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.