We’re teaching the scientific method incorrectly

As a scientist, I am often doing science. It’s my job. I know science. By any measure, I’m as much a scientist as any other scientist.

The scientific method as incorrectly taught to our children. Image from Washington Prep High School, Los Angeles Unified School District. photo: T. McGlynn

But if you look at what I do on a day to day basis, it looks absolutely nothing like what people think science should look like. Fixing misconceptions about science requires much more than correcting stereotypes of what scientists look like, though that’s a great start. (By the way, here’s my entry to This is what a scientist looks like.)

Science is taught in school as a linear process. In practice, it never is a linear process. It’s not even a linear process in the labs in which we teach the scientific method.

I was in a high school classroom last week, and on the whiteboard of this classroom was that odiously wrong conception that we see everywhere. I see this all the time, and if I was doing my job better I would openly contest it every time I see it.

In its stead, let me share with you what it looks like when I am doing science:

The Method of Science, as it happens in my lab

What science really looks like is a little more complex than how it is marketed by publishing companies to our children when they are in school. They’re not training kids to be scientists, they’re selling textbooks to teachers who are not scientists. Many of these teachers are reluctant to teach science because they are not adequately prepared, and because their bosses are making them overdose on math and English to maintain test scores.

Teaching science isn’t easy for those who aren’t used to doing science, so this cute linear process that kids see in school is what publishers have done to make teaching science as simple and boring as possible.

How do our kids really learn what science is? By actually doing science. By having teachers that understand science and do real science with them. What is often missing is the red arrow in the figure above. Even those who buy into the linear model of science need to realize that it is cyclical, that answers lead to questions. It’s not a plodding march of progress. It’s a messy tumble and jumble forward in which new information leads to even more confusion, but with broader horizons. Science expands the circumference of our ignorance.

How can teachers get our kids to do science if they don’t even know what real science looks like? We need to teach real science to the teachers. We can do this in college, but if you look at the science coursework that is required by future elementary- and middle-school teachers, you’d be either dismayed or outraged. This is the starting point in fixing the science education crisis in the US. We need elementary and middle-school teachers who understand, enjoy and prioritize science.

As scientists in science departments, we have the latitude to seize this curriculum and teach these classes the right way, and by the right people. And we can make sure that people don’t leave our classes without understanding and being excited about science. We can make sure that they’ve been involved in a genuine science experience. We can use genuine inquiry in our teaching.

We also can skip the middle man and do science with current teachers.

This summer I’m taking one of many small steps. I’m having an experienced master teacher at the middle school level joining my group in Costa Rica for a month. He should go home with a better idea what science looks like, I expect. If you want a teacher in your lab, and you’re one of those (declining few) with federal funding, just call up your program director and you probably could get hooked up mighty quickly once you find your teacher. To find a teacher, just ask around, and many will jump at the chance as long as they’re getting paid. Even if it’s just a lot of pipetting. Having a teacher in your lab can change science education for hundreds of kids in a short period of time.

To be clear, I’m not the only one who has this idea in mind. The more of us working to explode the notion that science is linear, the more opportunity kids have to get to do real science.

Open question: sabbatical funding?

This is a question for you:

I suspect most universities have moved to a one-semester sabbatical, with a full-year sabbatical at half pay. First of all, is that true? Second, if you want a full year of sabbatical, where do you find that other semester? (Or do you take a pay cut?)

One possibility is a Fulbright; then there are centers like NESCent; and there are on-site grants from facilities of DOE and NASA. Those sound wonderful, but if you don’t want to have to be geographically tied to a specific place for a whole semester, what to do?

Care to share what you’ve done for sabbatical, what you’re planning, or what questions you have? I won’t check back in for a day or two, but by all means chat away.

Teaching universities as the farm league

Many people seek faculty jobs at teaching universities even though they would prefer to work at a research university.

This isn’t unethical. A job is a job, and just because some people see a job as a calling or a sacred vocation, most people in the world are doing it for a paycheck above all else.

I have seen plenty of professors at teaching institutions look down upon their research-active colleagues in their institution, even though these researchers may be teaching quite well. (Of course, it’s even more common for some faculty at research institutions to look down upon, or feel sorry for, faculty at teaching institutions.)

Which is a more desirable job? Being a professor at a teaching-centered or a research-centered institution? What do objective measures say? There are two obvious ways to use numbers to answer this question. First, there is significantly more demand for the research faculty positions. Second, the salary of research faculty positions is appreciably higher than the salary of faculty at teaching institutions.

More people want research positions. Maybe they’re not more desirable, but they are more desired. (This makes sense, because the training required for a faculty position is all about research training and typically includes no training in teaching whatsoever.) A number of scientists who are excellent in all respects, but still don’t get a research position, might wind up taking a job at a teaching institution, even though they may continue to pursue their primary goal of being a faculty at a research institution. Is this wrong? No, it is not.

Nevertheless, because of the politics and emotions that people invest into their jobs, it is not socially acceptable at a teaching institution to communicate to others that your preferred job is at a research institution. This doesn’t require dishonesty, but it definitely means that you can’t be fully honest and you might have to be a little deceitful if this is your goal. You never want to say at your job that you want to eventually leave, after all, and this might even be true if you’re flipping burgers.

Though more people want jobs at research institutions, jobs at teaching schools are still mighty hard to land. Given this keen competition, and the huge differences between what happens on a research campus and a teaching campus, teaching institutions get to have their pick of candidates and have the latitude to pick out job candidates who, more than anything else, want to be at a teaching university. Ideally, a campus wants to hire someone who isn’t immediately looking to leave. So, teaching campuses prefer to hire people who are dedicated to working on teaching campuses.

That is, if search committees can identify who those people are. Good luck with that.

Faculty who want a research position seeking a job at teaching institution, if they are to be successful, need to mimic the true believers who are passionately interested in spending their careers (if not their lives) at teaching institutions.

To put this in context, let me offer a one-paragraph lesson in mimicry. In biology, we recognize a few kinds of mimicry. Batesian mimics falsely adopt the signal of another organism that honestly signals its status. (The classic example is a viceroy butterfly, which isn’t filled with toxic cardiac glycosides, but it looks a lot like a monarch butterfly, which picks up toxins from feeding on milkweeds as caterpillars.) In contrast, Müllerian mimics are only distantly related to one another but they have evolved a set of characteristics to honestly communicate their defenses. (The classic example is a set of mimicry complexes among Heliconius butterflies). Another kind are aggressive mimics, which could be predators that resemble their prey (such as jumping spiders that often look like their ant prey) or a caterpillar with a pattern that looks like the head of a viper, or a moth that looks like the face of an owl.

So, when scientists who want research positions choose to apply for teaching positions, what kind of mimic are they? It varies.

They could be Batesian mimics, which essentially are parasites on the system and reduce the effectiveness of the honest signal of the organisms that they mimic. These mimics don’t want to teach much at all, aren’t interested in developing that skill, and calculate the amount of effort they have to put in to just keep their job as long as necessary. They want to maintain this mimicry signal, and the quality of mimicry varies. They do hedge bets and are interested in being perceived as teaching-focused just in case they aren’t successful at moving on.

Aggressive mimics of teaching faculty actively reveal their colors as soon as they’re hired. These people are toxic and everyone identifies the mistake right away. Including the person who took the job. Let’s forget about these, because they’re both rare and annoying people in general.

There are Müllerian mimic professors, too. These are those that would prefer a job at a research university but they are also mighty pleased with a teaching institution too. They are showing their true colors when they say that they are dedicated to the teaching mission of the institution. They do belong, and they look like the dedicated faculty of the university because, in fact, they are.

What is the relative proportion of the Müllerian and Batesian mimic varieties? Or, in other words, how many professors in teaching positions who want to move on to research positions are actually dedicated to doing a great job at their current institution?

I don’t know the answer to that question.

Here’s a question to which I do know the answer: Among the faculty who move on to research positions, how many of them were dedicated to doing a great job at the teaching institution before they left?

That’s an easy one. In all of my experience, these people were wholly dedicated to their teaching jobs and before they left, they were recognized locally on their campus as spectacular in all respects before leaving.

I’ve worked with and known a goodly number of people who have moved on from teaching jobs to research institutions (and there are a number of commenters on the site who fall that pool, some of whom I know well and some I don’t). In every case of which I’m aware, the departure of that faculty member was a great loss.

These great losses were not the departures of the research programs, but because of excellence in teaching, collegial performance of service, and contribution to the institution as a whole. The departure of these people was seen as an inevitable “moving up” to bigger and better things. I’m not sure I agree with that assessment, but nonetheless people were uniformly happy for them. We all recognize that when dealing with employers, you need to look out for yourself above all else, as only you can be counted on to make choices in your own best interest, even if you have dedicated your career and then some to a specific institution.

I imagine these professors who moved “up” to research jobs may have always wanted such a position, and they essentially published their way out of their teaching position. That’s the standard interpretation. However, if you choose that route, then my experience indicates that you can’t just publish your way out. You have to do it while earning the respect and admiration of your colleagues. (This is something that can’t be done by faking it. There are people on my campus who are faking it, and it’s pretty obvious.) You have to be dedicated and do a good job and have the interests of your students and your institution in mind. All of these people who I know that have made the move have been tremendously nice people above all other identifying characteristics.

This much is clear: most faculty don’t move to a research institution once they start a teaching position. What happens to these people who don’t move, over the course of their careers? Here are a variety of possibilities:

Love teaching and accomplish lots of great research too
Love teaching and lose the passion for research
Teach badly, focus on research and be miserable
Hate teaching, give up on research, and be bitter
Be ambivalent and focus on doing the minimum
Be mediocre with delusions of grandeur
Move into administration
Don’t get tenure, and find a job outside academia

I’ve seen all of the above, and there are probably varieties I’m missing.

Where do I fall into this pool? I’m not in this group – I deliberately looked for a teaching-centered position from the outset, even though my initial motivation in taking a job at a teaching institution wasn’t well informed.

Since I am doing a decent amount of research at a teaching institution, is a research university a preferred job? I don’t think so. I don’t think I have a single ideal job. I do really want to go to a university where I can do more research and where it is valued, but there are lots of teaching-centered institutions that fit that label. I evolve over time, and my attitude towards research and teaching are very different from when I started out.

I’m mostly satisfied in a teaching institution, and I don’t think I’d be more satisfied at a research institution. Nevertheless, I would consider a good move. There are a few crippling aspects of my current position that I would hope to ameliorate. First, I’d like to be in a department that is adequately staffed to support its own students; I am feeling increasingly guilty for complicity in an organization that is undermining it own mission. As a small example, it’s unfair to our students (as well as myself) that every professor in my department has >100 advisees every semester. Second, our campus research infrastructure is experiencing continued neglect, and the people in charge of promoting research on campus aren’t focused on what matters. (Last, and this isn’t a small thing, I would be nice to be paid market rate.) I’d have to be sure that a job I move into wouldn’t have other hidden problems that are worse than these ones, of course.

If I do move, then I wouldn’t see it as “moving up” even if others at my university would see it that way. Most of my job is working with students, in the classroom, in the lab doing research, and in the field. That would happen wherever I go, and since I’ve been in my current job I’ve been blessed with a string of incomprehensively wonderful students. Every time I bring students to my field station in Costa Rica, my colleagues here uniformly remark, “you always have the best students.” And I agree with them. I’ve been blessed, and I doubt that blessing could transfer to a different institution.

Ultimately, in my book, the desirability of the job is in how much I enjoy each day, on a day to day basis. It doesn’t matter too much if it’s a teaching or research institution. This is regulated by the collegiality and professionalism of my colleagues and the opportunities that are seized by my students.

If you enjoy both research and the teaching, a true move “up” wouldn’t be about the relative emphasis on research or teaching, but the overall capacity to do both well.

Less valid complaints about not getting a tenure-track faculty position

We produce way more PhD scientists than the existing demand for tenure-track faculty positions. That’s a straight up fact that we all recognize. The corollary to this fact is that people planning to get PhD must recognize that there must be a multiplicity of careers to keep in mind while in graduate school. (There’s a great guest post at Dynamic Ecology on this topic.)

So, I’m sympathetic to the notion that there are many excellent people out there that, on account of both deterministic and random processes, don’t land faculty positions despite a sincere and dogged pursuit of that goal. I have some colleagues whose research record and teaching skills (as well as collegiality) have merited a great position, but haven’t landed one, or who took a mighty long time to do so.

Obviously, the system is messed up in a variety of ways. I’m not going to get into that, because, really, you can find that on every other blog out there. That niche is well covered.

Tenured professors are probably in the worst position to remark on the fact that it is hard it is to get a faculty position. So, to make my point here, I’m going out on a limb, albeit a sturdy one.

I take issue with one specific variety of complaint: “I never got a faculty position because of X.”

If X is anything other than the paucity of jobs, then these statements typically rely on unsubstantiated claims, false expectations and incomplete knowledge of oneself as well as job availability.

What are the kinds of X I’ve heard over the years? All kinds of crazy stuff. Some people who don’t get a job can find all kinds of rationalizations. There isn’t a secret job czar out there preventing any search committee from picking somebody, and there’s no collusion going on among different interview committees. Some people get lots of offers, some only get one, and many don’t get any. The outcome is initially determined by what’s inside the application, and finally by how the person interviews. There is a great deal of hap involved. Very good people might not get jobs.

On this theme, here is the outrageous X statement of the week:

Discover the secret of the 17-year-cicada, but it won’t get you tenure

When I first saw the link to this post in the Scientific American Guest Blog, I was excited to finally learn the elusive secret of the periodic cicada! Clicking through, my mind spun with possibilities: Were cicadas actually Somali pirates in a past life? Were cicadas once married to a reclusive billionaire who enslaved hamsters in a miniature dungeon decorated with novelty leather goods? Are cicadas actually descended from beluga whales in a fluke of evolution? Was there some mathematical modeling combined with cytogenetics, fossil reconstructions and ultra-fine-scale radiometric dating that fully resolved the question about whether their periodicity evolved only in prime numbers?

I wasn’t even close.

It turns out the “secret” is that male periodical cicadas have a ritualized courtship routine, involving annoying whirring in a very specific fashion, that’s required to be able to access females. I think it is about as elaborate as lampyrid beetles (fireflies), though without the light show.

As far as my 10-min bibliographic search got me, I believe that this find was first published in the journal Behaviour in 2001 (pdf). It’s good work. According to Google Scholar, it’s been cited 37 times since it’s been published, which is well above the average paper (not that the number of citations directly reflects how valuable or important something is, of course). This finding is important for outreach, considering the public interest in periodical cicada emergences.

I admit, however, that I was disappointed to find out the “secret” because I was expecting something more amazing. I imagine that figuring out precisely how cicadas use their loud sounds to attract females would require some tricky timing in the field, since sex is highly seasonal. It takes 17 years of development for an individual to get to the point when it’s ready to have sex, though there’s a decent emergence, somewhere, on most years.

The dilemma of the cicada researcher isn’t that different from most scientists who study highly seasonal phenomena. I also can relate to this problem. Up until I came up for tenure, all of my data collection in a year was done in a 3 week chunk of time, not because of seasonality, but because it involved working in a distant rainforest when I wasn’t teaching. So I know how hard it is to do research while having to travel and cram your work into a short period of time.

This piece wasn’t written by John Cooley or by David Marshall, the cicada researchers who figured out the “secret,” but instead by “musician, composer, author and philosopher-naturalist” David Rothenberg. Cooley was interviewed by Rothenberg. I don’t know either of them personally, and Rothenberg is good writer. If you’re not an entomologist familiar with animal behavior and field biology, you might allow Rothenberg into tricking you into thinking that the solid and interesting research by Cooley and Marshall comprised “such a momentous discovery.”

Here’s what Rothenberg writes:

It is shocking that even after publishing numerous papers on this unique aspect of animal behavior, there is no permanent place in academy for either of them.

and

“Frankly I’m shocked that you guys don’t both have prestigious positions, for the remarkable cicada discoveries you’ve made.”

Really?

I’d like one of those prestigious positions, too.

Tenure-track positions are not awards for prior discoveries. They are investments into the promise of future work. Unless you have a Nobel Prize or are a member of the National Academy, you aren’t hired for what you’ve done. Universities hiring tenure-track faculty only take into account prior publications and discoveries as an indicator of what they may expect in the future. Publications don’t win you a job, they are only one prerequisite. To get a job, you need to convince others that you are capable of generating a string of publications like the ones you’ve already been able to do in the past.

I don’t want to pick on Cooley and Marshall, but since Cooley was letting Rothenberg size up his academic prestige in the Scientific American blog, then I suppose it’s okay for me to do so in this more obscure venue. In the context of the academic job market, I want to put their achievements in the perspective of my own experience.

I finished my dissertation around the same time as Cooley and Marshall, and I’ve probably taught as much as they have since we finished our dissertations. Our publication records aren’t markedly different, though if you care about those things, my h-score is only slightly higher and I’ve had a more recent papers. In terms of research citation, recognition, productivity and so on, we’re roughly on the same par, I suspect. They probably garner more media attention when there’s a big cicada emergence, like the one that prompted Rothenberg’s post.

Another difference among us is that I’m a tenured Associate Professor and that they aren’t on the tenure track. So, why is that? Is it because they’ve chosen to work on an organism that’s difficult to work with in its seasonality and longevity? That’s what Rothenberg implied. They’ve chosen a difficult research angle, and though making discoveries, they are being punished for working on a less tractable system by not getting a job. At least, that is the tacit message of the article as I read it.

Meanwhile, I have a few colleagues in mind, with a research record way more robust than myself, Cooley or Marshall. And they’re not landing faculty positions, either.

The scientists who are landing faculty positions have CVs that are ripe with potential. You look at their past performance, and you think to yourself, “this person has a really great research career ahead of them.”

Why are there so many scientific researchers, with a consistently solid though non-rockstar record, such as Cooley, who can’t land tenure-track job?

First, and obviously, faculty jobs in the sciences are very hard to get, though not as bad as in the humanities.

Second – and this is my main point in this post – they’re not applying for the jobs.

How do I know that? Isn’t that presumptuous of me? Only slightly.

Let me put this idea another way: Going through the records in my department, I can go through and find the names of everyone who applied for the job in which I am currently working, to which I applied in 2006. Is Cooley’s name in that list? Is Marshall’s name in that list?

In 2006, I applied to 91 faculty or faculty-esque jobs (like a museum), for all of which I was qualified and for many of which I was a good fit. I got a handful of interviews, and two offers. (One more offer might have been forthcoming if I continued shopping for a job.)

Is Cooley applying for 91 jobs per year?

You might be saying to yourself, “91 jobs? How could there 91 jobs in a year?” If so, then my reply is, “There are that many jobs every year. They’re just not published in Science or Nature. They’re jobs that you might think are below you. I’m in one of those jobs that might be below you. I don’t think it was advertised in Science, though it was in the Chronicle of Higher Education.”

Keep in mind that both Cooley and Marshall are generalized cicada biologists, with academic experience and publications in entomology, behavior, ecology, and evolution. There are lots of academic tenure-track jobs for which their CV is suited. Few of these jobs, however, are at research universities.

When many scientists say they can’t get a faculty position, what they often mean is, “I can’t get a faculty position that enables me to do lots of research, doesn’t require much time teaching, in a place where I wouldn’t mind living.”

Wouldn’t we all.

We are hoping to advertise for two positions in our department in the fall, and we are probably going to be open to all kinds of fields and subfields. Is Cooley applying? If he isn’t, then he doesn’t have the right to say that he can’t land a tenure-track job, and he shouldn’t enable Rothenberg to complain on his behalf.

At our university, Cooley wouldn’t be a rock star, but he’d be one of the best researchers on campus. I don’t know how many double-digit h-index scientists we have, but he’d be in a small minority.

I’m open to being wrong. Nevertheless, I’d be surprised to go back to that file cabinet in our departmental office, maybe in the basement, and see a cover letter from Cooley. (I can’t do this since I’m writing this from the field.) The university where I work is a perfectly fine full-time job that allows one to conduct academic pursuits, and both the place is gorgeous and our union ensures that we have good benefits. If it’s good enough for me, then, frankly, it should be good enough for him, because we have the same level of academic prestige (unless he’s published with a pseudonym for most of his prior work).

All kinds of academics have been taking jobs in far away places because those were the only ones they got, and this has been true for many decades. (For all I know, in a department of biology study of integrative cicada biology might be viewed as important as a department of literature might view the translation and interpretation of an Old Low Norse epic poem.)

Yes, there is a huge problem in academia, which is arguably broken, that many people are being trained for jobs that aren’t available. However, many of these complaints are coming from sources such as Rothenberg, that don’t understand what constitutes massive progress in science, and don’t have an appreciation for the breadth of tenure-track jobs available to scientists.

I bet that our open call for a “biologist” at CSU Dominguez Hills will garner perhaps couple hundred applications, and probably fewer. At the same exact moment, there will be thousands of biologists out there claiming that jobs aren’t out there.

When I do that math, then I don’t feel quite as bad for the scientists with a PhD who say that they can’t find any permanent academic job.

The safety talk with students in your lab

Safety is a top priority in my lab, though in the lab I’m not particularly over-concerned about safety. The only chemical typically involved with our labwork is ethanol, there are other potential hazards, but not different than those that students experience in teaching labs.

Other researchers have bigger safety issues in the lab. Not far from me across town, another professor’s lab oversaw a major lapse of safety resulting in a tragic death. The PI of the lab is now standing trial for felony counts of violating workplace safety. Is the PI responsible for the technician’s safety lapse that ended up in her death? All I know is that I’m glad I don’t have to be on that jury, being familiar with what is in the newspaper.

While those kinds of dangers are absent from my lab, I am very, very concerned about safety in the field. It’s very important to make sure that safety guidelines are followed, that no student ever violates major safety standards even once, and that everyone remains safe and healthy at all times.

My main “lab” is a Costa Rican tropical rainforest. We work at a well-equipped and well-staffed field station. This contributes to the level of safety, but also can lull students into an overinflated sense of security. With one poor decision, students could get permanently lost, bit by a highly venomous animal, or get crushed by a treefall or branchfall.

The analogy that I have used, for the last few years, is that the rainforest is perfectly safe if you follow the rules of the road. We aren’t afraid of driving on the freeway even though it could very easily be a deadly place, if you changed lanes at the wrong time or went up an offramp and drove the wrong way, against traffic. That’s deadly. If you don’t follow basic safety rules in the rainforest, it can be very dangerous.

Just like students in chemistry labs aren’t accustomed to working with chemicals that ignite in contact with air, students in my lab aren’t accustomed to spending their working hours kilometers into a rainforest. So, it’s very important that my students do everything that is necessary to keep themselves safe. This matters just not for their own safety, but also for my own protection as well as protecting the interests of other students who are or wish to be involved in this research program.

How do I make sure that my students behave safely? I short, it involves a combination of scaring the bejezzus out of them, and reassuring them. I play both good cop and bad cop. And I bring in grad students with concrete experiences with hazards (snakes, treefalls, orientation) to explain that these concerns are not just mine, but are universal for all researchers on site. They might think I’m exaggerating but when everyone else on station agrees with me, it provides additional credence.

The safety process starts back at home. First of all, I am committed to not taking a student who even shows one hint of having bad judgment or lack of sincere appreciation for authority on safety issues. If there’s even a small chance that I think a student would make a bad call about safety in the field, then I won’t take a chance.

Before we leave the US, we have orientation meetings in which I prepare them for the rainforest, which is rather vague until you get here. I lay out my three cardinal safety rules:

Do not ever go into the forest without the required footwear (rubber boots)
Do not ever leave the trail without a map and compass in hand
Do not ever go into the forest or away from the station without telling others your destination

I also tell my students that if they break these rules, just once, that I’ll immediately send them home.

And I mean it.

In the past, I’ve had two students knowingly break the rules once. That was when I had an unstated two-strikes policy (in which a first time violator might be given a second chance at my discretion.) These rule-breakers never broke the rules again, as far as I know.

However, both of these rule-breakers turned out to be royal pains-in-the-ass in other ways. If they were willing to flout the cardinal safety rules even once, I learned, then they were just not good students to have around in general. I really wish, in hindsight, that I sent them home right away. They created more trouble than any possible benefit they could have added. (If this were a pseudonymous blog, I could tell some great stories, but those’ll have to wait until you buy me a beer.)

I tell my students what I just wrote — that I used to give a little slack, but that I don’t do that any more. For example, if I ever catch a student without boots in the forest, or if I hear of it, then we go straight to the computer and rebook their flight and order a 2-hour taxi ride to the airport.

I’ve had that policy for a few years and am glad that I haven’t had to implement it. I only once have sent a student home prematurely in recent years, but that wasn’t for a safety violation. It was because the student was overbearing, overconfident, and under-focused. That student might have eventually broken a safety rule from being overconfident. But nobody’s life or limb was at directly at risk in this situation, as far as I am aware.

I don’t want to terrify students unnecessarily, as I need them to function effectively and independently. I want them to have both a fear and respect for snakes, but I also want them to have the confidence that they know how to behave appropriately when they do encounter a fer-de-lance or a hog-nose viper. (And this when, not if, as they are mighty common, though cryptic.)

This is a difficult balancing act, to make sure that my students always behave in a safe manner but also are not irrationally afraid of their work environment. It’s something that you always have to have in your mind, every step you take, but also something that cannot overcome you. I imagine it’s not that different from working with a carcinogenic chemical in the lab. You follow safety guidelines, and stay calm, and everything is fine.

Now that my continued existence is more important to a couple other people than it even is to myself, I’m not going to take any personal safety risks for any reason. That means that I am consistently thinking about the safety of branches overhead and the likelihood that the patch of ground in front of me harbors a coiled-up reptile. I’m not afraid, but it’s always on my mind. How do I develop that attitude in my students? It’s taken long enough for me to come to that level of confidence and conscientiousness. So far, I just consistently talk about it calmly but sincerely, on a regular basis, and I walk the walk. My students consistently impress me in their professionalism in so many other ways, that I think they’re just fine with respect to safety.

This field season, things are going just fine with my students, as far as I can tell, just 2.5 days into their 2.5 months of research in the rainforest. I’ve got a great bunch. It also helps that 2 of the undergraduates are fathers like myself, and most of them have concerned mates back at home that are just as concerned as I am that they stay safe.

I think maintaining a safe environment starts with having mutual respect. If you communicate safety as a priority, and students truly respect you, then they should be behaving safely. If that statement isn’t true, then mutual respect at least helps grease the wheels for adherence to safety guidelines.

What do students call you? Professor, Ms., Mrs., Mr., Dr., Sir?

Update 05 June 2015:

You probably arrived to this page from a search trying to find out what to call your university instructor. Here is the answer to your question:

You should use “Dr.”

There’s a good chance you got here because you were searching to find out what to call your professor if she is a woman. The answer to that question is:

Call your female professors what you call your male professors. You should refer to your university instructor as “Doctor.” (You can also call her Professor, in the United States).

“Doctor” and “Professor” are gender-neutral terms. They work equally well for women and men. We are all professors and our gender is not relevant.

If you are worried because you aren’t positive if your professor has a Ph.D., then you can just use “Professor” in the United States, but nobody will be insulted if you just call your professor “Doctor,” and you wouldn’t be violating some secret code of conduct by calling your professor Doctor.

Let me make this very clear: You should be referring to your female professors the same way you refer to your male professors. To do otherwise is insulting and sexist.

(You should be aware that Mrs. indicates marital status and is unacceptable unless you have been specifically instructed to use it by your instructor. Using Ms. is not a good idea because it’s overlooking the fact that your professor might have a Ph.D.)

When in doubt, use Doctor. It’s that simple.

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Here’s the original post:

Should you always go by Dr. when you’re dealing with undergraduates on campus?

The answer to that one is easy: you follow prevailing departmental and university culture. If you don’t do this, then you’ll just look weird, in a way that distracts from things that matter.

I’ll always remember that one guy from college who always had students call him by his first name. He also hung out at the stoner fraternity parties, too. That was creepy. I don’t want to be that creepy guy who forces overfamiliarity. But if that kind of thing is normal on your campus, or if you’re in the university founded by Thomas Jefferson and use Mr. or Ms. in an egalitarian spirit, then by all means follow along.

If your campus culture does involve the use of your title, then do you say anything when students when they don’t say Dr. or Professor? I do.

Here’s why I interrupt the conversation with students to talk about titles. I find it unprofessional when some students refer to some of my colleagues as “Mrs.” or “Ms.” instead of Professor or Dr. I also think it often indicates structural sexism that needs to be addressed, especially if students are making assumptions about marital status. (The truth is that students who choose to use “Mrs.” probably are not aware that this requires an assumption about marital status, which is a whole lesson in itself.) It does seem to me that men are more likely to be called Dr. than women.

If I correct students about not using the right title for women, then I think I should do it for men. I get “Mr.” all of the time from students. I typically suggest that they call me “Dr.” Most students probably think I’m overbearing about it, but the optimistic side of me thinks that the majority of them appreciate the advice.

I also tell the former military students that “Sir” makes me uncomfortable, which it does. I don’t get bothered when they continue to use it, though, because it’s so engrained that I realize it’s hard for them to change.

I have all of my research students, who have worked with me closely, call me by my first name. There isn’t much any other option, considering we work so closely together in the field, and at the field station, that’s what everyone else calls me. The students would be at a strategic disadvantage if they called me Dr. McGlynn while all of the other students on site had a more casual relationship with their mentors. (Also, I want to be as approachable as possible, because open communication is so important while doing international field research. I stay professional but also get to know my students as individuals.)

Of course, in the context of working with my research students on campus with other students, such as if they were to take a class with me, they call me what all the other students call me.

Do you follow campus convention? Do you like your campus convention? Do you treat your research students differently than other students, with respect to what you are called?

Note: I was thinking about this after reading a post by the Thesis Whisperer about the choice to use Dr. in one’s non-academic life. That’s a different issue, but it made me think of this.

A method to develop scientists from underrepresented groups: Research Recruits

The United States needs to develop more scientists from underrepresented groups. This post describes an approach I’ve developed that has helped me do this more effectively.

The United States has always been, and remains, a nation of immigrants. For a variety of complex sociological reasons, our nation’s scientists are principally being drawn from one pool of historic immigrants. Now, the demographics of the country are changing more rapidly than the culture of our scientific community.

The subset of the US population from which scientists are drawn is proportionally shrinking. If our nation is going to remain (or regain) global prominence as a research powerhouse, then we need to recruit scientists from the entire population of the country. We need to make more Latino and African-American scientists, particularly women, from these groups.

The nation needs to overcome the sociocultural divisions that inhibit students from a variety of cultural backgrounds from becoming scientists.

A few generations ago, all women were excluded from most career paths, but these restrictions also applied to the men in my family because of their heritage. My Irish and Italian great grandparents living in Brooklyn were members an underrepresented ethnic and religious minority subjected to substantial discrimination (the movie Gangs of New York puts this history into context). A hundred years ago it would have been laughable that a fresh-off-the-boat McGlynn could become respected science professor in the US. Now, my ethnic background is such a part of the mainstream that I’m now considered to be a member of the privileged class.

It’s now, literally, my job to build that kind of progress for Latinos and African Americans, ethnic groups that have a longer history in the US than my own ancestors. I work in a university that gives me the opportunity of training many of these underrepresented students, and I create avenues of opportunity for those who aspire to become research scientists.

For nearly all of my students, the concept of going to graduate school to become a scientist isn’t even on their radar. Most students are oriented towards careers as technicians in the medical, biomedical or biotechnological fields. Some are broadly interested in environmental science but more about on-the-ground conservation work rather than become a research leader in the field.

Nobody new has come to me and said, “I want to go to graduate school and become a researcher.” If I were to introduce this concept to students, most would be neutral or opposed to the idea, meet resistance from their families, and would be more oriented towards finding a 9-5 job right after graduation or seeking vocational training.

Research is not an easy sell, even though I have some students who I intuitively know right off the bat that they would both excel at, and relish, a career in scientific research. How do I make this happen? There are many books and articles written about the general approach. This post describes one specific practice that can enhance recruitment efforts.

In general, researchers are created by the placement of promising students in an immersive and amazing research experience. They also are made with the provision of proximate models (e.g., not an old white married professor with a family) to show them how possible it is for them to pursue this route.

How do you get students into immersive experiences with the right role models? How I can I, at an underfunded state university with scant research activity on campus, make this happen?

One of the problems in recruiting students from underrepresented groups into scientific careers is that most of this underrepresented population goes to high school and college in environments where it sucks to do science. These urban high-need schools are so focused on raising test scores in English and math that science is merely an afterthought at best.

It’s no wonder that our underrepresented students don’t want to become scientists. They’ve never done genuine science in school, and at our university, our labs are shabby and poorly equipped, and there are no big active research labs on campus, so they don’t have any idea what it looks like to do research.

If I want to make research scientists out of my students, I’ve got to them the heck out of Dodge.

I’ve got to get them to a place where serious research happens all over the place, surrounded by a multiethnic group of students that are one step above them in experience and aspiration. There’s lots of fun tinkering in my lab, but nothing that can inspire someone to make the switch towards a life in science.

I’m not going to bring these students to local research universities like UCLA or Caltech, or to well-endowed undergraduate campuses with great undergraduate research programs like Occidental or Pomona. That could, and does, work, but I’ve got what I think is a better plan.

I’m writing this post right now on a plane. The six seats in front of me are occupied by students from my university, and when they started college they were not planning to become scientists. I’ll wager that a few years from now, about half of them will be published authors and enrolled in a great PhD program in biology. This plane is heading for Costa Rica, and they’ll be spending either 2.5 weeks, or 2.5 months, doing research on trophic ecology in a tropical rainforest. (Their work supported by the NSF International Research Experiences for Students program, also the Louis Stokes Alliance for Broadening Minority Participation administered by NSF.)

The rainforest itself isn’t what makes the students become scientists. Instead, it’s the research environment located at the edge of this massive fragment of forest, called La Selva Biological Station. There, my students interact with undergraduates, grad students, and postdocs from all over the US, Latin America and Europe. They hang out with people who are supremely excited about research, and they also see the social and ethnic diversity of scientists that is rare at most US universities. Many of my students speak Spanish at home, and at La Selva, they’re able to talk with research students from Latin America who are also native Spanish speakers. They see Latinos excelling at research, and it is inspiring.

What my students see at La Selva is something that I could never just explain to them: they can have a genuine future as a research scientist. If they love the research (and only some do), then this experience makes the avenue to success perfectly clear and obvious.

They know that it’s my job to clear the path for them, for the next few years, by bring them to conferences, making them published authors, and helping give them the skills they need. (You’ll be able to meet a bunch of them if you go to the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation meeting this summer, by the way.) They know it’s their job to deliver the goods as well, by being productive members of my research lab, primarily as the engines of data creation.

I don’t necessarily need to schlep these students to the rainforest to give them that kind of immersive research environment. I think active biological field stations are the best for this kind of experience, and there are lots of these within the US. Some universities are great for this as well, especially for those whose research orientation is focused on what happens in the lab. I bring these students to La Selva because that’s my biological home where I’ve worked for almost 20 years. I work there because my undergraduate advisor brought me there, and she remains a top mentor and model for my work with students.

Bringing the right students to the rainforest became really difficult since I came to a university filled with students from ethnicities underrepresented in the sciences (in California, you can’t call Latino a “minority” after all). When I worked at schools filled with relatively wealthy students with northern European ancestry, I had no problem finding students who wanted go down and work in the rainforest for a few weeks for a few months. They could pay for it themselves, and they enjoyed the experience, though not so many of them enjoyed it enough to become scientists.

I was surprised when I got to CSU Dominguez Hills. I posted signs up all over the (dilapidated) science building which read:

SUMMER RESEARCH IN THE RAINFOREST. ALL EXPENSES PAID PLUS $4000 STIPEND. APPLY NOW!

Who wouldn’t want to do that? It turns out, nearly everybody.

I thought I’d be overwhelmed with applications. I didn’t get enough credible applications to fill my slots. The few applicants I had were hardcore premeds who I knew (from past experience) would never be won over to research, and I didn’t want to waste NSF’s money (nor my time) that way.

I eventually filled the slots, mostly with the right students, but it took a serious recruitment effort. The most frustrating part of the experience is that there were students who I knew well, who I was confident would enjoy and succeed in the summer rainforest research experience, but I couldn’t convince them to apply. It turned out that nearly all of my best potential candidates were the ones that I couldn’t convince to come along.

In hindsight, I shouldn’t have been surprised. Many of these students were closely tied to their families and had never been away from family for a week, much less two months. Also, though I could pay a full stipend, this amount couldn’t fully match the revenue they would be earning from summer employment. Third, many students were counting on taking summer school so that they could graduate in 5 or 6 years instead of 7 or 8 years (no, I’m not exaggerating. Welcome to the contemporary California State University).

I couldn’t pull a student away from home for a whole summer of paid research unless they were exceptionally untied at home and had a great degree of financial freedom, combined with an independence of vision or a particularly free spirit that would allow them to have an open mind to the future. There were students I wanted to take down for the whole summer, but I just couldn’t hook them.

So, what did I do? As the title of the post suggests, I created a new category of student researcher, which I called the “Research Recruit.”

Remember how I wrote that some of the students traveling with me joined me for just 2.5 weeks. They spend two weeks doing research at La Selva, and a few days on “cultural experiences” such as the beach, cloud forest, volcano expeditions, hot springs, museums and zip-lining before going back home. They don’t receive a stipend, but they do get all their travel expenses covered plus a little per diem. Nothing has to come out of their own pockets.

It’s not that hard to convince most students to leave for the rainforest for 2.5 weeks. They can take that much time off their jobs with enough advance warning, and even if they have overprotective family, they can escape and reassure them with video chats from abroad. Students can get someone to watch their pets for that long, if not the whole summer. While not many people apply as research recruits on their own initiative, when we seek out students who we think are a good fit and ask them to apply, then we get a large and high quality applicant pool.

The Research Recruits don’t run their own projects like the long-term students. They pitch in as research technicians on the projects run by the other students. They also are encouraged to tag along with other researchers on station, which gives them the chance to meet a variety of grad students from the U.S. and also gives them exposure to a variety of biological and research system. Exceptional ones might be invited to stay for the whole summer, if there is adequate funding and mentorship.

By hosting a short-term cohort of Research Recruits, I am able to give students a taste of field biology and a thrilling research community. We are able to entice a number of recruits to apply to, and plan for, a full summer of research abroad in the following summer. Some research recruits don’t return to the rainforest for a full summer, as they discovered that they are not field biologists, but they have emerged from the experience excited about research and some have wound up as researchers in other lab-oriented disciplines. Others have gone into careers in teaching, and their tangible research experience has enhanced their classroom teaching.

It is hard work to make a scientist out of a person whose background precludes scientific research as a genuine career option. It is a highly personalized process, and it takes building genuine personal relationships. It also takes multiple years. Not all of my “research recruits” become scientists, but some of them do. These students who wind up in grad school never would have committed to a full summer of research without having an initial taste of research. If I gave up on them because they were wary of a summer of dedicated research, then it’s likely that they never would have been turned onto scientific research as a career option.

Once our Recruits go home, then they can prepare for the next summer. They can talk to their families, arrange for someone to watch their dog, don’t mind quitting their job and get excited about the projects that they can do. The level of commitment required to leave home for the summer, for the purpose of an intangible and vague experience, is a high bar for underrepresented students. The Research Recruit experience lets students know what they would be doing for the whole summer, and gets talented students to be motivated to make the personal commitment.

Is an exceptional summer experience enough to turn a student into a lifelong scientist? It can be. The hard part is getting students to envision themselves taking part in an experience for one summer. If you bring Research Recruits into your program, you lessen the initial level of commitment and then you can identify those who will succeed in long-term experiences.

Underrepresented students are going to college at underrepresented universities, the campuses that are not actively participating in the research community. To diversify the sciences, you need to recruit students from these campuses. To do this, you’ve got to go through us – the faculty who work with these students on a day to day basis.

To bring students from these institutions into the fold, you can’t just offer amazing experiences and hope that the right students sign up. You’ve got to court them, and convince them that research is a viable avenue. You’ve got to build personal relationships.

You can’t just expect the best students to commit to full summer research experiences. Research ability and motivation may be independent from the ability to envision research as a career path. I wish every program that is trying to recruit students from ethnic minorities included a Research Recruit option, which would bring in not only more students, but also the best students who otherwise would not see research as an option in their future.

We have a high conversion rate from our Research Recruit program, and after doing this for four years, our challenge is that we have too many qualified students looking for full-summer slots. That’s not a bad position to be in, and it also helps us argue for greater levels funding for our programs.

If you don’t have enough talented students from underrepresented groups applying, consider inviting them for just two weeks. Build your research community from the ground up. There are so many amazing students from underrepresented groups at non-research universities that can be excellent scientists. Creating funded opportunities is only the start, you’ve got to court them. I humbly suggest that creating a short-term Research Recruit program is one successful tactic that is absent from most programs.

“What are you doing for vacation?”

I feel a little put out when people ask me what I’m doing with my 3 month vacation. Um, what vacation are you talking about?

Does summer mean vacation for a university scientist? Heck yeah! Just not for 3 months.

It looks like vacation comes in second, only topped by the backlog of manuscripts, in voting so far.

Summer is when the most science gets done, but, come on, it’s glorious out and your schedule isn’t going to be more open than this. You’ve got to get away at some point.

I’m one of those vacationers, for a few weeks in July/August. I’m mentioning this because you might be interested in knowing how I arranged my vacation – it’s a home exchange.

If you live in a place that others might want to visit, then you should really think about signing onto a home exchange registry. The way this works, is that you arrange a swap so that others move into your house for a while, and you move into theirs. You can swap cars, too. (I haven’t seen this movie, but people have told me there’s one in which Kate Winslet falls in love with Jack Black, during some kind of home exchange.)

A couple years ago, we spent 2.5 weeks in Iceland, and this year, we’re spending almost three weeks in Paris. The only real cost of the vacation is getting there. No rental car, no housing expenses, a kitchen to cook in, a comfy house for an extended stay. The only challenge is that getting our abode ready for the exchange won’t be a minor tidy job. If you have questions about how home exchange works, put ’em in the comments and I can answer for everyone. I’m not a pro because I’ve only done it once so far, but it’s pretty straightforward.

Would I spend the kind of money needed for an apartment or hotel for an extended stay in a very nice place? Maybe, but it’d be painful. Nor would I want to impose on any friend for my family of three to camp out in their home for anything more than a short visit. The home exchange is the best way to go, a comfortable home away from home, with many conveniences, and you can’t beat the price. And someone to water your tomatoes while you’re gone.

When vacation time rolls around, it doesn’t help that I’m also hoping to submit a biggish grant with a deadline on the last day of this trip. But I’m committed to making this not a working vacation. In more than two months away. A lot has to happen before then.

So, off to the field! Things might be getting a little slow on the site, but I’ll check in periodically, at least a couple times per week if not more often.

Deadwood or Driftwood?

I’ve always disliked the phrase “deadwood” when referring to a certain class of senior faculty. It’s disrespectful. The term exists to identify a set of negative characteristics, after all.

I used it in an earlier post, addressing how I’ve gotten a bit stale. Nobody seemed bothered by it, at least not that I heard. I’m not personally opposed to the term, though I’d be very cautious in using it. I used it describing my potential fate, and a former professor of mine who fit the bill.

I wrote that I was trying to avoid “Drifting towards deadwood.”

In a comment, Jeremy Fox (of Dynamic Ecology) had some questions and insights into how we may not be able to diagnose the process.

On reflection, I realize that very few faculty are genuine deadwood. You’re deadwood if you do nothing but the minimum, you don’t care, don’t even try, and just show up for the paycheck. You don’t prepare for class, you don’t even attempt to do research, you barely show up at meetings and you duck all service, unless it gives you a chance to be overbearing. That’s deadwood.

Genuine deadwood is uncommon to rare. There are some faculty that might get the label unfairly, which I wouldn’t call “deadwood.”

How about the term “driftwood?”

These are faculty who have let their careers drift without conscious planning. They want to do a good job, but they haven’t kept up the skills to keep relevant. The research world has moved past them, and they aren’t familiar with the current literature. They think that their teaching is innovative and effective, but they haven’t changed their practices that much at all.

Driftwood professors are dedicated to their jobs and their students. It’s just that their professional training is out of date. They’ve drifted away, inadvertently, from the best that they can do.

I’m not worried about becoming deadwood, but I do have to be viligant about becoming driftwood.

What are some indicators?

You might be driftwood if your teaching relies on concepts that date back to your grad school days more than what you’ve learned since then.

You might be driftwood if you have trouble publishing an article because no solid journal thinks that the topic is important.

You might be driftwood if you are uncomfortable telling your students “I don’t know” because you fear that you are supposed to know.

You might be driftwood if you’re avoiding a specific research agenda not because you lack the tools but because you lack the information.

You might be driftwood if you find yourself disagreeing with most of the junior faculty about research standards or contemporary teaching approaches.

You might be driftwood if you rely on skills you learned in grad school that aren’t being taught in grad school anymore.

You get the idea.

So, when people are coming up the pike with skills and ideas in which I’m not proficient, I’ve got to get on it. Thus my interest in inquiry based learning, and my need to learn R, and getting to know grad students in general.

This much is sure: you’ve got to self-diagnose your own driftwood status, but it’s unlikely that anybody else is going to do you the favor. This doesn’t have anything to do with salary, promotion, reputation or recognition. It’s just about doing the best that you can.

A recommended summer read: How People Learn

As a scientist, when I teach I want to know that what I’m doing in class is effective.

To know that something is effective, we ideally need data that demonstrate understand how people learn. Then we can then tailor our approaches to fit these data.

The problem is that there is a massive literature about human learning in educational settings, and I have enough trouble keeping up with the literature in my own field, much less the educational literature.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was just a comprehensive but easy to understand meta-analysis and interpretation of everything we know about human learning?

It turns out, there is. It’s called How People Learn. It’s so good, I’ve received two free copies on separate occasions, in science education professional development events.

This book was brought to you by the U.S. National Academies Press, back in 2000. It’s about as information-packed and useful as you might imagine. Foll ow this link and you can download the free pdf, read it online, or order a new bound copy if you’re inclined. You can get a used copy from resellers for less than ten bucks, including shipping.

Yeah, it’s more than ten years old. A lot of current movements in science education have been shaped by what’s in this book.

By the way, if you’re looking for an amazing non-science recreational read, then look no further than Mike Dash’s Batavia’s Graveyard (h/t @Rob Dunn who shared this book with me a long while ago). Be warned, it’ll be hard to put down once you get a few chapters in.

If you have any other recommended reading for the summer, fun and otherwise, feel free to add a comment.

Drifting towards deadwood, or not: learning to use R (updated)

Update 15 May 2013: If you’re a newbie to R and want to know where to start, the comments on this post are now replete with (what I surmise to be) wonderful suggestions. Of course learning in the presence of those who know R is best, but this is a great set of suggested resources regardless of your environment.

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I’m not that old, but I already feel myself getting a little stale.

How did this happen? Well, I guess it’s because I’m a professor and this is just the default rate of entropy.

When I was an undergrad, one of our introductory bio professors was a kindly man who was the archetype of deadwood. He had a separate slide carousel for every lecture in his course. When it was his time to teach, all he did to prepare was to pull the carousel off of the shelf. He didn’t have any idea what he was going to say until he saw the slide appear on the screen. Then, he would say the same thing he’d been saying for that slide over the past 20 years. It was just so obvious. One day, the slide projector broke. What did he do? He cancelled class.

This kind of thing is even more common now than it was back then, because few people had so many carousels at their disposal. It’s just done with powerpoint.

I’ve worked hard to keep my teaching from becoming stale. And since I’m doing a lot of research, then I can’t get stale at doing research either, right? If only that were true.

I imagine that molecular biologists all had to learn the ropes at PCR as machines and reagents became commercially available, and then relatively cheap and efficient. Nobody’s out there doing allozymes for population genetics after all, I would hope. And the same is true for RNAi, and now with nextgen sequencing approaches to genomics. In my flavor of work, there isn’t as much required to stay current, but nonetheless I’m still getting behind. If only I could have the time to run to just to stay in place.

At least I’ve diagnosed this condition and can fight the entropy. Just I keep the dishes mostly clean in my house and I have the oil changed in my car on time, I’ve got to stay fresh as a practicing scientist too. It isn’t easy.

This occurred to me, in part, when reading something that Joan Strassmann wrote (in the context of picking a good PhD advisor) that grad students are probably better at using R than their own advisor. I guess that’s the case in most labs, even if their advisors might have better statistical acumen.

If you’re a serious ecologist, nowadays, then R is an essential or near-essential tool. Here’s a confession: I’m useless with R. This is a problem. And it’s not a little problem, it’s a big problem.

I suspect that I’m not the only one in this boat, though I haven’t really heard anybody else admit to it. Every day that passes in which I still can’t use R, I’m not able to collaborate as effectively, the more reliant I am on others, and the less able I am to apply the most current tools to the experiments which I’m running. There is a single analysis that I should be able to do in R in an hour, that’s keeping me from submitting a manuscript that otherwise is pretty much done. That’s a problem.

Now, I’m not a statistical dunderhead. (I teach our graduate biostatistics class, but obviously teaching a class in something doesn’t mean you’re an expert). I design my experiments with specific tests in mind, and I choose ones that work, and I use model selection understanding the power and limitations of the approach. I understand frequentist vs. bayesian perspectives even though I don’t choose to say anything that would start a disagreement. (If you read my stuff, you can decide for yourself if I know what I’m talking about.) I guess you’ll probably just take me at my word that I’m not stupid when it comes to stats.

But there are a few analyses that I just can’t run easily, like NMDS or a GLMM. This is because I mostly use a powerful menu-driven version of SAS called JMP. It does nearly everything I want, and quite well. But there are a few analyses that I can’t run in JMP, which are becoming more and more relevant to the questions which I’m asking in my lab.

How did I get into this situation? Well, when do people learn R? In grad school. When I was in grad school, R was not the standard tool. Before then, I used SPSS on a mainframe (NO, not with punchcards) and a variety of easy-to-use programs on a Mac. (Statview was unparalleled for simple exploratory data analyses on Macs, and it was bought up by SAS and orphaned so that people would use JMP instead. The world has moved on without it.). By the time I was finishing up grad school in the late ’90s, R wasn’t in widespread use but it was ramping up. None of my fellow grad students were using it at the time, and I wasn’t behind the curve.

A few years later, while I was starting on the tenure track in the early 2000s, I put aside a little time to figure out R. That was a disaster and I couldn’t even get it to read my files. I had a few halfhearted attempts, but I couldn’t find the time. I looked into taking a short course, getting a book, but I didn’t have the time to make it happen. At this point, it wasn’t a critical failing, but I saw that more and more people were using R, and that I wasn’t one of them.

My lack of R mojo isn’t a teaching problem. Even if I was an R pro, I don’t think I’d use this in my course because the class is about understanding how statistics works and how to apply them, not how to use the software. I use JMP in the course because it is so easy to use, and I’m not going to waste instructional time on software tutorials. (We should have a separate class or seminar or experience that teaches students to use R, but it can’t fit in this class.) I’ve talked to people who teach with R in their courses, and they’ve reported that you either have to make it a course about learning stats, or learning R, but you can’t do both well with 45 hours of class time. Clearly, by using R you actually learn what you’re doing statistically, because that’s part of understanding coding. So I hear. But I’m not going to spend half of my time in class dealing with coding errors and stress when my students still don’t fundamentally understand probability, randomness and the actual nature of a null hypothesis.

While not a teaching problem, my lack of R mojo is a research problem. I am on it. I’ve been aware of this for a while, and I’ve found a way to deal with it.

For the last month, I’ve had sitting in my backpack wherever I go, what appears to be the exact resource I need: Beckerman and Petchey’s Getting Started with R: An Introduction for Biologists. From my quick browse, I feel mighty confident that using R like a pro is now only a matter of finding the time, and it doesn’t seem as insurmountable.

My hope is that, this summer, I find the time to actually remove the book from my bag and use it. This is the point in the narrative where I could explain everything I’ve done in the last month that would explain why I haven’t found the time to get to it, but you know the story. I won’t try to out-busy you.

This summer is already booked. Learning to use R to some degree of proficiency is going to take the amount of time that it would take to write a whole manuscript, or nearly write a whole grant. I have to decide which one of those things I’m not going to do to keep my skills sharp. Of course, I’ll be using R in the context of a manuscript. It’s just that this manuscript will take 2-3 times longer to write because of my R learning curve.

Maintenance isn’t optional. Learning R feels more like an engine replacement instead of an oil change, but I’ve got enough miles that I guess I’ve got to make the investment to avoid being sold for scrap.

Kodak stopped making the carousel projector less than ten years ago. I still have a carousel sitting around my lab, containing slides from the last talk I gave in this format. It wasn’t that long ago, really. (In the early 2000s, the Entomological Society of America hadn’t yet switched to accepting digital projection. That’s what still in the carousel.)

The world changes really quickly. As I’m doing my day-to-day faculty job, the world will be passing me by unless I actively work to keep pace. I always wondered how some people became deadwood. Now, I see how easy it is. It’s not about giving up, and it’s not about not caring. It’s about not strategically and systematically planning to keep up, which takes you away from immediate responsibilities. I’ve avoided this particular maintenance task for ten years, and just like when I go to get oil changed in the car, I’m not thrilled to spend my time that way. Of course, I’m glad that I can continue to drive a working car that will last a long while, and I’m glad that my soon-to-be-developed R mojo will keep me fresh for a good long while as well.

On attending graduation

Do you attend graduation?

On every campus, the formal expectation is that all faculty attend graduation. Nonetheless, not everyone goes. On some campuses, such as mine, only a small fraction of faculty go. We have so few faculty attend that it’s downright embarrassing to stand in such a small group of faculty among the massive throng of reveling graduates.

Who doesn’t attend graduation? For starters, those who aren’t available don’t go.

Who else doesn’t go? I guess it’s those faculty who wouldn’t enjoy it. There’s a lot to not enjoy. It could be really hot, it has some major tedium with all of those names, and it sucks up a good part of your weekend.

What is there to enjoy about graduation? It’s a celebration and you get to be adjacent to the center of it. The pomp can be fun. You get to meet the joyful families of your students, and you can express your pride in your students’ work and accomplishments. At my university, this is a huge deal, because in a goodly-sized fraction of these families the students are the first ones to graduate from college, and for many, graduation is an endpoint of perseverance through both economic and personal challenges on a scale with which I’m not familiar. The successes of these students is genuinely heroic to me. If I was dealt the cards that they were, I don’t know if I would have been as successful. So I attend with great pride.

I also go because it matters to my chair, and keeping him happy is important to keeping me happy. And he’s a great guy, and graduation is not a hardship by any means.

We spend a good piece of our careers working with our students, and while graduation better not be the end of their education it does mark a major milestone. If you look out at the students, it’s a condensed mixture of pleasure, pride, satisfaction and trepidation. This kind of drama is something to savor.

And, you never know, the commencement address might not be the same trite stuff. (I missed one graduation a few years ago which was an absolute train wreck for which apparently no explanation can do justice, and I’m sad I missed it.) I imagine the faculty who attended the ’05 Kenyon College ceremony are glad they went.

If you take pleasure in your students, then go on, go to graduation. You don’t have to go. But if you only did the things you had to, you wouldn’t be happy for doing your job well.

Summer is approaching: beware the pit of crocodiles

Yes, this is a warning sign that your wheelchair might roll into a pit of crocodiles. Photo: Terry McGlynn

Summer is upon me, and the rest of us in the temperate Northern Hemisphere. I’ll be a little busier, keeping the away from mostly metaphorical crocodiles.

With extended travel, fieldwork, conferences and 2.5 weeks of bona fide vacation (I hope), posting frequency will be a little more sporadic until the academic year ramps up.

This summer, I’ll be thinking and writing, about the upcoming job season, academic and personal travel, and how to supervise full-time undergrads and how to best savor in summertime. What about you? Add as many new categories as you need.

The relationships among fame, impact and research quality

I just read a particularly interesting post by Dr. Becca about life about halfway through the tenure track that got me thinking, particularly one section:

I feel like most of my job right now is to be famous… What I mean by this is that I’m pretty sure a lot of my future success is going to depend on whether people remember my name when they review my grant applications and manuscripts…

What determines your success? How famous you are.

Most famous scientists have a history of excellent research with high impact. And most researchers with a history of excellent research with high impact are famous. (Fame, that is, among scientists.) However, the r² on this relationship is well below 1. What explains the variance?

What are the factors that makes you more famous, or less famous, than would be merited by your research quality?

Is the impact of your research — how much it influences the work others — closely tied to your fame or are there people who have a high impact but not well recognized – or people who are quite famous but don’t have much impact?

A working hypothesis for the relationships among aspects of a scientist’s research program

I posit the figure above only as a suggestion, a working hypothesis that I’m not wholly wedded to. It’s a good template for discussion.

The ceiling of the impact of your research is dictated by how famous you are. Your impact could be (very) crudely measured using impact factor, or by an h-score or some other measure of citations. How much of a difference you make. You might get cited a few times if nobody has heard of you, but essentially you need to be known for your work to make a splash. You can only make a difference if people know who you are, which is exactly the point that Dr. Becca made. Your job, if it is to make scientific progress, is to become famous. Because you can only make a difference if you’re famous.

If asked to name two huge advances in biology from mid-1800s, most of us would pick the same things. One came from a person working in obscurity and another by one who was, among scientists of the day, mighty famous and was in regular communication with other famous scientists. Darwin’s scientific impact was immediate. Mendel’s finding required the fame of Hugo de Vries to create a scientific impact more than thirty years later.

There are many things that contribute to fame. One of these is research quality, but also the institution you came from, your academic pedigree, attractiveness, personality, and also your ethnicity and gender can have an effect.

What’s another thing plays a key role in facilitating, or limiting, your fame? The institution where you work. If you’re not based out of a research institution, there is a hard cap on how famous that you’re allowed to become as a research scientist. However, if you’re at a teaching institution, the school doesn’t really want you to be a research scientist of any fame, anyway. Fame isn’t part of the evaluation process for tenure, and you could be entirely unknown off campus and this shouldn’t (necessarily) negatively reflect your tenure bid. This would be fatal at a research institution, where you’re expected to establish a visible profile in the research community.

Our jobs at teaching campuses do not expect us to be famous and do not require it. This might be a defining contrast between a teaching campus and a research campus. However, there are lots of us in teaching institutions that not only are doing consequential research, but also want this research to have as much impact as it possibly can. However, based on the name of the institution found on our nametag when we present at conferences, this becomes very difficult.

There’s a positive feedback loop connecting one’s pedigree, social network, publication history, favorable reviews of grants and proposals, funding, talent of collaborators and fame. They’re all connected to one another. And if you’re at a teaching campus, you’re at a strategic disadvantage because those positive feedback loops don’t work as tightly.

Leveraging your pedigree, papers, and collaborations is harder to do, because of unacknowledged biases against teaching campuses in the research community. You can’t be famous above a certain level, because those at research institutions assume that you aren’t working at one because you can’t get a job at one. If you’re doing research from a teaching institution, that means that you haven’t had enough success to work at a teaching institution. So the thinking goes. Even in the incredibly tight job market, that line of thinking still prevails. You’re skeptical? Pull up a few journals and look at the mastheads, to find the institutions of the editorial board members and the subject editors.

So, unlike Dr. Becca and those at research institutions, my job isn’t to become famous. Even if I was famous, nobody on campus would even be aware of it anyway. However, if I have ambitions for my research to make a difference, then I need to become famous. This fame is required to activate the positive feedbacks among friendly reviews, funding, invitations, collaborations, and so on.

Efficient teaching: marking down for grammatical errors

I used to be appalled at the quality of my students’ writing on exams and other in-class assignments.

Now I’m slightly less appalled. Here’s what changed things:

About ten years ago, I got overly fed up with sloppy errors on exams and quizzes. Students would misspell the most basic words, and make standard homonym errors (such as there/they’re/their) and just sloppy phrasing. It was unbefitting of any college student, or actually of any student in general. These errors indicated an overall lack of pride in one’s work. Grading these could slowly eat one’s soul.

So then, here’s what I did: I told my students that any error in writing (grammar, diction, syntax, spelling) that would not be accepted by a middle school English teacher, wouldn’t be accepted in my class. I said that every single error would result in a loss of a tenth of a point. If you did the same error four times, then that would mean that you’d lose four tenths of a point. If you had a hundred errors, you’d lose ten points.

I put the policy in the syllabus, and I told students every time I handed out a quiz or exam.

When I started grading quizzes, I would mark down a “- 1/10” for every stupid little error. Even on short one-page quizzes which only contained short responses, there could have been up to a score of such errors for some students. Others had none, and many had just one or two.

So, instead of getting a full 10 on a quiz, an otherwise perfect quiz with two lame-o errors receives a 9.8. How would this affect a student’s grade? Negligibly.

Each semester, I would get predictable outrage from a few students (at the expensive private school), that I would try to teach something other than science. I asked if it was reasonable for a college professor to expect proper grammar and spelling of a college student regardless of the discipline. That usually quieted things down, though earning the respect of these students would be an uphill challenge. At my current job, it’s just accepted as par for the course.

What is the outcome of marking down points for sloppy writing? It’s actually amazing. Their writing improved dramatically. The writing more closely resembles the professional output they always should be generating.

This is what I find depressing about this whole affair. If students don’t think that they’re being graded on spelling and grammar, then they actually misspell words far more frequently, by about two orders of magnitude. They also are more likely to craft nonsensical sentences, use adjectives in place of adverbs, and use apostrophes with abandon except where needed.

My students actually can spell, and follow basic rules of grammar. They just don’t bother to do so unless it’s required of them.

If I make my students do it right in my classroom, that’s one small part of it becoming a routine. However, in one semester I can’t undo a decade of other instructors who weren’t maintaining similar standards.

Applying for faculty positions: the teaching philosophy

Job application season is not ramping up until the end of summer, but I’m bringing this topic up now because it might require some thought and introspection before applications get sent out.

Some ads ask you to make a teaching statement. Others ask you to also provide a teaching philosophy.

Those are the same thing, right? I don’t think so.

A teaching statement explains what you have taught, what you’re capable of teaching, how you have taught these courses and how you go about teaching on a day to day basis. It’s important for a teaching school to know these things when evaluating a candidate. But some departments want more information. They also want to know your philosophy.

Keep in mind that many members of search committees don’t give a damn about teaching philosophies at all. They’d be glad if you wrote a teaching statement, or if you needed to provide both, that you just got a little wordy in the philosophy. They won’t care. But for those that do care, an excellent teaching philosophy can really make you stand out, with at least some of the teaching faculty who are doing the hiring.

You might be asking yourself, “What the hell is a teaching philosophy? Do I have to have an actual philosophy about teaching?”

My answer would be, “Yes, you really should have one. Your teaching philosophy is your overall approach to teaching and a guiding principle behind all of the decisions that you make when teaching.”

Ideally, your teaching philosophy can be expressed in a sentence or two. And then it takes a few paragraphs to explain it. That’s how you write a 1-page teaching philosophy.

What is the secret to writing a kickass teaching philosophy statement to get you that job interview?

The secret is to actually, genuinely, have a kickass teaching philosophy. If you don’t have a few firm guiding principles that guide your teaching, this summer is a good time to develop them.

Instead of just telling you what a teaching philosophy is, let me give you some specific examples. I’m most familiar with teaching philosophies not from the university, but from K-12 science and math teachers. I’ve been involved in scores of interview panels for beginning and experienced teachers. One question that we always ask is: “What is your teaching philosophy?”

All but the most nervous and least prepared teachers have their answer down pat. Most of them say a slight variant of:

Every child deserves an opportunity to learn.

I love that one. I think it is broadly applicable to many circumstances – dealing with economic inequalities, differentiating instruction for students with higher-level work, working with those learning English, and those with behavioral challenges. Everybody, despite the challenges that they face and those that they even create themselves, deserves the opportunity to learn. And it’s the job of the teacher to create that opportunity. That’s a powerful philosophy.

That philosophy, however, doesn’t work for me in the university environment. Here’s my philosophy, that I’ve had for at least the last eight years:

You don’t truly learn something unless you discover it for yourself.

Someone can explain something to you, and you can understand it. But you haven’t learned it. It hasn’t been banked in memory or as something of substance unless you figure it out for yourself. Consequently, labs are important. Fieldwork is important. Discovery-based lessons in class are important. Interactivity during lectures helps. Making sure that students genuinely and deeply read helps. Creating an environment in which students feel an interest and need to discover matters. And so on. In my more recent job applications I spent a few paragraphs spelling out the corollaries and applications of this philosophy.

What are some other teaching philosophies that could work? Maybe:

University students learn best when they have both extrinsic and intrinsic motivators.

or maybe:

Learning is a social activity and interactions with others are a critical part of the college experience.

or how about:

Being able to communicate a clear understanding of a topic verbally and in writing is required for mastery.

or perhaps:

Learning is fun.

and lastly:

To be an effective teacher you must be a lifelong learner and create that spirit in your students.

or other stuff that you can just make up like I just did.

The best teaching statement is not one that you just made up, it’s one that you genuinely believe.

Realistically, most people emerging from grad school and postdocs looking for teaching jobs have something less lofty on their minds, such as “My philosophy is to do anything that results in good evaluations,” or “My philosophy is to not entirely destroy the entire semester by not knowing what I’m doing,” or “I just want to spend as little time on class as possible so that I can get everything else I need to get done finished so that I can actually keep my job.”

Those might be acceptable ideas. But it’s not a philosophy.

So, how do you find your philosophy? Experience with teaching helps, but I think even more important is to spend time interacting with others who care about teaching, and care about understanding what works and what doesn’t work.

You don’t have to be an expert in the education literature, but you should be able to hold a respectable conversation with someone who is. (You don’t need to know the acronyms but you should be able to understand the concepts.) You should be familiar with Bloom’s taxonomy, if nobody’s hit you over the head with it yet. Knowing about constructivism is a good idea. If you’re going to spend even a small part of your career teaching, then understanding the way professional educators approach teaching is a good idea.

Beware, though, when you write your teaching philosophy, you actually have to be careful to not bust out the technical education terms, because that would piss off the majority of the faculty who harbor a genuine suspicion of educational theory.

Any search committee is likely to have some people involved who think, “It’s just my job to teach and their job to learn.” I actually think that’s true, but the definition of good teaching and good learning is where I part way with those folks. The education folk like to make a distinction between the “sage on the stage” versus the “guide on the side.” I don’t follow the Johnnie Cochran school of espousing teaching philosophies, though I think effective teachers guide rather than preach.

You’d hope that these people are fossilized enough that they’re not reading blogs. Nonetheless, a dislike for anything other than bullet-point lecturing is common among many junior faculty who don’t want to be bothered with student learning and instead think their job is to spew information. As in all things related to job applications, you don’t want to express any view strongly enough that it would piss anybody off, even if that person is unreasonable.

The take-home message is that you are best off using your Statement of Teaching Philosophy to actually espouse a genuine philosophy of teaching. If you don’t have one, it’s not too early to develop your own!

If you have one you like, or would like feedback from folks on one, please share in the comments. You’ll probably get some good comments. And we won’t charge $100/hour.

How much space do faculty at teaching campuses take up in journals?

What’s the relative influence of teaching faculty on their fields as a whole? That’s hard to measure.

Here’s an easier, related, question to ask: What fraction of papers coming out have teaching faculty as authors?

A couple months ago, I perused the tables of contents of a variety of journals. Here’s what I found:

Ecology: 3 of 25 papers were partially or completely authored by researchers in teaching institutions
Journal of the Kansas Entomological Society: 1 of 10
Biotropica: 0 of 16
Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics: 4 of 23.
Ecology Letters: 1 of 15
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: 0 of 20
Biology Letters: 2 of 32

By the way, in Physical Review Letters, it was 1 out of 32; Chemical Reviews was 0 of 12.

I can sniff out a teaching institution in the US based on its name. The primarily-teaching university doesn’t quite exist in the same manifestation internationally, but even so it was clear that most international authors were associated with research institutions of one kind or another.

Using this feeble back-of-the-envelope calculation using a very small sample size, maybe up to 10% of papers in my fields have teaching-school authors in the US. Is this more or less than you’d expect?

What’s it look like in your field, if you’re not a ecology/entomo/tropical type?

Getting and running a big site grant in a small institution: how collaborations fail

Here’s the message of the post in a single sentence:

You need open communication and collaboration to land and run a successful site grant, and petty concerns about sharing resources could mean that nobody gets anything.

Now here’s the rationale:

“Site grants” power research centers and student training programs. Research institutions are expected to have these big grants to make things run. These “site grants” support multiple faculty and students working together on a big project of some sort.

On a small teaching campus, having a site grant of any size has a proportionately large impact. For example, if a research university operates an NSF REU site (Research Experiences for Undergraduates), it would add a little substance and spice to business as normal. On a small teaching campus, though, an REU site could transform campus culture. It could fund a student or two in many labs and provide all kinds of ancillary support for participating faculty. It would be a big frickin’ deal.

My campus, at the moment, can’t run an REU site. We don’t have enough research active faculty to submit a credible proposal in any potential REU theme. This isn’t supposition, it’s an established fact, notwithstanding the unrealistically optimistic grant specialist that keeps suggesting it to us. (My first year on campus, I did put together a preliminary proposal for a similar program that no longer exists, the UMEB. The only reason we weren’t shot out of the water was because the grant didn’t stay afloat after it was assembled in drydock. Since that time, we’ve lost faculty who haven’t been replaced.)

Even though we can’t run an REU site, our campus actually runs a large number of other site grants. The majority of them are in education (including STEM education). There are also science site grants, including a couple NIH projects to support biomedical researchers in training, and grad school-bound students are supported by McNair and NSF-LSAMP programs. (I run a couple NSF-International Research Experiences for Students programs.) How do we we run these training programs if we don’t have the faculty? We farm the students out. For example, nearly all of the biomedical students are doing research in labs off campus in other institutions. We fund ’em and ship ’em off. This model does seem to work, to some extent, though the money from these grants then is not used to build our own laboratories or help our own scientists become successful. That is a drawback.

We could have a lot more big projects on campus, if it weren’t for one particular obstacle. That obstacle isn’t the limited number of faculty with biographical sketches that belong on a site grant. It’s the absolute absence of a collaborative attitude. It’s killed project after project, preventing them from getting to the submission stage.

I’ve seen so many grants get assembled without adequate involvement of the people who should be involved. And they’ve all either fallen apart, or are manifested in a suboptimal fashion. It’s maddening. I understand how it happens, and that’s exactly why it’s so maddening.

The people who control the money of these site grants have power that comes with allocating the budget. They can bring faculty on to the grant by giving them extra stipends, summer salary and reassigned time. They can fund your students, or choose to not fund your students. They can get access to space on campus that others can’t use. Also, the people with these grants have the ear of the administration, and since money begets money, this means that power begets even more influence.

Just like when people become rich they’re more likely to hate paying taxes, some faculty members in charge of grants start becoming stingy. Even worse, faculty members who are even thinking of being involved in grants get paranoid. They don’t want to talk about their plans for developing a grant. Any conversation even mentioning the grant should be “invitation only” (that is an actual quote, by the way). The thinking is, just like when you win the lottery and everybody becomes your best friend, then if you land a big grant then everyone’s going to nibble at you for a piece. That’s messed-up thinking.

Most people here writing grants do it behind closed doors, hush-hush, and if they decide to cut you in, it’s on a need-to-know basis.

I’ve seen this happen with four different projects in the last month. I was recently at a meeting to work on developing a proposal, and there was a side conversation referring to things to which I was not privy. When I asked, I was merely told, “it’s political.” Am I a collaborator or am I a little child?

Here’s another absurdity with which I was involved. A couple administrators and a few faculty members were discussing how to put together a particular proposal. The fact that we were all there to discuss the project was clearly a positive. It was clear that the person in charge had a clear vision for what the project was supposed to do, and her job was to bring us in line though she was open to hearing good ideas. After a while, a variety of specifics were discussed, a grantwriter was ready to go, and we were moving ahead. The next step: one of the administrators was to contact another person and inform him that he was going to be the PI.

Huh?!? That has to be an awkward conversation: “Hi there, Bob, so we met this afternoon to plan a big grant, we have a grantwriter doing it all, and we have the people to do the work on the project. It’s all set. And you’re PI. I know you don’t know anything about this, but that’s not a problem. Could you sign the paperwork?” This is what passes for collaboration ’round these parts.

Why are people doing these projects in the first place? Is it to get the job done the best way possible? If so, then shouldn’t the key personnel in the project be part of the conversation?

Here’s another illustrative anecdote: Last year, I was walking across campus and one of my administrators was showing around an off-campus colleague who was visiting for the day. I was walking alongside another faculty member. When she introduced the two of us, she didn’t say:

“This is Terry McGlynn, rainforest ant ecologist, and this is Horatio Wigglesworth, who works on apoptosis in naked mole rats.”

Instead, she said,

“Hi, this is Terry McGlynn, funded by NSF. This is Horatio Wigglesworth, funded by NIH.”

There was nary a mention of what we actually did. She communicated in a few words, what mattered to her: that we had grants. What we did with those grants was secondary. To her, the grant itself was what mattered, not the work that was empowered by the grant. This kind of thinking is not only petty, but it’s also wasteful because this mindset results in a focus on getting grants, rather than focusing on identifying funding for the projects that have the greatest need. The latter approach is the one that results in grants that are not only funded, but also successful.

Why do I choose to run the projects that I do? I have two big reasons. I love doing the research connected to them. And I’m committed to giving students the biggest and best opportunities I can create for them. That is clearly not a motivation for faculty cooking up these big projects and are being secretive. The reason they don’t want to talk about it isn’t because they fear the project will fail, but they fear that too many people will be part of its success. (Note that, even if you are successful in research and grantsmanship, that won’t help your baseline salary at all, as I’ve already addressed in a prior post.)

Here are some of the horrible reasons for getting grants that I see far too often:

Pay oneself extra stipends and summer salary (typically for not doing more work)
Be liberated from teaching
Enable one to spend less time on campus
Increase one’s power or prestige

These reasons are ones that can explain why there isn’t collaboration. If you’re running a project to keep things for yourself and your fiefdom, then to bring others in would just weaken your power while helping the students.

So, what’s the problem with ambition and wanting to be powerful and have influence? I’ll tell you the problem: it prevents reasonable people from actually doing their job to teach and help students grow. It prevents the projects from getting off the ground. If you’re in a lifeboat, you just can’t paddle in the direction you want to go. You need to communicate with the other people in the boat.

Territoriality around grants prevents conversations that bring in the best ideas, and also sometimes prevents the involvement of the most effective people who should be in on these projects.

Here’s another relevant anecdote from the grant silliness of the past month: A faculty member in education, who is operating one site grant at the moment, is now preparing for another one, involving science curricula and teacher preparation. On our campus, there’s one science faculty member that advises pre-service teachers on their science coursework, and is working with existing science education projects. It’s a no-brainer that this faculty member should be involved in developing this new science education grant. (It happens to be me.) Instead, of talking to me, the education faculty writing this grant hits up two of my department mates, who have absolutely no involvement in pre-service teacher advisement and curricula. She walks into their offices, and says, “I’ve written this grant, it’s all done. I’ll give you this amount of money if you give me a letter of support.”

Why did she want their letters of support, instead of talking to me, the guy who actually would be in a position to provide actual, genuine support instead of a mere letter? Because she didn’t want any of their help. She just wanted the letterhead. She wanted to buy them off to get the grant and have her own way without actually having them contribute to the project. Why didn’t she want any of us involved? Because our involvement would take time and money. It would involve synergies with other existing projects, but those aren’t under her control. It would actually improve the project, but that’s not what was important. Controlling the budget on her end, for her to spend it as she wishes, is what mattered.

I don’t know if she’ll get the grant or not. But what I do know is that the grant would be better if she talked to at least some of us before she wrote it. Why didn’t she want to talk to us while drafting it? Because we’d want a bigger piece than she was wiling to offer. Good for her, bad for the students.

Here’s a simple guiding principle: If you’re developing a project, you need to talk with all of the potential participants involved to not only gauge interest, but also to develop the best possible proposal.

If you do consult widely, then how do you keep it from growing out of control and having too many people demand a piece? That’s easy. It’s called leadership. That kind of leadership, though, just like that of Ernest Shackleton, means that you can’t elevate yourself on a pedestal, and you have to put the needs of those who you lead on the same par as your own needs, if not above your own needs. The PI with the most sway on our campus does exactly that, and it’s his collaborative attitude that puts students first is exactly the thing that’s made him so successful. It’s why I respect his work so much and why I always work with him when I have the opportunity. It’s what makes him so trustworthy and reliable, and also what makes his projects incredibly effective, or as they say, impactful.

Meanwhile, everyone else that can’t have a big enough piece of that particular pie is trying to build their own little walled fiefdom.

Perhaps because I study animals that live in social groups, I know that cooperation with others, even those with whom you have some conflict, leads to greater productivity for everybody. My fellow faculty members, for the most part, aren’t receptive to this lesson in animal behavior and game theory.

I hope that, on your campus, there’s a better spirit of collaboration.

–

Upon reading this post, the night before it came out, my spouse asked me, “Do you think that by writing about people not being team players, that you’re not being a team player?” That’s a really good point. I suppose that if the individuals in my anecdotes whom I do not name recognize themselves, then I won’t be on their team in any point in the near future. However, even if they never see this post, I still wouldn’t have been on their team regardless.

I wanted to write a post about how collaboration and cooperation can lead to better site grant proposals. Then, I realized that based on my recent experiences, that focusing on the negative makes my point quite well, because at a distance these stories are so absurd. They demonstrate how being secretive and exclusive about writing grants is absurd. For the record, the site grant of which I’m now a Co-PI was written in a highly collaborative manner, with all partners (including some who didn’t make the cut) in on the discussions from the very beginning. Building this project that way has helped us respond to unforeseen changes and challenges really well, and if we didn’t do the outreach at the beginning, it would have been not nearly as successful.

Getting past the comic stereotype of grad student life

I loved grad school. I have serious nostalgia for grad school. If I could be a grad student forever, that would rock.

In fact, my job as a faculty member is a lot like being a grad student. I do research, I teach, I write grants, I write manuscripts, I work with students less experienced than myself, and I build collaborations.

What about grad school was not awesome? You get to do research on exactly the topic or subsubfield that you chose to work in, you get to hang out with a diverse bunch of smart people with really similar interests, you presumably are traveling to conferences and sharing your work with others, and you have ample opportunity to shape your professional trajectory and identity in the direction you want. Sure, you don’t get paid much, but enough to get by. If you are in grad school later in life, it would cause some anxiety about saving up for retirement, I imagine. But in all, grad school rules.

Of course this might not be true for everyone. There are many kinds of graduate students, with many kinds of attitudes connected to many kinds of experiences. Labs are different, PIs are different, projects are different, and recreational pursuits vary. Some people have a horrible time in grad school. This I understand.

If you read the comics, grad students are pitiable creatures. They’re chronically poor and have no future. I’m not the only one tired of how the media consistently portrays grad school as financially insecure. In the context of the latest media sequester freakout, Joe Hanson agrees.

Humor often relies on stereotypes. In PhD Comics, the caricature of the miserable grad student is the basis of the humor. It’s often funny, and I’m a regular reader. I just hope people don’t buy into this stereotype as a mirror for their own lives, which is a recipe for misery.

The same for Matt Groening.

I realize that, as a fat cat tenured professor, this message might not be welcome to those who are unhappy. I’ll tell you at least this much: if you’re unhappy in grad school, then I don’t imagine you’d be happy as a tenured faculty member either.

How to run a summer undergraduate research lab

That title should indicate a question rather than a set of instructions.

How do you run a research lab in the summertime?

We’re approaching that time when campuses get really quiet, except for us scientists who are working year-round.

Many of us have undergrads funded (through a variety of internal and external funds) to work in our labs in the summer. What does it take to make sure that get work gets done on schedule, in high volume, and with the proper level of quality control? What can you do to make sure that the students have the best research experience? Are those two things wholly compatible?

What policies and procedures do you have, if any? Do you use a timecard with fidelity? How often do students report on their work formally, and how much time do you actually work alongside your students? How much is expected of the students in terms of hours per week, research product, or both? Do you have students write up much their work in the summer, save all it for the fall, or do they just hand over data to you and you write it up?

Please share your favorite practices, and ones you know that don’t work, in the comments. We’ve got lots to learn from one another.

I imagine that marital and reproductive status affect how you run the lab over the summer, too.

I tell my undergrads that I have three priorities for summer research:

Everybody is safe
Everybody has a fun time
Everybody is collecting genuine data that is designed to be part of a publication

I explain that all three are mutually compatible. We are doing real science, not a make-work research “experience.”

That said, I have almost no experience with personally mentoring undergraduates in the lab throughout the summer. Students working with me in the summer head to a large rainforest field station with me for a few weeks. And then I leave them behind to continue their projects, typically in the hands of capable peers or mentors. As my wife has described my field site, both the atmosphere and physical environment resembles the hybrid of a college campus and a summer camp. I’ll be sharing plenty more about this while I’m on site, just a few weeks away. (Gaaah! Not ready!)

If there’s a meltdown in my absence, or if a hole pops up in my schedule, then I might return back to the forest before the summer ends. But otherwise, much of my mentorship is conducted via skype and email. Which is no small task. I don’t supervise my students doing their field projects as closely as I could, but I have found that giving students with great judgment latitude to make decisions works out really well. I don’t allow students with less-than-great judgment to work independently in the rainforest. I’ve gotten pretty good at picking out the right students in advance, with the help of my colleagues, but I also intentionally occasionally take chances on students who I think might be deserving of a the opportunity. I’ve gotten burned occasionally, including last summer when I had to send a student home after just a few days.

I don’t think I could or would want to spend my summer in my lab. It’s glorious outside, and I want to travel, often in the guise of science, and I also want to spend lots of time with my family. So, when I’m not at my field station, I’m often working at home. There’s no shortage of writing projects that need my attention. If I were in the lab with students all summer, when would I be able to write?

What really is “excellence” in teaching ?

I’d like to extend a topic that I brought up recently – about the difficulty in evaluating excellence in teaching.

I danced around the central conundrum, by highlighting all the ways that we do, and don’t, evaluate teaching on our campuses. What I didn’t bring up is: what is it, exactly, that we are sizing up when we decide how good someone’s teaching is?

What I argued at the time is that most people use the template of their own teaching (or perhaps one’s aspirations for one’s own teaching) as a model for evaluating others. This operational definition of how excellence is measured doesn’t actually specify what characteristics define excellence.

Let’s set aside the evaluation problem, and ask: What is excellent teaching?

Nearly all of our evaluations focus on the process of teaching: what happens in class on a day to day basis.

What really matters is what happens in the end: what is the product of teaching?

If we focus on process, then we measure things like specific items in the curriculum, demeanor, what the assignments and exams look like, and classroom performance in the theatrical sense.

If we focus on product, then we look at outcomes: exam performance, student satisfaction, long-term professional growth, and — from the administration’s perspective — alumni giving.

You imagine that a quality process leads to a quality product, however a veneer of quality might not lead to a long-term high quality product. What educational practices that get high ranks in the evaluation system actually contribute to positive outcomes in the long term? How much of what we do in teaching doesn’t result in long-term learning but looks like quality teaching in the short term? For starters, the first thing that comes to mind is the use of overly detailed powerpoints that are shared with the class online for ~~cramming~~ studying for exams. Students love it, it raises satisfaction, the professor looks well prepared and: will students know any of it the next day, or how about five years later?

Just as we can design an individual class with backward planning, we can think of the whole college experience this way to inform what students really need to get what we want them to get out of the college experience. What constitutes an “excellent” college education? Whatever it is, then excellence in faculty is when they deliver on that goal.

In my view, when you graduate from college, the school has done its job if the product is:

articulate in thought, words and writing
able to differentiate between opinion and reason and has personal values informed by both
broadly interested in the world and all it has to offer
conversant in literature, art, history, geography, science, mathematics, philosophy, civics and more
able to separate style from substance
struggling to understand the faiths, or the lack thereof, of those in their midst
able to readily explain to any novice the basic tenets of their specialty
can perform admirably on a summative exam in the subject of one’s specialty (e.g., subject GRE)
reading the goddamn newspaper or its equivalent on a regular basis
able to whiff out pseudoacademic thinking (like Malcom Gladwell), pseudoscience and shabby reasoning
not taking oneself too seriously
treats other people as they would like to be treated

Those are my aspirations for what college should do for everyone. I wrote this on the fly but I imagine it would resemble to some degree what you think a “liberal arts education” is supposed to look like.

Just as it’s not the job of a K-12 teacher to merely teach the state standards, it’s not my job to cover the expected learning outcomes of my course. I’m working on providing one piece of a holistic college experience. Am I successful at this? No. But it’s a goal. Since I’m at a state comprehensive institution and all the talk is “career-training-this” and “job-preparation-that” we are really botching these fundamentals. My heart soared when our newish provost said, in his first address to the faculty, that he didn’t want to see any more business regarding what a college degree does for students, he wanted to hear more about what a college education does for students. In our environment, that idea is hard to deliver in deed, but I’m excited to see the emphasis nonetheless.

How do we measure teaching excellence? Foremost, students need to emerge from the class knowing the course material. In particular, they need to know it deeply: well beyond their graduation dates. Truly excellent teachers inspire lifelong learning, excitement tied to discovery in the discipline, and an academic ethos that pervades all aspects of life. There is a multiplicity of routes to this destination.

This is often why teaching is considered to be an art, because what works for one person might not work for another. The trickier part, though, is knowing what works. This might not be measurable at the end of a semester.

Don’t waste tenure

Tenure gives us academic freedom.

This doesn’t have to be an empty concept.

Before you get tenure, you need to live by the rules. After you get tenure, you have to follow the written rules but not live by them. You can choose to ignore as many unwritten rules as you think is wise. You have a lot of latitude.

I find it lamentable that, for most people, including myself, tenure changes very little.

It’s as if six years has been calculated as the amount of time that it takes for us to become a cog in the system.

Here’s another way to think about the time you spend in the system prior to tenure. Being a professor is like being a musician. Don’t they say that great musicians know all of the rules, and after developing technical expertise they know which rules to break, including how and when to do it, to to make extraordinary music? (I’m not talking about John Cage, but maybe the Beatles or the Pixies.)

Do you think the same is true for our academic careers, that we need to know which conventions have to be broken in order to excel?

In terms of research, I have always attempted projects with the notion that their success or failure wouldn’t alter my risk of unemployment. I have a variety of high-risk-but-potentially-really-cool projects happening, that I probably wouldn’t be inclined to take a chance on if I needed to focus on getting more papers and grants. (I’m able to take these research risks not because of tenure, though, but instead because my university isn’t in a position to expect much research productivity.)

Here’s one major change that I’ve made, that I wouldn’t have done pre-tenure: I rarely lecture. When I step into a classroom, I have a set of activities, discussion items and problems to be solved. I might occasionally bust into a 3-15 minute explanation of some topic if the circumstances require it. (As a caveat, I haven’t taught an introductory majors course in a number of years.) There are two reasons I wouldn’t have done this change pre-tenure. I wouldn’t risk a potential tank in my evaluation scores (which actually moved very little). And I wouldn’t have risked doing things so differently from my department mates who would be sizing up my tenure file. (My last department chair at my old job who observed me was actually put out when I stopped lecturing for a 2-minute think-pair-share activity, as I mentioned in the teaching/tenure post on Monday.) How do I find the time to do teach like this? I actually find that doing this takes less time than preparing a decent traditional lecture. I am actually concerned about being accused about not putting enough effort into my lessons, because the real work is being done by the students and not by myself. I just arrange the circumstances for them to learn. That is good teaching, in my view, but at most universities the lecture predominates and a departure from that practice might be viewed upon with suspicion, especially by scientists who aren’t trained in education. I haven’t had much formal education training, either, and by no means am I convinced that I’m doing it the best way. Which is why I call this change a risk that I can do with the benefit of tenure.

Here one risk that I’ve considered in my post-tenure era, but not had the guts to implement yet: In my Biostatistics class, I’d like to entirely do away with all quizzes and exams, and simply implement an oral performance-based final for 100% of the grade. By the end of the semester, the expected outcomes are so straightforward that a student should be able to demonstrate competency or mastery in the context of a short conversation and ten minutes with the software. (Last semester, gave my class the option to do this instead of doing a big take-home final, but everyone picked the time-intensive final.)

Here’s another risk I have yet to do: Instead of offering 0% participation points in a class (that’s a forthcoming post, at some point), switch to 100%. Grade students wholly on perceived effort. That’s the beauty of academic freedom. I can do this. I can’t be fired for it, I don’t think. Imagine if students were getting grades for trying, rather than for guessing right. Wouldn’t that be beautiful? Again, I’ve yet to try this.

This blog is a risk I took only because I have tenure. I’ve put effort into remaining civil and positive. However, a variety of things that I’ve written already could have been a huge liability before tenure, about my former dean, former president, how my campus is tragically underfunded, and how I interact with students. The only thing preventing me from telling it like it is, is my lack of confidence that I really understand how it is. That’s a nice perk of tenure. There are plenty of other pre-tenure bloggers, such as Dr. Becca among many others who I’ve linked to previously, but their identities are often hidden.

Once you are tenured, what risks would you want to take with your research and teaching? If you have tenure, what new risks have you taken or are you afraid to try?

Small Pond Science

Research, teaching, and mentorship in the sciences

Month: May 2013