Helping the Minoritized Achieve in Academic Science

Archive for the ‘TimeManagement’ Category

What do I do?

As described a couple posts ago, there is a lot to do in this job. In my experience, it doesn’t all come at you at full force right at the beginning. For instance, when I got to my new position, I didn’t have a lab. So, although I was stressed about teaching and other new things, I didn’t have any people to manage or a place work to on research yet. Instead of lamenting the lab, I decided to take advantage of the fact that I didn’t have a lab. My solution was to spend time just writing grant proposals for the first two semesters while my lab was getting together. After this, I realized that spending committed time focusing on just one aspect of the job allowed me to get really good at it, so that it became second nature. After that committed time, I didn’t have to focus on that thing as much, and could use my new skills to save time. This is just another testament to the idea that there is no such thing as multi-tasking. Since you cannot really multi-task, why not focus on one thing at a time and get it right?

When I started my tenure track job, it worked out best for me to focus on grant proposal writing for 1 year.  A lot of the grants I wrote were horrible, but I got feedback, and I got better with practice. After writing more than 10 proposals, I actually got one my first year!

The second year, I focused on making my teaching better. After my teaching went just OK the first year, I decided to focus on making it great the second year. I re-wrote my lectures, offered evening office hours, and really worked to learn the names of my students. In our department, they have a good policy that you get to teach the same courses three times in a row. This is great because a class is always the worst the first time around, but once you get the hang of the material, the second and third years can be great.

By year three, I finally had reliable people in my lab, I had some grant money to hire people to work on specific projects, and we were getting results. In year three, I finally came back to research, which was super fun after my hiatus. I spent significant time with my students, gave myself my own projects to get good preliminary data for new work, and we wrote our first papers.

Although this timeline for focusing on proposal writing first, teaching second, and research third worked well for me, it is highly personally dependent. If you step into a beautiful lab that is fully functional with people who can work on day 1, maybe work on getting papers out first. Some people I know had this, and they got their first papers out a year before me. Most people I know had to wait 1-2 years for their lab situation to get working well. Why waste time and energy working on something out of your control that you cannot fix? Instead, refocus on other things that you can succeed at first. Get those things taken care of, so you can focus on other aspects later. By the fourth or fifth year, all the important aspects of this job are under control – tackled one at a time.

I want to mention that at no time did I focus on service. My advice is to perform adequate, or just good enough, on service to your department and college. Doing a good job doesn’t buy you anything and is a big waste of time for the other stuff you have to do. Once my grants and research got going, I got asked to do more service to my scientific community, such as reviewing grants, reviewing papers, and organizing conferences. I did not say no to those opportunities, and I did a good job on them, because they helped my research. These opportunities led to more invited lectures for seminars and conferences.

Do you have some helpful information about what to focus on first when starting an academic job? If so comment or guest post!

Category:

Career, New Job, Service, Teaching, TimeManagement

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 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

Two-Body Solutions Bring More Problems?

This was a comment left by another WomanOfScience. I decided to repost to share with all. Enjoy!

Hello, WomanOfScience, this is your friend SeniorTrailingSpouse. I am not sure I like this name! I made up another one, below. For those of you who could not glean from my given name, my husband and I are both academics in science/engineering. We were apart for several years, during which time I had two babies and raised them up to school-age and almost-school-age largely on my own. After lots of looking, drama, negotiation with both institutions, we are now together at his institution.

I have so much to say on the Two Body Problem that I am not sure where to start. I will get around to writing the guest posts I have promised you, WOS. However, today in particular I am struggling with something, and I thought I should pose the comment/question to you and hopefully your blogosphere.

If you are lucky enough to have the Two Body Problem solved, how to then balance both of your ambitions? Suppose we both have the opportunity to submit (different) big grants, both with deadlines around the same time. Our own individual research programs are fine in terms of funding, so working on these grants would be a choice. These are both large-scale proposals that actually won’t give us much money directly, but are great for the institution and would be high-profile wins in terms of reputation if we get them.

But we are tired, and we want to spend some time with the kids this summer, now that we are finally together as a family. One of us could definitely work on a proposal like this while still leaving us collectively with enough “family time,” I think. But if we both choose to work on proposals like this, it will mean a lot of craziness this summer. So which one of us “leans back?”

Strangely, I never thought about this much when I was living apart from my husband, even though I was solely responsible for the kids during this time. My ambition was really only limited by what I could physically handle. Kids were in daycare a lot. If I had a big deadline, I hired extra babysitting help. If a particular project required consistently working after-hours, well — I couldn’t do it, or rather I was not willing to be away from the kids more often than I already was. Similarly, for travel, if I was invited to give a talk domestically, well fine. I made these trips as short as possible and cobbled together some solution — leave the kids with grandparents, bring Grandma along on a business trip with me, find a daycare in the area willing to do drop-in care. But if I was invited for an international trip — no, sorry, I could not manage this. (Saying no to these kind of trips was a choice, but again it was more than I felt I could handle at the time — I do know a single academic mom who did manage to take her daughter on international trips).

Now, living with my husband means I have more choices. He can of course watch them if I have to work late or if I am out of town. But when we both need to work, how do we balance this? I don’t want to just hire babysitters a lot so that we can both work like crazy — then our life wouldn’t be all that different than what we had before, honestly. It defeats the purpose of living together!

On a mostly separate note, I think work-life issues are one area where more senior women in science can benefit from mentoring from younger women. Mentoring does not have to go one-way, only from senior women to junior women. The culture has changed dramatically in the time that I’ve been in academia — negotiating for a position for your spouse was unheard of when I started. I think younger women have a better idea of how to navigate and negotiate issues around this than senior women do.

Category:

Career, Kids, TimeManagement, Two-BodyProblem, WomenRock

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