I have been a slacker blogger… But for a good reason! A lot of technical writing is happening these days, making sure papers variously get submitted/revised/come out before the proposal-writing lockdown commences in August.

But there’s always time for a little rant!

If you have been reading my blog for some time, you might remember that I think one of my defining qualities is impatience. I am intense and a real pain in the butt, so says pretty much everyone who knows me. I am irritated when people talk really slowly or can’t get to the point fast for whatever reason. I have colleagues whose emails I dread receiving, because they always respond to even the shortest of inquiries with multi-screen emails and I just get queasy at the thought of parsing through all that verbiage.

I do try (and unfortunately sometimes fail) to be cognizant and respectful of the fact that not everyone has the same priorities or timelines as me. However, for my own sanity, I try to stay away from people whose relevant timescales are longer than mine by an order of magnitude or more.

When it comes to writing papers, it seems I want them written up and published more passionately than most people I work with, even when those other people are first author. That’s a source of puzzlement and irritation on my part, perhaps on theirs as well.

First of all, I love working on papers. I love doing the figures, writing the text, I love all of the aspects of organizing my thoughts into something fluid and cogent. And I LOOOVE the process of uploading and submitting a paper. It’s like Christmas morning every time. I felt this way even when I was a student.

These days, my students do the uploading and paper tracking for the most part. I consider it part of training to learn to correspond with editors and referees, to fight for the publication of their work (I oversee and edit all the correspondence). But I almost never see in my students that crazy enthusiasm, which has followed and still does every submission on my part; it confuses and saddens me.

I wonder to what extent I and the likes of me really understand what motivates most graduate students to go to graduate school.  I mean, I understand intellectually — in my field, most people want to put in the time to get a degree that leads to a well-paying job — but I don’t think I actually get it at my very core. Many students have multiple hobbies to which they devote considerable energy and time. Graduate school seems just another thing they do, and not a particularly important one at that, or one that brings them much joy. Basically, it’s like a job. They do what they are told competently, but very little creativity goes into the work. I see very little pride about their work, very little desire to show their cool contributions to the world. This is very different from how I felt about graduate school or how I feel about my job even now, with the ups and downs and funding uncertainties and post-tenure slump. Being in grad school is a freakin’ privilege!

This post is motivated by a recent experience with a former group member (FGM) who is now a junior faculty member elsewehere. We are writing up our last paper together, one that should have been published a year or more ago, but FGM was preoccupied with job applications, then moving, getting settled into their first year teaching, etc., so I didn’t want to get on their case. But it’s time, and FGM really needs papers (I know they do, I hope they realize how much they do), yet working with them on this last one has been like pulling teeth. I did a large share of edits, a very lengthy referee response (3 referees), not to mention cleaning up the text and have recently had to redo a figure in a way that completely pissed me off because, while I love fiddling with figures, I am far too senior to do things like this (such as doing a point-by-point capture of experimental data from a graph in another group’s paper, to which we compare our theory). I was pissed because I was doing this work as I apparently wanted this manuscript submitted and done more than FGM, the person who is first author and considerably junior to me, and they were acting nearly disinterested. I have had to prod and poke them to submit every revision.

Another student told me that I am the only professor he knows who actually works on the figures themselves;  everybody else’s advisors just mark corrections on the paper and do that as many times as needed. I do go back and forth with students several times, but then at some point I need minor layout tweaks and to try different combinations of panels or colors etc. and with all but one or two students, who seem to have a naturally good aesthetic sense and are able to produce appealing visuals on their own without excessive intervention, it’s sometimes much less painful for me to do the tweaks than for us to exchange 6 gazillion emails.

So WTF do I want? Good question. I seem to whine about doing figures, yet also enjoy doing them.

Doing science and getting data is hard. Writing papers and making figures is necessary, but it is also much easier than doing science and and is super fun (for me, at least), and I don’t know why junior folks don’t savor it. Savor it, damnit!

What I want is for my trainees to take pride in their work and to be hungry to publish their work. I want them to chase me and nag me to finish the paper and to send me 15 versions of each figure and to be engaged in writing their work up for publication. I don’t expect them to do anything perfectly, but wish they would want to do things, on their own, without prodding. I know being effective at presenting takes time and practice, but I don’t think you can learn to have a fire in the belly.  Apparently, what I need are students with chronic indigestion…