finding a sparring partner

These days everything is slow - at least that is how it feels. Days pass by and sometimes I wonder if something happened earlier today or already yesterday. It is somehow disturbing. From this blurriness a thought about work and how to improve my output came up. I've by far missed my goals for this year and I'm very disappointed of myself. Even though there are a lot of external factors involved in why I missed my goals. But it is not all external factors to blame. Often I just can't find this additional bit of motivation to do something right now. Especially with writing papers I seem to waste a lot of time on side tracks or it takes me a day to write five proper lines. 

When I was a teenager I could easily motivate myself for a lot of stuff. My schedule was full of sports and social events and I usually not only participated, but took over some organizational roles. I LOVED doing all that stuff and my parents sometimes had to stop me and keep my duties to a reasonable amount. While I think it is a teenager thing to be easily motivated (maybe not for school, but for a lot of other stuff) and to be emotionally involved in everything, I was wondering how I could get closer again to this base level of passion. 

The word that crossed my mind was: competition. Not super serious job competition, more like in a low level sports match. Or like the hidden competition when you try to match the speed of another runner in the park. I love playing sports, I love the temporal rivalry and I love to win. So maybe it would help if I'd have a secret sparring partner, an "enemy" team, someone on a similar level but with currently better performance to increase my day-to-day motivation. Trying to match his/her speed, then close the gap, then overtake.

But how to measure performance? H-factor is the first measure that comes to mind, but it depends on so much more than my own direct performance, like: are my collaborators productive and put me on their papers, are my collaborators people how are often cited,... . 

H-factor only of first-author publications might be an option, or - similar - how many first-author publications contribute to the overall h-factor. But then I'm already on a level where my students publish and I'm not first author anymore, but not necessarily last one as well. And the next level people are on the junior professor levels. So there the ratio first-author to non-first-author publications gets even "worse" and performance comparison with a sparring partner on that level would be even more difficult. And do I want to exclude all the other time consuming work I'm doing? Supervision? Teaching? It would get really messy if I'd want to include them.

Maybe I keep it very simple. The weak point in my CV is my low number of first author publications. This is what I want to increase. So I'll look for an "enemy" team (maybe even several people) on a similar level to mine and I'll try to match their number of first author publications. Time-frame depends on how many publications they are ahead of me. A long term goal will be to match their h-factor and the number of first-author publications contributing to it. 

Finding a proper sparring partner is a nice task for the last days of the year.

the vehicles for the road to success

The question about what to do to become a successful and happy academic is one that pops up regularly in all kind of early career researcher seminars, mentoring sessions and blog articles. Being successful and being able to maintain a life outside academia is a balancing act that does not always work out as good one wishes. In the last few years I have been sitting in a number of "I tell you about my career" talks given by very successful people and I talked to a bunch of senior colleagues down the corridor about this topic. Some points always re-appear in these discussions - they seem to be the core of successful-senior-colleague-wisdom on the topic "success and happiness".

 1) Don't work your ass off

This is so against everything that everyday life in academia tells us. With funding rates going down, with job insecurity, with "publish or perish" it seems like everybody who does not work hir ass off, should better start to polish their resumes for non-academic jobs. But I've heard this sentence quite often and of course it is the key to whole-life happiness. Maybe it is easy to say that one should take time off on the weekend when you are the one with the Nobel-Prize on the shelf. But on the other hand it is essential to allow myself time to recharge my batteries and to actually enjoy my life today - this is not something that should be put on hold until I maybe have secured tenure.

2) Enjoy what you are doing and check once in a while if you are still enjoying it

For me as an ECR, this is the essential bit for my work in academia. With all the insecurity and the continuous search for funding, I better enjoy my work and the opportunities university offers. Maybe I'll become a professor and I can continue doing awesome research, maybe it'll not work out and I have to find something else that interests me and pays the bills. I don't doubt that I would. And if this happens it is better to not have regrets about the years spend in academia. It is easy to miss the point where you stop enjoying your work, because you just have so much on your plate and the piles on the desk don't become smaller. Taking the time once in while to reflect about what I'm doing and if I still like to be where I am, is a very good advice.

3) Be efficient and effective

This is a life-long learning process: tame the procrastination cat in you. Learn how to approach a task that you can finish it in a timely manner. How to not waste time on minor tasks. How to focus on the important things. How to get other people to support you work. Tons of books have been written about this - it's about finding the strategies that work for you and about applying them every day. Sometimes that works - sometimes it doesn't.

4) Have a bread and butter project and have a risky, exciting one as well

One of my super successful colleagues pointed out to me that the people who will be appointed on fixed term positions are the ones who work on the edge of knowledge and who dare to jump into the really unknown.But on the other hand nobody wants to hire a "crazy" person who is only looking for the Holy Grail. University wants to see solid publications, funding agencies - even though they claim that they want to fund novel ideas - want to make a safe investment and your colleagues will take you more seriously if you publish some not so far fetched ideas once in a while. 

5) Don't piss off your colleagues

Because you never know if you meet them again in the future and in which role. Maybe they will have to decide if your paper gets published or your grant gets funded. And even though we all should be unbiased by our personal relationship to someone, we are not. Even if we try. Especially not when the other one just pooped on your lawn. So it is better to choose which fights are really necessary - and some certainly are - and let go the other ones even if it would feel so good to just grmpf$%*.

6) Have friends outside your field or better even outside academia

That helps to see that the world is not evolving around your research niche. That other people have other priorities in life and still can be happy. That working in academia has a lot of perks and privileges. Getting your head off work is necessary to recharge your brain and having a hobby can actually be quite fulfilling as well, e.g. Nobel laureate Brian Schmidt owns a 4-star winery (to take one of the super successful people with super successful hobbies (= ).    

These points alone certainly won't make me a successful academic, but maybe a more happy and interesting one. It's good to realize that life happens now already and that it does not help to wait until an uncertain point in the future to start with being happy. And I go now and bake some cake, because that makes me happy on a Sunday afternoon!

publish! or somebody else will

I'm a slow writer and thus slow in publishing my research. If I manage t write two papers a year, it was a very good year. While writing I often think that my data is not enough, that I need to do another experiment to make the story round. And I develop a lot of side ideas while writing that seem to be essential for the paper and I need to read a bit more literature about it. Up to now this has not been a problem. I published when I had all my thoughts sorted out. But I always worried that one day somebody else will be faster than me and publish the ideas I had been brooding over for so long before I can.

This scenario just became reality. I'm not surprised, I saw it coming, but still I'm saddened and disappointed about myself. I have a 3/4 written paper on my desk since last year, I've discussed the methods with several people on conferences and well, now one of them used these methods on their systems, which are very similar to mine. My head says: no need to be upset. I had a big head start and did not use it. It is just normal that discussions spark ideas - that's how it is supposed to be. I should learn from their publication for my future work. But emotionally I'm disappointed, mostly of myself, a bit of my colleagues. And I slightly start to panic, as for sure they will have a bunch of follow up papers lined up and maybe they will be faster again to publish. Maybe through this lesson I will learn how to not waste months and months on one paper, but to get my writing tasks done a bit more efficient. I have five papers on my to-do list. Let's see how many I can finish this year!

contaminated time

Today I'd like to share a blog where no science or university topics are discussed. Little Eco Footprints is written by Tricia since quite a few years now and she mainly focuses on "learning to live better with less". I stumbled over her blog shortly after we had arrived in Australia with just two suitcases of clothes and two laptops. I loved having not so much stuff around me and instead more space in our apartment. It felt like I'd have more freedom. But things piled up quickly and I still wonder how it happened that by now all our shelves and cupboards are full again. Tricia wrote a lot of great articles about how to deal with this issue and how to live better and more creative with less.

Her latest post resonated with me, because it deals with the contamination of time. This feeling that I'm not living in the moment, I'm not appreciating the here and now, because my head is already checking the next few tasks on my to-do list, is getting stronger during the last years. The days pass and I often can hardly remember what I have done during the day, because all the things I (think I) still have to do block my sight. Especially now that I have not only my own things on my list, but all the stuff for the LittleOne as well. The weeks just fly by and I forget to take time to sit back and reflect about the moment. I've often heard that it is necessary to set time aside for leisure and breaks and private stuff. Sometimes I manage to do that and I know that it refuels my batteries like nothing else and my brain can again create interesting ideas. But I need more practice and constant reminders like Tricia's blog post to make what's now an occasional event a fixed habit. It will not get easier when I return to the office.

science & philosophy

I've been catching up on interesting bits and pieces about science, universities, gender equality,... that I missed during the last few months. A piece that got me thinking a lot is the Pub-Style Science Hangout from April. The topic was " Philosophy and Science" and it was an hour long discussion about the concept of the scientific method, if there is something like basic rules all scientist do/should follow in their research, what these rules are, how much our perception of "what is good science" is influenced by the labs we've been working in or our cultural background.

We scientists often enough think we are a notch smarter than most other people and with this much more aware of how the world functions and all the not so obvious cog wheels contributing to this. And of course we know how research should be done such that the results lead to rational explanations about the world around us - unbiased, based on a sound and logic foundation. We are convinced that our research is not influenced by our personalities or the way we approach it. But how can we be so sure about that? At least I have not spend much thought on these aspects of my research and I'm sure the majority of my colleagues has neither.

The scientific method and the philosophic concepts behind "doing science" were never a topic during my undergrad education. The curriculum contained an optional course about Science Philosophy for 3rd year students. None of us took it, because at the time it did not seem to be important knowledge. However, in hindsight it could have offered me a totally different view on my thesis research and the following years in my PhD lab. 

As an undergrad the science world is usually very small. Maybe one has been abroad for some studies, maybe one has changed to a different university. Some people have the opportunity to actually work in a lab as student assistants during their undergrad years, but for most people the thesis research is the first "real science" they do. If you ask them about science and philosophy, they might come up with ideas about ethics - don't copy and paste work of somebody else. But to realize that the way science is done is dependent on the specific lab, the people in the lab, the supervisor, the faculty, the university and the whole cultural background takes at least a project in a different lab or a close collaboration outside the well known orbit. These differences include the usage of different methodologies to answer the same question, as well as the way a research hypothesis is developed (if at all), the way collaboration takes place (if at all) and the attention that is given to ethical questions (if at all). To realize that the way science is done in my lab is not the Holy Grale, but just one shade of a very broad spectrum, can broaden the view and maybe lead to new, innovative approaches to research. Not only for the students but for researchers in general. During my education and even until now there has never been an offer from the universities side to discuss this topic - a great opportunity missed to encourage the critical thinking we all hold so high.

Maybe it's common at other universities to discuss the philosophical aspects of science and research with the students or even with the faculty members? I'd love to hear about it!

more structure or less?

After all these years of attending classes and having a pre-structured week there comes the time for each student, when they have to start their thesis work. For many this seems to be a scary thing and I remember that I had no clue what was expected of me when I started with my first thesis. In my undergrad institution there was no structure at all that would have helped to get me on the right track. I worked in my group for several months without having a real topic and during the whole thesis period I saw my professor only twice. Looking back I'd say that the PhD student who supervised me, was quite overstrained with this supervision job - something I can very much understand by hindsight. It's not easy to supervise an undergrad student when you have to keep your PhD thesis going at the same time - with a professor who is not around very often. I wasted a lot of time during my thesis and even though I've showed up every day early and stayed late my progress was slow and I wrote until the very last day possible. I would have loved to have a bit more structure given to me during my thesis.

At my current university the system is different. Still it is a big step from doing solely coursework to suddenly having a thesis project to work on. But the system is set up in a way that it gives as much structure as possible, means a Master thesis is designed as a course. A bunch of thought through topics to choose from, fixed starting date, fixed date to hand in the final thesis, a date to hand in the literature overview, a date to hand in a progress report, to give a test talk, .... . From a students perspective it might seem that doing a thesis is just another course you have to attend. But it's not! And this is the point where the expectations of students and their supervisors usually don't match. If you don't attend a course but you do well in the final exam, you might still get the credit. If you do a thesis, you have to continuously work on it. You can't do all the experiments or simulations in the last few weeks and expect everything to work and expect that your supervisor will be there to help 24 hours a day.

Unfortunately, this insight often comes quite late to some of the students. They don't seem to understand that if you start your "Master thesis course" a couple of weeks late that you have to catch up right away if you want to keep your head above the water. And even if you are used to go for travels in the semester break, it might be a good idea to spend this time in the lab instead. A decent literature overview takes more time to prepare and to write than some homework about the content of the last few classes.

Most supervisors (I guess) have a chat with their students about their expectations and about a thesis being so much more complex than a course. But still a lot of them (including myself) complain about students who do not show up for weeks and weeks, who send in terrible drafts seeking advice 24 hours before the deadline and who need several months to complete the safety paperwork to be even allowed to enter the laboratories. How can they not care about their own degree?

How can you make it clear to the students, that with starting a thesis the bar has been set higher? How can you motivate the students, who are not self.motivated enough? Where does this "I don't care" mentality come from? We had a lot of discussions about this but can't come up with a decent answer. Do we need even more structure? Or less? Have we lowered the bar too much and should we fail more students? Do we need to take them by the hand even more or is there something in our way to communicate that the students don't get that we are serious about this?

Are there any strategies out there to get your students on track? I'd love to hear about them.

New Year status

2013 has been flying by like nothing. It totally does not feel like New Year again, I'm mentally still stuck somewhere between June and September. If I think about all that has happened this year, it seems to be enough to fill 12 months, but still my soul did not quite follow the fast pace of the passing days.

And even though it is just one day following another the turn of the year is always a good milestone to check the current situation and clarify the boundary conditions to make proper plans for the following months.

This where I'm at:

• The most important point on this list is of course my pregnancy, which will last another month or so. My private life has been very settled with quite a bit of nice routines and there was not much to worry about - which I totally didn't mind. This will certainly change when the LittleOne takes his first glimpse of Australian summer and a slight nervousness about his arrival has already set in. He will certainly not only turn our private life up side down but my professional life as well and then we'll see if all my preparations were enough to keep my science on a good track - between nappy changes and sleep deprivation.
• The second most important point is that I have used last year to work on my future career. I've started in Feb already to talk to people about different options post-Australia, about different fellowships or general employment and until August or so I was very confident that I'll have this sorted out until..... welll.... now! Which did not happen. I'm writing on a big fellowship application but at the moment I can't progress because I don't have enough technical information from my host institution. And as I predicted: if I don't get this information before Christmas, I won't get it until the New Year. So I am stuck and I'm really worried, if I messed up the communication with my hosts so badly at some point, that they are not willing to support me at the moment. At the same time I'm hoping that this whole mess-up has nothing to do with me but is just a bad coincidence of a lot of work and unis closing over Christmas. I'm starting to think about other options, even though I really want this project proposal to be handed in, because it is a great topic and it would be an even greater opportunity for me if it would get funded. But for my sanity I had to sign up on every academic job portal I could find.
• In the meantime while my project proposal is on hold, I am writing on another big paper. It's a summary paper of the huge project my PhD project was connected to and as my PhD advisor is too occupied to write it himself, he offered me to take over his part. This is a great opportunity for me and it prevents me from pondering too much about the messed up communication situation.
• Publication-wise I had the plan to publish at least 3 first author papers this year and in June this aim was still in reach. Finally, I only managed to publish one paper this year. But I finalized the "doomed project" and we might even get a cover page out of it. Even though it was not published with a 2013 stamp on it, this was a lot of work and a big achievement - and I will certainly not write such a big piece again any time soon!
• My PhD students start in their final years and while I am quite confident about the progress of one of them I am a bit worried that the other got lost on too many tangents that can't be properly tied together in a good thesis. I've learned a lot about how much guidance, how much pressure, how much freedom they need to progress well and now I have to use this knowledge to get them on the writing track and to get the focused on the gaps that need to be filled before they can finish. All while being on maternity leave...
• Mentally I am in a state that I really would like to move back home. Even though I know that coming to Australia has been the best choice for my personal and professional development and I used every opportunity my university offered me during this time. But here is not home and it is not even close to it. We came here with the plan to stay for a few years and even though everybody here told us that we most likely don't want to leave anymore after a few years, this has not become true for us. The time we had set for us to be here is over and now the longing for going back home becomes stronger every day. This is the main aim for 2014: to find a possibility to go back to our home country and if that is not possible then to reduce the traveling time at least significantly.

The New Year starts with a lo of open questions and besides the plan to move back I don't have any other specific plans yet. Too much depends on how easy-going the LittleOne will be and how long it will take to find our family rhythm. I'm very curious and a bit scared about all the things that will change this year. How we survive as a family, if I will be perceived differently in my professional context with a child, if we will find a new place to live and work that we both like, ...

Have a Happy New Year all you readers and bloggers out there, an exciting and fulfilling one, whatever that means for each single one of you!

the requirements for promotion

Promotion: the process where you have to wrap up your work, your achievements, your aims on a few pages and present yourself in the best possible light to climb on the next career step and be allowed to bear a new title.

This process is totally new to me. On the one hand, of course, because I am still a "newbie" and the only "promotion" I had was from grad student to post doc, but on the other hand because the process here is totally different to the country where I did my PhD. In PhD-country there are no titles like "Associate Lecturer" or "Senior Lecturer" - you are either a Postdoc or a Professor. And because of this there is no small-step promotion process - there is just the big jump to the Professor-level. In PhD-country the salary depends on your age and maybe on how long you have worked at uni and it is automatically adapted each year. In Australia we have the same system, but just within one salary group. As an Associate Lecturer my salary will increase up to highest salary within this group and then I have to go through the promotion process to the Lecturer level, if I want my salary to increase further. This is the situation I am in at the moment. I've been here for a while now and have a decent track record, so I thought it would be good to apply for promotion! There is a bunch of boxes I have to tick and I have to put a big application together which shows all my achievements since I am here.

Out of curiosity I had a look at the promotion policies of other Australian universities and it appeared that they vary quite a lot from each other.

I certainly didn't do a comprehensive search, but from my impression most universities have quite comprehensible promotion requirements.

For example the University of Technology Sydney has the following requirements for promotion from level A to B:

The staff member’s overall performance should:
(i) consistently exceed that normally expected of a level A academic
(ii) demonstrate the staff member’s capacity to perform at the level of Lecturer
(iii) demonstrate the staff member’s capacity to pursue a successful academic career as evidenced by, for example:
• the commencement of an academic portfolio. [...]
• the ability to achieve an appropriate balance between teaching, research and service over time
• the ability to make linkages between these three areas and understand how one can inform the other
• the ability to form productive relationships and work collaboratively and in teams
(iv) reflect at least competent performance across each of the three areas of academic activity (a)-(c) described below. .[....]
(v) demonstrate high personal standing in terms of workplace behaviour, including ethical and professional behaviour, respect for others, a collegial approach and support for equity and diversity in the University community.

So, to get promoted one has to be at the top level of the Associate Lecturer cohort and show promise to be able to perform well on the Lecturer level. Sounds feasible.

The University of Sydney gives a little table to explain their threshold levels for promotion, which for Research focused promotion (there is teaching only and research and teaching combined as well) looks like this:

The explanation for the different levels is the following:

Exceptional - An applicant whose achievements are Exceptional should demonstrate highly significant achievements and contributions in relation to the criteria at the level for which the applicant is applying.

Outstanding - An applicant whose achievements are Outstanding should demonstrate achievements and contributions which clearly meet the criteria at the level for which the applicant is applying.
Superior - An applicant whose achievements are Superior should demonstrate highly significant achievements and contributions in relation to the criteria at the applicant's current level.
Satisfactory - An applicant whose achievements are Satisfactory should demonstrate achievements and contributions which meet the criteria at the applicant's current level.

So, at the University of Sydney one has not only to be at the top of the current level, but one has to show significant contributions compared to the people in the level above. This is a significantly higher hurdle to take compared to UTS. 

But the most specific promotion requirements I found for the University of New South Wales. They give a neat little table as well, giving the option to go for research focused, teaching focused or combined. But they are much more specific about on what level they want an applicant to perform. Here is the table:

 

 

And the abbreviations mean: 

Outstanding Plus is expected standard at the top quartile of level above current appointment (O+)
Outstanding is expected standard between the midpoint and the top quartile of the level above current appointment (O)
Superior is expected standard at the midpoint of level above current appointment (Sup)
Sustained is expected standard for the bottom quartile of the level above the current level of appointment (S) 

Not Sustained is a level of performance that is no higher than at the current level (NS)
Acceptable level of performance requires evidence of engagement with the university in both teaching and service (A)

To get promoted on the research focused track your research achievements have to be above the midpoint of what people in the level above you have achieved. So, you have to perform in the upper part of level B for at least some time while you are still level A, to be able to be promoted to level B. Which means you must be as good as or nearly as good as the people who plan to become promoted to level C, for which the same criteria are in place. This sounds to me like a crazy strategy to ensure the quality of each level is constantly increasing (which is not a bad thing per se). And what happened to the people in the lower two quartiles of a certain level? They must have started off somewhere above midpoint by definition. And where is the upper limit for this "quality increasing" strategy?

ticking the boxes

box one ticked: reached the 20 papers published mark - that does not sound a lot, but it was my goal for this year and I reached it already in May!

box two ticked: was asked to give an invited talk on a nice conference! Again: doesn't sound special, but it's my first one!

So: progress happens, can't complain!

Structureless

Why is it sometimes so hard to have a well structured working day? I have gazillion things to do, the uni is still pretty quiet and nobody really distracts me, but still there are some days where I can't finish one thing before I start another. Today I did data analysis for two paper drafts and some literature reading for a third one, just because while working on one I got some ideas about the others and directly had to check it. Then I had to check some more stuff and seconds later I already had forgotten why I actually changed the topic I was working on. This is an ongoing issue for me and I'm not very happy that I have not improved much since I wrote about it last time.

I know that having a plan for each day and each week works very good for me. When I was still commuting to work I was using the time on the train to note down daily plans. Ticking each point off was very motivating. I still have a general to-do list, not really a weekly plan though. But I never made it to having a plan for the whole year or even just a month, with well defined goals and stuff, even though that's supposed to be fantastic as well. Setting up a plan for the whole year scares me even a bit. When I'm really honest I think it would show me merciless that I'll never ever be able to do all the work that I think / wish /dream I could. So it even would be very helpful to become more realistic... *sigh*. Things like this seem to need a lot of fresh attempts to maybe / hopefully / finally master them.

different styles

My current and my former supervisor are very different personalities -not only in their general character, but especially in their style of leading a research group. 

My former supervisor is a very organized leader, who seems to have everything from deadlines for proposals to latest possible thesis defense date for each of his PhD students always present in his head. He says things like: "If you give me your paper draft until tomorrow at 3:30, I can read it on the plane and send the comments to you next Wednesday before 10am." and that is exactly what happens. He is running weekly group meetings not only to have all his students presenting their stuff once in a while, but he organizes who attends at which conference, who takes care of the next exchange student, the next group BBQ,... during these meetings and he lets his group know way in advance when he will be out of office.

My current supervisor is much more flexible with these things. Everything gets organized well and people know when they are in charge of something. But usually these decisions happen behind the scenes and often enough a new student arrives and only one of the grad students (the responsible one) knows about it. Same applies for his "out of office" times. If you need to be aware of them, because i.e. you have to hand in your thesis soon and there must be enough time for him to have a look at it, you'll know that he'll be away. But there is no general “keep the group informed” strategy as with my last supervisor.

While working with my former supervisor I found his perfect planning and thinking ahead very admirable yet sometimes even intimidating, as it set the standards very high for everybody who worked with him. Now I recognize that this actually brings the individuals in a group much more together. Everybody is on the same page and knows which deadlines, conferences, students, tasks,… are lying ahead. In my current group, the information gets transported where needed, but people work much more separate from each other – which has advantages of its own.

When it comes to my students, I often find myself acting not very strategic or long-term planned. I tell them when I’ll be away, but not very much in advance and I’ll let them know, when I see interesting conferences or workshops coming up, but I don’t have a specific timeline in my head for each of them. Even though I really appreciated that my PhD supervisor had this distinct plan and timeline for me as his PhD student.

I guess this is because I’m not their main supervisor, so I don’t actually make the strategy for them. I just push them, annoy them, motivate them, guide them, cheer them up on a daily basis. 

What is a good point in an academic career to have some deep thoughts and first actions about styles of leading a research group and strategies for successful PhD supervision? While you are “only” co-supervising? Or when you start with you first 100% responsibility student?

first baby steps in teaching

As I forecasted in the last post, my teaching kept me quite busy during the last weeks. It's the first class I'm teaching at all. I did a lot of lab course supervision for students from various disciplines during my undergrad and PhD time, but this is my really first serious class. I don't know how this is handled at other universities, but I just got pushed into the cold water. I got the old slides of my supervisor and the PostDoc, who gave the course last year. But that was about it. And slides, which mostly show graphs copied from various publications without any bullet points, are not sooooo helpful. So, I'm learning how to swim right now within a topic I haven't fully mastered myself. 

The first lecture was just awkward. I have never seen how a lecture within my school is "usually given", I don't know much about the curriculum and what the students are supposed to know. They are not all directly connected to our School. Some are enrolled in different studies and can do my course as an optional one.

 So, I gave a classic teacher-centered class, mostly me talking, mostly rushing too fast over important topics and I looked at quite a few confused faces at the end of it. I find it very hard to balance between explaining stuff on a too basic level and overwhelming them because I assume to much pre-knowledge. In the first class I definitely took too much knowledge for granted.

In the next classes I tried to implement more interaction with the students, asked more questions, let them use the stuff I talked about right away. That worked a bit better and there were a few bulbs lightening up once in a while. It still wasn't a totally amazing class, but at least I didn't drown half way through the course.

And now I just recognized how much I remind myself of all these young teachers I had in High School, who were fresh out of university, trying to test all the stuff they have learned during the last years on their students. Sometimes I liked that and sometimes I felt like a little lab rat with electrodes connected all over.

But its exactly what I'm doing right now for my class: Digging out everything I have ever heard of "engaging" teaching practices and test them out. And it's actually fun. I don't know how much for the students (I'll see in the evaluation, I guess), but at least for me. Next time I'll bring paper, cord and modeling clay. And then we'll see if this is a good learning experience or if my students feel relegated to pre-school.

adjustments to the timetable

Recently I admitted to myself that something seems to go pretty wrong since I'm here. I used to be much more productive and organized during my PhD, but here I'm easily distracted, esp. by all the random thoughts in my head. So I decided to put my focus-helmet back on and dig out some of the old strategies which helped so much in the past.

One of my main problems - and this sounds silly now - is the general working culture here. At my former uni I worked mostly from 8am to 6pm, because I was commuting and bound to the timetable of the trains. This external condition structured everything a lot. If you walk in here at 8am in the morning, you'll maybe meet one or two grad students but certainly no postdocs. This was very confusing during my first days at work, but I adapted very fast and by now I come to work around 9-9:30am - even though I know that my most productive time is in the morning and the best thing I can do in the afternoon is a nap.

So this will be adjusted back to the original time schedule and I'll try to come to work an hour earlier, even though I really got used to sleeping very long.

To make things even more complicated I decided to combine this task with a second one, inspired by Tanya’s fantastic blog and the book The Clockwork Muse. I realized how difficult it is for me to find time for my writing, when there is no boss who gives you a deadline and asks for drafts. So I'll test some strategies to get my own self-motivated and self-structured writing going, starting with dedicating some fixed time slots of my working hours to the task "writing" and then working my way through all the posts on Tanya’s blog - maybe.

I'm very excited about these adjustments, eve though they seem tiny and very straight forward - and then we'll see what a quiet office and one more hour of productive morning time can do to my research.

uni support - love it!

I just realized again how much effort my uni puts into supporting and "growing" its staff. Besides all the mandatory courses a new staff member has to attend, esp. about workplace safety stuff, there is a large variety of workshops offered, which are really well set up and I always take a bunch of new ideas back to my office. In my former uni we didn't have support like that and if there actually was a workshop related to the topics a researcher is interested in, it was not well advertised, so that most likely you heard about it a few weeks after it was held. Here, you can't actually miss the announcements because your mailbox is swamped (in a positive way) with reminder emails.

Workshops are usually held for all disciplines in the university together and depending on topic for all levels of academic staff. So that besides attending a good lecture, you usually meet a lot of interesting people from other faculties, who sometimes have very different views on how to teach students good writing habits or how to structure your own research. And well established concepts from the business or the arts people (had a few very nice conversations with people from the School of Arts) can be very fresh for someone in my field.

A lot of my colleagues don't attend any workshops, because they think, they don't have time for that and they are too busy with their research, paper writing, student supervision, lecture preparation,.. to once in a while spare half a day for a workshop. Even though the topics of the workshops are about efficient writing and reading, being a supervisor, transferring research ideas into good projects,.... . Maybe some of them even think, they know all the tricks anyways and don't need fresh input.

But I think the uni does a great thing in providing these workshops and investing in the development of its academic staff. Thank you! Love it!