The Egyptian goddess Isis was celebrated as the ideal wife and mother. The blogger known as Dr. Isis has some fancy-sounding degrees and is a physiologist at a major research university working on some terribly impressive stuff. She blogs about balancing her research career with the demands of raising small children, how to succeed as a woman in academia, and anything else she finds interesting. Also, she blogs about shoes. In fact, she blogs a lot about shoes.
"Set Oculus" is obviously a pseudonym. My real name is mysteriously hard to pronounce. I live in the rust belt of the US but am fortunate to have an income that allows me to pursue my interests in science and culture without starving. I'm very geeky. I like Star Trek but I don't get "slash" fiction; the thought of Star Trek characters "doing it", well, it's like your parents doing it. Ew.
I care. I really do. That's why I'm a voracious consumer of news, books, journals, and blogs. My writing reflects whatever my ADHD allows me to focus on at that particular moment so if you're looking for some sort of "theme", forget about it. I welcome your emails, comments, etc., but because I care, I may be quite critical. (That was a gentle warning.)
Blogroll
My blogroll has gotten too big for the regular sidebar! So, check out all of the delightful blogs that Dr. Isis reads regularly by clicking here. If you'd like to be added to the blogroll, shoot an email to isisthescientist at gmail dot com.
I got this email the other day from one of you lovely darlings and wanted to share it. Boy, you all have sent me some deliciously hilarious emails lately.
This comes from a reader who I once gave advice to here who now calls herself Dr. M. Dr. M. writes...
Dear Dr. Isis,
I recently made the transition from being a post-doc to running my own lab at a kick-ass MRU. After two years spent setting up the lab and applying for funding, I managed to pull in two major grants, which is amazing and means that I can do some hot science instead of writing applications to do hot science. For legal reasons, I had to advertize the three post-doc positions funded by the grants even though I had already lined up the people I wanted for two of the jobs. I could go on and on about the time wasted by this legal requirement, my time, the applicants' time, their references time, etc, but that is a rant for another day.
I have been dealing with a lot of informal enquiries and formal applications, many from amazing scientists, and it sort of breaks my heart that I can't give them all a job. However, this being my first time hiring people, I was completely shocked by how unprofessional some people were in their initial enquiries and applications. My discipline of academic science likes to think itself rather relaxed and informal, and I'm pretty easygoing about most things, but I could hardly believe that some of these people actually thought that it was OK to act like arrogant ass-hats, and that such behavior would score them a gig in my lab.
It is clear that a lot of PhD students and early post-docs don't know how to apply for a job, and when I think about it, there is no reason to assume they should know since it isn't a big part of our training. Your younger readers have already demonstrated by following your blog that they are far more plugged-in than your average scientist, but I wonder if they wouldn't still benefit from, or at least be entertained by, my compiled tips on how not to get a job in academia. I can assure you that these examples are all taken from my recent experience with interested applicants. To make it even more interesting, tips 2, 3 and 4 were all demonstrated by a single person. I sort of want to bring him in for an interview just to see what antics he might get up to in real life.
Dr. M's tips on how not to get a post-doc in academia.
1 - Enquire about the salary before you are even short-listed, especially if the salary range is clearly in the advert. It is even better if you don't have anything else to ask and simply write a terse email demanding how much the job pays.
2 - Suggest that the PI fly you in from Australia to check out the facilities in order to decide whether you should bother to apply, especially if you are not qualified for the job.
3 - Write in the cover letter that you would rather work somewhere else and that you are applying for this job as a Plan B in case Plan A doesn't work out.
4 - Send in as proof of scientific proficiency an unpublished manuscript recently reviewed and rejected by the PI, and to which she signed her name.
5 - Castigate the PI for not being in her office when you call without warning.
6 - Declare before you have even applied that you will only be able to work from another country for the entire length of the post.
7 - Inform the PI that her project, which received glowing reports from no less than eight peer-reviewers at an incredibly competitive granting agency, is all wrong and should be retooled completely.
These things seem rather common sense to me, but clearly they aren't obvious to everyone. I suspect that most of the people demonstrating tips 1 and 5-7 are decent, hardworking scientists who just haven't thought about how their actions appear to others (the person demonstrating tips 2-4 simultaneously is clearly an idiot). However, this very lack of consideration makes me seriously wonder whether they suffer generally from a lack of concern, and would therefore be a pain in my ass if they ever did manage to wind up in my lab. Dr. Isis, would you please help get the word to your followers so that they don't make the same mistakes?
Sincerely,
Dr. M.
PS - Please redact my address which follows this email. Also, many thanks for your recommendation about what to do when I was stuck on a pointless women-in-science committee. I've sucked it up, done my bit, and signed my name to the sorry document that the committee produced.
Consider the word gotten out. Any of you lovely darlings have anything to add?
Earlier today I picked Little Isis up from daycare and then drove to the gym. On our way there, I heard one of my favorite songs ever...
Video 1: You might not have thought Dr. Isis to be a big Dolly Parton fan, but I love, love, LOVES Dolly Parton. When I was a little girl I wanted to be Dolly Parton so badly. This song is easily in my Top 10 Favorite Songs of Forever.
The topic of the song got me thinking about something I have been pondering over the last few days - the schedules of people in a lab group. Let me explain...
I certainly hated being told when to come and go in graduate school. I figured that I am the queen of my own time and, since I was productive, I didn't need to be accountable to anyone for when I came and went. When Little Isis started daycare, he had a hard time. So I spent some extra time with him in the morning. I was still in by 9:30am, but I also didn't report my tardiness to anyone. That said, I was then and still am usually in my office, or nearby, between 8am and 5pm most days of the week. I've always been this way. Maybe it is because I worked in industry before I moved to academia?
On the flip side, I have known a number of graduate students, including some that I interact with now, who are never to be found. I asked about a particular gentleman today who just started as a graduate student. When I asked where he was, someone told me, "He is at home doing his online training." When I pondered aloud why he wasn't at his desk and when he'd be coming back, the person I was speaking to raised her hands in uncertainty. This seems like a growing trend where I am currently working - people come in when they have an experiment to run. Otherwise, they work from "home" (or some other undisclosed location). I was once of the mentality that "If everyone's getting their work done, I don't care where they are." But, when you can't find people when you need them, it's hard not to care.
Reflecting on my own life both in industry and academia, I realize that I have almost always built collaborations with people I had daily (or very regular) contact with. We would see each other in the hallway or around lunchtime and sit and talk. We'd stop by each other's desks for a few minutes to talk. I could bring my work to them to ask a question and they would do the same. If everyone is working some great scientific diaspora, when do the collaborations happen? Email is a wonderful technology, but there is also something important about the casual conversations that are had between people working in a common space.
While there are certainly times when people might need to be away from the lab - studying for preliminary exams, writing a thesis - when people routinely work away from the lab, how do these collaborations form? Is email really as valuable as these casual conversations?
So, all of this got me to thinking about something I have not yet had to seriously deal with, but am considering now that my projects are seriously expanding - if you are a PI, how do you manage the schedules of the trainees and technicians in the lab? Do you allow everyone complete freedom over their own schedule and leave them to either succeed or fail based on their ability to use their time efficiently? Do you demand that every person be in the lab from 8-5 and report every vacation day and sick day to you? Do you request some sort of compromise where everyone must be around during some set of common hours?
I'm certainly not blaming her. After all, everyone knows my deep, deep love of FWDAOTI. I'm just saying that should she feign offense at having been mentioned in this humble blog, I'm not having any of it. You just can't fake the shit she writes. It's pure FWDAOTI at its finest.
See, I was browsing around DrugMonkey's joint today when I saw this hilarious post. Apparently, GMP recently lamented on her blog that she can't seem to find any "hard science" blogs. So, she asked:
Sometimes I wonder why there are so few hard STEM(see clarification below) voices in the scientific blogosphere. There are technical blogs, but at least among the blogs I find appealing -- blogs which talk about cross-disciplinary academic issues (grants, peer review, tenure) without too many narrowly technical issues -- it appears that the vast majority are soft-STEM voices. There appear to be many students, postdocs, and faculty (untenured and tenured) in the biological and biomedical sciences/engineering fields. The only high profile hard STEM blogger I know of is FSP, and from the comments I have the impression that she draws a fair bit of hard STEM readership, but I am not sure. I am aware of several younger hard-STEM bloggers on blog collectives, such as Lab Spaces.
So where are the hard STEM science bloggers? Do they lurk but don't blog? Do they comment mostly anonymously? Do they blog but are largely independent so harder to find?
Now, I need not point out the blogs she is overlooking. Many of you have done just fine. But, it seems that some of her commenters questioned her definition of "hard" versus "soft" science, including DrugMonkey. That's when GMP showed up in his comments to write:
My impression is that "soft" generally refers to soft materials (a legitimate materials science category) of which biological systems are prime examples (tissues, cells), so people often equate "soft" with bio and "hard" with physical sciences/engineering. Soft Matter journal anyone?
Anyway, there is hard cond mat physics (solids) and soft cond matter phyics (gels, colloids, polymer, and yes bio systems). Even among inorganic materials, there are "hard" properties of materials (electronics, thermal, optical) and "soft" properties (generally mechanical -- response to stress, bendability etc., and more recently surface interactions with liquids etc.) Soft materials overall are actually quite fashionable and come with good funding prospects (in part because they open some avenues into NIH funding).
Anyway, hard vs soft are not dirty words in my field.
But, you are right DM, I most certainly should not apologize/explain myself. People will think what they will regarless of what I write or don't.
HA HA HA HA HA!!!! I'm telling you, she is a genius. "Soft science" means that you study things that soft? Followed up by a little "fuck you" to people who would question her Sesame Street-style definition? My hat's off to GMP.
Figure 2: Soft scientists study things like baby llamas, "I Love U" teddy bears, down comforters, and kittehs. Because the brain is also quite soft and squishy, that makes neuroscientists "soft scientists." Posers. Because the heart is quite firm, I consider myself a "hard scientist." Take that!!
In reality, the delineation between hard and soft science is made by how the science is done. In 1964 John Platt from the University of Chicago published an article called "Strong Inference" in Science defining a rigorous method of investigation that he believed necessary to the rapid advancement of science. He wrote:
Why should there be such rapid advances in some fields and not in others? I think the usual explanations that we tend to think of-such as the tractability of the subject, or the quality or education of the men drawn into it,or the size of research contracts-are important but inadequate. I have begun to believe that the primary factor in scientific advance is an intellectual one. These rapidly moving fields are fields where a partcular method of doing scientific research is systematically used and taught, an accumulative method of inductive inference that is so effective that I think it should be given the name of "strong inference."
In his paper he lumped high-energy physics and molecular biology together as disciplines that relied on "strong inference." He then listed the following steps:
1 ) Devising alternative hypotheses; 2) Devising a crucial experiment (or several of them), with alternative possible outcomes, each of which will, as nearly as possible, exclude one or more of the hypotheses; 3) Carrying out the experiment so as to get a clean result; 1') Recycling the procedure, making subhypotheses or sequential hypotheses to refine the possibilities that remain; and so on.
You may notice that this sounds a lot like what many of us learn in middle school as the scientific method. This, classically, is what has defined "hard" versus "soft" - the use of well pre-defined methods to test hypotheses, the quantification differences, and the use of mathematical schema to test the rigorousness of results. "Soft" sciences traditionally rely on qualitative description to yield results.
And you can qualitatively describe something that has the physical property of hardness.
The problem is that "hard" and "soft" have also come to be used to imply "easy" versus "difficult." That's simply not the case and only serves to build a bullshit hierarchy that "hard scientists" use to make themselves feel better about their position in life.
After all, you might be sitting in an exile cube, with an office that has no drywall, surrounded by chattering people, and eating warm yogurt, but at least you're not one of those "soft" scientists.
These last few weeks have been surreal, at best. The lab has been packed up and moved into a small closet while the remodeling on the new lab finishes.
Figure 1: CAUTION: Lab under construction! For weeks.
My office also had to move. That part was supposed to be easy. A slap of new paint and we'd be done. I would pack my books and papers and Jameson into moving crates that were brought for me, someone would transfer them to the new place, and then I would unpack them into my new space. When I saw the new space, I couldn't help think that it was kind of strange. One of the walls, right next to the door, is a one way mirror (how do those work?). Since I don't like having my back to the door, my new desk will face the one way mirror.
I had come to lovingly refer to the new place as a Faraday's Cage.
Video 1: I figure eventually one of the students will google this and figure out why it is hilarious to me.
There was only one problem with my Faraday's Cage (here's another cool video of Faraday's Cage from folks at MIT). When our lovely IT folks went into it to check the ethernet jacks, they found that there was no wiring going into the jacks. Now, being the resourceful people that they are, they had the good sense to also take the outlets off of the wall. No wiring going into those either. Not a single one. This meant that an electrician had to be called an, and that had to go out for bid, and the electrician has his own time table such that a little bit of the project gets done every day. As the office looks now, there are wires hanging everywhere. Indeed, my new office is looking less and less like Dr. Faraday's magical cage and more and more like the cage that kept Schrödinger's cat.
So, the fine folks in my department found me a little bit of temporary desk space in a room of cubicles where some of the clinical fellows and office-less faculty sit. Because I packed my office, it has been me, my laptop, and a Sharpie sitting in what I have now come to affectionately call my exile cube, surrounded by chattering people. It's a very different environment compared to my nice, quiet office. A little bit like the Lord of the Flies. It's making me crazy. Last week, when I had two grants due on Friday and came in to find someone new sitting in my exile cube (I didn't have anything to leave to mark it) I had a tantrum that basically looked like this:
<a href="http://msn.foxsports.com/video?vid=f808ad64-2ac4-46e7-86d7-f656ab32bdcf" target="_new" title="">Minor league meltdown</a> Video 2: Dr. Isis's meltdown was indeed on this scale.
I am assured that I have one more week in the exile cube and then there will be electricity in my office. That, of course, means I will be in the exile cube for at least 3 more weeks. Thankfully, now that my grants are done, I have some lovely emails from you fine folks to read and enjoy.
Our laboratory moved today, little darlings, and it was quite an endeavor. I smell horrible, I am covered in filth, and I still have a grant to finish tonight. The bright side is that the job is done and I had lots of time to spend with the lab peeps to plot and scheme. I'll tell you more about it soon. In short, though, if I never, ever, ever have to move a lab again it will be too soon.
Last night, as I sat down to work on the grant I am looking to finish tonight, I was reminded of a post from DrugMonkey and thought I would solicit your thoughts. Compiling an entire grant is infinitely harder than writing a background, aims, and methods. There are budgets, letters, biosketches and support pages, and an infinite number of administrators. About all of this, DrugMonkey writes:
I keep meaning to write about my grant writing "training" and this is a good excuse. In short, I "helped" my PI write two grants at the end of my second postdoc, about 5 years past defending. One project was about as straight down my alley as it could possibly be, very much a collaborative area and I thought I did a LOT of work on that grant. There were a lot of what I considered "my ideas" in that proposal. When I saw the submitted version after the PI had finished with it, I thought "Oh, gee, that's what a grant is" and "Well that's why s/he's the PI". Did I feel exploited? No, I did not. First, I was coming around to understand that I would be trying for a career in grant-funded science, that nothing was going to be handed to me and that I had better learn to write grants. This seemed a good opportunity for learning. Second, I was still planning to stay with the group for some indeterminate future. The relationship with the PI was good, I had a lot of intellectual freedom and responsibility and in my mind's eye, I suppose I saw myself as doing the work if we should get funded. Third, I was coming to understand at a very minor level that this was part of the job. Whether I stayed or not, the lab needed to seek additional funding and it was part of my job as postdoc to contribute to that process.
Let me underline this point from my current perspective as PI. Disgruntled post-doc let us be clear that even though part of your job is "training", part of your job is also...a job. That's right, you owe professional performance to your laboratory. No, it doesn't make a whit of difference that you funded your own fellowship. If you are using laboratory resources to your advantage (and if you are not you are already a PI) you owe a deal of work to someone else. That someone else is generally the PI of your group. And yes (gasp) some of what your "work" consists of is going to be intellectual property.
Go over and read this entire piece of classic DrugMonkey. But, I think I agree with the dude. It is impossible to comprehend how difficult grant writing is until you are charged with the entire task. And, all the other stuff that is not background, aims, and methods is really the most difficult part.
I just read on the ole 'tubes that my dear scibling PZ is headed off to the Twin Cities for heart surgery. Go over and wish him well. The Isis family wishes him nothing but a speedy recovery.
I have decided that this weekend I am a new woman, little darlings. These last 8 months or so I have moved at work and at home from task to task, from person who needed me to person who needed me, and from crisis to crisis without much thought of myself. You might say that this sounds totally selfless, but I assure you that it is totally stupid.
Child. Swimming Lessons. Science. Husband. Science. Grants. Papers. Blog Life. The result is that my life feels like it is in chaos. We have been eating away from home more and buying lunch at work, neither of which have been very good for us. So, this week I am going to start taking steps to restore order to things. Step one in my twelve step program is to start planning my dinners for the week on Sunday. This afternoon Little Isis and I sat the the kitchen table and wrote a list of everything we needed at the market. Then, when we got home, I made a list of the week's dinners.
Tonight is salmon burgers with corn and herb salad. Tomorrow is a pot roast that I will put in the crock pot before I go to work. Tuesday we are having salad, chicken and rolls. I now have dinners planned until next Tuesday and am feeling more in control of my life than I was yesterday. The cost of two feel three people, a dog, a cat, and a hamster for nine days? Including lunch materials, $180. I think this is an improvement considering that the Isis family could easily spend $40 in a day between buying lunch at work and then stopping for dinner on the way home.
We'll see how the first week of our endeavor goes. At the very least, we'll eat well this week.
I have to warn you all, little muffins. I am about to have a serious getoffamylawn moment.
Figure 1: Pretty much like this, minus the droopy bits. Dr. Isis has no droopy bits.
So, on with it. I think the iPhone is ruining my life. As an aside, I would like to apologize for using the phrase "on with it" on this blog. I have been watching a lot of British period dramas lately on Netflix. It started with watching The Tudors and now Netflix keeps recommending these things. Who am I to question them? Over the last several several days I watched Jane Eyre. I realized tonight, as I was speaking Spanish, that I think my Spanish is developing a British accent. If I curtsy to Drs. Buttercup and Triple Threat on Monday, you'll know that it is time to cut me off.
But, back to my iPhone. I think that the iPhone may be ruining society. Or, at least my immediate happiness. Allow me to explain. It seems as though every meeting I attend looks like this:
Figure 2: Except with iPhones instead of Blackberrys. I am told Blackberrys are totally 2008.
No one really pays attention to each other. And, while I realize that this can be a blessing when some deadwood professor emeritus is droning on and on, it can also be a huge distraction. Normally I have to contend simply with the distraction of the pager service. Even then, though, if someone wants to page you they have to really mean it. Now, every time some n00b gets an email, it is announced to the table by a few bars of Regulate.
I thought for a bit that people being able to reach my cell would be helpful, but calling turns in to texting and constant access to texting is worse than constant access to email. Lately it seems that, rather than forseeing and organizing meetings in advance, people text me at the last minute. It's not only my coworkers with their noses constantly in their iPhones. My friends are just as bad.
My iPhone has even soured my running. I thought when I got it that being able to use Pandora while running would be a nice change of pace, so to speak. The trouble is that I can hear every text message, every email, and every missed call. What was once a chance to clear my mind now leaves me guilty for all that I am not tending to.
I realize that this is ironic coming from a woman who has made her pseudonymous fame and fortunes on the internet, but I believe that it might be time for everyone's favorite domestic and laboratory diva to unplug herself from the evil empire.
