My first month as an assistant professor

If I had to estimate, so far my time each week is partitioned as follows:

Some points of interest include

• an insanely large proportion of time devoted to preparing for lectures, far more than I actually spend giving the lectures
• an abysmally small proportion of time devoted to doing research
• a much larger proportion of time spent dealing with other people's fuck-ups than I would like

Let me relate a few of these fuck-ups for entertainment purposes (yours, not mine). For about two weeks I was unable to get into my office because no one had a key to the door. I had a TA waiting for a copy of the course textbook for three weeks, and it turned out it was sitting in the dept. office the whole time. I am still waiting for computers because the purchase orders never got submitted.

The time spent preparing to teach is largely because it's a new prep, so hopefully in the future that will be pared down some. Also, it's because I'm OCD about my lecture slides being beautiful. That I can't blame anyone else for. Except maybe my PhD supervisor, since he is OCD about his lecture slides and he trained me to be just like him. Yes, it is all his fault.

Now, how would I like to be spending my time? Assuming that I can't just lie on a beach all day reading a good book:

A lot more research, a lot less dealing with other people's fuck-ups. Now that would get me out of bed in the morning.

Career resources for postdocs and new faculty

Today, in an effort to avoid working on lecture prep, I thought I would share some resources from around the web that I have found useful for my career preparation so far.

Psychology job wiki - This wiki is not only a useful place for perusing available faculty positions, the forums are really interesting. There is a lot of discussion about the job search process as well as issues relating to being a new faculty member. There are similar wiki's for other fields as well, and I imagine they also have useful forum discussions worth perusing.

Duke Postdoc Services YouTube channel - Duke has held a number of panel discussions and workshops for postdocs which they have helpfully recorded and made available via youtube. There are a number of videos on the job search and interview process, discussions about non-academic careers, lab management, funding... lots of good stuff.

Making the Right Moves: A Practical Guide to Scientific Management for Postdocs and New Faculty - this is the lab management guide I have just started going through. It is based on a course in scientific management offered at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and contains a ton of information on things like the job search process, staffing a lab, getting funding, effective teaching, and time management.

Other blogs that write about academic stuff and often provide some good food for thought:
Academic Jungle
The Professor is In
Female Science Professor
Female Computer Scientist
Academic Panhandling
Professor in Training
Prof-like Substance

Management skills

Yesterday a friend and I were swapping stories about our experiences with crappy supervisors and started discussing what we would do differently (which I think about a lot now that I'm a month away from having my own lab). This led to a more general discussion about good lab management skills and how a PI without good management skills can really destroy a lab. We're now both reading through this guide to scientific management and so far it seems to contain some really helpful information. I will write more as I continue reading through this manual, but for now I thought I'd share a couple of thoughts from yesterday's discussion.

1) In our field, lab dynamics are really important. Particularly because we all have to share the same equipment and work space, it is really important that the lab is filled with people who are good collaborators and co-workers. Even having one person who is inconsiderate of others' time and space can become toxic for a lab, leading to much anger and resentment. In my experience, this also destroys productivity, as people aren't usually great workers when they're miserable at work. Being a good manager means recognizing problems early, trying to fix those problems quickly, and recognizing when it's time to let someone go. For some reason, in academia there is very little "letting someone go," the status quo seems to be to avoid dealing with the problem person and just graduate them as quickly as possible (also, lots of scary stories about people writing great reference letters for bad people just to get them out of their lab quickly). As far as good management techniques go, this seems like a colossal failure to me and one that I am keen to avoid.

2) If a PI is a bad manager, there's no amount of good employees that can make up for it (unless the PI is so hands-off that they actually have no control over the lab). The PI typically makes all the decisions about which postdocs to hire, which grad students to accept, etc. So if a PI is unaware that there is a toxic person in the lab (or doesn't care, or cares but doesn't do anything about it) and no steps are taken to improve the situation, the whole lab will suffer. The PI is also the bottleneck for productivity, so even if a dozen talented students churn out top-notch papers, if the PI has poor time-management those papers will languish, unpublished, for months or years.

2b) The majority of people who end up in grad school are pretty competitive "Type A" people who want to succeed. If they feel like they are being prevented from succeeding by their PI in some way (or by other lab members) then they will probably end up being very unhappy, and unhappy people are not usually the most productive. Unhappy people also tend to want to get out of bad situations, which can mean really talented researchers leaving academia. Talented people leaving academia because they had a horrible experience with a supervisor is bad for science. If you are a scientist you probably love science, so it seems pretty counterproductive to behave in a way that's ultimately bad for science.

Happy Canada Day!!!

Canada Day google doodle on google.ca

Everyone should go drink some Canadian beer, maybe get yourself some poutine for lunch, and watch this video:

A note on the stupidest utility company ever

The lastest in a long line of moving-related hassles is that the electric company in my soon-to-be-state is, well, not so helpful: they require you to go into their office to show ID before they will set up service at your new address. Now, if I currently lived in that state, this wouldn't really be much of a problem. But since I do not, this is a GIANT F&*#ING HASSLE. I either will have no electricity when I move in and have to pay to stay in a hotel, or I have to drive 2.5 hours to the nearest office to show them my ID (because there is a lot of utility-related fraud?) then drive 2.5 hours home. Before my last move I was able to set up all my utilities from 3000 miles away (and in a different country no less) so that I had water and electricity when I moved in. One place required notarized copies, but paying the notary at the UPS store $5 is much less of a hassle than spending 5 hours in my car just to show ID in person. SCE&G, you suck.