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...

hot for teaching

Sometimes you just have a good lecture... the audience is listening, you're well-slept, you are getting the feedback you need to know that the class is following you. You even get questions from beyond the first row! Today, I gave a guest lecture on bacterial horizontal gene transfer, we were all collectively on, and it was an energizing experience.

It helps that I love this material -- nothing like covering conjugation, transduction and transformation for tossing in historical anecdotes, like how we first measured bacterial genomes in minutes. If that doesn't help them remember that the most commonly transferred bacterial genes due to an integrated conjugative plasmid are the ones closest to the site of integration... My asides weren't just historical, since I know a number of active researchers in the field. Amid all the talk of what good is it for large state schools to be centers of cutting-edge research, this is an example of the trickling down of research into the classroom. I was able to mention Rosie Redfield's papers, and their memorable titles (for instance, "is sex with dead cells ever better than no sex at all?"), and I was able to talk about the debate over why antibiotic resistance genes tend to be plasmid-borne, but mammalian toxin genes are usually phage-borne.

Of course, part of my excitement is because I haven't been teaching this semester, so these guest lectures are reminding me of the best aspects of lecturing -- without all the grading, emails about dead grandmothers, etc. But I'm spending the day smiling about the undergraduate student body (which doesn't always happen), and remembering that this is one of the reasons I decided against pursuing a career in industry. That, and I tried working in industry, and it was a soul-sucking experience (my PI agreed and he quit shortly after I left). But the teaching, that was part of the decision too.

science spending spree!

Few things make me happier than ordering books without any thought to the price, because the no-cost-extension of the grant is expiring soon. I happen to work in an area where single-author monographs and contributed volumes from the 1950s-1970s are very useful, so some very expensive used books are coming my way!

I wonder how many other fields still find the literature (especially the non-journal literature) from the pre-pubmed era so useful...