Squishy Deadlines

What is a deadline, exactly? In the program brochure, they seem so strict: Failure to make adequate progress will get you ... I want to say "expelled", but the language is more like "asked to leave the program". In real life, however, they aren't so strict. First there was a general consensus that, due to a probable typo in the guidelines, "by Month" really meant "by the end of Month". Everyone gained a 30 or 31 day extension on deadlines (there are no deadlines in February). Several of the master's students are being granted informal extensions on the grounds that their advisors were travelling during the critical pre-defense period. Only my advisor seems to break the laissez-faire attitude in our department by insisting on keeping deadlines or requesting formal extensions (when she's aware of them, which isn't always).

Now another grad student in my lab and I are in a small dance of deadlines. She started a year before me, but due to extensions granted to those pursuing a double-major PhD (I am not so dedicated), we are both due to defend our comps by (the end of) December. Which of us has a better chance of doing so is a matter for any departmental betting pools. What I do know is that

1) Last year's defenses were all late (I think ranging March-April after the deadline)
and
2) I assured my advisor additional teaching responsibilities would not delay my comps, so I must stick to the deadline.

This puts my poor lab mate in a sorry position. She doesn't have to really worry about the deadline, in the way that I do. I haven't checked with her yearmates (all of whom are doing the double-major thing; I'm a bit of an underachieving oddball) to see if they'll defend on time or late, but our advisor's measuring stick is more likely to be me than them. Our advisor is the one who will probably care, and just think how bad it would look if I defend (less than a year after I proposed my comps) on time and she's late (closer to 2 years after she proposed).

I sort of feel bad about this. My assurance of on-time performance is stressing out a fellow who has been very helpful on assorted matters over the past three years. I don't have much choice on how to progress, however. If I don't manage to defend on time, my advisor will never let me teach again, which would be problematic as I'm seriously considering finding some magical teaching-only position after graduation. So there will be no dance of unspoken agreement that we can both be late defending, taking advantage of those "holidays".

I also feel bad, after reading assorted mother-faculty-challenges posts on ScienceWomen, for hoping that a semester's maternity leave will be as good an excuse for our late defense as an advisor out of the country was for the Master's students'. It's not that I want people to get a negative opinion of childbearing and lactating faculty members' productivity, it's just that it would be so much easier if the deadline were in January.

Negotiation "Vacation" Time

Making plans for the semester break (also informally known as "Christmas break") can be a tricky business. Graduate students are both students (it's in the title) and employees. Students get non-semester time off; employees get that day or two off when the university is closed.

As as student, especially one who didn't take a "real" job before graduate school, I am accustomed to several weeks at home for the holiday season. I certainly have no compelling reason to be on campus; there are no classes for me to attend or to teach. As an employee, my advisor expects me to be producing research at an increased rate during a period unencumbered with coursework and teaching requirements.

I have had family reasons to be gone for the past three years, but those no longer apply. The student part of me still sees 2.5 weeks at home as a short and entirely reasonable period of time for December/January, but the employee part of me understands it might seem excessive. I've heard from other graduate students that my advisor is does not generally approve of such "excessive" time off.

But, this is the age of computer technology. The only real reason I need to be on campus, in a time when meetings and classes are on complete hold, is for data collection, and my data collection is literally impossible during the holidays when campus is shut down and the population at large is hectic and uninterested in contributing to science. Everything else I need to do simply requires my laptop and, for communication with my group, an Internet connection. This is where going home actually makes more sense.

I do not have Internet at home; the campus bus I usually take will shut down during the winter break; and the "winter" break will almost certainly consist of snow, ice, and below-freezing (possibly below-0) weather not at all conducive to walking to my office. I could stay in the state, but I wouldn't be answering emails more than once a week and I wouldn't be able to do any lit searches. On the other hand, I could go to my father's house, where my productivity would go from business-hours-only to 24/7 high-speed Internet acces. It doesn't matter how many house chores and family events I let take up my time; I would be exponentially more productive in a different state with the world encased in my laptop, than in the home state with myself cocooned away from the snow.

It remains to be seen whether my advisor will buy this. I have no intention of mentioning my travel plans unless the information is specifically requested; it's not as if my advisor can generally tell whether I'm in the state or not, she's on campus so rarely. I can always challenge her to name exactly what it is I need to do over winter break that requires a physical presence on campus.

Besides, it really has the following effect: I have to defend my comps by December 17th, or be late and defend them in the Spring. And then I can go home and recover...

"Expected" Graduation Date

I don't really need a reminder about the impossibility of predicting an end to graduate school. I think about the technical requirement of gathering a dissertation's worth of research in a year and a half (from defense of comps to expected graduation date) and want to laugh hysterically. But I really don't want to be in higher education for 10 years straight, so it must be done. Somehow. I anticipate a heavy recruitment of undergraduate labor...

We're a Serious Academic Instiution

Of course we are. We're all about the academics, and shedding that party-school image raised by college footbal scandals, drinking deaths, and the occasional riot on the Hill. Which is why the administration is encouraging the academics to completely shut down at 2pm on Thursday. Staff members should be allowed to leave early. Professors can't be forced to cancel classes, but it's strongly encouraged - and in my department's case, you might as well because the building will be locked and your students will have to convince campus security they have a legitimate reason to enter. Why? Because there's a footbal game. A football game will air on ESPN, so the campus must be deserted to make room for the crowds and the media.

According to the notice we received from our department chair, the Chancellor "believes that it will have some long-term benefits to academic side of the campus in spite of the obvious short-term disruptions". To me this sounds like some raging BS - the last thing the academic side of the campus needs is more students who want to come watch football instead of studying. Fortunately, I have no reason to be on campus Thursday - although given the location of my apartment, this won't stop the disruption. If I do go into college teaching, I am job hunting strictly at universities without football mania.

The New Bundle

Being a professor means answering students' emails up to 2 hours before your son is born, between contractions. I'm not kidding; that's when my last email from my advisor was dated, and she specifically mentioned contractions.

I do not get to slack off while my advisor's distracted; there's just too much stuff to do. The list of presentations and class work marches on uniterrupted, and there's no use pretending there won't be an end-of-semester checkup on the research. The real advantage is in the reduction of stress. I have the whole semester to get things done, rather than trying to meet certain checkpoints each week or every few weeks. Never underestimate the effect of being on your own timeline.

The Personal Touch

It's not hard to find laments about how online-everything is destorying the social fabric of America, or at least unweaving and reweaving it into a nearly unreconizable new fabric. Today I went back to in-person communication for tasks that, I am sure, some undergraduates are unaware can be done in person.

First was paying my semester bill. A huge salary overpayment and a last-minute addition of a 25% TA delayed my tuition and health insurance waivers. Not wishing to come up with/shell out some $4000 more than I had to, I put off paying the bill until the official due date. I decided taking the time to pay in person would be worth a receipt demonstrating zero balance. Even in the Internet age, there was a line of some 20 people. The wait wasn't all that long, though - and I got candy. Some fraction of a penny of my fees' contribution to the bursar's operating budget was spent on fun-size candy bars at all the cashier's desks.

Second was making an appointment at the campus health center. I was in the vicinity anyway - it's next to the administration complex - and stopping in at a desk seemed more pleasant than coaxing phone signal in a windowless office and probably being put on hold. No candy treats here, just generic pleasantness in dealing with a person instead of a voice on the phone. I'm starting to grow very skeptical of the voice on the phone.

It's almost to the point that I might start using in-person as a matter of course. The option for doing this is so rare, it can't possibly be that much of a drain on my time.

First Day of Class

Suddenly it seems a lot more crowded. The undergrads have returned. An entire summer of a near-deserted campus and uncrowded streets always makes me forget what it's like when 20,000-odd undergrads innundate the town. I've gone from being one of a half-dozen bikes at the spacious bike racks to barely finding a spot to squeeze my bike in.

For me, the "first week of class" is almost meaningless. I don't TA this semester, there are no meetings or colloquiua this week, one of my classes is attending a colloquium series (and writing a paper on it), and the other only meets once a week. There's a certain temptation to hide in my office and only being forced to recognize the presence of undergrads when classes change and the stairwells are suddenly jam-packed and ringing with noise.

New Year Career Crisis

Two weeks ago, I was not entirely successful in my struggles not to cry in the middle of a presentation directly relevant to the current section of my comps paper. For most of the past week, I have had an intense urge to either put my head down and cry onto my keyboard every time I have received the latest draft of four of the five papers I'm co-authoring. Diagnosis can go one of three ways:

1. Depression is rampant in our society, and every member of my immediate family (except maybe one sister) has been on medication for depression or manic depression at one point or another. I msyelf have a dubious diagnosis of depression hanging over from my freshman year of college. Perhaps it is time for professional help in regards to regulating neurochemicals.

2. Workaholicism also runs rampant in society and in my family. The pressure to get two abstracts submitted by Friday, two papers submitted before Advisor's impending delivery, help a student with her paper before that deadline, and get through a huge hurdle of my comps paper before Advisor's impending delivery, while attending two major multi-day conference/workshop sessions in two weeks and organizing the new TA orientation, has created an overabundance in stress. I spent too much of the past week and weekend working (i.e., pretty much all of it, aside from ~2 hours of exercise or leisure reading each day), and have no reserves left from my day at the beach in San Diego. I need to take a day away from campus, email, my work laptop, and reading in general.

3. What the fuck am I doing in graduate school? Progress is stalled on my comps because I have no interest in tackling the huge theoretical debate I have to tackle, but everyone else finds this interesting and worthwhile (it was the participant debate that set me off at the presentation). Endless drafts and post-review revisions and trying to write three papers on the same research is what academia is all about, so I should be thrilled to have so many studies worthy of submitting after the dearth of worthy reserach my first two years. Obviously I'm not cut out for this. Perhaps I should consider a brand new career path, maybe flipping burgers.

Deeper consideration suggests it can't just be #3. I'm giving myself a pass on my comps problems, because the huge theoretical debate is addressed in my comps only as a stumbling block: "if this take is correct, we can look at this cool manipulation; if not, well...". I would be totally into my comps if they would have just let me say #(*% the debate, it's not going to get resolved, and the evidence in favor the useful take is convincing enough to proceed. There are reasons I'm stuck with four drafts on the same idea (revisions to a publication I wasn't even part of are half of them) that are unlikely to repeat at any other point in my career (please!). There has been an ongoing career crisis in that direction for the past year or so, however.

Addressing the work overload is difficult. Thanks to comps, there's always something that needs to be done pressing on the back of my mind, so it's a matter of just ditching work rather than getting to a good stopping place. Re-evaluating assorted commitments means Friday, and probably Saturday, are now Grad Student Skip Days. My newly re-validated bus pass and I are taking off for anywhere not here. I am turning off the computers, ignoring the books, and either getting some sunshine or getting some expensive sugar.

Addressing the career crisis is less difficult. A very timely email has pointed me to a "Turning Points" career workshops just for graduate students. I will totally pay $60 for a six-week course on figuring out what I want to be when I grow up and how to be it. (Mild paranoia that three more people won't sign up to meet the 10-person minimum is adding to my stress load, however). And, I've enrolled in an entirely irrelevant education course I know nothing about (the title is probably Religion, Spirituality & Education, but abbreviations make it diffiuclt to tell) becuase I'd already maxed out tuition and fees anyway, so it's free!. Technically this adds to my workload, but the possibility of having non-optional chores with absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with my research is well worth it.

And, this day is ending early. There is absolutely nothing I have to do that is better off being done today poorly than tomorrow (hopefully) rejuvenated.

Teaching & Technology Conference

My school's teacher program hosted a state-wide conference on teaching and technology, and as lead TA I got to attend free (on a "scholarship"). I also got to run back and forth between the tech building and my department, as my advisor was somewhat inflexible about me attending a conference on our lab meeting day.

As with any conference, the workshops were hit and miss. There were some interesting discussions about Web 3.0 and Students 2.0, and sessions on what a wiki is and how to make use of it. As far as highlights go, there are two:

1. At 8:30 Wednesday morning I was introduced to Zotero, a Firefox-based reference management software. I promptly spent my free time between workshops converting my previous, insane, Excel-based managment. The bibliography export isn't perfect (it insists on including doi information on half the references), but the ability to have all the information, including the abstract, saved by a click of the mouse is more than enough to make up for this. This new productivity should go a long way to appeasing my advisor over my attendance.

2. The lawyers presented on mind mapping software, which looked interesting enough - I'm tempted to check out the freeware. The interesting part, however, was that they were demonstrating their department's product ($$), and had mentioned to the company that it was being demonstrated, and had been given a book, software, and t-shirts to give away. The drawing for the freebies consisted of one presenter throwing everyone's cards up in the air, and the other trying to catch one. It was worth jotting down my name just to watch. (I got a t-shirt for coming up with a use of mind mapping software earlier).

3. An intriguing presentation on using Second Life as an educational tool. One presenter used a Second Life location as a substition for a powerpoint (a kind of distance learning opportunity, I guess), and the other demonstrated NOAA's Island of demonstration tools for teaching about science. None of these seem to apply to my discipline, but it was interesting to watch. How soon will we be fulfilling the science fiction fantasy of sitting at computers instead of attending classes?

The Writing Never Ends

I wrote incessantly in high school, in notebooks ranging from letter-size to a little tiny thing I kept in my back pocket should inspiration strike. The challenge back then was in finishing a story. I might start a dozen at once, with no particular plot in mind, and just write aimlessly but interestedly until the interest was lost. There's a very real limit on how much time you can spend trying to write the same thing before it becomes more burden than pleasure.

Fast forward to graduate school. The same problem still applies, only now it applies to more scientific than science fiction endeavors. There's a little thrill when the challenge is handed down: put this experiment in parent-friendly terms for our newsletter, put that experiment in easily comprehended but thoroughly scientific terms for publication. But the same problem as high school applies: there has to be an end product.

You might think experiments would be very conducive to this, because the plot is all there: introduction, method, results, conclusion. With word limits, even, to keep you on track. The plot is anchored by the methods, so the rest can't get too far away from you (although there are certainly plenty of re-analysis and re-interpretations to extend the process quite a bit). And yet...The process still never seems to end.

The problem with the experiment is that now you aren't in control. There are your co-authors, for example. This calls for extensive, sentence-by-sentence, "what if we said...let's change this...". The tweaking process is very helpful, making for a much better paper than the early drafts. Once three people have gone through 20 iterations (I'm not exaggerating. I have all the drafts saved), however, interest in writing has already begun to wane. Dramatically. You want that paper done, the .doc file cast aside permanently in favor of the immutable .pdf.

And then, once the co-authors have been pleased, there's formatting for submission, and rejection, and formatting for submission somewhere else, and NOW there's an editor and two reviewers calling for further modifications. You thought you were done - but no! Now three people have called for a minor change here, an expansion there, convince me you don't need another experiment...all of which have to be addressed in yet another round of drafts.

I should be thrilled to get a revise-and-resubmit response; it's the most favorable of any reaction to my submissions thus far (unless you count the committee passing my master's thesis, of course). My immediate reaction was - hey, that's pretty good! Nice reviews, so we didn't explain that too well, alright. And then I started putting together the list of things we would need to change. By the time I informed the co-authors, I was ready to start banging my head against my desk: I. do. not. want. to. work. on. this. any. more. My head is hardened by many years of martial arts; surely it can handle ten bangs on a cheap plywood desk?

I had the same problem with my master's thesis - too many revisions, get it the hell away from me now! But that had a firm deadline, and rather lower standards than official publication. I did it for the degree, and continued progress towards the next degree, but I'm not sure I can do it just to have my name published.

Graduate School Is Not My Entire Life...I Spend More Time Sleeping

The second achievement of my obsessive time-keeping experiment was to demonstrate exactly how much time each week I have been dedicating to graduate school, specifically my research and my comps paper. This could alternatively be described as "not as much as I should" and "exactly as much as I feel like". The actual number is around 25 hours per week.

Keep in mind that this is time actually spent working on a task, not time spent in the lab but surfing the internet. Still, the number seems a bit sparse, given the usual informal expectations of graduate student time commitments; hence, "not as much as I should". I can come up with various excuses - no time-consuming data analyses to run, assorted stalls in attempts to spend time collecting data, no summer classes - that would explain how the summer has been an aberration. The reality, though, is that time spent is "exactly as much as I feel like".

If I don't feel like working in the evening, I don't work. It doesn't matter if I slept in, and only spent 4 hours of work on graduate school so far today. I have no deadlines; even meetings with my advisor have become "sign up if you want one". I have no significant other breathing down my neck to get on with it already, no parents demanding surcease from tuition payments. The only thing making sure work gets done is my own interest in getting it done.

This provides some excellent perspective. Sometimes it feels as if graduate school eats up my entire life; days where I stay at the office until 7:30, going home only to eat dinner at the desk while continuing to work (last Tuesday, I believe). The constant nag of assorted deadlines, imagined pressures, "I should be doing...", and doing work on the weekends makes it feel like the workload never ends. The workload might never end, and my subjective perceptions might be off, but I'm obviously very good at not spending excessive amounts of time on grad school.

Or, I'm obviously very good at not spending sufficient amounts of time on grad school...but that's all a matter of opinion. There is no exact number for time on task (our lab coordinator does have to keep such track of time, and the random conversations with undergraduates never seem to be made up elsewhere).

There is a lot to be said for working more efficiently, not longer. On the other hand, if I were truly a driven grad student, I wouldn't take that efficiency as a cue to take a break; I'd take it as a cue to excel and get the Nobel prize or get published in Science. Reflections on whether I will start spending more time on work come later.

Uni-tasking vs. Multi-tasking

For two months I have conducted an experiment in obsessive timekeeping: tracking time spent on work (anything relating to grad school) down to 3 minute increments (because 3 minutes = .05 hours, a nice round number). This experiment was probably more successful than any of the research I've done to date, and certainly has a more noticeable impact on my life - or anything, really. I have achieved two things: one, I've trained myself to uni-task; two, I now know exaclty how much of my life I'm spending on graduate school. Today, we look at uni-tasking.

Uni-tasking as a goal was partially instigated by my advisor, who relayed a general faculty observation about graduate students multi-tasking through colloquia, and heavily inspired by "Zen Habits", which has a rather unique perspective on multitasking.. This perspective seems entirely correct: what's the point of sitting through a seminar if you're only listening to half of what the speaker says? The answer is usually "because I'm required to and don't want my advisor/the faculty at large to note my absence", but this seems to miss the point. There are a large number of seminars that turn out to feel not worth the time spent sitting in an uncomfortable chair, but assuming that the time would be better spent on other projects means not paying enough attention to the current seminar to have any idea whether it would be interesting.

Keeping track of time emphasizes the point of uni-tasking, or rather the lack of point to multi-tasking: in the end, each minute gets counted as only one thing. Two hours spent in a colloquium gets listed as two hours regardless of how much of that time I spend listening to the speaker and how much is spent on other tasks on the laptop. If I just listen, on the other hand, and do the other chores later, more hours get counted and the magic number of "that's enough work for today!" happens much sooner. And, I both have a better chance of understanding the speaker and of making an errorless data analysis that won't need to be redone later.

Keeping such anal track of time also trained sticking to a single task in the face of more pleasurable distractions. This is more than just not trying to do two tasks at the same time, but to not quit working and do something else (check other blogs, for example). The three-minute increments often turned into "alright, I need two more minutes to make the .05", which often turned into 10 minutes or more. The impulse to do something fun is acknowledged and then put off until the current task is actually finished.

The whole exercise sounds like something out of a self-improvement manual, although I came up with it on my own, and certainly took it to an obsessive level only possible in the name of semi-scientific inquiry. One week would have been enough for a "hmm, that's interesting"; two months gave me enough to develop an actual dislike of multi-tasking or stopping a task before it's done (unless I've already spent hours doing it, of course, in which case I'm ready to chuck the laptop against a wall).

Perhaps the biggest effect of uni-tasking is that I don't feel as if I'm spending my entire life on research. I was always in the habit of putting movies or music on in the background while I worked, which made work slightly more bearable but also stretched things out to cover the entire day. I also know exactly how much of my time I'm spending on this work, which helps put the entire experience in perspective. More on this next time.

Job Flexibility

Graduate school has the reputation of being a time sinkhole: 40 to 80 hours a week spent on work despite a 20-hour stipend, Friday nights spent analyzing data rather than going out. To a certain extent, this is true, although I personally don't push my time much past 40 (of real work, not of browsing the Internet from my office). The upside to the time sinkhole is that it doesn't really matter when you work. My advisor doesn't care if I show up to the office at 9 a.m. or at all. There are offices out there that work 10/4, or take every other Friday off, or treat Saturdays as required work time. My schedule can do any of these, depending on my need. It took my advisor three days to notice that my computer clock was accidentally set 12 hours ahead; who notices whether a grad student sends emails at 3 in the morning, unless it's three in the morning tomorrow?

The upshot of this is that informing my advisor that I would unexpectedly be out of town and out of contact for a given weekend is more of a courtesy than a necessity. I'm not entirely sure it would be noticed if all emails went unanswered for a four-day weekend. Normally I'm not in a position to think about, let alone take advantage of, this flexibility. Impulsive trips to Cancun are not in the graduate student budget. At the moment, however, I have reasons to be thankful for this flexibility, as I plan to ditch research to attend my grandmother's memorial service.

My first semester as a TA, I received some advice about dealing with students who request extensions or make-up tests on the grounds of attending a grandparent's funeral. I can't remember exactly what the advice was - I think that it would be okay to request some proof of needing to attend a grandparent's funeral, but to accept a parent's funeral without question as if they're lying they're going to hell anyway. I never experienced the request from a teaching standpoint, although I did have to put up with any manner of other excuses. From a student standpoint, on the other hand, I got to make the request - my mother had a heart attack the last week of classes, so I missed an exam and a term paper deadline. I much appreciated the fact that the teacher didn't request proof. I even more appreciated that my advisor had no problems with me vanishing for a full four weeks; no one else in my family had that option.

Now again, I am the only member of my immediate family with an easy time attending this service. Three can't get out of work, the fourth is trying but has an even tighter budget than I do (yes, it's possible, especially if you have a house and two kids). Any time I think about leaving academia for the "real world", I think about how much more difficult it would be to drop everything; professors can cancel class, or call for guest lectures, but in a business there are bosses to appease and hourly wages to accrue. I have yet to decide whether this time sinkhole-flexibility trade-off would be worth it on a more permanent basis.

Back to the Daily Grind

One of my siblings, taking a week-long vacation from the wage-slave grind to coincide with my week-long vacation from...not that much work at all, really...informed me that the vacation was a test of sorts, to see if getting a break from a six-day work week of customer service would make her job any more tolerable. If not, she would seriously start looking for another job. I would not say that I returned to the lab with any great enthusiasm, but I'm certainly in better shape than that. My somewhat leisurely return to work has more to do with needing to catch up on a week's worth of Internet browsing than with any reluctance on my part, since I didn't even maintain the pretense of taking the laptop with me.

It's not just the Internet browsing, of course. It's the fact that my annual vacation is arranged around my birthday. I am now 25. I need a new plan. I have begun implementing the new plan, as tenuous as it is. It occupies more of my thoughts than research at the moment, but the pressure of a meeting with my advisor - specifically, the fact that the meeting is themed "that huge critical point of your comps paper" - should help turn things around quickly.

Graduate Student Survival Kit

Our lab coordinator is leaving for graduate school. We encouraged this, perpetuating the great circle of no-life. We were, however, nice enough to provide a Graduate School Survival Kit. It contained:

-Combination coffee mug and french press. Caffeine is vital.
-Dial-An-Excuse wheel. A must-have for all advisor meetings.
-PhD Comic Scrapbook. Rather than conducting research, time was spent selecting a dozen PhD Comics, putting them in a nice scrapbook, and adding advice. For example, "don't take bad papers personally".

This kit was presented as part of my advisor's Fourth of July lab barbecue. The departing lab coordinator then gave a thank-you speech, to all members of the lab. I was singled out for being very organized (this makes a lab coordinator's job much easier). It is my defining feature.

"Pure" Science

A lab mate's review of a Learning Institute she attended last week opened with a discussion on ways of knowing. It is our field's equivalent of nature vs. nurture, now nature via nurture: the huge debate that has raged for a decade but is now succumbing to "well, it's really more complicated than that". For me, it started highlighting the difference between pure and applied science. Pure science says "But we can only understand why people are X if we have all the details!". Applied science says "It doesn't matter what precise interactions of these genes and this environment resulted in this behavior, here's something that can help". In case it isn't obvious, I am an applied science person.

Perhaps I'm still bitter from having a very prediction-based study dismissed as a fishing expedition on the grounds of investigating three possible causes at once. Perhaps I'm very, very bored with the never-ending reading and the completely stalled attempts to gather data. More likely, though, it's just the thing I always liked about research. I think of science not just as a means to understand why; I think of science as a means of testing ideas, and the ideas that are most interesting are the ones that could actualy make a difference.

I'm glad somone is out there looking for the Real Reason Why. Identifying exactly why some men are homosexual could have profound impacts on culture, for example. It's just not something I could spend my life doing. I'm happier to say "this didn't work" than to say "it didn't work because it actually only applies to half of the sample, and it works great IFF features X, Y, Z1, and Z2 are present". A job in industry sounds more and more appealing; as long as I stay out of marketing, I should be able to swing something where it comes down to "Does this work better than this?". Too many qualifiers just makes science seem meaningless.

Time Watch

The time-track system mentioned in the previous post is not a computer program, but a self-regimen. I selected 3-minute increments because 3 minutes = .05 hours (I like round numbers), and multiples of 3 and 5 are the easiest to memorize and divide.

I looked into Meetimer (since non-work time at the office is by definition time spent surfing the web), and there are probably programs out there that record how much time you spend with a certain program or window in focus, but I decided against them. No computer would be able to log how much time I spent on different projects (teaching, vs three different experiments) and I'm not quite so irrevocably tied to the computer for work anyway.

An actual computer program would defeat half the purpose. In the short term, I want to make sure I'm earning my paycheck, yes; but I also want to make sure some time is being spent on the less pleasant projects, and in the long term, I want to thwart excessive multi-tasking and create some boundaries between work and the rest of my life. This can be difficult; I work at home when I don't need internet access, and play at work when I want to surf the web. Time only counts when I'm watching the clock, so there's a more compelling reason not to fret about research while cooking or shopping.

The Excel spreadsheet gets updated with time spent whenever I stop working, which also lets me see how much time I spend working at a step. Usually this is less than an hour (Go go generation short-attention-span!). Ultimately I hope to train myself toward two or three hours at a time, which will help separate life and work even further. Half an hour of reading followed by half an hour of tv sounds good, but at the end of the day it feels like the entire day was spent working.

If I were really obsessive, I'd buy a stopwatch and carry it around with me everywhere, starting the timer whenever I have a work related thought and stopping it whenever I have a non-work thought. One day we will have chips implanted in our brains that do this for us. In the meantime, it would miss all that experimental design that happens in the shower.

And yes, time spent on this blog counts as work, filed under the general "student" category. I consider it a vital part of my career; if I could vent the frustration or reflect on grad student life, I probably wouldn't have lasted this long.

How Many Hours Is Full-Time, Really?

For my own entertainment, when the pay period switched to summer and the lovely full-time RA status (i.e., twice the paycheck), I started an Excel spreadsheet to track how much time I was really spending on work, with separate calculations for teaching, general student work, the specific projects I was working on. What I've found is that it's very difficult to actually spend 40 hours a week on my work.

This is a system that records the work I do in 3-minute chunks. It does not include the time I spend reading blogs online, chatting with other graduate students in the hall, or assorted other activities that frequently break up the work day of those on the standard 9 to 5 schedule. I had thought that this might account for only an hour's worth of time, in little bits and pieces over the course of a regular day. Yet even with my careful on-task-only, there is not yet a week with even 35 hours dedicated to graduate school work of any type.

It could be that I'm just more interested in spending some time in the sunshine than in getting more work done. It could be that, as much as I love reading, there are very finite limits in the number of journal articles one can focus on in a single day. It could be that the 8-hour workday is design to really only get 5 or 6 hours of productive work (which is what I usually manage). I might just take the delusional road and declare this last to be the case; spending 40 hours a week in the office just translates into 30 hours of time spent on task.

Meanwhile, only a third of my time is being spent specifically on the project for which I am funded this term. Throw in the basic "student" time (dealing with the never-ending emails, etc) and general lab time, and it gets up toward 60%. This was the real purpose of the spreadsheet; I'm not neglecting the project. I'm just neglecting comps and data collection.

An Overflow of Grad Students

My first e-mail announcement as lead TA, describing the teaching/professional development workshops being offered over the summers, only gave me a minor fit. Fortunately, I sent it out before I realized how many people there were on the department's "students" list, and how few of them I knew.

The official list of students requesting TA funding for the fall numbers 43 students. The count of graduate students on the department website is 93. I can take some comfort from the fact that this is out of date - at least three students are listed in my area that I know have since graduated or left the department - but I hadn't realized exactly how big our department is, when it isn't broken down into our specialties. No wonder we have a multi-person department business office, and one staffer assigned just to administrating graduate students.

On the bright side, if five or even 10 students see that I'm the new lead and create a filter to junk my messages (which wouldn't surprise me), I can console myself with the knowledge that it's only a small fraction of the students I'm supposed to be inspiring to expand their graduate training. Sure.

Back to the Library

I'm not sure which shocks me more: That for the second time in two months (and the second time in three years) I had to resort to the campus library to get hold of a reference, or that the book was actually checked out. Technically, the article was available online, thanks to the magic of Google Books, but I don't actually like this resource; I prefer my downloadable .pdfs, particularly since I'm too cheap (grad student stipend, after all) to pay for internet access at home.

I think the fact that it was checked out is the shocker. Generally speaking, anything that starts "Multidimensional" from the 1990s is probably not high on anyone's reading list. I recalled it, quite easily, but then had to go back an reassure myself that it was due in 2008 and wasn't lost sometime years ago. I'm actually curious who has it out, and whether they're in my field/department. Odds are, it's sitting in my advisor's office, or the other faculty member involved in this project's office, but there was no way to tell. My own experiences working at my undergraduate library tell me this may or may not be returned as recalled, since professors often take books for their year-long checkout period, renew them automatically regardless of use, and come to think of them as their own property.

It's not as if I'm eager to read the 40-page article starting with "Multidimensional" myself...

Dual Tasking

Yesterday's lab meeting opened with a message passed on from my advisor: people notice when grad students take laptops to colloquia/seminars/things where a crowd of people gather to sit and listen for an hour or more, then spend the time listening with half the brain and doing work with the other half. The general consensus of these "people" is that if you're going to do that, you might as well not come. My advisor is at least willing to admit that we don't actually have a choice about attendance to most of these events, but discouraged dual-tasking all the same.

There are four grad students in our lab, all of whom have laptops we carry around just about everywhere. It was a general message, but I know I am one of the worst offenders. I briefly considered making it a personal rule not to take the laptop to these meetings (unless I'm actually taking notes on the talk, which happens fairly often), but then I started wondering exactly why this is considered to be such a big problem.

There's disrespect to the speaker; this would seem to be the most likely culprit. And yet, the back rows of chairs at these events are lined with faculty who showed up 5, 10, 15 minutes late. How is that less disrespectful? I'm not just sitting there and ignoring the speaker, so I probably only miss as much of the talk as the people who show up late. When the speaker and others in the audience get into a nuanced debate I have no hope of understanding, I lose nothing by running a quick lit search or composing an email to someone.

There's missing the details of the talk; this was my advisor's tack. The point of attending these events is to learn more about other fields, and to learn how to ask good questions. The problem here is that I am not the best learner from the colloquium format. There are too many details, and the slides are too poorly organized, to get a grasp of a talk without interrupting in the middle, which we're not supposed to do. I'm rarely going to do better than getting the gist of the talk anyway, and checking the weather or typing up a blog entry bit by bit is not going to change that.

It doesn't matter how often someone tells you that there are no stupid questions; you can tell how few graduate students buy it by how few actually ask questions. Surrounded by faculty, in a talk far out of my own area, I'm not going to ask what might turn out to be the most basic fact imaginable.

Then there's the appearance. Showing up at a talk and only paying half the attention it might be merited reflects upon you as a student (and your advisor as an advisor, which is probably why we got the lecture in the first place). All those other members of the faculty see that you aren't dedicated, and this is bad, so at least look like you're devoting your entire attention to the talk.Since I can see at least one faculty member doing the same thing, such an angle is slightly hypocritical.

The problem with any of these reasons is that removing the laptop treats the symptom, not the cause: boredom, loss of attention, inability to follow what's being talked about. The worst case was when I watched my lab mate give a practice brown bag, then give the actual brown bag, and then give an extended version for the new summer series. The talk got better each time, but it also got old; the best strategy for attendance was to follow the new information and listen with one ear while he went over the unchanged slides. Hence, the laptop. I'm currently listening to the fourth or fifth iteration of another lab mate's talk, and obviously the umpteenth explanation of the phenomenon she studies does not hold my entire attention.

No one has ever suggested that I have ADHD, but I am a product of my generation. I put a CD or DVD on while I work, I move around cleaning house when I'm on the phone; I multi-task as a way of life; the only time I don't is when I read a book, which is accompanied by a lot of meta-analysis on writing style and possibly upcoming plot turns.Perhaps I should cultivate the ability to put my entire mind behind a single task, but this almost seems counter-productive. I've been involved in several long discussions about "what is intelligence", and to me multi-tasking is a critical component.There may be arguments for how it can be better to get a lot out of the one thing, but there's not clear case for one or the other that might make me put the effort into changing my own thought patterns.

I suppose the real question is this: If hearing about research and findings stimulates my brain, and I'm stuck in an environment where that creative energy can't be channeled into discussion and brainstorming, why is it so wrong to caputre as much of it as possible on my electronic notepad?

"Exclusive Focus"

The comic I meant to reference in response to my funding being shifted to a new project is apparently called "Bad News", which is why my archive searches for things like "funding" and the punchline were ineffective. Fortunately, journal articles are named in much more sensible ways. At least, I assume they are.

The day after my post about being given a new project for balance of funding purposes, PhD came out with a comic commentary on why thesis research never progresses as well as it seems it should. This seems to describe the current situation very well. I was going to spend the summer finishing a project, mentoring an undergrad, and writing my comps paper; now I've added a very long weekly meeting and an entire new set of background and design requirements. The old project and the undergrad have priority (i.e., I can't possibly pay any less attention than I already am), which means it is the comps writing that suffers. If it were really a matter of just reading the 119 papers (last count) and integrating them, it doesn't seem like it should take one month, let alone seven. But it's finding time to read those papers that's the hard part.

I'm on the verge of sectioning off days for each project. I've already added "read 2 journal articles for comps" to my daily checklist. It's juvenile, but it's the best way of motivating me to build my exercise habits and accomplish certain chores). Blocking off one or two afternoons to work on this new project (4 to 8 hours out of the 40 I'm being paid for...I'll just have to assume funding agencies know what they're getting when they agree to pay grad student salaries) may be the easiest way to make sure everything gets accomplished this summer than needs to be done before entering the (hopefully) next-to-last year.

Grant and Project Juggling

Several faculty in my department were recently awarded a big, collaborative grant - just under two million dollars across five "projects" over the course of however many years. My advisor is on this grant. My advisor is still in the process of attempting to renew the "main" grant under which I have been funded for the past few years. Although I had been guaranteed summer funding, and paperwork was complete, my advisor asked me if I would be interested in doing one of the big grant's experiments to lessen the upcoming budget squeeze.

It's not quite as incestuous as it sounds. (Actually, it could be more incestuous than it sounds. The part of the grant I'm being funded under is headed by my advisor's spouse). The project I'm working on is in my broader interests, although not directly relevant to my comps/planned dissertation work; the project also meets my stated end-of-year review goals of expanding the content of my research and my work with other faculty. So it is a generally interesting and beneficial arrangement, although it does put me in the position (horror of horrors) of most other graduate students out there, technically being employed to do work that is not related to my dissertation. I expect no sympathy for this. I'm not sure it's even possible to spend 40 hours a week on this project, so I'm at least partially getting paid to do my dissertation work.

All of this translates into projects in the very beginning (theoretical, comps), beginning (design, this project), middle (data collection, a mentee's project) and end (last data collection / analysis, my other project). I technically have a project in very end stages (attempting publication), although with any luck that will just be formatting rather than additional shopping around for publishers. It's not a bad place to be.

There's a PhD Comic strip for this, but I can't find the specific one and actually don't want to spend several hours re-reading the entire archives right now.

The March of the PRAs

Our Lab Coordinator (LC) is going to graduate school, so the next few days/weeks will be taken up with interviewing potential replacements. We only advertised locally, and still got a pile of applicants, and are in the middle of an interviewing marathon: three days in a row, we bring an applicant in for a four-hour interview process. I'm only involved for a half-hour of each, joining another graduate student in a team interview, but it's a very all-consuming process for the lab in general.

This will be the second time I've been involved in LC interviews, and the third time I'll be involved in the early stages of training a replacement. Since I worked in this lab the summer between my junior and senior years of college, I'm the only student (graduate or otherwise) to have worked with every LC to work here. So far that's four; by my expected graduation date it will be six.

I could see this as a strong connection to the lab, a badge of honor for the length of my tenure (although not unreasonably long for a dissertation). At the moment, all I see is four to six people who have spent a year or two in a given job and have since moved on to other things, while I have stayed here with the same people and the same non-productive research projects. It roughly translates into: they've made progress in their lives, and I'm still here. Granted, I'm here with a master's degree, and I get paid more than a PRA (once you factor in full-time summer appointments, anyway), but there's a definite hint of stagnation.

Lead TA Training, Day Five

The half-day finale comes just in time; I only have to put up with three and a half hours of training while muzzy-headed from my burgeoning cold.I remain entirely uninspired about the contents of my discipline-specific seminar, which is supposed to be a one-hour session in which I present tips to the new TAs about something in my department that will be hard to teach. Beyond repeating last year's session on statistics, I have no idea how to cross the various sub-disciplines.

There is a great deal of repetitive talk about things I could have figured out by reading the manual, a partner exercise with a guy who has no concept of "personal space", and a very long feedback form, to which I add a gripe about diversity training focusing on race and gender while ignoring potential problems with religious or political viewpoints. Then, freedom, my academic management skills having been improved to the best of the teaching program's ability.

Lead TA Training, Day Four

The morning was dedicated to "microteaching", the shorter, group-based version of the videotape consultation. Everyone gives a five minute lesson, watches the video, and then the "students" provide I-Statement Feedback. Yes, this was the 15 to 30 minute session on how to give feedback in I Statements, such as "I felt confused when..." rather than "You were confusing". The good news is that I've already trained myself in this technique, and had to translate away from them to participate in the venting-against-bad-professors exercise. The bad news is that we were all recycling the lesson we'd just got consulted on the day before, so there wasn't much room for improvement. I did get a total-immersion experience in German, and a refresher on derivatives and the properties of light, as part of my student experience.

The afternoon covered a lot of managerial information about our Plan. We are being held very strictly to our 120 hours. Students who don't complete them get to work in the office during the summer. Students who complete them early drop out of existence. The director's rationale for not letting us do, say, 130 hours if we so choose, is that this might scare off anyone else who might take the position later. This to me is pretty stupid. ("I feel frustrated with the reasons behind this strict time requirement"). First, because it's unlikely anyone is going to take the position after me anyway; second, because it's simple enough to say that there's only 120 hours required and you don't have to do as much as I did.

I did get to find out about what other departments do. Some leads will spend their entire flex hours putting on the mandatory seminar for graduate students over the course of the entire year. Some (like me) have 60-70 hours (all that's left after the assorted meetings, plan updates, and other administrative duties are added up) to do whatever they feel like. I have no concrete plans as yet about what these will be; I used my planning time to create the Excel spreadsheet that would tell me just how much time I had to do stuff with.

Lead TA Training, Day Three

An entire day spent on the videotape consultation, the established procedure by which we non-evaluatively guide teachers toward a problem in their teaching they wish to work on. The morning d r a g g e d . . . o n . . . f o r e v e r. I was far from the only person in the room who had been through one of these, so I didn't really need to watch one for an entire hour, especially not after two hours of reading the procedures in the manual and having lengthy and highly redundant discussions about them.

The afternoon was much better. I was one of a group of four who would take turns teaching and consulting. The teaching was quite exciting. The Anthropology lead brought a 30-million-year-old partial jawbone and some sample skullls to guide us through comparative morphology in determining what a species ate. The Art History lead had us trying to draw concrete objects and abstract concepts. Our Chemical Engineering lead had a prior engagement, so we also had an impromptu lesson on positive and negative perceptions of persuasion from a communications teacher with over 20 years of experience. I offered the first steps in deciding how to design an experiment. So the four hours of videotape consulting was well broken up by interesting content.

For two of the consultations I was stuck back in the observer mode of the morning. The first one - before I got to do anything myself - started dragging as well. There's a limit to how interested you can feel when you're deliberately inhibiting all the comments you want to interject so the two role-players have their own time. I literally leapt to my feet at the chance to teach. The feedback I got wasn't particularly memorable - we talked about ways I could work on planning alternative questions in advance (when prepared questions failed to elicit the proper response) and be more willing to pause the class for a minute or two rather than trying to talk and think about follow-up questions at the same time.

My turn at consultation apparently went well. The facilitator for my groups was none less than the GTP Director herself (i.e., my boss), and my feedback form contained points starting "excellent" or "good" (and one "friendly"), with no suggestions for improvement. This despite the fact that I was consulting someone who is close to my complete opposite as a teacher: someone who wanted to figure out how she could deal with her nervousness and worry about how her students were feeling during the class. I cannot quite conceive of having any difficulty telling someone to stop sending text messages during class. That's cold-dominant for you.

I had left the morning thinking I probably wasn't going to offer to do videotape consultations at all - the lead network exists as a "network", so other leads could help with any psych students trying for certification. I left the afternoon session thinking that I'd want to encourae all the students to do one, regardless of whether they wanted certification. Tomorrow we start developing our lead plans, and the process of trying to fit two semesters' worth of teaching activities into just 90 hours begins.

Lead TA Training, Day Two

I will say this for the week-long intensive: it may fall behind schedule as easily as anything else in academia, but it has a commitment to ending on time. Yesterday ended promptly at 3:30, despite being half an hour behind all afternoon; today we were running 25 minutes behind all morning and still got out to lunch just five minutes late.

Of course, that statement was typed before the director decided to make us do breathing exercises to open the afternoon. I refuse to do either the plug-one-nostril or the fire-breathing technique of relax/energize breating. If they want me to demonstrate I'm energized, I will get up on the platform and show off some kata, but I am not risking hyperventilation to feel my belly "pop" with each exhale.

Thus far, I have learned about no less than six personality, learning style, and academic leadership style inventories, and ranked myself somewhere on all of them. I am a cold, dominant, refelctive observer, abstract conceptualizer, fact-based, task-oriented, committed relativist, separated knower who prefers synthesis-based exam questions. There are at least two more inventories of one type or another to go, to round out the day.

The diversity workshop did exactly what I expected it would: It reaffirmed my belief that gender disparity is in the eyes of those who expect to find it. It is the woman who could spout phrases like "feminist ideology" who argued that women might be subconsciously cultured to preface statements with "This may be a stupid question" and end with "I don't know", where I firmly place this as a reaction to teacher attitude (i.e., whether I've been extra cold-dominant that day whether I'm staring blankly as I try to come up with a reasonable answer).

Tomorrow we may actually move on to the training in job duties. Hopefully.

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Lead TA Training, Day One

This week is brought to you by the nine-to-five (well, 8:30 to 4:30) adventure that is Lead Graduate TA training. The good news is that I'm kind of getting paid (the job pays 6% time over nine months, a total of 120 hours, of which this is 30, but I don't get a paycheck until September) and the week counts as no less than 10 credits for workshops completed towards my teaching certificate. The bad news: aforementioned 8:30, "continental breakfast" of juice and bagels, many hours of latest pedagogical paradigm. Tomorrow, I believe, I get to sit through an hour and a half on "Diversity"; somewhere in the schedule is a section devoted to "I-Statement Feedback".

The lead TA position is two-fold. First, a lot of training for me - pre-professionalism in committee work, presentations, etc., and actual teaching tips. Second, filtered training through me to the other graduate students in my department. That's the hard part of the job: convince continuing graduate students to check out the official workshops on the grounds of "unless you're going into business, you're gonna have to teach at some point", and convince the new TAs (including undergraduate recitation leaders for Intro) that they want to attend the discipline-specific skills kit workshops I think I'm planning. At the moment, I feel that I'll settle for getting them to actually read the emails I will be required to send out, rather than deleting them automatically. This may be accomplished by actuall writing emails, instead of just forwarding them with "FYI. -Me" added on top.

I have found out interesting things about the other TA training programs. There's the department that covers everything including "erase the board up and down, because if you do it left to right your butt will wiggle automatically in a distracting fashion", or the department that says "see the GTP if you want training". My department tends toward the latter. I wish I could have a few hours before the semester starts to run the toolkits workshop (when else will it be useful to discuss syllabus and assignment design), but I'm hopeful for getting ideas from training on how to work around it.

What A Difference A Year Makes

Let's reiterate the "you didn't really think I could do this, did you?" nature of end-of-year progress report/plans with a side-by-side comparison.

Now:

"Following completion of the doctoral degree, I plan to continue in the academic field. I prefer to enter a teaching-focused university, where I will teach during the school year with options to continue research either during the summer or on the side. Depending on the level of experience I gain with future TA positions, I may seek one- or two-year terms as Instructors to replace professors on sabbatical before I attempt to get a relatively permanent position as an assistant professor. I prefer to take on a teaching position where I will be able to teach [my field] and statistics, and where I can focus on teaching critical thinking and writing skills. I also prefer to take a position east of the Mississippi, in order to be within easier traveling distance of my immediate family."

Then:

"Following completion of the doctoral degree, I plan to continue in the academic field. I will seek employment as a postdoctoral researcher, preferably doing work that is related to my graduate research but branches off into new theoretical territory or skills. Ideally I would complete two two-year postdoctoral positions. At least one of these would continue in [my field], although a second may [be related field]. I have no strong geographic or technical constraints regarding where these postdoctoral positions are, although I would probably not actively search for positions in the Southeast. I prefer to complete two positions to allow more variety in travel before starting a relatively permanent position as an assistant professor. I will most likely seek positions with an emphasis on teaching and mentoring rather than research exclusively, as I have found my work mentoring individual undergraduates to be some of the most satisfying in my graduate career thus far and expect I will feel as strongly about teaching when I have more in-depth experience."

Rejection Junction

My advisor has announced an intention to give a "rejection" talk to the lab sometime this summer. This may or may not be related to a post (on my personal blog) linking the intense need for a vacation and the series of rejections I've received this past year. I'd welcome a discussion, but I'm not sure a talk would help.

Being told that it's part of the process, that it's common even for the big names, is nothing new. Being told not to take it personally is besides the point. I have not been particularly attached to any of my rejected applications - I didn't really need funding/to attend a workshop/whatever; my motivation could easily be summed up as "that would be pretty cool". It just doesn't matter how unattached or thick-skinned you think you are; a rejection is a negative event that puts at least a small dent in your mood and casts a mild pall over all future attempts. Without some clear breeze of an acceptance to clear the air, future rejections just pile up, even over the course of a semester.

At a guess, my advisor has lost touch with the sensations of uninterrupted rejections. Congratulations are handed out to some people in the lab on a fairly regular basis, and they are all shared by the Head Honcho. The advisor gets some kudos on any accomplishment, that "look what we've done; it was a success!" Except that it's harder for a graduate student to share in the success of another grad student; it's more "look what they've done; so why can't my stuff get published?". The rejection train (hence the Schoolhouse Rock reference in the title) already pushed me into "I need a vacation"; even with this morale boost, I'm not sure how much more I can take before I cross the line into "Why bother?".

It's probably not about thick skin or detachment at all; it's about needing to be successful. People who want to go into academia will keep going despite rejection because they're determined to succeed. I don't have enough ambition to care about getting published or otherwise showing off my professional aspirations. The rejection may hit less, than if I thought these things were all important, but there's less reason to bounce back.

Justify Yourself

The end of the school year brings with it the department's request for my Education Plan and CV. What have I done this year, and what do I plan to do next year?

This means, among other things, that I need to go back to last year's justification essay and see whether I actually accomplished the planned accomplishments. On a basic level, I know this to be true. This is because on a basic level, last year's plan was "get a master's degree and start working on comps". On a more detailed level, the "you didn't really think I could do this, did you?" seems possible.

The only problem I have with my education plan is that I get no credit for what I tried to do. I got rejected from a conference, from a workshop, from a fellowship, from a paper submission, but at least I tried, unlike past years when I just worked on classes and data collection. Trying is progress that is not indicated on my progress report. Perhaps I was getting the benefit of the doubt in previous years, if they (wrongly) assumed I had unmentioned unsuccessful attempts at enhancing my CV, but being unable to count these attempts - even as failures - makes the past year feel like more of wasted time than actually listing the litany of rejections would.

I doubt the department really cares, beyond "got master's, check; proposed comps, check; took time to answer our short-essay questions, check". The only thing they're likely to care about is if I say flat out I have no intention of entering academia or doing research for a living, at which point they might wonder what they've spent so much money on me for.

The only way this will work is if I write down all the same period non-academic accomplishments and plans at the same time. There's no point in examining only one aspect of my life to see if the past year was worth remembering.

Negative Motivation Is Still Motivation

Grad school might be a financially strapped time, and the country might be full of financial uncertainty, but I think I have my priorities in order. When I discovered that my nephew's birthday party would be held the week after he turned one, a weekend I was remarkably free of Friday and Monday classes and meetings, I immediately shelled out airfare for a much-needed vacation. If I were given to superstition, I'd have taken the fact that I managed to travel for just $300 on less than 2 weeks noticed as a sign confirming how vital this trip was.

I stepped up my production schedule to get all my classwork done in advance of my trip, which was the weekend before the last week of classes; I wanted no deadlines floating around in the back of my mind. I only brought my laptop because I would return Monday morning and go straight to campus. I did not think about school or research for three whole days, except to provide the one-sentence-summary of my comps paper when asked how school was going.

Chasing my niece and nephew and hanging out with my sisters led me to an important revelation: I want to move. As much as I love the city I'm living in, I'd love being within easy travel of my family more. Getting from the continental divide to the East coast is rarely convenient; it's a trip that has been limited to just twice a year. I've been thinking about how much I want to get out of grad school recently; now I have some idea of where I want to get to. Motivation increases tenfold to get it all done - the sooner I finish comps and defend my dissertation, the sooner I'm spending more time playing with kids instead of staring at a computer screen. It might not be the best motivation for getting a PhD, but it's a far more effective goal to keep in mind than, say, landing a professorship.

The Committee

My comps committee has, with substantial revisions, approved my comps paper proposal. Not that revisions are a bad thing; the main comments were prefaced with "it's way too ambitious and you're going to go crazy trying it that way", and followed with "overall, it's really interesting!" - fifty-five minutes later.

I didn't want to use the same three-person committee I had used for my first two years. My advisor is (obviously or fortunately, take your pick) still the same. We have a relatively small group of faculty - less than a dozen - so I wasn't exactly spoiled for choice. I wound up with one other person from my master's committee, because that's the only other person in our department who does research using our methodology, if not quite in our domain; very helpful for experiment design and feasibility assessment.

The third person on my committee is new, one of two faculty members I haven't had a class with. I haven't actually spoken with her since my prospective weekend, when I struggled not to doze off while attending her lab meeting. I was hopeful she had no idea who I was. The request was based on the fact that my comps paper marks my attempts to get beyond my advisor's research; the half of it that is not my advisor's area of expertise is this person's. You could tell, because she's the reason the committee meeting lasted as long as it did.

I was somewhat prepared for this by her probing questions to a lab mate's colloquium presentation just an hour earlier. I said very little during the meeting, my contributions being mainly the furious typing as I tried to get down all the references that I should have included on my reading list, the brief lecture on how what I was looking at really worked, and assorted sections I should cut, adjust, or expand. I started out planning to organize comments by who made them, but they were all from one person, so there wasn't any point.

None of this is a bad thing, of course. It's the kind of revision that turned a never-going-to-be-read 15,000-word master's thesis into a 4,500-word article that, while never going to be published or presented, at least I can show off to my family if they want to know what I did to get the fancy degree. All those comments might very well keep me from going crazy as I attempt to demonstrate my ability to synthesize different literatures and produce novel ideas. But first I have to pick through two full single-space pages of notes and track down "that review paper in Journal Name that discussed your topic", among others.

Longing for Professionalism

There are days - coming more and more frequently - when I long for the business world and its supposed emphasis on deadlines and punctuality.

We have a regular colloquium on Mondays; the graduate student presenting this week was so late the organizer called her to find out if she was arriving. I have a Tuesday-Thursday class to which the professor is always five to ten minutes late, and then keeps us five to ten minutes after the official end of class (it's not clear whether this is to make up for the late start or because he's generally incapable of keeping track of time). The audience to a meeting doesn't show up until several minutes after the official start time (unless there is free food, in which case they chat around the food table until several minutes after the official start time.

This week has been worst than most. First there was my interview with the director of my university's graduate teacher program, a formality for hiring me as the lead graduate teacher for my department next year. My appointment was at 1; I dressed in business casual for the occasion and arrived at 12:55. The director wasn't there. She had gone to pick up her car from the mechanic over her lunch break, and was expected back momentarily. Around 1:20 the administrative assistant called her; she would be another 15 minutes. It's not that the meeting was late, which is somewhat understandable. It's that she was able to answer her phone right away, and remembered she had a meeting, but hadn't bothered to call when she knew she wouldn't be on time.

Then there was our lab meeting. My advisor's son behaved true to toddler form, ran into something head-first, and had to be taken to the hospital for stitches. Again, a perfectly understandable reason for throwing off a schedule. She informed our lab coordinator that she would be late, with instructions on what could be handled before she got there. We handled all of that, and then sat around for 15 minutes chatting about nothing waiting to see if she would show up. Eventually the lab coordinator borrowed a cell phone to check messages and discovered that a voicemail had been left to just videotape the meeting. This is one of those situations where no one is really at fault: the advisor could have tried calling someone else after not having the call (placed after the meeting had begun) answered, the coordinator could have brought her cell phone to the meeting, one of us could have encouraged checking messages earlier.

Why is it too much to ask that if people say something will happen at noon, it happens at noon? When I do have an event scheduled, I show up on time or five minutes early. No one else in academia appears to offer the same courtesy. I know I impair my own productivity often enough by surfing the web instead of writing a paper, but at least that's on me: my fault, my responsibility to correct. If I have to spend five to twenty minutes sitting around waiting because someone else didn't have the courtesy to arrive on time or at least inform me that they would be late, that's on them. That's time I can't spend on what needs doing.

I appreciate the flexibility of an academic's schedule; I show up to work at 10 or 11 many days of the week, though usually after working until midnight the night before. I would happily exchange it, however, for a 9 to 5 job where I at least am told if something won't happen on schedule.

Best Laid Plans of Herding Cats

What is the difference between staff and faculty? Staff coordinate; faculty stray. Getting faculty together is like herding cats; staff herd themselves.

I needed four official signatures on a form. My advisor was easy; she happened to be on campus, we had a quick meeting, she signed. The others were two staff and the department chair. I emailed the first staff member, she agreed to sign, I put it in her box. Within two hours, I had the form back with all three needed signatures in place. I didn't have to try to pin down the department chair, I didn't even have to put any effort into finding the other staff member.

I also needed to arrange a meeting of my comps committee. A mere formality, one hour to discuss my proposal. In the entire month of April, there are three days one person can make it, and one time slot each day my advisor can make. I sent three e-mails over six days to the third committee member trying to find out if she could make any of those responses, then had to send another email to the first person to find out if she was available that (since she'd only given me days, not times) before I could finally know what time my comps proposal would be officially completed.

So, one morning to get a form taken care of by staff; one week to even hear back from all faculty committee members. The upshot of this is that my comps proposal is three weeks later than planned, although still within the "by April" deadline (and the paper was at least sent out before April), but the Lead Department GTA application was submitted the same day I started requesting signatures. I can't quite imagine how bad it will be when I'm trying to coordinate a five-person dissertation committee.

It's Not the Receiving, It's the Reporting

The first of two attempts to get something publishable (i.e., meaningful) out of my master's thesis was a submission of a much simplified version of the thesis to a conference. The challenge was that the only discipline conference to submit to didn't just take poster abstracts on a first-come first-served basis (that was the conference I wanted to submit to when the research was in early phases, but which my advisor vetoed). Instead, you have to submit a six-page paper that would be published in the proceedings of the conference. Pros: reviews of the paper to be read, and more prestige than the normal poster presentation. Cons: submissions are actually reviewed, and get rejected.

At submission, I was of the opinion that the paper was much more interesting and convincing than it had been when written up as my thesis, but was still full of enough only-marginally-significant results that we weren't quite sure how to interpret that it certainly wasn't going to be worth trying to publish elsewhere (although my advisor will veto that opinion as well). The reviewers seem to agree: official verdict is rejection, but there was enough mixed opinion that we go four reviewers in three rounds instead of the two reviewers mentioned in the form response. Individual opinions range from 1/5 (unoriginal fishing expedition) to 4/5 (cautiously recommended as a talk, not just a poster).

I'm not any more upset about this than I was about my abusive FCQ commenter. Perhaps I'm going through an unemotional even-keel week, but I prefer to think I've finally matured to the point that I have realistic opinions of my work and appropriately healthy respect for other peoples' opinions. I can disagree with some of the comments (since when is considering three factors that have reasonable explanations for contributing to something "fishing"? would it be science if I picked my favorite theory and didn't even consider the alternatives?), but overall the comments are in line with my own opinion (not that I would tell my advisor this) of "somewhat interesting results but not at all impressive".

So I'm not bothered by the rejection. What I actually am bothered by is the expectation that my advisor won't let it die. I have no intention of mentioning the status to anyone else unless asked, because I don't need or want whatever consolation comes with manuscript rejection, but I have to notify my co-author. And she'll want to comment, and try to revise and submit it somewhere else, and I'm just done. I'm not particularly interested in following up on the research. I spent two and a half years on the topic, I was incredibly dedicated and fascinated at the time, but interest can only be sustained for so long. I have been forced onto bigger (if not better) things by the requirements for my comps paper, and I would much rather spend my time on the impending research and consign the master's work to the It Is Not Worthy annals of science.

The only question I want to deal with is whether I want to attend the conference as audience. It's an expensive prospect, since funding in my department is generally limited to people who are presenting research. But I've never been to a conference before, and it might be an important piece to figuring out what I want to do. If it's exciting enough, it might even tip me towards research over teaching. There is also the question of how important attending and presenting at conferences will be on my yearly progress reports, since I won't have a chance to present a poster before even next year's progress report is due. I don't want to get a letter or equivalent black mark for not working with the broader scientific community, just because my attempts to do so have been rebuffed.

What Students Think - FCQs

I delayed in looking at the comments on my FCQs. First I delayed two months from receiving them to even looking to see if there had been comments. Then I pulled out the 8 extra-graphite scantrons (out of 34 submitted, 46 students) while very carefully not reading anything. The I munched fresh chocolate cookies and watched a scene or two of "Noises Off" before casually reaching over to the very short stack and beginning to read. Reading itself took less than two minutes. Procrastinating and aftereffects took much longer.

Random movements of the universe were favorable for me. The first comment on the stack was the best: "Could be more enthusiastic, I think most of her humor was not understood by the class, but a very good teacher." Contrary to expectations, most students seemed to note that the prompt called for "constructive comments to your instructor", and did not spend just complain. I need to slow down, speak more clearly, pay more attention to student comments/questions, and "cheer up", but "assignments were well-prepared and graded fairly". I obviously made progress: "Once she finished her outside work (dissertation?) it was a complete turn around for the better"; my defense coincided with figuring out what I was doing, and it was developing a plan that made the difference.

But, There's Always One, or so I'm assured by friends who don't teach. There was the One who complained that there was too much work - I tend to agree, although I'm hesitant to accept the opinion of someone who thinks 1/3rd of a 4 credit class is 1 credit, and I'm a bit proud that the lab had more work than the lecture (no readings, four non-cumulative multiple choice and short answer exams). But that wasn't the real One. The real One was the Outright Negative One: "I think she is a pompous TA and needs to tone it down. If she ever became a prof (god forbid) nobody would go."

The delay, chocolate, and movie worked: I wasn't exactly upset by this. Considering, disturbed, even bugged, but not really upset. Obviously this person missed the part of the instructions where it said complaints should be directed elsewhere, since the teacher is the only person to read the comments. Or perhaps they did, and the attack is all the more personal; not couched as "you" directly, but intended to be read by the subject.

Naturally, I wondered who it might be. The obvious candidate, the girl who complained vociferously to many people about getting a D- on the first assignment, wasn't there for FCQs. And then I realized that, completely fortuitously, I'd never thrown away the informational index cards I had all students fill out the first week of class. I pondered upon the ethics of comparison, and ultimately decided that peace of mind gained from some idea WHY mattered more than an implied promise of anonymity. It's not as if I'll ever see this student again, or could have any impact on his life.

"His" because features of letters ruled out every female in the class. I probably identified the person, although there is no reason "why" to be found. Just a student; not one that skipped or failed an assignment or got a bad grade, not one that came to office hours, no one who got any comment in class - although I think I suppose his name wrong sometime late in the semester. Just a student.

Does it matter? The comment doesn't qualify as "representative", so there's no ethical argument against leaving it out of my socratic portfolio (teaching resume) or yearly progress report. No one else ever looked at the comments, and I doubt anyone would do a lot based on just one comment anyway. I don't think it's going to impact my decision to teach. I don't think it will even affect the way I teach. I received one carefully phrased request to give more consideration to student questions, and that will remain in the forefront of my mind. Being called full of myself in the same sentence as a parenthetical request for religious intervention in my career prospects lacks clout. Nothing will change that wasn't already going to change, except perhaps a more jaundiced view of FCQs.

It's not worth having future FCQs filtered for abusive comments; the entire teaching experience can qualify as a unique trial-by-fire, sink-or-swim experience that won't be repeated, so it doesn't necessarily follow that comments for any other class would be as outrageous. I don't even have any reaction to wondering what this student would think at learning that I will be the Lead GTA for the entire department next year. Having worked myself through the intriguing puzzle of handwriting (this person does all r's capitalized, this person all r's and n's...no one else seems to use a three-line I for the personal pronoun but a one-line I for everything else), it just doesn't seem to matter.

Searching Science

I can't quite imagine what it would have been like to conduct a literature search before the age of the Internet. It must have been a combination of browsing through hundreds of Tables of Contents and "treeing" through the references (they cite this paper, so I should look that one up too). Many hours would have been spent in the library stacks.

If I need to conduct a literature search, I first decide on which of many databases I will use. Google has its own Scholar function for searching through academic resources, which will pull up long lists of references on relatively obscure topics, complete with "Find It At *U" links for the vast majority of results (when I'm on campus, of course) so I can download the .pdf file.

Only once has the Internet failed me - that I'm aware of. It was a matter of more old-fashioned searching. A paper I found online cited a very relevant study, which I wanted to read for myself. It was from 1988, in a relatively obscure journal. This isn't necessarily a problem; I have a .pdf of an aritcle published in 1985, and 1989. But this article does not appear to exist on the Internet - the abstract is all over the place, of course, but the article itself has eluded me.

So it's off to the library for me. For just one of the 93 articles I have listed in my comps references, the article has been protected and *U has a print-only subscription. So I have to find the Science Stacks, and use the call number to find a specific shelf and a specific volume. I'll actually have to photocopy the article (or, heck, scan it and create my own .pdf). And while I'm there, I might spend a moment's silent contemplation in awe of how hard finding articles once was.

Motivated by Nostalgia

The graduate school application process of my lab coordinator and assorted prospective students recently prompted me to examine old emails from my own applications. The intent was simply to get a time frame for when I heard final rejection or acceptance to various schools. The effect was rather different.

I had remembered spending something close to a month agonizing over the decision between two specific schools, the Excel file of pros and cons, the emails requesting more information about programs and research possibilities, the careful phrasing of both the positive and negative emails to convey my decision. I hadn't remember just how heavily I had been courted to those schools and one other.

In one of the emails sent during that decision making process, my current advisor wrote of how much she hoped I would come to work with her, of how she'd thought in recent lab meetings that it would be so great to have my perspective on a lot of the discussions that were coming up. Excitement at my acceptance almost radiated from the monitor. Just over three years later, it seems a bit unreal. The first question that comes to mind: what would my advisor think looking back over these emails? Have I lived up to such expectations? Have I simply progressed into the not-quite-taken-for-granted state of a long-present student? From my advisor's perspective, are there any regrets at having admitted me?

It's certainly hard to imagine that I could have managed to live up to the implied expectations; I just don't have brilliantly insightful commentary to produce at every lab meeting. But it's impossible to have any real idea. My interactions with my advisor are limited to participation in a two-hour lab meeting every week and a 40-minute individual meeting every other week or so. There are plenty of emails, complete with enthusiasm for various ideas and results, but I can't help but feel that any conceptualization my advisor has of me is woefully incomplete, with little idea about how dedicated or motivated I am. It's difficult to assign "on" time to a specific three hours of the week, and if lab meeting day happens to be the longest day of my week, then I certainly don't cut an impressive figure that semester.

Still, it's inspiring - or at least motivating - in a way. Graduate school contains plenty of pressure to get things done, but rarely in a personal way. The only person making sure I'm getting my comps proposal completed by the appointed deadline is myself; my advisor didn't even know when the deadline was (although she did ask me to remind my year-mate). There's some amount of support, but by this point we're supposed to be quite self-sufficient. I work in the standard windowless office, and I have a better-than-standard-but-still-busy-and-absentminded advisor. It's hard to think of myself as anything other than the necessary lackey.

I suppose those emails are the first reminder I've had in a long while that my advisor chose to work with me as much as I chose to work with her. I'm normally quite skeptical about the American tendencies to worth enhancement and carefully constructed "constructive" criticism. At the moment, I'm much more understanding. I still think modern culture goes overboard, but I can't deny the motivating factor of having an explicit statement from your boss that you're a great person and they have high positive feelings and expectations. I can't say I'm much more enthusiastic about my graduate career at the moment, because aching ribs caused by an overly enthusiastic and entirely uncontrolled teenage boy of a karate partner have a significant damping effect, but there is a certain amount of determination and even dedication to my lab that wasn't present before my brief trip to the past.