sciencewoman | September 8, 2008As you may have already heard, ScienceBlogs is expecting to reach the 1 million comments mark sometime this month. And our generous overlords want to throw a party...actually several parties. They've encouraged ScienceBloggers to take their readers out for drinks, and the parties are happening all over the world.
To make matters even more exciting, I just happen to be visiting North Carolina the weekend of the big shindig there. Minnow and I will be catching up with my college roomie who has an adorable new baby, and I'll be investigating some potential research collaborations. But we're also…
skookumchick | September 6, 2008My small friend Annika is in the PICU in Chicago, on a ventilator and delirious. Anni is 7, and has already had two liver transplants. The current visit is particularly scary 'cause they can't work out what is wrong with her. More info from her mom's blog is here. If you are the praying sort, please pray. If you are the non-praying sort, please hope. If you are the giving sort, consider donating some money to help cover her medical costs here. And sign up to be an organ donor, too.
skookumchick | September 5, 2008Just got word that our NSF-ADVANCE grant that we'd been waiting on was finally funded. W00T!!! Start date of October 1. It's not listed on the NSF website yet, but I'll post the link when it is.
It's $3.9M. The president of the university is the PI, and I'm one of 3 co-PIs. It will fund my research assistants and my major research for 5 years. Not bad for a newbie assistant professor.
I think I'm going to take the evening off.
Updated 9/6/08: the NSF award information and abstract is here.
sciencewoman | September 5, 2008Earlier this week, I thought that it would be a great idea to nip over to a local field site and get some work done. Wednesday seemed like the perfect day. The mere fact that I am only now getting a chance to write this should indicate that ideas and reality don't always mesh.
10. Your laptop will get infected by a virus (called XP 2008 Antivirus) on Tuesday afternoon, leaving you sans computer for two days. (You'll also have to reinstall all your programs and files once you get it back.)
9. Your dean will insist on scheduling a mid-morning meeting on Wednesday - and then fail to show up.…
skookumchick | September 2, 2008(Okay, I admit this is a pure plug. You've now been warned.)
My department is hosting an open house for prospective graduate students September 18-19 here in West Lafayette. If you have been thinking about doing a PhD in engineering education at Purdue, here's your opportunity to:
interact with current engineering education grad students
chat with faculty about research opportunities and ideas
check out Purdue and Lafayette/West Lafayette.
come to a departmental seminar that yours truly organizes
tour the Neil Armstrong Hall of Engineering (where our department is located), as an added…
skookumchick | September 1, 2008Lab Cat has hosted a September Scientiae BBQ, with posts from both ScienceWoman and me. Thanks for hosting, Lab Cat! A good read to chew over as you labor over canning pears, I will admit.
Next Scientiae will be hosted by Jen Myers over at deliberatepixel.
sciencewoman | September 1, 2008
Possibly my favorite political statement of all time:
I was raised to believe I could do it all, and that was very empowering. Then I got into the work force and realized there was really no support for me to do it all. ... We either have to fix that or be honest about it.
Michelle Obama as quoted in a NYT op-ed by Gail Collins.
h/t Sheril.
sciencewoman | August 31, 2008From Wikipedia:
Labor Day is a United States federal holiday observed on the first Monday in September. The holiday originated in 1882 as the Central Labor Union (of New York City) sought to create "a day off for the working citizens".
Congress made Labor Day a federal holiday in 1894.[1] All fifty states have made Labor Day a state holiday.
Traditionally, Labor Day is celebrated by most Americans as the symbolic end of the summer.
Classes started last week, so the summer has already come to an end in my neck of the woods. It seems kind of silly to have a three day weekend after the first…
sciencewoman | August 29, 2008This post is for Scientiae's call to share what we did on our summer vacation. I've been fairly silent about my personal life the last few months, But I was hugely encouraged by all the wonderful comments that so many of you made in the getting to know you post a few weeks back, when you said that you were sticking around because you were interested in my story and want to hear how everything turns out for me. So I am feeling brave enough (or foolish enough) to let you have a bit of peek into what's going on in my life outside of the professional sphere.
I'm not really sure how to right this…
skookumchick | August 29, 2008... now that I live on the western edge of a time zone, I regularly have to get up before the sun rises. These days that are approaching the equinox, when the sine function of daylight hours has a steep slope, the time of sunrise seems to really change a lot from day to day. Today's the first time I had to have breakfast with the light on.
While I love fall, this makes me feel winter isn't far behind. Sunny breakfasts will be relegated to the weekends, and my sleep will be bracketed by darkness, which makes me feel I'm not sleeping enough. (Which maybe I'm not anyway.)
*Sigh.*
sciencewoman | August 28, 2008I'm part of a team submitting a proposal to NASA, and as such, I had to register in the NASA proposal tracking system, creatively named NSPIRES. But I was a little less than inspired when I got to the first step of the registration process. The screen shot and my analysis are below the fold.
The last name on my birth certificate has nothing to do with my professional identity and I don't want an automatically generated username (or similar) that I'm not going to remember because I would never use my birth last name for that purpose. My name change didn't come through marriage, but 81% of US…
skookumchick | August 28, 2008I've taken some of the last week to try to practice what Boice calls "actively waiting" in preparation for writing on a project I've been avoiding. See the project plan here and a discussion about "actively waiting" here. Some of my thoughts on this exercise from the last week are below the fold.
Full disclosure: I didn't manage to do the 10 minutes every day, but I think I did it more days than I didn't do it. I think.
I found it pretty tough to just sit with my notes "in the moment." I kept worrying that I was "doing it wrong" -- did I have the right notes? Should I open up the old…
sciencewoman | August 26, 2008Following up on Alice's excellent discussion-starter post on "negotiating the illegal questions on an academic job interview," I'd like to offer a few thoughts from the departmental side of the equation. Anyone with more or different experiences should also chime in below.
First of all, search committees, and really anyone in the department who will interact with the candidate, should get correct and up-to-date information on university policies and relevant laws. Then nobody can pretend to be in the dark about which questions are off the table. I haven't served on a search committee, but…
skookumchick | August 26, 2008The Scientiae theme for September is "my summer vacation." My first week of class started today, so perhaps this is a good way to remind myself of what I've done this summer.
We had dinner early in May at a friend and colleague's house to acknowledge my husband's decision to step away from his tenure-track job.
I went to a co-PI meeting in Washington DC for a grant we are hoping to get in mid-May - learned a lot, networked, and got all jazzed up to get the grant. Unfortunately, at the end of August, we're still waiting to hear. We have made progress in the meantime, however - we have…
skookumchick | August 25, 2008So, have you been asked whether you are married or have kids on an academic job interview? Many of us have, even though the people interviewing you are not supposed to ask. What strategies have you used (or would have liked to use ;-) ) to deal with these awkward questions? Do you wear your wedding rings? Do you change the background of your computer screen before using your laptop to give your presentation? If you are part of a dual-career couple, when do you bring up your spouse to take advantage of spousal hiring opportunities?
This thread stems from a comment on this post about an…
skookumchick | August 24, 2008I got an email from a reader a few days ago posing a doozy of a problem: she's heading to an interview this week at an institution, and part of her interview involves having "beer with the guys".
With her permission, I share with you an edited version of her email:
Hi ladies,I am a job candidate for a tenure track position in my field interviewing at a university in the south in 2 weeks. These are huntin' fishin' PhD folks (of course 95% white dude phenotype). There's 2 women of around 30 faculty in the department (grad students are 50% female). I have some colleagues (three relatively…
sciencewoman | August 23, 2008Over at FairerScience they are looking for a Clinical/Social Science Research Associate to work on a project about "Career Decision-Making of Future Minority Biomedical Science Faculty." Here's an excerpt of the job description:
This new position is responsible for the coordination and management of a national, interview-based research study of the career decision-making processes of undergraduates in the sciences and biomedical PhD students. In addition to managing the study, there will be opportunity for the individual to participate in analysis of interview data and conduct of phone…
sciencewoman | August 22, 2008It's nearing ten p.m. on a Friday night. After putting my daughter to bed, I've washed the dishes, done the laundry, and boxed up some outgrown toys. Next I'm going to start writing up work plans for two independent studies I'm supervising this semester. Then I'm going to bed.
Tomorrow, I've got to take Minnow to the store and buy some diapers, wipes, milk, and chocolate. I'll take the dog for the first decent walk she's had all week. I'll supervise toddler playtime, mealtime, and bathtime. Hopefully during naptime, I'll get a chance to do battle with the invasive plant that's taking over our…
skookumchick | August 20, 2008In my inbox this afternoon:
We are requesting your help in identifying participants for a study that we are conducting at Rice University. Essentially, we are trying to identify ANY faculty who have voluntarily left one academic job for another job (either academic or nonacademic).
Who fits in this criteria?
Any faculty member who was in an academic position but left academics altogether.
Any faculty member who left a research institution for a teaching institution.
Any faculty member who left a teaching institution for a research university.
Any faculty member who left a teaching or…
sciencewoman | August 20, 2008One class I'm teaching this semester is a senior seminar focusing on oral communication. It should be a really fun class, and I'm looking forward to it. A major assignment for the semester will involve the students presenting a journal-club style talk on a scientific paper. Before I make them give a talk though, it only seems fair that I should have to give one myself. So I am going to borrow an idea from a colleague and attempt to give my talk using all the things one should NOT do during an oral presentation. (This is going to be really painful for me to do - but hopefully also kind of fun…