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Over the past few weeks I have been working on papers with several students in parallel, and I am again pulling my hair out and wondering if there is a way to get the writing done and the students trained without me going bald. Reporting findings in written form is an inherent part of doing science.…
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A Chemical Imbalance — a film, a book and a call for action The movie (below) and project are about women in STEM and their continued under-representation. The movie illustrates the issue through historical data and interviews with several faculty from the University of Edinburgh School of Chemistry (recipient of the Athena Swan Gold Award).
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A few weeks ago I chatted with a colleague. One issue that came up was this colleague’s frustration with a student whom the colleague recognized as very talented, someone with great potential in the colleague’s area of study, but also someone who had no interest in applying themselves towards achieving excellence. I understand where the…
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For faculty on the semester system, there are only a couple of weeks of teaching left. This is probably the busiest time of the year, due to the sinister convergence of the semester ending and the conference season approaching. Program committees of many conferences are working hard these days to evaluate the abstracts; I am…
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Some time ago DH and I went to see ZZ Ward live. It was the best concert I have been to in a long time. She and the musicians who work with her are absolutely SENSATIONAL live. The live performance is even better than the already excellent studio album (“Til the Casket Drops“). ZZ Ward is still touring and,…
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I have been a professor for nearly 10 years. I am good at what I do and respected within my community, as small as it is. I am well-funded, although that’s always a temporarily accurate statement. As I do theory and computation, I don’t bring in oodles of money, but I have always been able to support…
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By psykadamnit I want to follow up on xykademiqz’s posts on job search strangeness. I’m in a STEM discipline at an undergrad-oriented school. My department has no graduate program, and those departments that do have graduate programs usually only have small MS programs. The focus is on undergrads. For some reason, most of our candidates…
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Humbug, Hirsch’s h-index! The humbling yet heartwarming hooligan, happily hopping homeward. Many people have issues with the widespread use of the h-index in determining one’s scientific worth. But the h-index is not inherently bad; it simply needs to be considered in the context of one’s field and seniority. Even in a given field, the h-index is higher for the…
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We have been interviewing and it’s been quite exhausting. But, the process reveals more about the colleagues with whom I interact in regards to the search than it does about the candidates. My school is a large and reputable public school and the department ranks about 15th in the discipline. We are no MIT or…
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Shockingly, I am in DC. Again. [For my non-professorial readers, NSF (National Science Foundation) provides funding for basic science research across all disciplines. NSF panels meet to evaluate grant proposals. A lot of work is involved in reviewing other people’s proposals and serving on panels. A lot.] This post was brought to you by the crappy overpriced…
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