skookumchick | March 29, 2009For this month's Scientiae, Candid Engineer has asked for stories about overcoming challenges. ScienceWoman has already contributed an awesome story to the Diversity in Science carnival, but I think it does for Scientiae, too.
What about my own story?
Prior to my current job, my biggest soul-searching career-related moment was when I didn't pass my prelim exam in 2005. Ugh.
In retrospect, I think I was taking the prelim pretty casually. I had written my ~100 page, 3 chapter research proposal document, and none of my dissertation committee advisors had raised a hair about it. I had never…
skookumchick | March 28, 2009ScienceWoman has been a rockstar carrying the blogging load this week, and I'll have to crave her (and your) indulgence a little bit longer. Apart from discovering that both my university president and my university provost read our blog (hi again!), I had a site visit on Friday, attended a poster session one evening, am working towards a quarterly review, and am 3 weeks late on submitting my P&T document for my annual review. I hope to dig out of this soon; but for today, I am completely zonked. Sorry to not be pulling my harness in the blogging wagon still even longer... :-(
sciencewoman | March 26, 2009Mary Ann Mason has a column in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education describing the importance of role models and mentors for women graduate students. Though Zuska recently wrote a provocative post that argued that "the problem of motherhood" might be a red herring for those interested in increasing the representation of women in science, Mason's column provides some data that suggest the problem of motherhood is very real.
Role models, particularly ones with children, can make the difference in whether a female graduate student takes the next big step along the tenure track. While…
sciencewoman | March 25, 2009There's a crafty meme going around the blogosphere and lovely academic blogger phd me is going to be sending me a craft of her making. In order to be deserving of her crafty goodness, I've promised to make crafts for 5 others. If you'd like to get something from me (probably photo-oriented), be one of the first five to leave a comment on this post.
Here are the complete rules:
The first 5 people to respond to this post will get something made by me! This offer does have some restrictions and limitations so please read carefully:
* I make no guarantees that you will like what I…
sciencewoman | March 24, 2009It's Women's History Month, and the Diversity in Science Carnival has asked us to profile women scientists. I spend a lot of time thing about the things that affect the lives of today's young women scientists, but I also know that we are preceded by some incredibly strong and brave women who faced much tougher working conditions than we. And some of those trail-blazing women in science were young not that long ago. So I'm taking this post to talk with one of those amazing women and see what has changed and what hasn't.
Over the course of two hours, I had a wonderful conversation with this…
sciencewoman | March 24, 2009Yesterday Sheril Kirschenbaum and Chris Mooney of the Intersection announced that they were leaving Scienceblogs in favor of new digs at Discover. Unfortunately, commenters on other blogs around those parts have been behaving badly on posts welcoming the new bloggers. It appears that it doesn't matter how good a scientist and writer a blogger is, if she's female, only her appearance matters. (One more reason I only show off my footwear.)
Physioprof has an excellent (and relatively profanity-free!) post up taking apart this behavior and explaining why it is not appropriate to make your first…
skookumchick | March 23, 2009Happiness is boots that makes one feel strengthened and tough when one wears them. Even better is wearing boots called "engineer boots" when one is an engineer. And perhaps even better again is that one buys such boots from here but significantly on sale, and for one's birthday, no less.
A photo taken for Isis, among others.
skookumchick | March 21, 2009Happiness is time to plant bulbs, even if you plant them indoors, and even if they were already sprouting in their paper bags in the fridge...
sciencewoman | March 20, 2009The Smithsonian Institution has made available on Flickr an amazing set of photographs of early women scientists and engineers.The pictures include women who worked at the Smithsonian and images from the Science Service Archives now housed at the Smithsonian. Some of these women scientists are well-known, even Nobel laureates, while others worked in obscurity. Some used their scientific training and passion to do research, some to save lives as doctors and nurses, some to write about science, some to break the sound barrier, and some to advance the cause of women. To me, all of them were…
skookumchick | March 20, 2009Happiness is vegetable seeds arriving, and 70 degree days that remind you you can plant soon.
Click to embiggen.
Even better is when those seeds are given to you by a farmer friend, so you have way cooler varieties than you would when you just bought them through the seed catalogue.
Now, when is that last average frost date again?
sciencewoman | March 20, 2009Let me start by saying that I love my upper-level undergraduate students. They are engaged, enthusiastic, willing to try anything, hard-working, and asking great questions. I have near perfect attendance in my class, and when a student misses class, I usually hear a pretty legitimate excuse, often with documentation. Our students have complicated lives.
But it pains me when students miss hands-on labs or field trips. I want them to get the educational experience of the lab/field, and I don't want to penalize them because they were prostrate over the toilet with the stomach flu. (Boy, has…
sciencewoman | March 19, 2009Two recent announcements caught my eye and I thought they might be of interest to some of you. Plus, I'm always pleased to see universities taking seriously the issues career development and training future faculty.
Opportunity 1: Washington State University Summer Doctoral Fellows Program
Opportunity 2: Rochester Institute of Technology's Future Faculty Career Exploration Program
Details below the fold.
Opportunity 1: Washington State University Summer Doctoral Fellows Program
Washington State University invites applications from doctoral candidates who are nearing completion of their…
skookumchick | March 19, 2009Dr. Isis has decided to donate the funds from her blog traffic to fund a scholarship for undergraduate research, and has gotten the American Physiological Society to match her donation up to $500. And all you have to do is click on her site - no $$ donations required. So cool!
Go visit her announcement, and her site through teh browser not the RSS feed reader for this month. :-)
skookumchick | March 19, 2009I know this clip is a few days old, but that's how far behind I am in watching the Daily Show (does Tucker Carlson really call Jon Stewart "Jon Daily?"). Hat tip to my colleague who sent me the link.
*/
The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c
Stem Sell
Daily Show Full EpisodesImportant Things w/ Demetri Martin
Political HumorJim Cramer
skookumchick | March 19, 2009Okay, so what on earth *have* I been up to, if not blogging? I'm catching you up (rather like the recitative bits in opera - dry, dull, but advancing the action, rather than arias which are beautiful but don't get you anywhere much) with some RBOCs...
As previously mentioned, I had a trip to Washington DC for a symposium on engineering education research. I've uploaded some photos here if you want to see the outcomes of the sticky-note brainstorm (the funnest part of the conference!). I did get a pretty awesome dinner with some attendees:
I submitted an IEECI grant, my first PI…
skookumchick | March 18, 2009So the readers have spoken: one more vote for hearing about my PI experience than the weird convo with the deans.
However, I was working on the draft, and then some more work stuff got dumped on me, then SW had her popular deconstruction of one of Greg Laden's posts and I didn't want to interrupt the flow. But it seems to have petered off, and I'm trying to dig out of my work stuff (next post will be RBOC) and so I'm finally getting back to this.
Here you are, then, and caveat emptor or whatever the bloggy-equivalent is:
Even though I'm co-PI on a big grant (>$3M when all is said and done…
sciencewoman | March 17, 2009A semi-coherent point-by-point reply to the nearly incoherent, yet overwhelmingly disturbing, musings of Greg Laden on the subject of women scientists in the field. SIWOTI alert.
If you don't understand why many of us get so riled up by Greg Laden here's a snippet that should help explain things:
"That is, indeed, what every scholar needs: A wife (or two) who knows how to type, edit, wield a caliper, and still have time to do the grocery shopping, have lunch ready at noon, and give birth to and raise the kids."
The point-by-point takedown of the rest of Laden's post is below the fold.
The…
sciencewoman | March 16, 2009For several months, Minnow has thought that Mommy's computer exists mainly to let her look at pictures and videos of herself. But now she knows it can also access Elmo at any time of day. It was rainy here this weekend, and we must have watched this clip at least 37 times.
Sometimes we mixed it up by watching this one.
And, when Mommy needs some math, sometimes she sneaks this one into the mix:
But, it doesn't feature Elmo, so it is not favored. When my daughter becomes an English major, I will blame Elmo.
At least I'm culturing a good taste in music.
(And, yes this is a shameless ploy to…
sciencewoman | March 15, 2009Thumbing a nose at Bobby Jindal, we enthusiastically welcome ScienceBlogs newest addition, Eruptions, written by Erik Klemetti. Erik is a post-doc in igneous petrology, which means he studies how the rocks under volcanoes work. Near daily ]posts on Eruptions profile volcanoes in the news, explaining the science behind the eruptions in terms that non-rock heads can understand. At his old digs, he also did some fantastic analysis of the politics and sociology of relocating an entire town from the danger zone around Chaiten volcano. I'm looking forward to more great posts from Erik, and it looks…
sciencewoman | March 15, 2009The theme for this month's Scientiae carnival asks us to talk about a challenging point in our lives and describe how we overcame the adversity. Did we have help along the way, and are we better scientists for having been through the trial by fire? Truthfully, I'd have to say that the last two years have been the most challenging of my professional life. I don't think anyone could be prepared for the combination of first-time motherhood and a new tenure track job. I certainly wasn't. But I haven't gotten past that challenge yet, and I've been blogging about it along the way. Thus, a better…