Helping the Minoritized Achieve in Academic Science

Archive for the ‘Mentoring’ Category

Small Changes for Big Impacts in Teaching

Going along with the 20% change rule, a couple PersonsOfScience who are CottrellScholars had some good things to say, so I am reposting them here. In case you are not aware, the Cottrell Scholars are a group of research faculty who take teaching very seriously. Their ideas and actions on good teaching practices are informed by education research literature. They know what they are talking about, but they don’t try to make you feel bad about what you don’t know yourself. Much like any good teacher, they are truly interested in educating people… about good teaching practices.

Andrew Feig says:

One of my favorite quick fixes is Just-In-Time Teaching. This is a method wherein you give a short assignment to the students typically due about 15 or 30 minutes prior to class. The assignment can be a warmup exercise based on the readings, it can recap something from the prior class or it can assess if students remember a foundational skill relevant to the topic of the day. The idea is to get the students engaged in the material prior to setting foot in class. You then browse the answers quickly immediately prior to starting class so that you can start the class with a comment based on how the class performed. If they did well, complement them and move on. If they could not do something that you expected them to be able to do (such as the foundational question or one that identifies a common misconception), then you had better stop and address the issue before moving onward with the new material. To make it work, you must be consistent and do it for every class and you must spend a minute or two at the start of class addressing the problem they did. It also helps to award a trivial number of points for completion. Grade on completion not correctness here. Remember, the goal is to judge if they can do an exercise and you don’t want them circumventing the challenge and copying from one another.

Many resources are available on line to learn more about JITT including:

http://webphysics.iupui.edu/jitt/what.html

http://www.pkal.org/documents/Vol4JiTT21stCenturyPedagogies.cfm

Sarah Keller says:

Here’s a quick one: Assign a homework problem requiring students to write an “exam question” that would be appropriate for a future students taking the final in the same class, along with the answer key. Students get a nice review of the course material while they are hunting for ideas. As a bonus they discover (and are usually surprised to find out) that writing a decent exam question is hard; they become more appreciative of good exams with interesting problems.

Some compiled hints are at: S.L. Keller and A.L. Smith, Advice for New Faculty Teaching Undergraduate Science J. Chem. Educ., 83, 401-406, 2006.

Thanks for the great ideas Cottrell Scholars!

Category:

Career, Mentoring, New Job, Teaching, TimeManagement

Managerial Solutions

In the last post, I gave some specific examples where communications and lack of policy led to annoying and awkward situations that had relatively large consequences (at least at the time). These issues are managerial. Leadership and management skills are a huge part of running a lab, and we are not taught how to do this at all. There is some idea that if you are a good and organized researcher who has had some smart people as your advisors in the past, you will just pick up all these things. Why should any of that be true? There is no guarantee that because you are good at science you are good at management or even that organized! And the idea that someone else who has been successful is also a good manager is laughable. A lot of leadership and management comes down to communication, but just saying things is not enough, because students don’t always listen (just think about lecturing in class!).

In this post, I want to give some solutions I came up with to tackle these issues. I hope if others have other creative and innovative solutions, they share them as well.

State of the Lab Address:   I realized a lot of the issues I was having with students came from cultural differences. I don’t mean cultural like a foreign country, although I have always had international students and postdocs, I mean that I expected the lab to have a certain culture, a certain work ethic, a certain civility and collegiality. If you lab is established, a new student can get a lot of this from cultural cues from the other people, but a new lab has no culture yet! Partly some of this stuff is out of your control and depends on the personalities in the lab, but actually a lot of the tone is set by you as the leader of the group, what you will tolerate, and what you will not. So, I decided to just spell it out and not leave it ambiguous.
The State of the Lab address is also an orientation talk for new people in the lab and a reminder to those who have been there for a while. The first pages go through lab culture stuff like Who is in the lab? What are graduate students and what are they supposed to do? What policies do they adhere to that are specific to them? What is expected from undergraduates? What is a postdoc and what are they supposed to do? Perhaps most importantly, what is a Principle Investigator (PI = you)? What are you doing all day when they don’t see you in the lab? Some immature students feel like they only need to be in the lab if the PI is there. I disabuse them of that idea early on and actually explain that I do a lot of lab work in my office writing grants and papers. The address changes based on changing lab policy, organization, and what is happening.
I couch all of this in an allegory of the lab as a small business. I tell them I am the CEO and my job is lead them to success. They are the shareholders and they should realize that the success of the lab depends on their success. The explain that our product from the lab is papers, presentations at meetings, and good students who can reason and think creatively. Unlike a real small business, we don’t make a profit and I can’t go to a bank to get a loan to pay them, so part of my job as CEO is to get the money. I do this by writing grants to the government and foundations. Without these sources of funding none of them would be able to do research in the lab. I also tell the students straight out what our financial situation looks like. I tell them how many grants we have and what it covers. I let them know if I am getting summer salary or working for free over the summer. I tell them how much certain equipment costs and remind them to be careful with it. I tell them how much money we spend on disposable lab supplies and reagents each month. I tell them what grants I am working on, how much we ask for, and the chances of getting it. I know a lot of people try to hide these sausage-making details from their students, but why? When you explain and they can understand the concerns of the lab, they go in with open eyes.
After these discussions, I spend some time on the individual projects of the lab members and how they should be spending their time, so there is no confusion about who is working on which project. We have very few issues with project ownership in the lab because I try to discuss it openly in a full lab meeting with all members present. I make these little presentations twice a year, so everyone is up to date on what is going on consistently.
Lab Rules: Although the State of the Lab really helped define lab culture and told policy, not every student can see that presentation right when they come into the lab. Further, there are a lot of other policies that the lab has, and they cannot all be covered in one meeting that has to address culture, too. So, based on my friend AfricanAmericanManOfScience’s own document that he came up with after the fire incident, I developed a set of Lab Rules.
The Lab Rules are an 8-page document that details all the policies of the lab. When a new policy arises, it goes in the document. Here are some topic headings I have in my Lab Rules document:
  1. Personal Issues, Work, and Work Hours
  2. Lab Organization
  3. Lab Meetings, Seminars, Journal Clubs, Semesterly Reports
  4. Reagent Preparation, Use, and Disposal
  5. Reagent Storage
  6. Ordering and Receiving
  7. Data Collection and Archiving
  8. Lab Safety and Environmental Health
  9. Computers
  10. Major Equipment Use and Maintenance
In order to ensure that the students read it, they must print, read, sign the document. I have them return the final signature page to me, which I keep on record and will use if something goes wrong. Having these rules spelled out, in print, and forcing them to read it has cut down a lot of incidents in my lab. This is especially useful in the summer when my lab balloons up with visiting student researchers.
Undergraduate Documents: I have a lot of undergraduates working in my lab over the summer and each semester. I found I was losing track of which ones were being paid, getting credit from which department, and communicating to them what the expectations were for them to be in the lab and do their work. I decided to make a couple of undergraduate-specific documents. The first was a UndergraduateApplication to work in the lab, an idea that came from a peer mentor colleague while discussing over lunch. I was getting a huge number of students asking to work in the lab, and he found that this simple barrier to making them fill out a form before he would meet with them cut down a lot of frivolous meetings with students who weren’t really interested. The Application is simple with their name, classes and grades, the names of 1-2 professors who can serve as a reference, and if they are in the honors college or interested in a thesis or capstone project.
After they fill out the application to work in the lab, we meet, and decide if they are going to join the lab. If they are joining the lab, we decide how many hours they will work and how they will be compensated (money, if available vs. credit vs. just volunteering). When that is settled, we fill out a contract. The contract has all the details of if they are getting paid or credit, which course they sign up for in which department. They sign and I sign, and we make a copy, so we are all on the same page. I keep it until the end of the semester, so I can keep track with which students need to have grades reported and which department to report the grades to. This system works much better than trying to remember for 6 different students.
Lab Fun: All this managerial stuff is boring, so I try to do some team building as well. We try to take lab trips at least once in the summer to the beach or a lake. I think a lot of people do this because it is fun, but it serves an important part of building lab morale and camaraderie. Another thing I do that is specific to my lab is to make wacky science videos. Unlike in other labs where the students self-organize behind the professor’s back, mine is professor-initiated and lab-sanctioned. We take a whole day in the summer, make costumes, work out shots and film. Someone has to take the film to edit it into a video. I did this at first, but I don’t have time anymore, so I rely on having at least one student with editing skills. When it is done, we watch it and post it to YouTube.
I am sure there are many other creative and innovative ways to manage a lab and cut down on silly miscommunications or other issues. Please comment or guest post (it can be anonymous), if you have more helpful hints!

Category:

Mentoring, New Job, Research

Starting the Tenure Track

Starting up a new tenure track job is really, really hard. You are stepping into a new job that you were not trained to do. Up until now, your training was in research, and research is important (especially at research-intensive universities). In your new tenure track job, you will also have to teach (well), perform service work, mentor students and guide them, start a lab/research group from scratch, and manage people, manage budgets, manage your time. This job is not just one job, but several. The worst part is that you were supposed to have learned all these skills through osmosis somehow and observation. Unfortunately for many of us, our prior mentors were not good teachers, mentors, or managers. Or if they were, they did not share the secrets of their craft either through purposeful or accidental neglect. Thus, we are left to bumble through and figure things out on our own. 

Over the next few posts, I will be discussing some of the parts of starting a new job and some possible strategies for coping with myriad of new things you are now responsible for. In addition, the initial trial period before attaining tenure is prime time for fertility and trying to start a family and a life. Many women have babies in this time because it is now of never.  I hope the next several posts will help those entering and make those who somehow made it through feel better about how they did to get to the next stage. Please send guest posts and comments, especially those who just got tenure or are still pre-tenure and have specific questions.

Category:

Career, Mentoring, Service, Teaching, TimeManagement, WomenRock

Mentoring on the Fly

Just like mentoring in the classroom, mentoring does not have to formal or scheduled. Throughout my career, I have started a number of mentoring groups for women both in graduate school and as a professor. These can be very helpful, but I think I have had the most impact and success mentoring on the fly. Here are some examples of what I mean.

Whenever I pass a WomanGraduateStudentOfScience in the hall or stairwell, I ask them how they are doing, how their research is going, if they are writing papers, and what the next step is for them in their research or their careers. These casual mentoring activities do not have lasting impacts, but they show you care. Several of these students have turned to me when bigger issues have arisen in their careers.

I have a group of peer and near-peer colleagues in a variety of science departments on campus. I try to call them for lunch or meet them in the student center lunch room often to strategize about

Conferences are a time to see people from afar who you might not talk to usually. I always make sure to connect with any SeniorWomenOfScience mentors I have made over the years by having a lunch or dinner with them. I also connect with my broader peer-mentoring network to talk with others at the same stage as myself to exchange ideas of problem solving.

Small conferences, like Gordon Research Conferences, are another good place to do some on the fly mentoring. This can come through having lunch with graduate students and postdocs and having informal talks. Many of these conferences have open times in the afternoons. I once used that time to set up a meeting to mentor women at the conference. Several professors, women and men, came to offer their advice to the young women of the conference. We had over 20 people there from a 100-person conference. It was quite successful, and a number of women came out feeling like they knew better strategies than when they went in.

Do people have other example of mentoring on the fly? Comment or send a guest post.

Category:

Career, Mentoring

Mentoring Groups

Mentoring groups come in a variety of shapes and sizes. I have been involved in a number of these groups over the years, and have found them to be very helpful for problem solving and just plain bitching – both of which are needed to survive the academic career path.

In graduate school, I started a women’s group in the department I was in at the time. In grad school, it was for female graduate students. We had speakers and panels on these issues and met once a month. Some of the meetings were supported by the department with food (pizza). Sometimes the female professors would have us to their houses.

As a new assistant professor, I started a women and minorities mentoring group in my new department. After several years of teas, student talks, and student lunches with visiting women and minority scientists, I convinced the department to make it a true committee assignment that should be assigned to a male colleague as well as a woman. Thus, it was taken over a morphed by another, and they changed it. I was released from the extra organization, and made a sustainable contribution to mentoring in the department. The women who have run the group after me did not do the same activities as me, but that is good.

A couple years into my tenure track job, a couple of WomenOfScience at my university assembled two EveryOtherThursday groups for peer mentoring and group problem solving for professors. These groups are based on the book, “Every Other Thursday: Stories and Strategies from Successful Women in Science,” by Ellen Daniell. One group met after work. The other met during lunch. My group has women from all career stages, and their collective wisdom has helped me navigate through tenure. I am sure I could have made it without them, but it was a much better, more pleasant trip with their support. Further, despite my being on the younger side of the group, I felt I was able to mentor more senior women as they worked on issues that I had successfully navigated, such as the Two-Body Problem and juggling kids with work. I highly recommend getting into one of these groups or forming one of your own. They continue to be an essential part of my peer network on campus.

If others have other examples or mechanisms of group mentoring, don’t be afraid to comment or to send me a guest post!

Category:

Career, Mentoring, WomenRock

Mentoring in the Classroom

Another place where you can mentor students is in the classroom. This may be a less obvious place to mentor, but approaching classroom teaching as an opportunity to mentor can help you be a better teacher, allow you to connect to the students more personally, and help the students connect with you and see you as a real and likable person.

How can you incorporate mentoring into your class when you have a lot of material to cover with a limited time? Here are a few things I use that I invented and learned from other WomenOfScience. If you have other suggestions, please comment or send a post to me.

At the beginning of classes, I always get there early to get the room set-up for class. As students come in, I just chat with them. I talk to them about my lab, how research works, and what kind of research they might be interested in doing. I encourage them to get into laboratories and approach professors. I remind them that, professors are people too, but busy people. Even if they don’t get into the first lab/research group they try, they should keep trying and asking. If they are already doing research, I ask them about it, what is most challenging, and which skills they are learning. If I have to travel, I tell the students about where I am going and why. They are often proud that their teacher is a highly sought-after speaker, as opposed to thinking that I am skipping class and do not care about them. This also is a small way of self-promoting to the students, who are an important audience as future donors to the university and department.

When I teach classes for majors in my subject, I have homework sessions in the evening instead of office hours (more on that in teaching strategy posts). During these homework sessions, I have ample opportunity to talk with students one-on-one. Between homework problems, I ask them about why they are studying science, what they want to do when they grow up, and how they plan to get there. I explain how graduate school in science works and how they can apply. Most students are not aware that  graduate school is paid for, and they will get paid a stipend to teach and do research to live independently. This realization opens the world of graduate studies to many students who thought it was out of their reach financially.

At least one day of the semester is a lost cause. In the fall, it is the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. In the spring, the Friday before Spring Break. I am sure there are others. These are days when students just don’t attend because of holidays. You can cancel that day, and many do, especially if they are traveling. But, if your family is far away, you might not be able to travel for short breaks. Or, if Spring Break is the only time of the semester you can get some research done, you might not want to travel that week. Whatever the case, these throw-away days are perfect opportunities to mentor. I typically take that day to give a talk called, “How to Get Into Graduate School” for undergraduate courses. I advertise the topic beforehand, so students can choose to come or not. Some students who have to travel early ask me for the slides, and I provide them. For graduate courses, I take a day to talk about my research. I can use this to encourage graduate students to join my lab, show them how the topics of class pertain to my research, and give them an example of a research talk, which many of these students have never given before.

Like many professors who teach major classes, I get asked to write letters of recommendation. I basically always agree to do this when a student requests it. But, the student must also do some things in return. I ask that the student come to my office with a CV and a 1-page write up of their current research or research aspirations. Many of the students who request letters are those I see often at the start of class and in homework sessions, so I know some of the information, but I want to see it in their own words. Further, I can give them a little feedback on their CV, which it is often not clear how to format (I have seen some poor CVs even from professors because people often don’t think about the formatting, but it is important). I can also check out their writing skills and talk to them about their research, which I can then comment on in the letter. These extra steps are a low bar that dissuade non-serious students to rethink asking me for the letter. The good students get a little extra mentoring out of it.

Many of these things are tiny modifications to they way people act already, but these small overtures can go a long way to mentoring a wide array of students you see in class. Further, they will also help you get better teaching evaluations because the students can observe that you care about their development as scientists.

Category:

Mentoring, Self-Promotion, Teaching

Mentoring in the Lab

One place where a lot of mentoring occurs is in the laboratory/research group. This is a classic place where the master (you) are mentoring and directly educating the apprentice (student) in a one-on-one setting. There are a lot of different ways to mentor students. Some people are very hands-off. Others are very hands-on. Also, each student is going to need different mentoring on different aspects at different times in their tenure in the group. It is very much a fluid interaction that is easy to mess up, even if your students consider you to be a great mentor.

There are a variety of items students need mentoring and training about and many different mechanisms to achieve this. I am going to report what I find works best for me, but different people are… different. Please post other ideas of successful mentoring strategies as comments, or as guest posts!

Meetings. There are a variety of ways to meet with students. Many people like to have one-on-one meetings with each student every week. These can take a lot of time, especially if you have a lot of students. Further, it may not be necessary for most students who are continuing fine on their projects. I recommend streamlining meetings by having a group meeting where every student gives one slide each week. During this time, it often become obvious who needs more attention, and I set an individual meeting during the lab meeting. The slide has a specific structure, again to facilitate the process. Every student must have a list of what they did the past week with a image, movie, of plot to represent their work. They must list their goals for the following week. If someone doesn’t have a slide, they must do an interpretive dance of their work, which is funny and encourages them having a slide the following week.

Writing. Science writing is hard. And most of us learned it the hard way – through terrible cycles of trial and error trying to write our first manuscripts. In order to help that issue, I have adapted a strategy from another SeniorWomanOfScience to have informal writing assignments from my students. The original idea was to have monthly assignments, but that was too often, and I couldn’t keep up with the reading! Instead, I have semester/summer reports. Each person in the lab has to write one. It must include:

  1. A list of goals that the student had for the previous semester/summer.
  2. The experiments the student performed to reach those goals with data results (images of raw data, examples of analysis methods, and plots). Publication-worthy level is encouraged.
  3. Any problems that the student encountered in attaining those goals.
  4. A list of unmet goals.
  5. A list of goals for the next semester/summer.
  6. Your view of your progress, what you have done well, and what you need to improve on.
  7. Any new protocols developed over the last semester, typed, and as separate word documents.

The students turn them in, and I make comments in writing and return it to the students. If needed, we have a one-on-one meeting to discuss the report writing and figures, progress, changes in the goals for the next term. At least once, after seeing all the results together in one report, we submitted a paper. These regular writing assignments help students get over their fear of putting words to paper, facilitating the manuscript writing process.

Speaking. There is a lot of public speaking in science. Ironically, many students in science are shy. Thus, they need to practice and not just in front of you and the group. In addition to our weekly lab group meetings, we have a a multi-lab group meeting where students present their work. It is a reasonable safe environment, and I expect students to have seminar-level talks that explain the background, aims, raw data, analysis, and results of their research.

Research Training. Training students in good research techniques is the obvious mentoring avenue of academic science, yet it is surprisingly still neglected. Maybe people believe that students will learn things through osmosis or from their peers. Also, teaching students one-at-a-time is time consuming. In my lab, I developed a week-long lecture and lab curriculum that I term a “Bootcamp” to train new students. I offer it 1-3 times per year to teach basics of laboratory research specific to my lab. I start with some really basic ideas and orientation such as how to keep a laboratory notebook and how to do the types of calculations we use most in the lab. The students work is small teams and do hands-on laboratory work. This way, students learn all together, can teach each other through peer-learning, and create a sense of camaraderie early in the lab. Students who go through bootcamp start their projects seamlessly and feel comfortable in the lab. Students that do not often have a hard time incorporating into the group, and have a higher likelihood of leaving the lab without significant progress being made.

Research Group Culture. Another part of research is knowing some of the social aspects of the lab. Many new (undergraduate or high school) students coming into the lab don’t know what a graduate student or a postdoc are or what they do. Many graduate students and even postdocs don’t understand how what the PI does all day, since she is not in the lab. Such gaps in knowledge can get people into trouble and cause bad feelings between lab-mates. The easiest way to combat this is to just communicate. Twice per year, I give a lab meeting where only I speak called the “State of the Lab.” In it, I define the roles and responsibilities of people in the lab. I also take everyone through the funding situation and how it works and each science project from 10,000 feet, how it started, its current status, and where it is going led by which researchers of the lab group.

Category:

Career, Mentoring, TimeManagement

Mentoring

One of the WomenOfScience who follows this blog asked for some posts about mentoring. So, we are going to have a few posts on mentoring students of all levels, mentoring your peers, and mentoring on the fly. I think there is a stereotype that women are somehow innately good mentors. I can assure you, that is not the case. Further, why should women be better mentors than men innately? If everyone thinks that, then the bar will be set higher for women mentors than male mentors. Frankly, I think the bar is higher for women mentors than men, yet why should it be? Women are not innate mentors any more than we are innate moms. As a mom, I can tell you that we are not innate at motherhood. Mentoring and mothering are learned skill sets, and we will discuss some strategies for success in mentoring.

Category:

Mentoring

The Importance of…People

Guest Post from another WomanOfScience – Thank you!!

When I got to grad school I was lucky to already be a part of a research group (I had arranged with a professor to work in her lab the summer before my first year). I was even luckier that another student, one year ahead of me in school, had also recently joined the group. She quickly became a good friend and I honestly don’t know if I’d have a PhD today if she hadn’t. She helped me navigate the large state university 3,000 miles from my home. She helped me find an apartment. She introduced me to her friends (some of whom would be my TAs once school started). Just having her in the lab made it easier for me to show up to work. She was my friend, and she was my role model, guide, and mentor.

She also helped me in the lab, and I helped her too. We enjoyed working together. Our research projects were completely separate but we used similar (large) equipment and often needed a second set of hands. So she and I would help each other out occasionally, but our experiments took place in different rooms (on different floors) and soon we’d need to go our separate ways and return to work. Alone. A senior graduate student once commented to our advisor that he thought my friend and I would be unstoppable if we could do research together, but obviously science needs to be done alone. *Obviously*

So, most of my memories of graduate research are of being alone in a large, grey, chilly lab. It was not all bad. I am an introvert. I like having my own space and my own tools and equipment, organized in my own way. And when you’re getting good data everything is good! But it was common for me to spend days by myself, and I was lonely a lot of the time. I was also the only student in my group working on my project, so I didn’t have colleagues to run ideas off of or troubleshoot or be creative with. I was envious when my advisor hired a postdoc to work with a labmate on part of his project. They always seemed to be having fun!

I realize now, years later, that science does not need to be done alone and it is fun and rewarding to work with others. Ideas evolve when you work with others. You can be an independent scholar and have collaborators. You can be a scientist and be a person. Science should be done with others! I liked my PhD advisor in many ways, but I wish she had recognized how isolating our work conditions were. People are important.

Category:

Career, Mentoring, WomenRock

Women Are Awesome

I think women in science are awesome! They are highly competent, smart,  quick, and able to multitask in amazing ways. I don’t mean this to be sexist, but in my opinion, on average, women are typically better than their male colleagues. I think the reason is because the bar is so much higher for women. In order to be taken seriously and be seen as competent, women actually have to be better than men. It’s true! There was a recent paper about it in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA. See the paper here.

So, that means that by the time a woman has gone through all the trial and tribulations of graduate school, postdocing, and finding a position, they are probably pretty excellent. Now, this is not always the case, and that is OK. But 90% of the time, woman are absolutely fantastic.  I will be spending a couple posts on women.

Category:

Career, Mentoring, WomenRock

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