Education

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Postdoc Productivity

May 31, 2010 in Education, postdoc by Kris | 4 comments

Summer’s here.  I capped off my semester with graduation. Even though I defended my dissertation last June, I was just over the deadline to graduate last Spring, so I got to graduate with two of my lab buddies, instead. Totally worth the wait.

That's me on the right, with another PhD (left) and master's candidate (center) from my grad lab.

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The last few weeks of the Spring semester leading up to graduation were rough, trying to meet deadlines for coursework and other projects.  This semester I finished:

  • Intro to Epidemiology (two exams, four quizzes, a final presentation and a paper)
  • Grant Writing (a draft potential R03 grant)
  • Biostats II (a final project)

and submitted:

  • one project to IRB
  • one grant proposal to a local foundation
  • one application for a summer workshop
  • one poster for an international conference
  • one poster for the national meetings
  • one poster for the departmental program annual symposium

My semester, especially towards the end, felt a bit like this

Except without the tutu.

For the last several weeks, I was jumping from one deadline to another, having just a few days between to work on the next project on the list.  Not surprisingly, I’ve felt the need to have a way to keep more on top of things: projects, due dates, meetings. While I was writing my dissertation, I had used LifeBalance, but decided against upgrading because their iPhone app apparently has issues, and I had stopped using the desktop version over a year ago because it just wasn’t working for me and I didn’t want to pay for the update.  I downloaded the trial version of Things, but decided it didn’t fit my current (lack of) workflow, and required adaptations that didn’t really work for me.  Same for Midnight Inbox. I settled on OmniFocus instead, personal task management software based on David Allen’s Getting Things Done.  ProfHacker has a nice series of posts on applying the concept as an academic, including an Introduction, Contexts and Academic Work, Mind-sweeping, and Managing Project Files.

I’ve slowly been adding projects, setting contexts and due dates. I’ve been using OmniFocus for about three weeks, but I haven’t completed a mind-sweep yet, partly due to lack of time (cleaning up from the end of semester crazy), partly because I’m still in the process of learning the system (reviewing podcasts, screencasts, and blogs about implementation), and partly because I’m a little afraid to have all of my commitments down on paper. I’m still figuring out exactly what should go on the list. Everything? Or just those out of the ordinary things that I might forget if I don’t write them down? Most of what I have set up so far are work projects, and I feel already like I have a better idea of where things are and what needs to be done next.

That’s good, because my summer is shaping up to be very busy, even without taking classes.  Right now, the project list looks like this:

  • resubmit proposal to IRB
  • write three articles from dissertation
  • write/contribute to other articles as assigned
  • write book chapter
  • help with PI R01 submission
  • present research idea to local partner organization
  • meet with biostatistics re. R03 proposal
  • develop syllabus/course description for potential class
  • plan analysis of samples from PI’s current R01
  • create a career development plan

It feels really good to be finishing up the first year of my postdoc, despite feeling like I’m eating an apple while juggling knives balanced on a rickety table sometimes.  I’m hoping GTD and OmniFocus can alleviate some of that end of semester panic in the future.

For the other postdocs out there, what strategies/tips do you have for task management?

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Image credit: Graduation photo courtesy of lab buddies. Knife juggler photo Creative Commons licensed by peter.bryant via Flickr.

National Lab Day

November 26, 2009 in Education, Science by Kris | 1 comment


Part of President Obama’s “Educate to Innovate” initiative, National Lab Day puts scientists and engineers in the classroom for hands-on learning opportunities. The project runs year round, with a special week of activities in early May. Best of all, everyone can volunteer. If you’re a scientist or engineer, you can help out by designing and implementing hands-on activities at your local schools. Teachers can request specific projects for their students.

The website will automatically match volunteers to requests from educators to participate on the basis of geography and interests. The website also provides resources and ideas for hands-on learning experiments and invites the public to suggest new materials.

The hubby and I have already signed up. I know some of my other science colleagues (looking at you, Philanthropologist), have been searching for volunteer opportunities. For those with a science/technology bent, National Lab Day may be the perfect fit.

The Leaky Pipeline

November 23, 2009 in Education, Grad School, Science by Kris | 1 comment

The Center for American Progress has released a new white paper, in response to a report by the National Research Council which stated that women with terminal degrees were less likely to enter the tenure track, and more likely to drop out before receiving tenure, than men.
http://images2.americanprogress.org/CAP/2009/11/MaryAnnMason_womenandscience.mp4
The CAP study, Staying Competitive, Patching America’s Leaky Pipeline in the Sciences (pdf), addresses factors that contribute to this attrition of highly trained women in STEM fields.

In the life sciences, women now earn more the 50% of the PhDs. However, women are more likely to “leak” out of the system before getting tenure, primarily as a result of family obligation. Getting married and having children are the source of the biggest leak between earning a terminal degree and achieving tenure. Married female PhDs with children are 35% less likely to enter the tenure track than their male counterparts.  So being married and having children doesn’t prevent you from becoming a fully tenured professor, but add being female on top of that, and your chances drop by 35%. And married women with young children who do enter the tenure track are 27% less likely than married men with young children to achieve tenure. Why? Part of the reason women opt-out of the tenure track is the lack of family-friendly work policies, especially for junior researchers.

benefits

From the chart, between 77-87% of junior researchers (graduate students and postdocs) are NOT entitled to paid maternity leave. My graduate institution falls into that ad hoc category. None of the women in my program (14 babies!) were given paid maternity leave. And many took only 4 weeks off before returning to work at least part time.  At that’s just the beginning. Even for those faculty who have protected paid maternity leave, once they return to their jobs, they face more work. What constitutes work?

When combined with caregiving hours and house work, UC women faculty with children, ages 30 to 50, report a weekly average of over 100 hours of combined activities (in comparison to around 86 hours for men with children). This staggering amount of overall work gives a sense of how challenging it can be for women to combine children with a fast-track career in the sciences. [In addition,] the number of care hours provided by women faculty with children stays very high through age 50, averaging more than 30 hours a week of care. By age 58 women faculty with children still engage in 15 hours a week of care, and a full convergence of care hours provided by all of our faculty, regardless of gender and children, does not occur until the age of 60.

These talented and highly-trained women are being set up to fail, thanks to a system that doesn’t recognize the importance and effect of family obligations, and to the detriment of American science as a whole.

To lose talented scholars…because of our failure to provide baseline family responsive policies seems pennywise but pound foolish. If young scholars continue to leak out of the pipeline prior to seeking fast-track careers in the sciences, there is no way to make sure that they are not largely or entirely lost to our nation’s capacity to generate new scientific discoveries.

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Reference: Staying Competitive Patching America’s Leaky Pipeline in the Sciences

PSA: Powerpoint Don’ts

November 19, 2009 in Education, Grad School by Kris | No comments

I had a few professors who could have benefited from this information. Although, when I started graduate school, most of my profs were still using overhead transparencies.

YouTube Preview Image

Online Literacy

July 28, 2008 in Critical Thinking, Education, Technology by Kris | No comments

I read an article this morning on the New York Times – Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?

The entire article was interesting, discussing different skills gained by reading online vs. reading books, as well as the concern that online reading may fracture attention spans, making reading books that much more difficult.

What really jumped out at me, though, was this:

Web readers are persistently weak at judging whether information is trustworthy. In one study, Donald J. Leu, who researches literacy and technology at the University of Connecticut, asked 48 students to look at a spoof Web site (http://www.zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/) about a mythical species known as the “Pacific Northwest tree octopus.” Nearly 90 percent of them missed the joke and deemed the site a reliable source (emphasis mine).

Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus

Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus

I’m wondering if this lack of critical thinking skills is a side effect of all the information available on the Internet, or if the Internet has just exposed a wider problem, the fundamental lack of critical thinking by a majority of the US population.

This subject has been on my mind recently, due in part to family members who send e-mails “proving” that the presidential candidate they do not support did something horrible, and therefore is obviously not qualified to be leader of the free world, commander-in-chief, etc.  These emails amount to little more than character assassination, and the scary thing is, people believe them and don’t bother to check the facts (easily done online) for themselves.

In the future, traditional reading skills may not be as important as the ability to determine reliable sources, and critical consideration — not just comprehension — of what is read.

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