline, but I'm not quite so anal as to demand revisions by the end of the month, as reasonable as that seemed when I first set the date. Perhaps I should be more laid-back about an error when the overall idea is probably correct, and this really should be my advisor's lowest priority. But I can't convince myself of that. It's a relatively minor ethical issue, but I can't help wondering if this is how she would react if we didn't have some reason to argue that the results didn't change that much.

Someone Thinks I'm Accomplished

As I trailed my dad around his office Thursday afternoon, so he could introduce me to the manager helping him with the new company website for which I will be writing content over the next two weeks (I get to add a brief stint as a Technical Writer to my resume, and make enough money to pay for April's conference registration fees), I discovered that I'd given him a whole new realm of bragging rights.

Tuesday afternoon, in my last e-mail check before heading out of town, I discovered the e-mail informing me that the submission of my first real article was "accepted pending minor revisions". I happily informed my dad as we waited for luggage Wednesday evening, and he happily informed everyone at the office who either recognized me or wondered why this tall young woman in jeans was following around their IT person. He couldn't remember the name of the journal, but then, I couldn't really remember the title of the paper (I remember the witty pre-colon part, but not the official post-colon jargon).

It's not quite enough to make up for the comps "passed with conditions", since "accepted with minor revisions" is much the same (the work of trying to coordinate minor changes with 2 co-authors is about the same as the work of trying to rewrite an entire paper by myself). But at least being able to deliver the news in person and hear the bragging makes me feel less of a loser for still being in graduate school and so far from graduating.

The Semester Is Over

With the turning in of the final lab grades, my semester is over. All of my papers have been written, all of my students' papers have been graded, and there is not one place I am required to be for school purposes until January. Even all of my research projects, while not finished (because they're never finished) are all in the hands of my various collaborators, and I don't expect to hear back about a single one of them before New Year's.

Not that I get the vacation of the true college student. There is still the comps revisions to be done, or at least half-heartedly attempted. There is revising the lab I will be teaching for the third time next semester (This counts as more fun than work, since it's completely voluntary and I'm doing it because it's fun). There is the creation of the Socratic portfolio, part of my certification process. There are a few little projects I never have time to do during the semester. And, of course, anything my advisor asks me to do in the meantime. But it will be away from the snow (and today's lovely single-digit weather), the time crunch will all be in terms of "before the semester starts" not "next week", and there will certainly be more goofing off than I can let myself get away with here.

Resigning Myself to Comps Revisions

It took an hour-long meeting with my advisor, the numerous distractions caused by spending the school/work week with the gas to my apartment turned off (no oven, no stove, no hot water, and the vagaries of a temporary space heater), and the seemingly productive analysis of new data from two projects, but I think I've resigned myself to spending my winter break reading several dozen papers on new topics and completely reorganizing my review paper to fit them in.

Monday's weekly progress report to my advisor was completely truthful. The first topic listed had the heading "comps", and the details simply stated that I had not yet decided whether to do the revisions or just quit come May. This prompted a rearranging of the afternoon schedule so that we could meet for an hour and discuss what I want to do long-term, and how comps and the dissertation fit in to this. I can't say I buy her argument that the purpose of the revisions was not to have me jump through hoops in order to pass - the committee's take is reportedly that the revisions would make the comps a stronger introduction for a dissertation, but if that's the case they should pass me on the comps and let me worry about the dissertation when it's time to worry about the dissertation. However, I have been swayed that it's worth at least reading the papers to figure out if this could be my dissertation. I have resigned myself to that much.

Frankly, I'm sick of the topic, but I think that would be true of anything I had to work on that hard for that long, and changing topics now would just mean having to write an entire dissertation introduction from scratch. There's only one approach that wouldn't have me starting completely from scratch - I have completed 2 studies with meaningful results along one theme - but I'm not sure I want to bone up on the background or even pursue that research as the focus of my life for the next year or two. I'm hoping this general lack of interest is just due to Post-Quals Slump, and that I'll find any research interesting once the semester is over (one paper to write, one stack of papers to grade) and I've gotten away from the lab for a while.

Countdown to the End of the Semester

Welcome to the last week of class. In the next week, I have only 2 things that truly need to get done: 1) write a 7-9 page term paper for my thankfully nothing-to-do-with-my-major class, and 2) grade 21 research proposals. The term paper is due Friday or Saturday (my professor is lax, as he should be, since it's been over a month since I turned in the last paper and I still haven't gotten it back); the graded papers have to be finished by Monday afternoon so I can offload them to my students at their final exam.

Looking back at the semester does not make me feel in any way successful. Let's review.

Study #1 - At my advisor's insistence, I continued to collect data on a project after the initial data analysis revealed that the manipulation wasn't work. Final data analysis shows exactly the same pattern, and the additional data points didn't make anything more significant than it had been. This project is a complete wash for anything except doing a follow-up, and I probably won't do that because it doesn't fit into my dissertation.

Study #2 - The downside to collaborating with my advisor and her husband is that they both go on baby leave at the same time. Delays in getting responses to emails and a shortage of programming resources in our lab means that I barely managed to program the experiment, and am squeaking out a minuscule amount of pilot data before the semester ends.

Study #3 - My senior thesis student collected all the data for this project. The follow-up to an early (under revision) project is mixed; the replication is only marginally significant (pending massaging of data), but the expansion is significant in ways we don't know how to interpret yet. The thesis data (another of my ideas, with my student's help) turned out to be a wash, just like every other research project I've conceived myself (except my master's, which was just unpublishable).

Comps - Completed the review paper, reading approximately 150 journal articles, writing 10,000+ words (final draft), and answering every question I outlined in my proposal. My committee decided that I should have asked two additional questions, and instructed me to add these questions - which essentially means reorganizing and probably rewriting the entire thing.

Corrections Draft - My advisor has been sitting on this for almost four months, so I have been unable to make any progress. I'm close to losing my faith in research ethics over this; we found out that the published results were inaccurate almost 10 months ago, and still haven't told anyone. I set a firm deadline for getting revisions back, lest I lose all self-respect.

And...that's my semester. There was teaching a class, and some "lead" teaching activities, and helping out my thesis student - but as far as my "real" activities, demanded for research, the only thing I've managed to completed (Study #3) was really completed by an undergrad; I've just had to do the data analysis. I can't even count my two accepted conference posters, because they were submitted in the summer, and it just took this long to get the acceptances.

Yet another semester at graduate school, with nothing to show for it.

Revise and Resubmit

When we submitted my first-ever paper to a second journal, it came back "revise and resubmit", to which a professor in my department offered congratulations. I'm sure I smiled and thanked him, but I was thinking "For what? Is this what my life has come to - Celebrate, because they said your work didn't suck that much?" It took quite a bit of convincing for me to accept that "revise and resubmit" is as good as it gets, because no one gets accepted in the first round. I still don't think it's worth congratulations, though. It may be an encouraging sign, and it's certainly better for morale than a rejection, but what it really means is that thing you hoped you were done with isn't done after all, and it's time to force yourself back into it and go back to work.

I have the same reaction to the end result of my comps defense. There were three possibilities: pass, pass with conditions, and fail. Of the three, the one I dreaded most was "pass with conditions", which would mean not being done at all, but going back and rewriting that paper I had already given so much effort to. Sure, failing would suck, but at least it would be over. Naturally, "with conditions", and with rewrites, is what I got. Do two new literature searches, add two new sections on research the committee has decided would be relevant, and revise the entire paper to fit that research in.

As I returned to my office from the defense, I found two grad students planning on going to a grad school-sponsored happy hour, and I was invited along. I had no idea if I agreed to drown my sorrows or to celebrate. When the other students found out I'd just defended, they tried to convince me I'd done great - my committee members had signed in the "satisfactory" column, and all I have to do is get one person (probably my advisor) to agree that the conditions have been met. Four screwdrivers later, this argument was still not convincing. I won't be spending my semester break completing straightforward projects to get ahead in my work, or planning my dissertation proposal; I'll be spending it reading uninteresting journal articles and revising that [expletive deleted] paper yet again.

I don't care that the changes will let the comps paper serve as an introduction to my dissertation, which the old version just couldn't. At the moment, at least, I'm tempted to just not do it. I just cannot work up any enthusiasm or interest in reading one more paper or writing one more word on this [expletive deleted] assignment. I'm experiencing post-quals slump, and I haven't even finished "quals" yet. Another resurgence of cynicism towards or outright hatred of academia has me seriously considering whether failing comps would actually have been a blessing in disguise.

One Day to Defense

In a little over 24 hours, I will sit down with my three-person committee, present them with a brief reminder of the key points of my 10,000-word review paper, and let them grill me for an hour. Such is the "comprehensive exam" in my department. I don't feel sick, but my brain definitely feels numb.

I could be lucky, in that there was only a single hour of overlapping availability between the three faculty members. It means my advisor advised against doing a real presentation, like I did for my master's, because her take on the other members is that they'd want to get right into the questions. So I don't have to try to put together a powerpoint presentation tonight. However, I can't shake the feeling that I won't be able to satisfy them all in such a short period of time; they'll still have questions left, and they won't want to pass me.

I just won't be comforted. Having a fellow grad student, who defended her comps last month, tell me that she passed on the grounds that it was clear she had learned a lot, she already had a post-doc set up, and didn't have the time to revise her comps and writer her dissertation by the end of the school year, does not make me feel any better about it. I have no such time pressures, and I really don't want to spend my winter break making any revisions, let alone extensive ones.

I'm just about burnt out on the topic. I'm not even sure I want it to be my dissertation topic. Part of the problem is that there was just too much time between writing the paper and defending it - three weeks. The timing was dictated by graduate school paper requirements and an unfortunate placement of Fall Break, and the effects became apparent in yesterday's meeting with my advisor. Studies that I knew backward and forward at the time of writing are now blurred; I don't know if I can call them all to mind when I need to, and I don't know if I have the willpower to sit down and try to re-learn them all tonight.

At some level I'm convinced it's over with, and there's no point to brushing up. My writing has always been stronger than my ability to think on my feet; I just wish the writing could speak for itself, without all this extra grilling on whatever the weak points of writing are. (This probably sounds really stupid - obviously the writing can't speak for itself if there are weak points to be grilled on. I think that the day-before-defense should be understood to be one of completely illogical and nonsensical thinking).

My advisor was able to pinpoint a few points and papers that I should brush up on, as they are the ones she is more likely to ask, or seem weakest to her (It must be tough, being the advisor. How do you advise the stressed-out student without giving away all of your questions in advance? Or could it be that she doesn't care, because she sees the defense as a formality and is already willing to sign the paperwork?). I've put myself to about five articles (of the 100+ reference list) to review and reconsider. I should just about be able to stagger through those. Then I have one night of recovery, before I start writing one last (mercifully short, at 7-9 pages) paper for the semester.

Finally, Something Was Accepted

Technically, I didn't get much work done over my week-long Thanksgiving break. I responded to some student emails, I commented on my thesis student's end-of-semester paper, I contemplated my future. But, I feel very accomplished, because not one but both of my poster submissions to a major conference in my field were accepted.

This marks my first acceptance in anything (besides the master's thesis itself, I suppose) since I came to graduate school. My first poster, my first "publication" of any type, my first conference. Every other poster submission, workshop application, grant application, etc. has been rejected. So, four years into my graduate studies, and I finally have something with my name on it that can go on my CV. In fact, I have two of them.

One of the posters will be the only form of publication that my master's thesis gets, because I'm still refusing to follow through on anything that would make it paper-worthy. I almost refused to do the poster submission, but my advisor encouraged me to give her some way of citing the research in future. And perhaps the poster will make me feel like I actually accomplished something with that thesis.