research
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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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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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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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There is a small programming assignment I like to give my beginning grad students or upper-level undergrads who want to do research in my group. The assignment is a reasonably simple but quite accurate simulation of a system they all encountered during undergraduate studies. Most students never really ask themselves what the approximations are that
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I had a really, really long day. I spent 12 hours at work, and much of it on face time. I prepped a class, then taught the class, then spent the next 7 hours meeting with a total of 14 different students: 2 for office hours, 3 who are my research students about various points
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In a comment thread on someone else’s blog, I can’t remember whose, a commenter said that they never understood how or why teaching and research were related. The following is a truth universally acknowledged, but I am going to say it anyway: You have no idea how much you don’t know about something until it’s
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Tenure is a major landmark in the life of an academic scientist. While its original purpose was to protect academic freedom and enable professors to teach what they felt appropriate, without fear of retribution, this is not a major concern for most academic scientists and engineers. For STEM folks, tenure means job security and is
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Two of my big grants are expiring in 2015. The NSF one cannot really be renewed; I basically need to apply for a completely new grant. The other one is in principle a competitive renewal, but is a renewal nonetheless, and I have high expectations of funding as we are quite productive on that project
xykademiqz 