Helping the Minoritized Achieve in Academic Science

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Networking at Grant Panels

WomanNetworkNetworking is so very important!! I cannot stress this enough. This is true at all levels. At early levels (student), it helps you to establish connections and can even get you a job (see this post). Pretenure, it is essential to get the word out that you exist and are doing things that people should pay attention to. You gotta go to conferences (old post) and network on campus (recent post). When you are senior, lack of travel and often result in lack of recognition, and getting back out there can be essential to re-starting after a long absence due to childcare or other issue (see this awesome post).

When you are a professor, another important place to network is on grant panels. Serving on grant panels is so important for so many reasons:

  1. You get to read grants. Good grants, crap grants, many in between grants. When I read grants, I not only try to evaluate the science, but I also use the time to think about how best to write grants. Of course, you have to get rid of the grants afterward, but you can think and even write down what was good about the writing, the style, the format. All these things matter to writing a great grant that gets funded.
  2. You get to meet other scientists. On grant panels, you spend an intimate 1-4 days with a group of scientists talking about science that can be funded, using your expertise, learning new things you never knew before, and basically interacting. You are also together at meals where you spend time talking about your family, your pets, your house, and all the other lifestyle stuff. Scientists have similar lifestyles no matter if you are from California, Texas, or Michigan. This is the networking. This is the close kind of network that you often only find at very small meetings. Grant panels are the smallest of meetings.
  3. You get to meet program officers. In addition to working with other scientists who may or may not be in your field, you also get to work with the program officers who will presumably have the opportunity to fund your research. You can figure out what types of science they like to find and how they like to interact with scientists. Different program officers like to hear more about motivation or technical stuff or diversity impacts. Plus, if you are already at a funding agency, you might be able to visit other program officers while you are there.

What is a grant panel like? I have a lot more experience serving on NSF panels and foundation proposal review panels, so that is what I will describe. If you have information about NIH, DOD, DOE, or other, please comment here! At NSF you have to come prepared and be early. Most program officers want you to have all your evaluations uploaded over a day early, so they can prioritize the discussion list. Be prepared – it takes over an hour to review a single proposal and write a review, so make sure you start early enough.

At the panel. The program officer will start with a little background or information you need for the panel. Good ones will describe implicit bias and how it is important to be aware of biases, so that you can avoid them.

Reviewing. The panel will begin to review each grant. Some panels prioritize the grants so that the obvious ones (all highly rated or all low rated) are discussed first and taken care of. Sometimes the bottom ones are completely triaged – not discussed at all. Most program officers will try to keep you on track by giving you only 12-15 minutes to discuss the proposal. One person will be the “lead” discussant and describe the strengths and weaknesses of the proposal. The second and possibly third reviewers will describe and additional and not previously described issues. Typically, a third or fourth assigned reviewer will serve as the scribe who will record what is said at the panel to give some inside information about what was said in the room and write up the panel summary that also goes to the proposers.

Serving as a virtual panelist. In a recent panel, I served as a virtual panelist. In this, I used my computer camera to interact with the panel. Frankly, I didn’t like it. It was harder to interact and network with others. I felt like it was also more difficult to be convincing. Most of the other virtual panelists had cameras, but not everyone, so I couldn’t use facial cues to help me be more convincing. Also, I realize that I typically use these meetings for networking – specifically with the women scientists on the panel. I am not sure if I will be a virtual panelist again.

Anything else I missed? Post or comment here. To get an email every time I post, push the +Follow button.

Category:

Career, Networking, New Job, Research, Service, Uncategorized

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Getting It All Done

TimeManagementv2In science, there is a lot to be done. When you are an undergraduate, you had problem sets, lab reports, maybe even a capstone to complete. You were maintaining your grades while having some fun and doing some extracurricular activities. As a graduates student, you passed classes, TAed, performed novel research, became the world’s expert in your exact experiments, perhaps organized some science-related on-campus activities, attended conferences, made posters and talks, wrote papers and a thesis, and got a postdoc. As a postdoc, you juggled multiple projects, learned new techniques, wrote proposals for fellowships, mentored graduate students and undergraduates, perhaps juggled multiple mentors, wrote papers, edited papers, edited theses, attended conferences, networked, gave talks, wrote papers, applied to jobs, interviewed, got a job, and wrote papers.

Now, as a faculty member, your job tripled because in addition to doing all the stuff above, you are now having to manage other people (posts), get enough funds to support other people (write grants, see post), teach courses (perhaps some that you never took yourself, see post), work on service for the department and college (post), and take on larger and larger service roles for your scientific community. Each of these has a huge number responsibilities and components to it, and could be a job unto itself. So, how do you do everything?

I have had some posts about starting a new job here and here, but at the beginning, the job isn’t as much. It definitely ramps up over time. I have one post that is good for helping to organize yourself over a yearly time frame, but there is also something to be said for a monthly or weekly schedule that is conducive to getting everything done. One extra issue with academia, is that your schedule changes throughout the year depending on when you are teaching, what you are teaching, who is in your lab, and other what naught. I will give some examples of weekly schedules that worked well for me over the years, in a hopes that they will help you to organize your schedule, too.

Example 1 – 10am class for 1 hour. Several semesters, I taught at around 10am for about an hour three days per week. This time slot was pretty close to ideal, which is probably why they are so popular in the schedule. The students were awake, I had time for last minute prep before class, and I took the entire morning for “teaching.” Here is how I actually arranged my schedule. On the days I was teaching, I got in around 9am and did some last minute psyching up for class, making sure I had demos, and my computer was set up. I would print off and make copies of anything needed for class. I would go 15 minutes early to the classroom to set up projectors and demos and also talk to students as they came into the lecture hall. After teaching, I would go to the gym for an hour to get exercise and decompress after teaching. After the gym, I would shower and go to lunch. I would spend the afternoon working on leftover class stuff, like scanning and posting my notes or homework solution sets, office hours, and meeting with students. On the other days, I would try to take the entire day for writing grants and papers. In the evening the day before I would teach, I would spend a couple hours in the evening re-writing my lectures.

Example 2 – afternoon lab course. Other semesters, I taught afternoon lab courses two times per week for several hours in the afternoon. Lab classes take less preparation because there are not lectures to make up. I usually try to keep all the teaching stuff on the same day, so any preparation, photocopying, or equipment set-up that I might need to do would be done in the morning. Again, the other days are reserved for research. I would also try to go to the gym first thing in the morning on research days before going into work but after getting the kids to school. Sometimes working out was a great way to kick my brain into gear and get it working for the rest of the days on research days.

The key to all of these ideas is to give myself the time I need to do what I need to do. I block out full days for research and I do not allow committee meetings to be made on those days. The days I teach classes, I put other meetings and office hours, so that it is all on the same day. Although I have been failing recently, I also try to get to the gym 3 days per week. Also, I eat lunch with friends almost every single day, and I try to sleep 7-8 hours per night.

Also, none of this includes any family stuff, which happens outside of 9-5. But, here is the key, by giving myself time for stuff like rest and the gym, I have some slack that I can take up with family stuff happens. The week when the baby has a fever and he has to stay home, I cut out gym and some other stuff so that I can still get the important stuff done take the time I need to be with the baby at home. (My spouse and I split days off with sick baby, and negotiate which days/times we can be home. We often don’t schedule important, non-rearrageable meetings at the same time not he same days, so we can do this. We have a joint-shared set of calendars.) If my time is already stretched to the breaking point, a sick kid or other family emergency will wipe me out. If I am giving up going to the gym for a week, so I can get more research done, it isn’t as bad.

So, what do you think? Do you have a way to arrange your time that enables you to get it all done? Post or comment. You can receive an email every time I post by pushing the +Follow button.

Category:

Career, Mentoring, Networking, Research, Service, Teaching, Tenure, TimeManagement, Uncategorized

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Organizing Your Group: Lab Rules

The presence of some species, like this crusta...

The presence of some species, like this crustacean, may be used as an environmental health indicator. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Does your research group or lab have rules? Codes of conduct? Specific ways you need students to do things, so that science happen faster and things do not get broken? How do these rules or codes get relayed to your students?

When I first started my lab, the codes of conduct for the lab were haphazardly passed from me to student A to student B. But, much like the telephone game, I started noticing things sounding funny out the other end. People didn’t seem to know how to wash dishes or run the autoclave. I started training people with a BootCamp (more on that in another post), and that was helpful to get everyone on the same starting page. But there were still other things that would come up, occur, or happen that made me realize that not all was covered.

I talked to other young faculty about the issue, and one ManOfScience told me that he just made a list of rules and requires everyone to read it. I was intrigued, but not convinced because this seemed very formal for a lab. I wasn’t against increased formality, but the idea of having explicit rules seemed counter to the rebellious and outsider nature of experimental lab work. Does that make sense? You may have felt that way when you read the title. I am sure most people don’t have “rules” for their labs, but I hope this post convinces you that it might be worthwhile.

Here is what convinced me: During our conversation, this ManOfScience told me what sold him on having explicit rules. At some point someone carelessly, accidentally started a fire in the lab. The fire was in the back of the lab, and other people were working in the front of the lab. The person in the back, knew there was a fire, ran out, and called 911 from afar. But, they never told the other people working in the front of the lab! This seems appalling, but panic can do crazy things. You think that you should not have to tell someone to tell the entire lab to evacuate when their is a fire, yet this story says that even the most obvious-seeming things may not be obvious to all people. To this ManOfScience, and to me, it is not worth losing your lab over something you could have easily told to your students. It isn’t worth losing a piece of equipment or a person. All labs have specialized equipment and facilities. You need to clearly tell students how to you these facilities and how to treat the equipment, the strains, cell lines, animals, human subjects. Some of these issues are covered in Environmental Health and Safety courses, but it is still worth reminding.

The following are specific sections that can go in your rules:

  • Personnel issues, work hours, vacation policy, and expectations
  • Group organization
  • Group meetings, seminars, journal clubs, and semester reports
  • Reagent preparation, sterilization, storage, and disposal
  • Freezer and refrigerator storage
  • Ordering and receiveing
  • Data collection and archiving
  • Lab safety and environmental health
  • Computers
  • BIg Equipment
  • Other equipment

At the end of the rules, I have a signature page. They have to sign and return the last page to me to verify that they read the rules. If they break the rules, this signature holds them accountable. I have them read and sign 3 times a year. I update the rules when I need to, and periodically review it myself. The rules are great for new people to get up to speed on how the lab works quickly. Most students appreciate being told directly what to expect and what the rules are. Students that don’t like it also don’t last long in the lab.

How about you? Any other rules or categories I missed? How do you tell people what’s up in the lab?

Category:

New Job, Research, Uncategorized

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Things Unsaid

Fairly soon after being a Lab of One, you will get new students to form your research group. In establishing your new research group, there are a lot of little things to consider. Many of these issues will become apparent only after some negative event occurs. You can head off many of these annoying set-backs by establishing lab policies early and communicating to your laboratory. Here, I present a few examples of things that go wrong. Hopefully others will chime in with more examples? Next post, we will discuss some solutions for these types of problems.

Example 1: The first student to join my lab was from a foreign country. Within 13 months of beginning work, he asked if he could take 4 weeks (the entire month of January) off to go back home. I was shocked at his lack of commitment to his project. I was proud of myself for not going with my reaction which was to say, “No! Absolutely not!” Instead, I told him I would have to look up the vacation policy for graduate students on RA and talk with some of my colleagues about what their policies are before I decided how to deal with it (he was obviously going to go regardless). The graduate policy wasn’t helpful because it was all based on hours worked, and that is a sticky subject in science where we pay for 20 hours per week, but expect 80. My colleagues were much more reasonable. They ranged from (A) any student can take as long as he/she wants without bound to (Z) students get 2 weeks per year, and they can accumulate that time. So, if they take 4 weeks, they cannot go on (long) vacation for another 2 years (short jaunts don’t count against this). I decided to pick the latter view, which seemed reasonable and easy to keep track of. I also explained why January was particularly bad time to go on vacation because I had January off from teaching, and it was a long time that I could be in the lab working with the student. He went anyway and quit the lab within 4 weeks of returning from vacation. Despite that student’s issues, this policy, which I actually considered and thought about, persists today in the lab.

Example 2: I got a really promising postdoc to join the lab joint with another WomanOfScience. She had a Ph.D. from a great institution and was already living in the area doing a postdoc with another professor. After about 9 months, it was clear that she wasn’t making progress on her project. She didn’t even know how to do the main assays of either lab, and she still needed guidance from the graduate students to run the equipment. Instead of working on her own project, she was “helping” another graduate student on some basic work that had a lot of downtime (the graduate student was doing that work and the main assays on the main equipment). When I spoke to her and calmly let her know that, as a postdoc, it is OK to help others, but your main priority is your own project, she flat told me that I was wrong. Whoa! How could her perceptions have been so off from mine? In my opinion, a postdoc has to do his/her own project and make progress. This postdoc left the lab after the 1-year contract was up after accomplishing nothing. (We can talk more about if she would have said that to a man, yadda yadda, but at the end of the day, it didn’t matter.)

Example 3: I had an undergraduate working in the lab for credit. The general university policy and my own policy is 3 hours per week is one credit. This student signed up for 3 credits for the Fall semester. I am sure you can see where this is going… The student didn’t show up often, but when she did, she didn’t do anything and acted like she was in the lab all the time. It was maddening to the other students who were working well and this students mentor in the lab. Although I told her explicitly the rules about credit when she signed up, it somehow didn’t sink in.

Example 4: This one is not from me, but comes from a AfricanAmericanManOfScience I know. Two students were working in the lab at different benches. Suddenly, one student notices the other student run past and out the door. Several minutes later, the student still in the lab smells something funny and it turns out that something was on fire in the lab! The student who quickly exited was likely running from the incident and subsequent fire, but neglected to inform the other student or try to put out the fire with an extinguisher or do any other reasonable thing. Now, this seems like common sense. You set a fire, you should at least tell your labmate so they don’t burn to a crisp, yet some people need to be told everything. Further, young people and scientists do not always have the best common sense. Thus, you need to tell them everything – even seemingly obvious things.

In each of these examples there was some policy that I didn’t think about, odd perception or preconceived notions that were incongruent, forgetfulness, or just plan idiocy. Despite this, fewer and fewer of these incidents occurred in my lab over time as I developed policies, materials, content, and new activities to keep everyone on the same page. Since this post is getting out of control, I will describe some of the methods I employ in the next post. Please comment of guest post with other examples or with your own solutions.

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Uncategorized

Guest Post on Grants

This post is from WomanOfScience, Prof. Robin Selinger, Professor, Chemical Physics, Kent State University Liquid Crystal Institute. Thanks you for sharing and for sharing your name! That way other WomenOfScience can email you directly. Robin is a great mentor, and I am glad to have her on the WOS team. Other guest posts are welcome!

I suggest you read “A PhD is NOT Enough,” a very helpful book written by Peter Feibelman. Get the newer edition (about 2011 I think.) It has plenty of useful advice about many of the issues you will confront in the next year or two.

One of your most important goals is to bring in some grant funds. As a new assistant professor in the mid 1990′s, I found it helpful to get advice from a senior colleague who was a former NSF program officer. He was a great coach and provided very useful feedback.

Some new faculty resent the idea that they might benefit from this kind of input from a senior colleague. The way I see it, even superstar athletes work with coaches who help them to achieve their full potential. Why should scientists be any different?

Don’t wait until the proposal deadline is looming to get advice from your grant-writing mentor. Start bouncing research ideas around and working on your proposal and budget plan at least 60 to 90 days before the deadline. Every campus and funding agency have their own particular rules about budgets and you don’t want to waste valuable time figuring them out when the deadline is pressing.

The most important page of your proposal is the project summary. Many panel members will vote having read only this small piece of the proposal with care and perused the rest.

Remember that some programs such as the NSF Career Award are sufficiently interdisciplinary that many members of the panel will not be experts in your exact field. Make sure your summary is accessible to the panel. If you don’t know what kind of panel to expect, talk with the program officer at the funding agency for advice prior to submission.

Make your project summary memorable and really clear without excessive jargon, and have three people proofread it to make sure it is 100% flawless.

Check the agency’s formatting rules for total proposal length and font size and abide by them. Something as silly as using the wrong format for cited references can result in a proposal returned without review. Also don’t forget required elements such as a “postdoc mentoring plan” or “data management plan” that the funding agency may demand.

Good luck!

 

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Uncategorized

Practice Makes Perfect

Practicing negotiating and having bargaining chips ready are important so that you are prepared when an opportunity to negotiate comes up.

Practice is easy, especially if you have children. They seem to be born negotiators. Don’t view the task of trying to convince them to eat their veggies as a chore. See it as practice negotiating. Think of a compromise solution that is moderate. Neither of you will get exactly what you want, but you will both get something and both give something.

Anticipate what the other party will want, but don’t start there. Start high, so that you have some room to work down. If your child wants to eat zero veggies, but you want her to eat 5 carrots, start with 10.

Have your bargaining chips ready. If you are asked to do something heinous, make sure you have something already pre-loaded that you can ask for in return for the favor of doing the crap work. For the child example, the child could request a dessert, if she eats all 10 carrots, as requested. That would be good forethought on the child’s part, and she would be eating all her carrots. You wouldn’t mind giving her the dessert after 10 carrots.

Obviously, there are other examples that don’t include kids, so please share. The point is to see the negotiating potential in all situations, and to practice your skills. It will eventually become second nature.

Category:

Kids, Negotiating, Uncategorized

Giving Back

Part of the reason why I became a professor was to help people. I love to mentor students. Recently, as I am at the precipice of achieving tenure, I have felt the need to give back to other women in academic science. I hope this blog helps you. Plus, I am happy to have others add their comments and ideas to the blog to help others.

Scientists are well-known critics. We are raised to be critical, but I want this blog to be a spot for positive help. I am reserving the right to remove overtly negative and unhelpful comments. Further, despite the fact that everyone – men and women – have a higher bar for women, I have found most women in science to be extremely competent and excellent. I hope this blog will be a place for women to support women. This is a place to celebrate how amazing women in science really are. I have found other women in science blogs helpful, such as FemaleScienceProfessor, and I hope that this blog can be as successful as that one was/is.

Further, the issues raised in this blog are not for women only – but for people who want a balance between work and life. But, I want to say that choosing career does not make you a bad parent. I hope to have posts about the guilt felt by being a mother with a career and to let other know that you are a great parent – even if you have a career.

With that, I toast to my imminent tenure and this new blog – a new era to mentoring!

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Uncategorized

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