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I am fortunate to have a faculty job at a great public R1 university. Owing to the high research activity, there is always someone here to give a talk. There are three seminar series, associated with three departments, that I usually attend (generally biweekly), and another 1 or 2 where occasionally an interesting seminar comes…
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Over the course of the past few weeks, the topic of average PhD duration at different institutions came up. I am in the physical sciences; it is normal to expect variations among fields, but in a single field you’d think the PhD takes more or less the same amount of time across different R1 institutions. In reality,…
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You know, I sometimes longingly reflect upon the good old days of hard-core spam email. Viagra and penis enlargement ads always brightened my day. Incidentally, this $150, 26-pound gummy python comes to mind. These days, my inbox is as cluttered as always, but the annoying part is that most of the email comes from people who…
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Have you ever noticed how certain words or certain phenomena seem never to be on your radar, you may even be completely oblivious to them, only to show up repeatedly over a very short time span? I remember a few years back coming across the word sinister, not exactly a word frequently used in daily…
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I have been thinking recently about what we, as professors, owe the department and the university where we work in terms of service. Let me start by stating that I understand we all have to do service, and that doing very little is extremely uncollegial. With teaching, it is clear that we have a duty…
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In STEM fields, a graduate student works on supervised research and is part of a research group led by a professor. Learning how to write up technical papers for publication is one of the most important parts of PhD training, so the student will typically be tasked with producing the first draft of a manuscript,…
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Dear colleague: Once you are a grown-ass scientist with several years of experience past your PhD — which means that among other things you are not a graduate student of mine, for whose technical writing practices I am responsible and after whom I (grudgingly) accept that it is my job to clean up prior to manuscript…
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