friendly funding

Many congratulations go out to a friend who has just secured external funding for a very cool (non-biological) research project. I'm exceedingly happy for him!!! Since the funding is coming from the Space Vehicles Directorate, this makes him, at least temporarily, a rocket scientist.



At least some of the grants we're all writing are getting funded... it brings me hope.

being okay with being #2...

DrJ&H has a recent post titled "It turns out I'm ok with being 2nd", but just like my last post, the title isn't what I thought it would be. DrJ&H was talking about the difficulty accepting she's THE expert in a sub-sub-field, and how she's okay being the second most expert person...

Whereas I want to post about what it's like to actually know you're the #2 young professor in my sub-sub-(sub-)field. I'm not sure how that sets me up for tenure -- is #2 good enough? -- and I'm having trouble navigating how much I should help the seeming #1 in my area when he asks for my opinions.

We are both young PIs and interested in ridiculously similar questions. Now, there isn't 100% overlap in our interests and expertise, but it's substantial, and we both have multiyear research plans that will keep bumping up against each other. We know that collaboration is one way out of this, but this has begun without great communication of what areas we're going to share, what we'll both conduct parallel work in, etc. And we have no joint funding.

While the thought of giving any competitor/colleague the ammunition with which they could scoop you would drives one to extensive email editing, it's worse with this particular frival. He's *much* faster at publishing than I am, he publishes in higher impact journals than I do (those two facts are not independent), and, for the last five years, I've had the concrete sense he's smarter than I am. This opinion isn't just based on having been blown away by him since the first time we met, it's based on the fact that several of my mentors have used the word "genius" to describe him. My postdoctoral advisor, for example, decided to decline an invitation to write a book chapter and recommended my frival -- someone who had never been associated with my mentor's lab -- instead of one of his own postdocs.

I should mention somewhere in here that my frival is also an amazingly nice and kind person. This isn't a personal, or personality conflict, in the slightest.

But having regular email contact with the frival is helping me see some cracks in the pedestal that I have put him on. We are having some intellectual disagreements, and I don't just think I'm right: his data support my side... leading to conclusions he didn't see on his own. In another instance, I was able to come up with the critical literature citations that radically changed the conclusions of another paper of his... I still don't know how much to reveal/hold back in any given conversation (the frival is a man of fewer words than I, and he never volunteers what his next steps will be), but having a peek under the hood of his gleaming, cherry red corvette of a research program has humanized him, and made me confront another iteration of impostor syndrome. He may be #1, but I'm not all that far behind at #2.

I have been trying to imagine whether there are things about me that might intimidate my frival. But of course, my frival is so perfect that he might just be the one young scientist without impostor syndrome himself...

People I'm taking for granted

I have been busy working on grant applications lately, and I want to publicly, if anonymously, thank all of my non-scientist friends for their support as I work through this.

I am grateful for my supportive academic friends, too! But it's something special to get encouraging and inquisitive Twitters from distant friends who don't particularly care what I study. It's important to them because it's important to me... and maybe because I tend to gesticulate wildly when I tell funny anecdotes about my work.

(Besides, my scientist friends are still on the hook to read my drafts... they'll get their thanks later ;-))

knowing when to fold 'em

Quitting a bad situation is often much harder than staying in it, suffering and experiencing incremental daily losses. That's advice that I'm sure can be found in the pages of Glamour, but it is true, and maybe harder to apply in the workplace than in our love lives. After all, most of us hold our shortest jobs longer than we kept our shortest romantic partners around...

Quitting can be seen as failure, as a situation you couldn't deal with, a situation you couldn't suavely turn into a something good for you. That you couldn't cope with the hand you were dealt, or what you signed up for. What's worse, even if you know getting out of a toxic situation ASAP isn't a 'failure', often others view it that way, such as the boss you're quitting, other narrow-minded members of the department, or your extended family.

I have seen many people suffer in academia because they didn't quit a bad situation (a bad advisor, typically). At the time most of them thought that sticking it out wasn't just the inertial path... they thought it was the smartest thing to do. They thought the suffering would be worth the benefits they'd get from working with an asshole bignameprof at FancyPantsU. Why quit a lab and make an 'official' enemy of the advisor? Why waste time starting up a new project in a new lab, when you're only n years away from finishing their PhD, and then you can move into a better lab? What's the worst that could happen... it's not going to get worse than the situation is right now, right?

At least one of my friends felt explicitly trapped, like all his other choices brought significant losses of prestige, status, and potential for the future. Instead of quitting, he started having panic attacks, which (thankfully) cleared up after he graduated...

My reply to their feelings at the time was get out, get out now (sometimes I suggested trying to stay at FancyPantsU in another lab). The following is somewhat informed by hindsight, since they all stayed in their bad situations.

* If you and your advisor have really hit the skids, it's unlikely you will reconstruct a working relationship with him or her. That ship has sailed, get out and start working with someone who will give you a good recommendation letter.

* It takes longer to get a good number of papers when you do your PhD/postdoc in a toxic lab, so you're not losing as much time as you think if you find another lab. Plus, you probably have a more refined idea of what you'd like to study, and you can pick a better lab for your interests. This doesn't apply if you're really just about to leave (less than 12 months? This heavily depends on your life situation), then there is a value to just getting through your remaining time.

* Things can always get worse. You can't bargain with yourself based on exactly how bad things are for you at one exact moment. Imagine how your asshole advisor will react if you get married/pregnant/have a family crisis... if your experiments are equivocal for a year through no fault of your own... if your advisor's spouse gets cancer/alzheimers and your advisor stops showing up for months on end. These situations (all plucked from my and my friends' experiences) try the best of working relationships, and make the bad go to much worse.

But none of my friends chose to quit their bad academic situation. Perhaps I have a skewed circle of friends... but it's not universal because I've quit two bad situations in my academic past.

Neither was easy, but the first quitting was harder. I was quitting in large part because I could not handle a family crisis and the position, and I had to face disappointing people's expectations, for not doing the best/most prestigious thing. It actually had nothing to do with the very nice guy who was supervising me.

The second quitting was changing advisors after my first year of grad school. I had been told that the way to pick a grad program was to pick the person I wanted to work with, go work with them, and follow them if they leave that school. Well, I came to a certain university to work with a well-known female professor, and I did not enjoy that lab environment, and would not have thrived there. My apologies for the vague description... but she and I get along fine now that I don't work for her, so I'm not going to give too many identifying/entertaining details. Initially, I felt I would have to change institutions, and was worried that it was another gamble... what if I couldn't get along with the next advisor? Would I then move *again*? As many were aware I was feeling this way, I was gently approached by a younger professor with whom I was friendly, and I decided to stay and join his lab. I was very, very nervous about confronting my professor, and telling her I wanted to change advisors, but it was just one awkward conversation. And maybe a few slightly awkward months. She was completely professional, though clearly surprised. It was an unequivocally good decision. Through the grapevine, I have heard that she thinks I'm a decent scientist, she and I are friendly at meetings (and that's not an act, at least from my side), and I remained friends with the members of her lab. And that friendly professor became my wonderful PhD advisor.

My bad first PhD year was not as bad as the situations of those I know who suffered through their PhD. At least it hadn't gotten that bad yet, but I had more of a desire to act than they did. I think this was mostly because I'd quit something before (and hadn't been blackballed/struck with lightening), and because I'd had an amazing undergraduate advisor who had showed me what a mentor is/can be.

My best friend dragged herself through a PhD in a lab she should have quit years earlier. Despite graduating her, her asshole advisor has told lies about her to colleagues, won't write her letters, and always seems surprised to see her at meetings -- didn't I destroy your career? why are you still here? While I am amazed to see that the asshole advisor is being worn down, and has started admitting that she will have a career after all, my friend shouldn't have to deal with these ridiculous, extra obstacles to getting a TT job. She has experienced far more negatives to her science and to her career path from staying with a bad advisor than she would have experienced by changing labs. But she is stubborn, she is driven, and her science is very, very hot, so she's going to make it.

There's a lot of advice out there, of people telling others it's time to walk away... but fewer stories of how quitting can work out, or how staying in a bad situation takes more years from your life than leaving would. If people know of others, please link to them in the comments.

"I love bacteria."

Several of my oldest friends are writing application essays right now. One is writing his research statement for tenure-track positions, one is applying to PhD programs, and one is applying to become a New York City teaching fellow. Of course, I think each of my friends will be great at the position to which he is applying, and I've happily been reading and editing their essays. I've especially been enjoying seeing which of my changes each of them likes and which alterations they can't stand.

But I'm far from the only one with application essays on the brain. FSP has opened up a contest for egregious parodies of graduate school application essays. I've been poking around on the internet looking for advice on essay writing for my PhD-bound friend, and have found some interesting things:

1. There are places you can pay to edit your graduate school application essays. This shouldn't have surprised me, but it's nice, in a way, to know I'm still this naive.

2. The typical, generic and earnest advice I expected to find. However, there were some interesting sections in these, like "What if I don’t have any unique experiences or qualities?" and some that were written in more relaxed tones. One site offered free example essays as a loss-leader, I suppose, for the "pre-written," "model" papers they sell.

3. Overall, the science blogs focus on other aspects of applying to grad school (being very very careful when selecting an advisor, etc), though FSP gives some excellent practical dos and don'ts of grad school application essays.

I remember that starting my graduate school application essay was very problematic. I was blocked on it for weeks. In the end I said %$*^ it, and started the essay "I love bacteria." And I went on to explain what I thought was cool, attractive, intensely important about microbiology for the rest of the first paragraph, then I wrote about my research experience, and finished with a paragraph about whom I would have liked to work with in each department. Overall, it was very conventional, but my honest and blunt introduction did have some consequences; I was identified by people at several interviews as "ohhhh, the girl who loves bacteria." But there's no such thing as bad publicity for one's application... right?

Since then, I have learned a few things about how to start writing introductions. Besides the ubiquitous and useful "start writing now, polish/cut later," I've found I often write an entirely superfluous, too-much-background paragraph that precedes a perfectly reasonable introductory paragraph in my drafts. Sometimes this superfluous paragraph is very well-written, but it doesn't really need to be there. This was pointed out by one of my oldest advisors, when I was writing my research statements last year, and I now see this problem in many things I write. If I took the time to look back, maybe even in my blog posts . But I also have been able to see this in other people's writing -- including in one of my friends' application essays. So that's my contribution to the application essay resources on the intertubes... check and see if your second paragraph actually is a decent introduction in and of itself.

Mostly, though, I'm happy to be at a stage in my life/career where I have a lot more direction and purpose to the starts of my essays (cough, grants), and no one expects me to start with "My life's purpose came to me as I was hiking though the French Alps three summers ago..." Except Female Science Professor, of course.

Failures of Peer Review, Part I

I think a lot about the state of peer review. I spend a substantial amount of time on peer reviews (and re-reviews, and re-re-reviews... it would save time to accept more papers), but that's just a symptom of my belief that without thorough, fair and constructive peer review, science doesn't work. Especially as more journals publish more papers, and as online-early articles are distributed even though they contain errors that will be corrected in proof... we're being saturated with scientific information. While Faculty of 1000 and other TV guides to the recent scientific literature can help one find the better articles in the sea of decent ones, rigorous peer review is the bedrock assumption underlying all of the articles in the literature. When we read a peer-reviewed, published article we assume that the authors are not trying to deceive us, and we assume that they correctly drew conclusions from their data. And, despite the fact that two or more scientists evaluated each of these articles prior to publication, we often find we disagree with their conclusions, or feel the published experiments were done incorrectly. The goal of peer review is to help papers go into the literature in the least flawed form possible, and as we have less and less time to devote to reading each published article, peer review becomes more important.

Or, we need to move to a wiki commenting format on each and every article, which seems like it will increase the time required to read each "paper" since one will have to read all the comments as well...

I could go on for far too long about peer review... but I was prompted to write about it today because a friend of mine sent me the best example of a peer review failure that I'd seen for a very long time.

In the reference list of von Szentpály, L. 2008. Atom-Based Thermochemistry: Predictions of the Sublimation Enthalpies of Group 12 Chalcogenides and the Formation Enthalpies of their Polonides. The Journal of Physical Chemistry A (published online 11/17/08), we find:

Reference 27: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polonium#Toxicity. Weight-for-weight, polonium is about 10^11 times more toxic than hydrocyanic acid, HCN. The element and its compounds have been found in tobacco and, particularly, cigarettes. If inhaled, polonium is deposited in the lungs, where its nucleus emits α-particles causing severest damage to the tissue. The amount of polonium taken in by a smoker is approximately equal to that taken in from all other sources.

The peer reviewers didn't insist on a more stable and authoritative reference to support this than wikipedia. Surely one sign of the impending apocalypse... but the bigger issue is that the article appears to have incorrectly cited wikipedia, at least for the information listed on that page today, 11/18/08 (the Toxicity section had not been edited since 9/5/08). The wikipedia page purports:

By mass, polonium-210 is around 250,000 times more toxic than hydrogen cyanide (the actual LD50 for 210Po is about 1 microgram for an 80 kg person (see below) compared with about 250 milligrams for hydrogen cyanide

I have to say that if I were peer reviewing an article that had a wikipedia page as a reference I would have checked it out, and likely would have noticed the discrepancy between 250,000 and 10^11 times. But, there has to be a more appropriate reference for 99.9999% of facts than wikipedia (communication and information science researchers studying wikis being one obvious exception).