Supervision: Teaching More Than Science

I just came across a link on google+ (my new favourite place for all things sciencey) to a nice piece from The Chronicle of Higher Education regarding professors failing their students when it comes to career preparation. Here are a few excerpts:

To be sure, my clients tell me that advising occurs—endless advising of "the dissertation project." As if that project, and its minutiae of citations and shades of meaning, is the point of graduate school. It is not the point of graduate school. It is simply a document that demonstrates a mastery of a discipline and a topic. The point of graduate school, for the actual graduate students themselves, is preparation for a career. A career like yours, with benefits and a retirement plan.

[...]Your responsibility to your advisees extends to telling the whole truth about the academic enterprise at this time. Tenure-track lines have been evaporating for years. Aiming for a tenure-track job is, for most students, unrealistic. For those students who wish to try, the effort requires years of methodical training and calculation of career chances, from the point of arrival in the graduate program through the dissertation defense and beyond. Your job is to look up from your students' dissertations, and assist them in mastering those skills and calculations.

How? By teaching your Ph.D.'s how to write a CV; to cultivate prominent scholarly supporters; to pursue grant money with a single-minded purpose; to apply for national awards; to publish, publish more, publish higher, write a stellar application letter, and do the elevator talk.

And when, even after doing all of the above, the tenure-track job doesn't materialize, as it often will not, instead of averting your eyes in shame from their so-called "failures," you step up, professors, and work with your Ph.D.'s to transfer their skills into some sector of the economy that is not contracting as badly as your own.

This post brings up a number of issues that just don't seem to be discussed enough, at least in my field. First, although it's important to teach a student to perform good science, it is equally important to teach them the professional skills they will need to succeed in academia. There are too many graduate students who know that they should network at conferences but have no idea how to do that so they just don't. Or who have never been taught how to provide constructive criticism as a reviewer. Or don't know how to go about finding a postdoc position. Or have no idea what should go into their research and teaching statements when they apply for faculty positions. In fact, often students don't even really know what a faculty position entails. They've experienced the lecturing and research, but they often don't know about all the other responsibilities professors have within the department (or the hell of grant writing, or all the department politics that make you crazy). All of these are things that a good supervisor will make a point of teaching their graduate students, particularly if the student's goal is to stay in academia.

Second, there needs to be an acknowledgement that not everyone can, or should, get a tenure-track faculty position. It seems to be assumed that that's where all grad students will end up, but it is often unrealistic. If a student has a talent and enjoyment for teaching, they can be encouraged to explore teaching-based faculty positions. There are research-based positions in both private and government institutions that may be perfect for someone who doesn't want to teach but really loves research. Some people may be better suited for industry jobs. Given how tough getting a faculty position is these days, the alternatives need to be discussed more. There are many options, and both students and supervisors should communicate what their goals are, what outcome it is reasonable to expect, and then tailor the student's program to try to meet everyone's needs.

And that's my rant for the day. The full article from The Chronicle of Higher Education can be found here.

That's one good-looking flow chart you've got there

I do love a good flow chart, and this one of the top 100 Science Fiction / Fantasy books is pretty impressive. I may use it to decide what to read this weekend.

Well done, SF Signal

Random geekiness: 100th visitor!

Adventures in Academia rustled up it's 100th visitor today! In honour of this occasion, I... worked on my job applications. Because that's pretty much all I ever do anymore. I'm really looking forward to that happy day in mid-November when the bulk of my applications have been sent in. Although then I'll be anxiously waiting to see if I get interviews, which might be worse. We'll find out in six weeks or so.

I'm working on part III in my "How to kill a grad student's love of research" series. In the meantime, here are some pretty pictures:

Photos by Eric Hines, reblogged here from boingboing

And a pretty cool video:

Teaching evaluations

I spent some time last night going through my old teaching evaluations so that I could put some information about them in my job applications. Here are some of the best responses to, "What do you consider to be the strongest and weakest features of the instructor, as a teacher?"

Positive comments are usually pretty similar, just variations on "great teacher." But occasionally a student will be more creative with their praise:

• "No weaknesses, she's divine!"
• "Very responsible"
• "She made the class tolerable"
• "Put up with my pedantic questions"
• "I only took this class b/c I didn't want to take [biological psychology]. It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be."
• "She was really patient when students made stupid comments"

But you can't please everyone:

• "She should walk around a bit more while she's lecturing" 
• "Needs to stop walking around so much, it's distracting"

Some complaints really have to be taken with a grain of salt:

• "There is far too much in this course that lacks scientific reliability and validity"
• "Office hours too early. I shouldn't have to be on campus at 10am"

And my personal favourite:

• "I think the TAs are having sex" 

This wins on so many levels. Either this person didn't actually read the question, or they have some interesting theories about how teaching ability is related to sexual activity (and the sexual activity of people other than the teacher, no less!). Although, there's no judgement about it, so I can't tell if this student thought that the (imagined) relationship between my TAs was a strength or weakness of my teaching. Perhaps they meant it as a compliment.

Pirate science

In honour of International Talk Like a Pirate Day, here is a pirate-themed paper from PNAS.

Gordon, V. D. (in press). Shiver me timbers: Pulsatile contractility in model tissues. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA.

Ok, the science actually has nothing to do with pirates, but the title is awesome. Yarrrr!

It seems so simple when you put it in a chart

from I Love Charts

How to kill a grad student's love of research: Step 2

Quite often when students complain about their supervisor, they start off with, "I really like him, but..." or, "He's a really nice guy, but..." And it's true - many of these "bad" supervisors are really awesome people to grab a beer with. Often, one of their most frustrating attributes is that they really do mean well and are trying to be nice, which brings us to...

2) Killing the lab with "kindness"

In today's craptastic economy, tenure-track faculty positions are harder to come by (although this year looks much better, which is great for me!). It's harder for PIs to get funding, making it harder for them to fund postdocs. Basically, anyone who finished their PhD in the last 5 years probably had the panicky realization at some point that all their education guaranteed them diddly-squat. Why is this important, you ask? Well, because it means that the competition for the available positions heated up and the typical 'publish or perish' mentality went into overdrive. PIs need their students to go on to good postdocs, and their postdocs to go on to good faculty positions, almost as much as the students and postdocs need those things. So the kindly supervisor, with their heart in the right place, realizes that they have a student (or two, or three) who is not going to be very competitive in today's market and they decide to help them out.

On the surface, it seems harmless enough to tack someone's name onto a paper even though they didn't contribute or to give the student first-author credit even though the supervisor (or often another student or postdoc) did the majority of the work. In the long run though, NO ONE WINS. Seriously, this is bad for everyone, the PI included.

• The students who aren't being helped because they are perceived as capable of succeeding on their own become increasingly bitter and disillusioned. They are often the students who end up doing all the work while others get the credit, and now they have to fight for jobs with people who have inflated CVs. If you've been this person, you know how disheartening it is to feel like other people are being handed freebies while you work your ass off. This situation often leads to comments like, "Maybe I should just go work at the mall" and a desire to find a job outside of academia, thus pushing the most talented researchers out and making way for the mediocre. 
• The student who received the help often ends up in one of two situations because they didn't learn how to do good work on their own: a) they have to work three times as hard to catch up in their next position, or b) they flounder without someone to help them out and end up being unable to live up to the expectations set out for them in their next job.
• The PI, although they may initially have warm fuzzy feelings that they've done a good deed, will also suffer for their kindness. Sending students on to other jobs that they are unprepared for eventually bites them in the ass... once people realize that you're helping student's pad their CV and writing overly-positive reference letters, they're not going to trust your recommendations and will avoid taking people from your lab, thus effectively screwing over any person you supervise.

So everyone, what is the moral of this story? Just say, "NO!" to CV-padding handouts in the name of kindness! Making sure your students have earned every line on their CV and are truly prepared to be independent researchers will benefit everyone.

Timely...

Like what I said yesterday, but in funnier comic form.

How to kill a grad student's love of research: Step 1

Now that I am in the midst of applying for faculty positions, I spend a lot of time thinking about the kind of supervisor I want to be when one day (hopefully soon!) I have my own grad students. Although grad school was hard work, and I am very happy to never have to write a dissertation again, on the whole it was a positive experience for me. My supervisor was really excited about research and good at motivating me, and as a result we worked well together and managed to be very productive. But I know a lot of people who have had such bad experiences with their supervisor that they've left academia altogether, depriving the field of truly promising scientists. So in my quest to be the world's best supervisor, I've started thinking about what I should avoid doing so that my students don't end up hating science.

There seems to be a fine balance to be struck with how often you interact with your students and how much control they have over their projects. Based on the not-so-random sample of grad students I've talked to, a supervisor going to either extreme of attentiveness will cause problems:

1a) Be an absentee supervisor
I've heard more than a few students (and ex-students) complain about how difficult it was to get help when they needed it. Particularly when students are just starting out, they need a lot of guidance from their supervisors. And when they don't get it, things can be disastrous... New students often have great ideas, but have trouble implementing them well because they don't have the background knowledge in the theoretical and practical aspects of their field yet. It's hard work for the most experienced researchers to design an experiment with minimal confounds, and yet many supervisors seem to expect their young grad students to do so without much assistance. The end result seems to be crap projects that have to be re-done over and over again, leading to frustration, despair, and a desire to do anything other than research for a living.

1b) Be a control freak supervisor
Conversely, students seem to be equally frustrated by supervisors that are always hovering over them and micromanaging everything they do. This seems to be a problem particularly for senior students who, like teenagers, are struggling to assert their independence from their academic parent. The joy of publishing one's work is pretty much lost when you feel like you had no real contribution to it or everything you did do was redone by your supervisor. In extreme circumstances, I've heard students describe themselves as slave labour or unpaid RAs. It's hard to enjoy and take pride in your research when you don't actually feel like it's your research.

The Solution?
It seems like the solution that would satisfy everyone is to have a gradient of attentiveness, with new and inexperienced students getting more supervision and more senior students being given more freedom. Not having had a lab full of people to supervise myself, is this actually a reasonable and practical thing to do? Would there be a perception of inequality and favouritism if some students got more help than others, even if it was because they needed it? How does one balance giving the student the time and attention they need while ensuring that the project remains theirs?

Random Geekiness

The other day while discussing the relative merits of red vs. green laser pointers with a colleague, I got to thinking, "you know what would be cool? A sonic screwdriver laser pointer. I would totally buy that."

I have managed to find instructions on how to make one from a laser pointer and a sonic screwdriver flashlight, but it seems like there are a lot of people discussing how to make these on forums. I feel like geeky academics everywhere would totally love a Doctor-Who-inspired laser pointer. Why has no company produced these yet?

Welcome!

I started setting up a blog a handful of years ago as a means of procrastinating from writing my dissertation, but I never quite got around to posting anything. Now that I have a handful of manuscripts to procrastinate from again, I thought I'd give this blogging thing another try. Ahhh, procrastination!

My goal for this blog is to share interesting science as well as some thoughts about academia and the challenges that young researchers face when trying to find jobs and start new labs. As it's important to have a balance between our work and personal lives, I'm sure some random non-academic geekiness will show up occasionally as well :)

I hope you enjoy reading it!