academia
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In a comment to my recent post, “Musings on Networking,” TheGrinch asked: Any advice on how to follow up / be in touch with new connections? How to follow up depends a little on what type of interaction you had. With some people you just had a nice brief chat, but you didn’t connect either…
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Presenting work at conferences is an important part of being a scientist. It falls under the broad umbrella of making your research known to the scientific community. Being able to create and deliver a good presentation is an inherent part of graduate and postdoctoral training. Let’s say you are a junior scientist — a graduate…
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In the comments to yesterday’s post, Academic Job Search — Know Who Thy Friends Are, reader MidCareerTenured asked a question about upgrading institutions mid-career: xykademiqz and other: What do you think the chances are for a midcareer tenured scientist to move from a very low ranking research institution to a quality R1? Assume a solid…
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Professors are frequently asked to write letters of reference: recommendation letters for undergrads applying to grad school, graduate students and postdocs seeking postdocs or jobs; evaluation letters for tenure-track faculty who are being considered for tenure, as well as for faculty at various career stages who are being nominated for honors or awards. If I…
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Over the past few weeks, I have read or heard several times that there are some academics who don’t consider those among their colleagues who run large groups and are prolific in experimental research to be worthwhile academic scholars. I am no experimentalist and some experimental collaborators have annoyed the hell out of me on…
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I love my job. It’s awesome even when it’s not. But there are aspects of it that are best not thought about lest you really enjoy feeling helpless. One of them is being able fund research with students, which requires long-term planning and flexibility, through 3-year-grants with small budgets and very low paylines (probability of…
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Over the past few weeks I have been looking at tenure-track faculty applications. Most candidates are on their first postdoc, with some who are about to finish graduate school and some on their second postdoc, or even further in their career. As I have written before, most applications are unfortunately not competitive and will be…
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Academia is often referred to as ‘the ivory tower’, where ‘ivory’ presumably conveys nobility while ‘tower’ hints at unattainability. This moniker is not helping the view of academia in today’s increasingly anti-intellectual and anti-elitist US. By many, the concept of tenure and the job security it implies are viewed as an undeserved perk that nobody else…
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A colleague once remarked that, past a certain point in one’s career, one could easily spend all of one’s time just reviewing other people’s papers. Truer words have seldom been spoken. There are several venues where I like to publish and, as a rule, I will accept referral requests from them as long as the manuscripts…
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