Zooze the Horse roams around the pasture near Lamar State College. Zooze thinks about problems in academia. Zhe wants proffies to submit posts (blog posts, not fence posts).
Monday, October 2, 2017
Monday Magic in October
If you could go back and change something you did in graduate school, what would it be?
I would keep a better lab notebook so that I didn't have a nervous breakdown writing my dissertation - and then I would have submitted it and defended instead of hiding until my time limit expired.
Grad school 2.0 is going much better because of this. But I'm 43 and won't be done for a few more years. It would have been much better to be where I am now when I was 27.
in 1994 i was at a cross roads. two years into a program and my research advisor fell apart (not hir fault, i dont think anyone could have done differently) and it put me back to square 1. choice A: stick out the grad program. choice B: ditch school and get on board with this world wide web thingy. I chose A, silly me. Ok so i probably wouldn't have been a dot com millionaire or the darling of silicon valley. and i am certain it comes with its own share of headaches. no regrets, but i am driven by curiosity by a large extent so i do wonder how it would have played out.
You may keep the keys to the time machine. If I could go back in time and change things, just about every major thing I could change would in all probability have made things worse.
My girlfriend during my early years of grad school was extraordinarily beautiful. She was without question the finest mathematician I have ever seen in my entire life: truly astonishing. After two years she dumped me, because I balked at marrying her that year.
If I had, she’d no doubt have had the four kids she told me she wanted, and knowing her, she wouldn’t have stopped there. Yes, she was getting an MRS degree in the most difficult, expensive way possible: as a graduate student at an Ivy. Why she thought I was such a hot prospect still baffles me: from Day 1, I told everyone I was going into astronomy.
Marrying her would have ended my scientific career in short order. Never mind that I’m now a tenured, full professor of physics: all those lean years between then and now as a postdoc wouldn’t have been tolerated. If there had been no kids, she’d probably have divorced me. I might now be doing a remunerative, but dull job in finance or IT. Since my heart wouldn’t be in it, it may not have been so remunerative, so she’d have divorced me anyway.
And besides, I wouldn’t have found the musician girlfriend I’ve been with for 12 years now, so all’s well that ends well. She thinks “The Big Bang Theory” is the funniest show on TV, because she thinks that’s the physics department where I work. It’s disturbing to admit she may be right.
Perhaps I might have changed fields into something more practical, such as space physics or solar physics. The trouble with that is that these fields have nearly as long of a postdoctoral struggle, and don’t pay all that much better, except that not just universities or government labs hire space physicists or solar physicists: aerospace companies do too. Still, I wouldn’t have thrived as a corporate “team player”: I’ve always been too much of a free-spirited, so-called intellectual, creative, bohemian, avant-garde, left-wing, namby-pamby, you know. I also still maintain scientific interests in space physics and solar physics, now collectively known as heliophysics: I ought to stop writing this and publish some results on stellar magnetism.
When I think about more minor decisions, such as the courses in grad school I didn’t take, I reach similar conclusions. I could have taken a class on non-linear physics in 1990, but since there’s been so much development in this field since then, what they covered would have been mostly obsolete by now. I did take the courses with lasting value, of course, such as Jackson e&m, and the QM I need to teach today.
All those years of struggling as a postdoc might have gone more smoothly if I’d been more adept at lying to my mother. I really didn’t need to worry her by giving her honest appraisals of the perennially dire funding situation. All I needed to do was to fake a cheerful, “I’m working as a research scientist, Mom: everything’s fine” and never mention the words “fixed term” or “postdoc.”
Likewise, when I became an Accursed Visiting Assistant Professor, all I needed to tell her about it was “I’m teaching, Mom.” Teaching is a real job, isn’t it?
You may still keep the keys to the time machine, though, since doing this would have required an ethical monstrosity: lying to my mother. The way I changed jobs across continents four times within five years would have alerted her to something amiss. Cheerfully saying “But that’s the way they do things these days” wouldn’t have been believed, even if it is largely true these days.
I can think of lots of little dumb or arrogant things I wish I hadn't said, but no really big things that I would change. Well, I wish I could go back and re-teach my classes with the skills I have now, because the students I had in grad school deserved much better, but I'm not sure there is a way to acquire those skills without screwing up a lot.
That's one thing that especially horned me off when I was an Accursed Visiting Assistant Professor. I was expected to be teaching---and getting numerical scores on my anonymous student evaluations---just as good as the 20-year veteran for whom I was a leave-term replacement. And I didn’t get anywhere NEAR his salary! And the best teaching advice HE was able to give me was, “Just do what you do in your previous classes,” he apparently having forgotten I’d never HAD any previous classes.
It got even worse when I was a tenure-track Assistant Professor. Again, the deal was seemingly that I was expected to be batting 1.000 from the beginning, and maintaining that standard. Worse, our Provost told us that to get tenure, we’d have to be getting teaching evaluations “at or above the department averages.” I tried to tell him that if this was sustained over time, the junior faculty would need to get higher and higher averages, until they all reached perfect scores, at which case no one could get tenure. He gave me a deer-in-the-headlights look.
And furthermore, ANYTHING that ANYONE from the education school about teaching is PATENTLY ABSURD, because they’re all clearly a bunch of LUNKHEADS!!!
Frod, that post makes me really wish we had a "like" button or an upvote as we see on Disqus. Just spot on target. And Fretful one, I'd love a do-over too!
I took coursework notes on my laptop, which was stolen immediately after I finished coursework. Yes, no backup. And then, a wave of studies came out indicating that we remember less when we type our notes. I had a wonderful graduate school experience, but I'll never get back those notes from seminars with some of the top experts in my field. I tell this to every undergrad and grad student I come across. Most are unmoved.
Well, the obvious: find a way to finish the dissertation more quickly, or find the courage to quit and try something else. One avenue to finishing more quickly would have been choosing a different department (one that wouldn't fall apart two years later) in the first place, but I find it hard to imagine that, since it would mean not meeting some people who are now very good friends.
So I guess I'll settle for having found a more proactive, and more politically savvy, way of dealing with the fact that both of my advisors and every other faculty member I might like to have had as an advisor left the department the spring I passed generals. It would also have been nice if my father, who had completed a Ph.D. himself, had offered some advice, or at least paid a bit more attention to the situation. But offering help and support in that kind of not-easily-fixable situation was never his forte (I think feeling anxious for/worried about me was uncomfortable and that, combined with his desire to get back to his own work, tended to lead to his looking for a quick fix, and, in the absence of same, leaving me to work it out -- which, to be fair to him, had generally worked out pretty well in the past). And he was understandably preoccupied with dealing with his mother's final illness and death and getting engaged, more or less simultaneously (and the coincidence of those two events probably has some bearing on what was, at least in my view, a less-than-wise choice of 2nd wife). So expecting a mid-20s daughter who had shown herself quite competent in handling her academic affairs up to then to continue said competence wasn't unreasonable.
So it would have been a good time for me to learn to be proactive (and not by putting all my concerns, including the impolitic ones, on paper and then waiting for someone in the department to respond -- which, as far as I can tell, they never did). Trying to figure the whole process out entirely on my own when no guidance was forthcoming was *not* the wisest approach (though it was one for which my family situation had prepared me -- and which, once again, had worked out more or less okay in the past).
It would also probably have helped for me to recognize consciously what I was observing unconsciously: that while the (remaining) faculty in my department were insisting the job market was just fine (or at least temporarily resting rather than expiring), and that our department's very short program prepared candidates well, and that all we needed to do to ensure success was to finish as soon as possible, there were a suspiciously large (and ever-increasing) number of recent (and not-so-recent) Ph.D. graduates still hanging around the department/area of the university, teaching or doing other sorts of work, while remaining "on the market." To be fair (once again) to my elders, I think they genuinely believed what they were saying, but I don't deal all that well with situations where the reality I'm observing and that described by authority figures around me (especially when I want to believe in the latter) don't match.
And writing all of the above, I still feel a bit like complaining makes me a "special snowflake," and I just should have figured/toughed it out, even as I realize, from 25+ years distance, that 25-year-old me both needed and deserved considerably more guidance and support (or at least a more clear-eyed description of her choices and their likely consequences) than she got.
The other, probably at least equally important, thing I should have done was invested the financial resources I had available -- and I did have some, thanks to the other grandmother, who died a bit earlier -- in a home and a garden, whether in the area around my grad school, or in the area where I grew up (and now live). I was tempted, but it didn't seem to make sense at the time, since where I lived was going to be determined by that supposedly-reliable job market. Not every 25-year-old (perhaps most 25-year-olds) should buy a house, but I should have (and I had some sense that I should have, but didn't, because I was listening more to others' ideas of what my priorities should be than to my own sense of what was most important to me).
I would keep a better lab notebook so that I didn't have a nervous breakdown writing my dissertation - and then I would have submitted it and defended instead of hiding until my time limit expired.
ReplyDeleteGrad school 2.0 is going much better because of this. But I'm 43 and won't be done for a few more years. It would have been much better to be where I am now when I was 27.
in 1994 i was at a cross roads. two years into a program and my research advisor fell apart (not hir fault, i dont think anyone could have done differently) and it put me back to square 1.
ReplyDeletechoice A: stick out the grad program. choice B: ditch school and get on board with this world wide web thingy. I chose A, silly me. Ok so i probably wouldn't have been a dot com millionaire or the darling of silicon valley. and i am certain it comes with its own share of headaches. no regrets, but i am driven by curiosity by a large extent so i do wonder how it would have played out.
You may keep the keys to the time machine. If I could go back in time and change things, just about every major thing I could change would in all probability have made things worse.
ReplyDeleteMy girlfriend during my early years of grad school was extraordinarily beautiful. She was without question the finest mathematician I have ever seen in my entire life: truly astonishing. After two years she dumped me, because I balked at marrying her that year.
If I had, she’d no doubt have had the four kids she told me she wanted, and knowing her, she wouldn’t have stopped there. Yes, she was getting an MRS degree in the most difficult, expensive way possible: as a graduate student at an Ivy. Why she thought I was such a hot prospect still baffles me: from Day 1, I told everyone I was going into astronomy.
Marrying her would have ended my scientific career in short order. Never mind that I’m now a tenured, full professor of physics: all those lean years between then and now as a postdoc wouldn’t have been tolerated. If there had been no kids, she’d probably have divorced me. I might now be doing a remunerative, but dull job in finance or IT. Since my heart wouldn’t be in it, it may not have been so remunerative, so she’d have divorced me anyway.
And besides, I wouldn’t have found the musician girlfriend I’ve been with for 12 years now, so all’s well that ends well. She thinks “The Big Bang Theory” is the funniest show on TV, because she thinks that’s the physics department where I work. It’s disturbing to admit she may be right.
Perhaps I might have changed fields into something more practical, such as space physics or solar physics. The trouble with that is that these fields have nearly as long of a postdoctoral struggle, and don’t pay all that much better, except that not just universities or government labs hire space physicists or solar physicists: aerospace companies do too. Still, I wouldn’t have thrived as a corporate “team player”: I’ve always been too much of a free-spirited, so-called intellectual, creative, bohemian, avant-garde, left-wing, namby-pamby, you know. I also still maintain scientific interests in space physics and solar physics, now collectively known as heliophysics: I ought to stop writing this and publish some results on stellar magnetism.
When I think about more minor decisions, such as the courses in grad school I didn’t take, I reach similar conclusions. I could have taken a class on non-linear physics in 1990, but since there’s been so much development in this field since then, what they covered would have been mostly obsolete by now. I did take the courses with lasting value, of course, such as Jackson e&m, and the QM I need to teach today.
All those years of struggling as a postdoc might have gone more smoothly if I’d been more adept at lying to my mother. I really didn’t need to worry her by giving her honest appraisals of the perennially dire funding situation. All I needed to do was to fake a cheerful, “I’m working as a research scientist, Mom: everything’s fine” and never mention the words “fixed term” or “postdoc.”
Likewise, when I became an Accursed Visiting Assistant Professor, all I needed to tell her about it was “I’m teaching, Mom.” Teaching is a real job, isn’t it?
You may still keep the keys to the time machine, though, since doing this would have required an ethical monstrosity: lying to my mother. The way I changed jobs across continents four times within five years would have alerted her to something amiss. Cheerfully saying “But that’s the way they do things these days” wouldn’t have been believed, even if it is largely true these days.
I can think of lots of little dumb or arrogant things I wish I hadn't said, but no really big things that I would change. Well, I wish I could go back and re-teach my classes with the skills I have now, because the students I had in grad school deserved much better, but I'm not sure there is a way to acquire those skills without screwing up a lot.
ReplyDeleteThat's one thing that especially horned me off when I was an Accursed Visiting Assistant Professor. I was expected to be teaching---and getting numerical scores on my anonymous student evaluations---just as good as the 20-year veteran for whom I was a leave-term replacement. And I didn’t get anywhere NEAR his salary! And the best teaching advice HE was able to give me was, “Just do what you do in your previous classes,” he apparently having forgotten I’d never HAD any previous classes.
DeleteIt got even worse when I was a tenure-track Assistant Professor. Again, the deal was seemingly that I was expected to be batting 1.000 from the beginning, and maintaining that standard. Worse, our Provost told us that to get tenure, we’d have to be getting teaching evaluations “at or above the department averages.” I tried to tell him that if this was sustained over time, the junior faculty would need to get higher and higher averages, until they all reached perfect scores, at which case no one could get tenure. He gave me a deer-in-the-headlights look.
And furthermore, ANYTHING that ANYONE from the education school about teaching is PATENTLY ABSURD, because they’re all clearly a bunch of LUNKHEADS!!!
Frod, that post makes me really wish we had a "like" button or an upvote as we see on Disqus. Just spot on target. And Fretful one, I'd love a do-over too!
DeleteThanks, but I'd like to make a correction to one of my previous statements:
Delete...ANYTHING that ANYONE from the education school says about ANYTHING is PATENTLY ABSURD, because they’re all clearly a bunch of CHOWDERHEADS!!!
I would have studied a narrower, "hotter" field if only for career advancement.
ReplyDeleteI took coursework notes on my laptop, which was stolen immediately after I finished coursework. Yes, no backup. And then, a wave of studies came out indicating that we remember less when we type our notes.
ReplyDeleteI had a wonderful graduate school experience, but I'll never get back those notes from seminars with some of the top experts in my field. I tell this to every undergrad and grad student I come across. Most are unmoved.
Well, the obvious: find a way to finish the dissertation more quickly, or find the courage to quit and try something else. One avenue to finishing more quickly would have been choosing a different department (one that wouldn't fall apart two years later) in the first place, but I find it hard to imagine that, since it would mean not meeting some people who are now very good friends.
ReplyDeleteSo I guess I'll settle for having found a more proactive, and more politically savvy, way of dealing with the fact that both of my advisors and every other faculty member I might like to have had as an advisor left the department the spring I passed generals. It would also have been nice if my father, who had completed a Ph.D. himself, had offered some advice, or at least paid a bit more attention to the situation. But offering help and support in that kind of not-easily-fixable situation was never his forte (I think feeling anxious for/worried about me was uncomfortable and that, combined with his desire to get back to his own work, tended to lead to his looking for a quick fix, and, in the absence of same, leaving me to work it out -- which, to be fair to him, had generally worked out pretty well in the past). And he was understandably preoccupied with dealing with his mother's final illness and death and getting engaged, more or less simultaneously (and the coincidence of those two events probably has some bearing on what was, at least in my view, a less-than-wise choice of 2nd wife). So expecting a mid-20s daughter who had shown herself quite competent in handling her academic affairs up to then to continue said competence wasn't unreasonable.
So it would have been a good time for me to learn to be proactive (and not by putting all my concerns, including the impolitic ones, on paper and then waiting for someone in the department to respond -- which, as far as I can tell, they never did). Trying to figure the whole process out entirely on my own when no guidance was forthcoming was *not* the wisest approach (though it was one for which my family situation had prepared me -- and which, once again, had worked out more or less okay in the past).
It would also probably have helped for me to recognize consciously what I was observing unconsciously: that while the (remaining) faculty in my department were insisting the job market was just fine (or at least temporarily resting rather than expiring), and that our department's very short program prepared candidates well, and that all we needed to do to ensure success was to finish as soon as possible, there were a suspiciously large (and ever-increasing) number of recent (and not-so-recent) Ph.D. graduates still hanging around the department/area of the university, teaching or doing other sorts of work, while remaining "on the market." To be fair (once again) to my elders, I think they genuinely believed what they were saying, but I don't deal all that well with situations where the reality I'm observing and that described by authority figures around me (especially when I want to believe in the latter) don't match.
And writing all of the above, I still feel a bit like complaining makes me a "special snowflake," and I just should have figured/toughed it out, even as I realize, from 25+ years distance, that 25-year-old me both needed and deserved considerably more guidance and support (or at least a more clear-eyed description of her choices and their likely consequences) than she got.
The other, probably at least equally important, thing I should have done was invested the financial resources I had available -- and I did have some, thanks to the other grandmother, who died a bit earlier -- in a home and a garden, whether in the area around my grad school, or in the area where I grew up (and now live). I was tempted, but it didn't seem to make sense at the time, since where I lived was going to be determined by that supposedly-reliable job market. Not every 25-year-old (perhaps most 25-year-olds) should buy a house, but I should have (and I had some sense that I should have, but didn't, because I was listening more to others' ideas of what my priorities should be than to my own sense of what was most important to me).
Delete