Boy, was I wrong.

People actually stopped by to read what I had to say…and many of them stuck around. I found that writing was both fun and cathartic. I found a whole new community of people, of friends, of supporters, of commiserators. It was the support group I didn’t have, the voice of reason I wasn’t hearing, the sympathetic men and women that I lacked in my own department. Blogging got me through my horrible third-year review. It helped me clarify whether I wanted to stay in my current position or cut my losses and leave. It helped me figure out when I was overreacting and when I was really facing some serious gender-related shit. It helped me get over at least some of my fears: fear of standing up for myself in my department, fear of submitting my work in writing, fear that I wasn’t good enough for this job.

When I started this gig, at my former blog and here at ScienceBlogs, I promised myself that I would stop as soon as blogging became more of a chore than a hobby. Increasingly, it’s been the former. And so, I’ve decided to quit, to walk away before I run out of things to say or become irrelevant or before this blog jumps the shark.

I can’t point to exactly one moment when I decided I was done; it’s been more of an evolving process. I’m crazy busy this year: my job is demanding ever more of me, especially as I go up for tenure next year; my daughter is 2, and that’s both a fun and a very intensive age, requiring ever more of my time and energy; and there are lots of other things going on in my personal life that are increasingly taking up my time and energy as well. I’ve had plenty of ideas, but no time or energy or inclination to actually sit down and write them. And I kind of feel like I’ve said everything I can say in this space. Increasingly, I’m hitting the brick wall of pseudonymity: I’d love to talk about lots of things, like what the tenure process at my school is really like or what classes I’m teaching or stuff about my research or my fairly unusual background as an engineer who transitioned to computer science later in her career. But I can’t because of the whole being outed thing. (OK, maybe I just outed a little something about myself. But I feel like I should leave you with something. Feel better?)

I thought for a while about holding out until tenure. After all, isn’t that why some of you are reading? To see if I’ll succeed in this crazy quest or if I’ll just be another statistic in the leaky pipeline? But I don’t care much for stories that have neat endings. My favorite stories are the ones that leave you guessing at the end: did they end up together or not? does the record store get saved from the wrecking ball? did she live or die? So maybe it’s fitting that this blog ends with some loose ends as well.

I haven’t ruled out blogging ever again, but at least for now, I don’t want to do it anymore. I’ll continue to read and comment at y’all’s blogs; I just won’t have my own space to vent anymore. And I’m OK with that. I’ll still be Jane around those parts and I’ll still keep checking my Jane email, at least for a while….but who knows, maybe ScienceBlogs is already planning the reality show to pick my successor! See Jane Compute 2: This Time, It’s Personal.

(I am on FB IRL, so if you want to keep up w/ me that way, shoot me an email.)

What’s hardest for me about this decision, and what I will definitely miss the most, is the community. I am so, so humbled at the number of people who have read and commented and continue to read and comment. I am so grateful for all of the people I have met because of blogging—people too numerous to mention here. I am extremely grateful for the whole ScienceBlogs community: my SciBlings and Erin and Arikia, who have always made me feel welcome here and who have been tremendously supportive as well. I love you all and wish you all the best. And I hope to continue to be a part of the community, even without the blog.

Take care, everyone, and thanks so much for listening.

One of the normal parts of the tenure process is submitting a list of external reviewers. This is a list of people (I’m guessing the number varies by school, but in my case N is around a dozen) that you think could “fairly” evaluate your work, for some definition of “fairly”. There are all sorts of rules around who can and cannot be on the list: no one on your thesis committee, no coauthors, must be tenured at an academic institution, etc.

This sounds simple enough, but as with most parts of the tenure process (I’m finding), there’s some gamesmanship that occurs. You want to pick people whom you think will review your work favorably, but you don’t want to stack your list exclusively with your fan club (because that looks suspicious). You want to make sure that the people on your list understand the type of institution you are at and will review your work through that particular filter (so, for instance, someone at an R1 evaluating someone at a SLAC will not expect the research production of an R1 prof). But you also know that only a few people are going to be picked from your list, so you have to think about maybe leaving someone off and hoping they “magically” end up on the committee’s list…and so on.

And this is where I got stuck.

Now, I should preface this by saying that I feel pretty confident about my research. I’ve been publishing steadily, at an appropriate pace and in appropriate venues for my institution. My work is well-reviewed, and there is some interest in my subfield for this particular line of research that I’m doing. So this really should have been a pretty straightforward exercise for me.

Instead, I panicked. Totally and completely panicked. As I started to compile my list, I immediately started second-guessing myself. “Hmmm, this one works exactly in my area and we’ve exchanged ideas and papers over email. But how do I know he doesn’t think my work is crap? What if this person is bad-mouthing my work behind my back? And what about this one—oh my god, he publishes sooooo much! There’s no way he’s going to find my publication pace adequate. And I have to add this guy, but I think he might be idealogically different in his assumptions about X, and may decide to trash my work on X! Oh, and this person who works on Y—but I don’t know her that well; what if she hates my work? Crap, I can’t add FanClubGuy because I forgot we collaborated years and years ago. And I need to find a Z person, but I only know people in industry in that area!”

So about 5 minutes after I started, I had myself completely convinced that (a) I was a total and complete fraud, (b) my research is crap, (c) no one in fact likes my research, and (d) no one could ever possibly review my research positively.

At this point I (wisely) decided to put the list aside. The problem is that I found that I couldn’t pick the list up again—every time I tried to go back to the list, I panicked. Meanwhile, the deadline came and went, and I started getting emails asking me where my list was, which made me panic even more. I was in a serious spiral and I couldn’t get myself out.

Finally, I came to my senses and—duh!—ran the list by a couple of my senior colleagues. And they helped pull me out of my Serious Meltdown state, enough so that I could sit down and finish the list. But I still panicked a bit when I submitted the list—still found those feelings of total professional inadequacy sneaking in.

I *think* I’m mostly ok with the list now, although there’s really not much I can do at this point! (Because I’m guessing bribing my potential external reviewers would be considered bad form. I’m kidding, of course.) I ended up putting some questionable names on there—questionable in the sense that I’m not entirely sure how they will review my work, to be honest. But there’s a part of me that probably won’t relax until I see the external review letters. And the saga is still not over, because at some point (soon, I’m guessing) I will get the committee’s list and have to go through this whole feeling like a fraud thing all over again. Gah.

I mentioned that I was blindsided by the fact that I reacted so strongly and so negatively to what’s really a routine part of tenure. I think I was blindsided because I’m pretty confident in the research part of my package, and so I didn’t think the tenure panic would come from the research side. My reaction also reminded me, though, that I can *say* all I want that I’m going to be all zen with the tenure process, but that saying it doesn’t make it true. You know what? This whole hazing process is stressful. There’s no way it can’t be. And I’m sure now that at every other stage of this process, I will also freak out at least a little (ok, probably a lot) because the stakes are so high. So maybe having my complete freak-out early is a good thing, because it will prepare me for the other freak-outs I will inevitably have.

We’ll see how the rest of the process goes….

I have multiple deadlines that are Looming Large this week.

My scholarly materials are due fairly soon, and there are a couple more things that need to be sent out into the Great Reviewing Stream ASAP.

I have about 20 research-related tasks that must be done Right Now.

I have been completely neglecting Mr. Jane. We are not even 2 ships passing in the night….we are 2 ships flying in completely different solar systems.

So what have I spent the last 4 hours doing? Writing a homework assignment. (And actually, much of that was tweaking the assignment details, since I wrote the basic assignment earlier this afternoon.)

In my defense, it’s a brand-new assignment, in a topic area I’m not completely comfortable with, and I needed to do some sanity checking and write the solution to make sure that I was giving them something do-able. But honestly? I could have finished the assignment in maybe 2 hours, tops. I spent way too much time finessing the assignment, for very little gain.

Perhaps it’s time to remind myself that there’s no tenure category for “kick-ass homework assignments”.

What’s making you feel old these days?

Cool! The pieces are falling into place, I thought.

So I talked with Soon-To-Be-Advisor and indeed, he was very interested. Negotiations started with the lab in terms of ownership of intellectual property, publishing rights, and all that fun stuff. An agreement was in place about halfway through the summer. The project went very well, and the results I got were way beyond what my supervisor expected. The results were interesting—very interesting. I was excited. My supervisor and colleagues at the lab were way excited. The lab hired me back on a part-time basis for the academic year, basically paying my research assistantship stipend for the next year, so that I could finish up my experiments and simulations and write up my masters thesis. I thought for sure I would be graduating in May/June with the rest of my cohort.

That’s when my personal hell started.

My advisor turned from Pretty Reasonable Guy to Nothing You Do Is Ever Good Enough Guy. Any experiments or simulations I did were not good enough, any results I obtained were not strong enough. The things we originally agreed upon as being sufficient for the master’s suddenly were not sufficient anymore. The things I needed to do were constantly shifting. I would meet one of his goals, only to be told that the goal wasn’t relevant anymore, and that instead I had to achieve this other goal instead. While my cohort was starting to write up their results, I was essentially starting over with my simulations because the originals “weren’t rigorous enough”. While my cohort was sending out their first papers to conferences, my advisor was telling me that my stuff would never be publishable.

May and June passed, then August and September, then January and February. And still I was redoing simulations, redoing experiments, and never quite getting it right enough for this guy. I spent weekend nights in the lab, running experiments and simulations from midnight until dawn, leaving as the sun came up. I was exhausted and demoralized.

I don’t know what it was that finally caused me to snap. Maybe it was too many weekends of too little sleep. Maybe it was that I was falling way behind my cohort, in pace towards graduation and in publications. Maybe it was the job offer I was considering from Industrial Lab that would get me out of this hell-hole once and for all. But I met with my advisor one day in March, showing him my latest results. “Those aren’t good enough. You’ll have to do the experiments again.”

“No.” I said, firmly and confidently.

He sat, in stunned silence. I continued, “Look. We both know that I’ve done enough work for three master’s projects at this point. We both know that I’m ready to graduate. This is just ridiculous at this point. So you’re going to sit here with me and we’re going to map out a plan for me to finish, NOW. I can’t be held back by this any longer. We both need to move on. I need to graduate and move on to the PhD.”

He looked at me for a few minutes, during which I kept my frowny pissed-off face on him (although inside I was shaking like a leaf and feeling pretty sure that I had just burned every single bridge I had at that school), then slowly nodded and said “OK.”

I defended later that summer, and moved on to another advisor and another project (although again, not without drama, but that’s another story for another time). And I actually ended up graduating with most of my cohort, because I finished my PhD in record time just so I could get the hell out of there. Of course, I spent the rest of my time playing catch-up, and when I graduated I was at a serious disadvantage as compared to my cohort in terms of publications, because of my master’s advisor’s obstinance. (He never did let me publish anything from my work, and I *know* I had at least 2 conference papers worth of publishable stuff.)

This experience was my first, hard lesson that life is not a meritocracy, that it’s not enough for you to just do good work. I learned that I have to be my own best advocate. I learned that only I am looking out for my best interests. I learned what an academic bully looks like and how to stand up to one. I figured out what traits to look for in future advisors/mentors to avoid situations like this in the future. I learned how to find my own resources and allies, how to evaluate my own work, what good research looks like. Sure, I would have learned these eventually, and maybe less traumatically, but I think it ultimately served me well to learn these lessons early on.

I also learned to trust my research instincts. When it came time to pick my PhD thesis topic, I was actually able to identify a topic completely on my own because of this experience. And luckily, I found a supportive advisor to guide me along. (I sometimes wonder if part of the problem was that this project was *my* project and not something that *he* came up with, because none of his other graduate students had the same level of problems with him that I did.) I became confident in my ability to not only pick good problems, but pick good directions for those problems, too.

In a sense, though, this experience also hurt me, in that it made me more reluctant to trust my colleagues. I still, to this day, will persist in trying to do too much on my own without asking for help or advice. I guess part of me is still afraid that my trusted colleagues and mentors will eventually turn on me, just like my master’s advisor did.

scientiae-carnival

I first heard about Dr. Cassell’s work in this article:

Using “virtual peers” — animated life-sized children that simulate the behaviors and conversation of typically developing children — Northwestern University researchers are developing interventions designed to prepare children with autism for interactions with real-life children.
…
Cassell and researcher Andrea Tartaro collected data from six children with high-functioning autism aged 7 to 11 as they engaged in play during an hour-long session with a real-life child, and with a virtual peer named Sam.

In an analysis of those interactions, they found that children with autism produced more and more “contingent” sentences when they spoke with the virtual peer, while their sentences did not become increasingly contingent when they were paired with the real-life children.

“Certainly we’re not saying that virtual peers make the best playmates for children with autism,” said Tartaro. “The overall goal is for the children with autism to generalize the skills they learn in practice sessions with virtual peers to meaningful interactions with real-world children.”

Nor are Northwestern researchers saying they can teach “contingency” — appropriate back and forth conversation — in a single session. But their findings hold promise that virtual peers can be useful in helping children with autism develop communication and social skills.

Teaching appropriate social interactions can be difficult even for milder cases of autism/autism spectrum disorder. Here, virtual peers hold a distinct advantage over other mechanisms:

For starters, children with autism often like technology. “It interacts to us,” said one child with autism upon first meeting a virtual peer.

What’s more, said Cassell, virtual peers don’t get tired or impatient. “We can program their conversation to elicit socially-skilled behavior, and we can vary the way that they look and behave so children with autism are exposed to different kinds of behavior.”

The work with autistic children is just one facet of Dr. Cassell’s work:

Our research includes the interaction between humans and virtual peers we call Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA), as well as how humans interact with each other through computer-mediated contexts on the Internet and in online communities. We are also interested in how gender and ethnicity mediate technology use, including issues of power and empowerment. Finally, we are interested in how technology can be used for positive educational and developmental initiatives, such as improving literacy skills for children who do not grow up speaking Standard American English, or social skills for children with Autism.

What I think is so awesomely cool about this work is how many areas it touches: Medicine. Psychology. New media. Computer science. Linguistics. Educational studies. Heck, even gaming, if you consider avatars to be a byproduct of the gaming world. Seriously, go look at the backgrounds of the people in the ArticuLab. It’s way impressive. Geeks and social scientists and new media types, all working together to help further our understanding of how communication happens.

I think it’s also pretty damn cool how Dr. Cassell got her start:

She holds a master’s degree in Literature from the Université de Besançon (France), a master’s degree in Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh (Scotland), and a double Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, in Psychology and in Linguistics.

Cassell’s research interests originated in the study of human-human conversation and storytelling. Progressively she became interested in allowing computational systems to participate in these activities. This new technological focus led her to deconstruct the linguistic elements of conversation and storytelling in such a way as to embody machines with conversational, social and narrative intelligence so that they could interact with humans in human-like ways. Increasingly, however, her research has come to address the impact and benefits of technologies such as these on learning and communication.

And if there’s any doubt left as to just how awesome Dr. Cassell is:

Cassell’s interest in the use of technology to empower and give voice led her, in 1998, to direct the Junior Summit. This international project brought together 3000 children from 139 countries in a 6 month on-line forum that allowed children to communicate with each other across languages on topics of international concern. The forum culminated in a 6-day program at MIT where 100 of the children met with world leaders. The technology and design of the program focused on bringing voices to the table that are not often heard, to help children reach beyond clichés to the areas in which they can make the most valuable contributions, and potentially increase their role on the world stage afterwards. Cassell has continued to follow these young people, and has published on the children’s interaction during the Junior Summit, and the effects of the Summit on their later development. Her work is demonstrating that these young people were launching a new kind of leadership style where strength was found through engagement with the community.

This is why I chose to highlight Dr. Cassell for my Ada Lovelace Day post: she’s a woman of vision, a computer scientist with a diverse background who came to CS via other fields, a true multidisciplinarian, and a woman who’s committed to making the world a better place, through her work and her outreach efforts. When I think “computer scientist”, my ideal picture looks a lot like her—and I think CS, as a field, would do a lot better if our collective ideal looked a lot like her as well.

I am so excited about my own post—the woman I am posting about totally rocks, and I can’t wait to introduce you to her and her work.

Also, while we are on the subject of reminders: If you’re not familiar with fellow scibling Isis the Scientist….well, why the hell aren’t you reading her already? Anyway, you definitely want to click through to her site this month, because she is donating all of her blogging income this month to fund an American Physiological Society scholarship for a young undergraduate woman who submits the best abstract to the Experimental Biology meeting. Details are here. So go show her some clicky love, ok?

In addition to not having time to breathe blog, I haven’t really been in the headspace to blog. I have a ton of stuff on my mind, but I’m not sure how to blog it. It’s all about tenure, of course: the price of it on my health and relationships, the continued hazing aspects of it, my yearning for a less-encompassing job, the weirdness of starting to think about your long-term relationship with your institution, and how who I consider to be my “peers” is changing as I go up for tenure. It’s all swirling around in my head, but not in a way that I can easily put into words. And of course there’s a lot of student stuff going on that I feel like I should talk about, and the phone call incident that refuses to be resolved (still).

The good news is that things are starting to calm down and slow down a bit—or at least, that’s how it looks now. And I think sitting down and blogging about some of the stuff that’s on my mind will help me focus more clearly on what needs to get done. So you’ll hear from me soon—I promise. For now, I’m going to do something good for myself for a bit before I get back to that huge pile o’ work.

One of the groups is highly functional—on the surface. The students all get along really well with each other and appear to complement each other, skill-wise and personality-wise. They truly enjoy working with each other. Yet, their progress has been disappointing. They’ve allowed themselves to get bogged down in details, forgetting to focus on the goals of the project. They get easily frustrated by setbacks, and are afraid to try new and unfamiliar things. They expect everything to work perfectly, and get thrown off track when things don’t go according to plan. This group has two strong, vocal personalities who also happen to be pessimists. The rest of the group is made up of smart but less confident students.

Another group appears to be slightly dysfunctional—on the surface. Some of the group members are best friends, while the rest don’t know each other. This group also has a strong, vocal personality, as well as someone who barely says 3 words at any meeting. It has several very strong students and a very weak student. Yet, the group has achieved well beyond my initial expectations, and has done one of the best projects I’ve seen in years. They are turning out amazing work, and have done so consistently since Day 1 of the project. Amazingly, everyone is contributing equally, and the weak student has done some of the most crucial work on the project. The vocal personality is also pretty good-natured and self-deprecating, so other group members feel comfortable calling this person out when necessary.

In each of these cases, the whole tenor of the group is set by a couple of individuals. My theory is that the first group hasn’t worked out well because the vocal pessimists exuded enough confidence early on to convince the others that they knew what they were talking about—so of course, when they say “we can’t do this, it’s too hard”, their comments are taken seriously. Conversely, the second group works well because others in that group stood up, early on, to the vocal person, setting the tone that disagreement was ok and that leadership, and good ideas, can come from multiple places (that student who barely speaks has emerged as a quiet leader—no pun intended). In the first group, the group opinion is formed by the two; in the second group, decisions and direction are developed by committee.

I’ve seen similar scenarios play out in my classroom as well. I use quite a bit of group/pair work in my classes, and I spend some time on the first day of class explaining why I feel it’s important, what I plan on doing, and what and how I expect them to contribute. Not everyone is on board all of the time, but it mostly works. In one of my intro classes a few years ago, though, I had a cohort of students who sat in the back corner and generally acted “too cool for school”. They were a small percentage of the class, but their actions set the tone for the rest of the class. Getting them to contribute in a meaningful way was like pulling teeth, and eventually their attitude spilled over to the rest of the class, such that group work became a painful exercise for everyone, with lots of cajoling from me and lots of eye-rolling from them. By contrast, when I got sick last fall and *had* to rely on the students to carry more of the class (because I was just too exhausted to make it through an entire class most days), the students came through beautifully and cheerfully—even the biggest and most vocal skeptics of group work.

The tricky thing is that it’s often hard to tell whether a group will be functional or dysfunctional at first glance. At the start of each of the independent studies, I would have bet money that the first group would accomplish more, based on my initial first impressions. With the eye-rolling class, my initial impression was that the class was open to new ideas and experiences, based on their enthusiasm the first week or so. I was wrong in all of these cases. Does this mean I am a bad judge of group character? Maybe. But I’ve gotten it right sometimes, too—typically, I’m able to pick undergraduate research assistants who work very well together, even if they didn’t know each other previously.

I’m not sure if there is a good way to assess group dynamics accurately up front, without knowing the parties well. Doing so would definitely be useful—I might have advised that first group differently, maybe been a bit more proactive early on to diffuse the effect of the pessimists, although who knows if it would have helped ultimately. What about you—do you have good strategies for assessing group dynamics early on? Have you had spectacularly good groups, or spectacularly bad groups, and what made them so? Please share your experiences in the comments!