Dear fellow researchers... (this is a rant!)

... it is quite normal that after spending hours/days/months in the lab/in front of the computer/scribbling notes and equations on paper, we have the desire to show the world the results of all our hard work (and of course because the next funding agency we apply to needs to be impressed was well). And of course we are all busy and writing a publication can be a tedious task.

But if you think it is good style to toss all your data of all the 38 systems you've found in your drawer in one confusing graph, that it is enough to describe details of these graphs that can't actually be seen in the text and base your conclusions on them without providing proper evidence and that this huge mess will then be published, you just missed a very important point. You should not be writing to increase the length of your publication list! Surprised? You should be writing to make your research progress available to the public or at least to the science audience. You should write in a way that the story of your research is easy to grasp for the reader. He should not be forced to decipher from 20 different data sets presented as black lines, which one is the double dash dot one. Nor should it be necessary to read up 5 other publications to be able to follow your conclusions. Trying to wrap up your research in a concise and maybe even (gasp!) interesting way is certainly a skill that needs to be practiced, but it is as well a courtesy to your audience to at least try. And in general it is always a good idea to have a good think about the reviewer comments, before you reply something along the line that you don't give a shit. I dearly hope you will not be able to find reviewers who let you publish this mess!

Rant: stop!

this is so nice

When people remember you even though you have just talked to them a couple of times and the last time was already about a year age. And when they not just recognize your but even remember your name and some topics you talked about the last time you've met. It is so nice it's nearly creepy! I'd love to be as good in connecting names to faces as my colleague is who just remembered mine after a very long time.

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!

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!

if I had a resolution list for 2014...

... this would be on it: reading less but more in depth and with undivided attention!

It is as Zoe says in her article: I have piles of unread papers printed and electronically stored. All were somehow urgent at the time I downloaded them. For some of them this process took place over a year ago. At the moment I don't read multiple books simultaneously, but it wouldn't be unusual if I did.

In the last few years I've degraded into a skimmer, especially for professional reading. I'm searching for a certain bit of information and just fly over publications to find it. But often I don't see the whole story anymore and I feel too busy to take the time to really think about what I'm reading. Even though this is bread and butter in scientific research.

So I'll adopt this as "optional" resolution for 2014: less but deeper reading. Thanks Zoe - maybe maternity leave is a good time to develop - or re-develop - such a habit.

the four horsemen of writers block

I read this post when I was caught in the claws of horseman No 4 - it put everything back into perspective.

is there something like a "perfect supervisor"?

When I think back about myself as an undergrad and a grad student and how I perceived more senior people around me, I'd say that a lot of them appeared to me as authorities. Authorities in a sense that I would take their opinions serious and I'd respect the time they'd take for me as well as their knowledge and experience in general. When I'd been given a task by them I'd try to complete it in a timely and satisfactorily manner. Authoritarian people were my professors, my direct undergrad and PhD supervisors, other more senior people in the faculty, collaborative partners of our group,.... . For most of them I had and still have deep respect even from a personal point of view. For some of them I had not much respect regarding to their general character, but still for their scientific expertise and experience. Recalling the behavior of my fellow students back then I'd say most of them shared a similar view on what makes a person an authority and how to behave in that context. In that sense we were a very homogeneous group and I never had the impression that our professor treated some of us different to the others.

Looking at myself now, a few years out of my PhD and after having supervised a bunch of students, I wonder if I am perceived as an authority by them - or not at all. What I didn't like as student were people who tried to build their authority on "impeccable knowledge". People who'd never admit a mistake or a gap in knowledge and who had a talent to make you feel crappy if your own knowledge is not as flawless as theirs. I think this behavior stops real learning and inhibits good research, which is never flawless, and I never wanted to become like that. 
However, some my students seem to demand this kind of behavior. They seem to expect that I have to know everything about their research topics even before they have done a single experiment and they express their disappointment when I don't. I can see my "score" on their respect scale drop significantly in that case and it rises again when I appear "knowledgeable enough". This seems to be a constant and very tiring game and they play it not only with me but with everybody from student to professor level - sometimes more, sometimes less obvious. Instead of working together on an interesting project acknowledging each others abilities and experience I feel like I am under constant surveillance and rated against some imaginary "perfect" supervisor. The only way out seems to be to play the impeccable supervisor. But that would be tiring as well and against everything I'd like to be as a supervisor. So, how to be an authority in this case without pretending to be someone I am not?

I am convinced that the way you decided to lead your group has to fit your personality. But I am convinced as well that to do so you have to be able to choose the students you want to work with to avoid major personality clashes. At the moment I can't choose the students I work with and most likely it will take a few more years until I can if at all. And even then it'll always happen that the expectations of a student don't fit with your style of heading your group. Some people seem to be naturally authoritarian not matter what kind of situation they are put into or what kind of people they have to deal with - unfortunately I'm not. 
So how can I deal with a group of very diverse students with very diverse expectations about what a good supervisor should be like? How much personalized care does every student need, how much do the students have to adapt to the supervisor I am and how can we still work together to improve our scientific output? How much distance is necessary and how much interest in each other beyond the research? How can I keep everybody motivated if what motivates them is so different and often not even clear to them?

go for a swim

it's good for your brain! 

And reading The Conversation of course helps as well.

how much trust, how much control?

This is a question I ponder about a lot. How much freedom should you give your students in their work and how much should you trust them that they stick to the rules of scientific working even when there are so many tempting options that could make their life easier.

GMP wrote this great article about taking over paper drafts that don't come along good enough or fast enough if written by students. This is one great example about the boundary between giving freedom and trusting that the students will do a great job - even though it might take a while - and taking over control at some point to get that paper out to the public.

Another related point is plagiarism. We all would love to have students who don't copy and paste sentences or whole paragraphs from other peoples work and it would save so much time to not have to check at all. I often feel bad, that I do check my students works for plagiarism, because -hey- they are not little kids anymore, they are grown-ups in their mid 20s, they know the rules, they understand why these rules are in place. But often enough I get reports written in more or less heavy accent of whatever nation the author comes from and in between there are these flawless, well constructed sentences. Pasting them in Google gives a straight hit in 99% of the cases - very sad, but at least you know that they had a look at some of the famous papers in their field. So I continue to check on them, which is annoying, takes a lot of time and does not build my trust in their general scientific work.

Because if they copy and paste from other people for their reports, what is their standard for their own work? How well do they conduct their experiments? Do they just show me the one flawless data set and don't mention the other 10, which look "unexpected"? I had a case like this once and it made me dig through the persons raw data, which was a real pain. Of course there are people with very high standards, who prefer to measure 5 additional data sets just to be sure and who are not afraid of data that does not look like textbook but instead ask the big "why is this" question. If I'd dig through their raw data I'd understand that they would feel treated like little kids.

Another sensitive topic is the communication with collaboration partners. I'd love to have my students discussing their projects with more senior scientists and this means that there has to be an initial contact at first. If they don't meet in person on a conference or during a visit, this contact will be most likely via email - and there are so many pitfalls to be aware of. Some students just write perfectly polite emails just by themselves, but others come across quite rude - even if from their cultural background they should be very good in expressing respect towards a more experienced person. Does that mean I have to check emails before they are sent? That again feels like massive paternalism.

How do you determine the level of control a certain student needs? Do you fully trust them in the beginning and adjust the control level on the go? Or do you control a lot and let them run free if they seem to get the concepts of scientific standards? What if they don't care and try to take the "easy path" again and again?

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?

journal club

In our institute we have a bunch of researchers working on similar stuff as I do. It took me over a year to figure that out because there is not much collaboration going on and we don't have larger research funding in this field that would force people to work together. A colleague came up with the idea of a journal club, where we could meet on a regular basis and discuss a recent paper of significant importance. We agreed that this would be great and might even lead to some internal collaborations. But it'll be difficult to get esp. all the senior people together for this who might "just" send their students, if at all. But finally, we haven't done anything to give this idea a try.

This will change now! I'm very motivated to give the whole thing a try and by now I'm not a total newbie anymore, so I think I should show some initiative. So far there is just the idea to meet and discuss a paper that hopefully everybody has read beforehand, presented by a different person each time.

Are there any actions to spice this concept a bit up (maybe except pizza and beer), to make it more interesting and valuable for both the senior staff and the grad students? And how often should such a meeting be scheduled? Any experiences with journal clubs in the web space?

striking a chord with me

A while ago I've been on a conference and really rare thing happened. I sat in a talk of a young PhD student from a different university and his work and results just struck a chord with me. I talked to him later on and got really excited about doing some experiments complementing his work, because I think it'll help answer one of the big questions in my field. As I said, this is a really rare experience for me. Usually I go to conferences and there are interesting talks, yes, and I take notes, yes, and sometimes I ask some questions. But it does not happen very often that other people's work inspire me so much, that I'd love to go to the lab right away and set up some experiments.

This seems to be similar for a lot of my colleagues. Many of them just sit in the talks during the first day and meet with their usual crows of collaborators during the rest of the event. This is important to catch up on common work and plan the next papers face-to-face. But what do we then need all the talks for? Why is the inspiring-rate so low? Or am I just really bad in seeing all the great stuff my colleagues are doing and how it relates to my work?

Is anybody here who usually gets a lot out of conference talks? I'd like to learn the tricks!

Climbing the literature mountain

or maybe better "drowning in the literature ocean".

When I commenced my position here in Australia I had a lot of time to read and I really enjoyed it. I had no fixed project and with this no equipment to do experiments on the non-existing samples together with my non-existing students paid by my non-existing money. So I used my time for reading, applied for some money with a project based on my literature research (and experience and collaborations and awesomeness, of course) and now I have money, students, samples and equipment. And by now even results! This is all awesome and I don't want it to change. Only the time that I can spend on reading the relevant literature becomes less and less. And my folder which is named "literature to read" has an obesity problem by now.

Many of my colleagues say, they only read for specific projects or publications in progress or sometimes in preparation for a class. But not to keep up with the science in their field in general. My supervisor seems to read only articles from one specific journal ( but he is involved in several other research topics, so maybe he has one preferred journal per topic). I get journal alerts from about 10 different journals covering the whole range from "superstar journal I want to publish in in the far future" and "mmhhhjiiaaa journal which I wouldn't want to publish in but sometimes they have good papers". The amount of stuff that is published every day is just overwhelming. And it's not only the scanning through the alerts which is already time consuming but then the actual reading and digesting and sorting and knowing where it is and that it is somewhere when I need it is what gives me headaches. But I really want to know where we are standing in the big picture, not only in the picture of 1-2 journals.

When talking to more senior researchers about my prospective career path one advice that I often hear is to have one bread-and-butter project, which constantly produces publishable data. And to have a second high-risk-high-return project, exploring a new field, pushing the edges of knowledge. Sounds like great advice and I hope I'll manage to open up such a project soon, but at the moment I'm already struggling to find out where the edges of knowledge are in my bread-and-butter project, 'caus I'm just drowning in the literature. To master the literature of something out my comfort zone seems not feasible at all.

Can I apply for a post-doctoral sabbatical, please? And just read for let say... 3 month? Preferably somewhere at a nice beach?

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.

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!