Category Archives: academia

First teaching experience: Midpoint assessment

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2013.01.16 - Campus That waking up to fresh snowfall, which won’t interfere with my schedule, and which I won’t have to shovel, is lovely and magical. Photo by jby.

Things I am at least starting to learn, a week and a half into this January-term teaching gig at Bard College (With a couple updates about 17:30h, same day.):

  • That, for some reason, a “spot quiz” is less threatening than a “pop quiz.”
  • That the logisitical difficulties of organizing a lab activity increases nonlinearly with the number of people performing said lab acitivity.
    • That I have not yet found a point at which this curve becomes asymptotic.
    • That I’m not sure there is one.
  • That kids today are still everyone is into Frank Sinatra.
  • That it makes me pathetically happy to discover more than half of the class is interested in the topic I’ve picked for the day.
  • That the ungodly lunchtime crowd in the dining hall will reliably thin out if I just wait half an hour.
  • That four and a half hours of daily class time is a vast, gaping expanse of emptiness.
  • That four and a half hours of daily class is not nearly enough time to teach all the science.
  • That it is possible to detect the precise moment when the temperature of class discussion transitions from “vigorous” to “heated.”
    • That it is not necessarily possible to change the subject before this point is reached.
  • That no one complains when I put on a video.
  • That I will never be completely prepared.
  • That I am, at most, one-third as hip and interesting and witty as I generally assume.

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Campus life

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Bard College has buildings like this:

2012.01.06 - Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts Richard B. Fisher Center for Performing Arts. Photo by jby.

And like this:

2012.01.06 - Ward Manor Ward Manor. Photo by jby.

And also like this:

2012.01.06 - Bertelsmann Campus Center Bertelsmann Campus Center. Photo by jby.

Which is to say, it’s about what you’d expect for a Northeastern liberal arts college which has (1) been around awhile, and (2) has money for Frank Gehry. It’s a nice place to walk around in the winter sunshine, after a morning working in this building:

2013.01.05 - Reem-Kayden Center Reem-Kayden Center for Science and Computation. Photo by jby.

2012.01.06 - RKC II RKC from another angle. Photo by jby.

Had a good first meeting with my class this afternoon; we hit the ground running tomorrow!◼

New year, new challenge: Teaching!

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Chalkboard Blank slate. Photo by monikahoinkis.

Two days after ringing in the New Year, I had to wake up early to catch an eastbound plane. I’m starting out 2013 not by plunging back into the lab-greenhouse-office rotutine, but with a 3-week guest teaching gig at Bard College in upstate New York, as one of the faculty for Bard’s winter-term course Citizen Science.

Citizen Science is part of the Bard freshman seminar, and it’s primarily meant to help bring students up to a basic level of understanding how science and scientific reasoning work. Since the entire freshman class takes it, Bard brings on about two dozen temporary faculty to teach Citizen Science—and, while there are some elements of the course that are in place before we arrive, each faculty member builds his or her own curriculum.

That makes this my very first effort at building and teaching a course from (more or less) scratch. There’s a lot of starting material to work from, provided by the Bard faculty running the program, and by other CS faculty—course development is highly collaborative. But ultimately, what my students do for the next three weeks is entirely up to me—I have to pick readings, plan four and a half hours of in-class acitivites a day, and figure out appropriate homework assignments.

I spent most of my holiday vacation sketching out plans for the course, but I’ve still been scrambling to pull things together in the three days I’ve been at Bard. CS starts on Monday, but there’s an introduction/opening event this afternoon, at which I’ll meet my students and give them their first assignment, Robert Fisher’s essay “Mathematics of a lady tasting tea.” My class roster shows only three science majors out of 20 students—this will be one long exercise in talking about science with educated people who, after this month, may never set foot in a wet lab again.

Which is exactly what I signed on for.◼

The Molecular Ecologist: Knowing what I know now (about grad school)

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2007 - Day 113 - This England Tea. It’s important. Photo by Jonathan_W.

In what I hope will be the start of a whole series of posts about careers in science, I’ve taken a stab at writing down what I wish I’d known to do (and what I’m glad I did) during graduate school, over at The Molecular Ecologist:

I can’t claim to have any blinding new insights — my own career is very much still under construction. But I’ve been interacting with a number of freshly-arrived graduate students this semester, and I’ve found myself thinking, after conversations with them, about what I might have done differently back when I was looking ahead to five (oops, six) years of grad school — and about what I did that worked out pretty well.

And no, I will not apologize for the choice of videos I’ve used to illustrate the complete post.◼

Give the NSF a piece of your mind

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This last year, the Biological Sciences Directorate at the National Science Foundation—one of the biggest single funders of ecology and evolutionary biology research in the U.S.—introduced a new process for reviewing grant proposals.

Lots of other folks with better first-hand knowledge have written about the new process. The key change is that, where formerly NSF offered two opportunities per year to submit a proposal for funds, the new procedures introduced a “pre-proposal” stage in which biologists write a much shorter pre-proposal first. If this mini-proposal is judged worthy, the applicant is then invited to submit a full proposal several months later.

This effectively reduced the workload (in terms of full proposals) for NSF reviewers, and it makes the funding rate for “full” proposals look much better—as long as you don’t look too closely at the triage (i.e., rejection) rate for preproposals, which, eek. But it also cut the “real” opportunities to submit a grant proposal in half. If you’re trying to land NSF funding in the few short years before a tenure review, that might make you a bit … concerned.

So a bunch of biologists wrote to NSF about this [PDF], pointing out that the new process

  • Creates a much longer “lag time” between submitting a new idea as a proposal and recieving money to pursue the idea, effectively slowing down the pace of basic science;
  • Reduces the scope and complexity of ideas that can be proposed; and
  • Provides less feedback for applicants, which makes it difficult to improve rejected proposals for the next round of applications.

That letter, and followup discussions, got NSF thinking about (or maybe thinking about thinking about) some changes to the new process. I’ve just learned via an e-mail from the Society for the Study of Evolution that there’s a very short survey that interested parties (i.e., those of us who study ecology and evolutionary biology, and might like the NSF to pay for some of our work) should fill out by next Tuesday, the 18th. It took me about a minute. So maybe go do it now?◼

New blog on the block

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Awesome Bitches Dissertating is a blog by two queer University of Minnesota doctoral students (one of whom is a friend of mine) who have achieved the “All but Dissertation” stage of grad school, and wanted an online venue to vent about academic bureaucracy, the exquisite pain of dissertation writing, and, yes, the appropriate use of the word “bitch.”◼

Adventures in funding applications

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Just got back the decision on my proposal for the NSF’s International Research Fellowship, which would’ve paid for me to go to southern France and do kickass field experiments with the study plant I’ve currently only seen in a greenhouse, Medicago truncatula. Except my project was rated “not competitive.”

It looks like my chief mistake was writing with an audience of evolutionary ecologists in mind when, in fact, the IRF covers a broader range of science, and the reviewer panels reflect that. Which is to say, I got dinged for using “jargon” twice—the first time that’s ever happened in my grant-writing experience—and one reviewer (the third one, natch) had this to say under the heading of “Qualifications of applicant, including applicant’s potential for continued growth”:

The applicant is obviously able, and has written what, judging by their titles, are interesting papers of general interest. The proposal worries me because it was full of bureaucratic generalities about what we would learn and the benefits to be gained therefrom … The top half page of the project summary gave me precious little idea whether the author had any mind or not. He obviously does, but when reading the proposal I kept wanting to tell him to read Homer’s Iliad, or J-H Fabre’s Souvenirs Entomologiques. or Darwin’s Origin of Species, to learn how to liven his stuff with concrete, illustrative detail. But I expect the applicant has plenty of potential, and plenty of willingness, to grow. [Emphasis added.]

Ow. I guess I’d better try and shoehorn in some references to the “wine-dark sea” if I want to revise and resubmit next fall.◼

How to interview for a faculty job

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This is billed as “how to get a faculty job in 20 not-so-easy steps,” but it’s actually all about what to do when you’re invited out for an interview, which seems to me* to be eliding some even less easy steps, but whatever. It is, in fact, quite funny, and much of it is good advice for academic job interviewing at all levels, e.g.:

5. Wear a catheter. Your interview will consist of 1-2 days of 20-minute meetings scheduled back-to-back with absolutely anybody they could cram onto your schedule. There will be no bathroom breaks, no water breaks, and no insulin injections. This is exacerbated by the fact that every single one of the people you meet will want to take the 20-minutes as their coffee break. In the end, most of the interview will be a blur, except that you will be able to find the coffee cart from any point on campus blindfolded.

See also, the advice on the “interview dinner.” ◼

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* At this stage of the game, I would be so thrilled to be asked for a phone interview I might just ignore the call when it came, so as to preserve the blessed event as the current pinnacle of my job-hunting success.**

** No, of course I would not actually do this, because I would very much like a faculty job, thank you.

Tell Congress to increase NIH funding

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Cross-posted from Nothing in Biology Makes Sense!.

For your consideration: a Change.org petition asking the U.S. Congress to increase funding to the National Institutes of Health by 3% in next year’s Federal budget. NIH is one of the biggest sources of public research funds in the U.S., and its support goes well beyond things immediately connected to human health and medicine—I did many analyses for my dissertation research on Joshua trees and yucca moths on a supercomputing cluster supported, in large part, by NIH funds.

Some would argue that the private sector should take over some of the lost funding for academic, basic research. The sad fact is that the private sector does not support the type of basic research that the NIH does; they take the results NIH-funded research and apply it to drug development. In addition, many entities in the private sector are currently slashing their Research & Development (R&D) budgets! For example, Pfizer recently cut its R & D budget by 1.5 billion.

Consider the following numbers. For 2011 budget, U.S. spending on:
Social security was $2564 per citizen (20.8% of the budget)
Defense was $2203 per citizen (18% of the budget)
Medicare was $1569 per citizen (12.8% of the budget)
Medicaid was $1172 per citizen (7.8% of the budget)
NIH was $99 per citizen (0.8% of the budget)

The original idea, as I understand it, is for this to be an “open letter” to Congress from working scientists across the nation, but supportive non-scientists should definitely sign on, too. ◼

Haven’t written this much html in a while

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I just built my first course webpage, for the Mammalogy lab I’ll be leading for this semester’s teaching assistantship. It pulls together a bunch of resources I developed for the same lab last year—photos of lab specimens taken by students (thanks to a little extra credit for inducement) and Anki decks. Now I need to get started on the slides for my first week’s lecture …