The real update: "embrace your inner bitch"

I had my lunch with the potential mentor.

The highlight is that I got a lot of "do what I say not as I do to the extent that you can." Ok so on one hand it was useful -- sanity check wise, I know what ideally I should do. On the other hand -- I didn't get much on the shared experience how does one balance priorities in the non ideal situation.

Short term plan -- spend every weekday on the project that currently funds me.
Weekends I will split between the project that pays me and for conference and resubmitting the two papers I had already submitted with a nice letter- of the form "Dear Editor, This paper has gone through the process before, and here are the changes requested. I realize that this is way after the deadline I was given; however, the delay was due to serious health problems outside my control. If this cannot be continued from the previous position in the process, please consider this as a new submission."

I also have a better idea of how to broach the subject of the conference/continuation of this project.

I have a good idea on how to balance the projects given sufficient time. Sufficient time is about 12 months if the above papers have to start the submission process all over, and 9 months if they can pick up mid way through the process. Then I will rank all my side projects based to how long they will take to result in a paper. Then I will make a schedule assuming only weekend work on them, and send the schedule to all the other collaborators, with a note of "This is realistic schedule. If you don't like it, either offer to hire me or offer to do something that shortens the time to publication for me."

If there is not sufficient time, then I am screwed. I didn't get advice on what to do then. But I think I know what I will do. I will balance this project, which after all has been funding me through my treatment, and what I think would be the contributions that I care about the most. Everyone will get the "This is my schedule. This is what I think is important for me to accomplish (i.e. this is what I want my legacy to be) before I am out of science due to lack of funding. If you don't like it, either offer to hire me or do it yourself, while giving me credit for the work I have done."

In other words, no matter what the time, I have to embrace my inner bitch. At least I won't have to worry that I will be given the recommendation letter full of "she plays well with others" aka the communal qualities that seem to hurt women anyways.

Update

For those curious: mentoring lunch is postponed until mid week.

Uncluttering the mind...

One of the issues with the health problem I had is a generic mind numbness and tiredness due to the illness as well as the medication taken to control it. As a result my desk as the rest of my life and work have been quietly getting piled up with important and unimportant stuff.

For me at least, the task of uncluttering everything is daunting. Every piece of paper was either something important that still needs doing or that I missed doing or didn't do as well(or fast as I could) or ... And lets be honest, on my list of things to do are several papers and projects that should have been done nine months ago, and are more important than figuring out how to unclutter.

A successful strategy for me is to leverage random outside events to get me to focus in a burst on one of those tasks, without expectations.

The random event: a garage sale/giveaway.
The random find: a desk that could work as a TV stand and matches our living room colour scheme.
The random mishap that helped: what was formerly our TV stand was a coupe of wood like shoe racks on top of each other, which I always worried would break and hence were filled with inaccessible books to turn it into a more solid rectangle of wood and paper. I t turns out that as we moved the tV onto the new desk/console, I got excited to use the shoe rack for my shoes -- and it didn't fit into our shoe and coat closet by less than an inch. Loathe to not use up the shoe shelves, and loathe to put my shoes in the bedroom closet where lets be honest I rarely would look for shoes, I had the idea to stack them on one of my desks and organize the papers on them.

The result: a very clean desk. I sorted my papers by shelves for project: code, set up notes, troubleshooting notes, papers on the science code, papers on the technique from a different field, etc.

All of a sudden what was left was a pile of papers that are not needed, which got trashed, and a very small pile of personal stuff to sort through. I made a space for pile of personal stuff to be sorted through, and voila my desk is clean.

But the mind is a funny thing -- it translated the order on my desk, as getting control of my life (finally). I wonder how long this feeling will last.

Anyways, it seems someone at the New York Times has spent some more time musing on the brain on metaphors, backed up by some curious scientific studies.

I shouldn't be surprised...

...that there are so many supportive (at least when funding is not an issue) faculty. The possible mentor I emailed yesterday has kindly agreed to meet me in the next 2 weeks. So she is now a probably mentor, and I think she will be helpful.

I really do admire her. She manages to walk that tight line where she is successful and tough, without coming off as bitchy, overly aggressive or in any way compromised due to her femaleness. This to me honestly is a first, so I hope I get to turn this one meeting into the-rest-of-the-year-mentoring to figure out how she does it.

Today, I am full of hope...

(and yeah I know lack of funding will destroy me)

I am back

As I have hinted not so subtly before, I have been sick. i had an operation this last week or so, and (fingers crossed) all that is taken care off -- have another post op appointment in a few months to verify that.

In other words: I am back to work and this blog.

And here in lies the struggle -- of all the things that should have happened over the last 12 months of nightmarish health stuff, what do I do first? No, this is a misleading question -- all need to be done, but clearly I should devote different amount of time on the different projects. There is the current project so 100% of my official work time has to go to that. But we all know that we work more than our 40hrs a week schedule. So how do I allocate the time? Spend all that time to get the current project up to speed, because after all it is paying my salary? Spend some of that time on tying up graduate work projects? Or work on the new projects that do not pay my salary but have a higher chance of success, i.e., the papers are in sight?

In graduate school, I always had multiple projects. And I had problems because the new project was always more interesting than tying up loose ends and putting all the sections of the paper together and making the figures publication quality and what not. After all I am driven by curiosity.

Alas, careers are based on what one publishes -- the bits that I find the most unsatisfying. I admit there is a great value in the paper writing process -- it makes me double check that I haven't missed important work, it makes me explain my ideas from scratch again thus double checking for faults and flaws, and it makes me think about the larger picture, and finally down the road it gets me feedback and sometimes new ideas.

So in the past, I could discuss with my Ph.D. adviser and mentors my priorities. I could say I want to do this and this and that but i only have so much time, and get some kind of plan or help with accomplishing all that. In theory I could do the same here, but my postdoc project is vastly different from my other side projects, so I feel guilty for asking for help with stuff my adviser's name won't go on. Especially since my adviser has been incredibly supportive with the little amount of work that has been done over those 12 months. Am I wrong on this issue, and hence discuss it with him? Or ...

Do I need even more so to find another mentor for sanity check? And I don't know how to find one.

In grad school, due to issues with my Ph.D adviser, and due to having taken classes/being a TA, and due to making yearly presentations to the department (that people outside my group found interesting!), I was lucky to find 2 mentors very very easily. The reason I opted for two to run things by was that I didn't want to get too skewed on either the male or the female side; I wanted a balanced gender feedback not the least reason being that a lot of the problems I had were based on sexual harassment by certain faculty.

Here I am struggling. I am in generally a private person, so while I had been open to the facts of being sick and the operation schedule and what not, I don't want to have it define me. On the other hand it is the crux of the issue I think. So more details will have to come out. To make it worse, I have yet to figure out how to talk about it without crying -- not that I want to burst crying, but that my eyes just start crying. Again with my previous mentors who knew my work, I felt I had their respect and could and did ask them to just ignore the tears since they are involuntary.

Anyways, having written the above I decided to bite the bullet. I have looked around and found a faculty member who I think will be level headed and a good mentor. So I emailed her.

Here is me sitting with fingers crossed hoping she will say yes.

Which SF writer are you?

Thanks to Ms. Ph.D.

I am: Gregory Benford A master literary stylist who is also a working scientist.

Which science fiction writer are you?

I wish! Then I won't be a postdoc anymore!

What kind of success...

There are days I feel I am all wrong for academia. These days are the days when I look outside, and wonder what it means to ...live a normal life. Life not full of papers and codes. Life that does not propel you to be the best in your narrow field. A life that is happy in spite of that.

I will come out of this as an expert in nothing.

Every day I work on this postdoc is a day my competition gets to think more about my Ph.D. work. So I fall behind and I turn from the expert to a sideviewer. And I am just starting out in this new field, and in the end I would be in this new field in the position I was with the old field at the end of my Ph.D. Except I will now have two fields to be falling behind in.

Adversity strains us. It can be a good strain -- when we work on a project and experiments fail but with each failure we learn something new. But it can also be a bad strain -- when we work on a project that is ill thought out, governed unreasonably, unfunded, or otherwise blocked in ways irrelevant to greater understanding. When we overcome the first type of adversity, we come out tired but able to get up the next day and try again and again. The second one, however, leaves us empty, drained, struggling to make the next day count.

The current job/postdoc situation turns even the first adversity into the second. Regardless of how successful your projects are, you still hear that you need to do 1-2 more postdoc, publish in Science, or some other goal which seems unreasonable -- including that we should be grateful to have the opportunity to learn new skills, not manage a lab or some other reason which does not leave us fulfilled.

Lets step back. You are young, you find you have a knack for math/physics/chemistry/biology. You go to college and find you really do like it. You go ahead and work hard to get a Ph.D. becoming an expert on your thesis topic. You are sustained by speeches, such as the President's State of the Union address in 2006, of how badly needed are people in the STEM disciplines. You read about the American Competitiveness Initiative and you know you have a future.

And then you wake up.

No jobs in STEMS. Sorry we're all filled up with people who got their Ph.D. a decade or more ago. But you can be a wage slave and a certified nobody as a post doc. And you'd better appreciate the opportunity. Oh and post docs are limited in duration; we must make room for the next batch of graduates.

The current economic crisis has little to do with it. Academia does not grow and shrink in quite the same way as industries do. Tenured professors did not get fired -- at the worst they got furloughs, maybe even a small pay cut. They get to do their science, publish and peer review each other.

The race is often won not by the quickest but rather by the one who doesn't quit in the face of adversity.

This isn't true. The race is won by the lucky few who are at the right place at the right time working for the right person, getting the right introduction. The rest face adversity of the maybe the first and definitely the second kind. Some drop out, and inevitably some of those left do succeed. But what kind of success is this?

To be continued ...

Pressure and murder

First off, nothing really excuses murder. Dr. Bishop cannot, and should not, be excused. But some details are worth discussing anyways.

Postdocs have recently been discussed over at Ms. PhD and DrugMonkey quite a bit. In summary it seems, that established faculty tend to not see the problems with long postdocs, and current postdocs seethe at being underpaid and under respected.

A friend of mine, in his 4th or 5th year as a postdoc, was recently told that there is nothing else that he can do to improve his chances for a faculty job but to publish in Science or Nature. This was not for a job at Harvard or Standford or anywhere close. It came from people well towards the end of their career, who are sitting on the hiring committees and who have never ever published in Science or Nature.

Unrealistic expectations and pressure...

But postdoc is not the final rat race. Tenure is.

She had developed a new approach to treating Lou Gehrig’s disease, which a company was in the process of licensing for development. And she and her husband, a computer engineer with a biology degree, had invented an automated system for incubating cells that investors said would be a vast improvement over the petri dish. The system is to be marketed by Prodigy Biosystems, which raised $1.2 million in capital financing.

“From the way it looked to us, looking from the outside, she’s had success,” said Krishnan Chittur, a chemical engineering professor. “I’ve been here longer than she has, and she’s had more success raising money than I’ve had.”

Geez! I wish I were that successful. Making progress on a horrible disease, making progress in a technique, and getting more funding? No! That is not good enough anymore.

What Dr. Bishop did is deplorable and inexcusable. But are we truly surprised?

...
...
...

As a foreign scientist, I found some other things disturbing. It was mentioned that the department chairman, who was shot is not American. I wonder what is the value of this information?

Should we sympathize more or less with him? He and others are dead. It is an equal tragedy whether the person killed is American or not. Or should we sympathize more with her? I mean this foreigner is taking the jobs of the hard working Americans?

Either option is in bad taste and inflammatory. And sad.

WSJ: Who Has Easy Path to Top?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704094304575029201692700496.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_sections_careerjournal#articleTabs%3Darticle

Cover Letter

Dear Small Liberal Arts College/Liberal Arts University

My name is Foreign and Female in Science and I'd like to get a position in a liberal arts college (preferred) or university.

I have a BS degree in Math from a SLAC that made one top 20 for something list or other. I had the wonderful opportunity to explore interesting classes and to talk with interesting people, both students and faculty. It led to my choice to study the Maths and Physics of Nails for Paper, at Very Famous Research University for my masters, where I further defined my love for the subject, and having narrowed it down to the Nails for Paper called Pushpins, I got my PhD on the physics of Pushpins at top 50 Research University. During my Ph.D. I co-wrote 5 grants with my adviser, where the degree to my involvement increased to the point of the last couple being my vision and a lot of my writing. One of them got start up funding. I also supervised 2 undergraduate students who worked exclusively with me, which ended up with two presentations at a national conference (a talk and a poster). Now I am at Large Public University doing a postdoc on exciting but solitary project on the physics of Paperclips.

While I find research exciting, I feel unfulfilled and not entirely happy. So I'd like to shift the focus of my career.

Looking back, my fondest memories involved primarily (1) teaching and (2) doing research as or with undergraduate student(s), and to a slightly lesser extent (3) taking up interesting classes or projects that would not make me research famous. Both the Very Famous Research University and the top 50 Research University required only 1 year of TAing courses. You may notice that I have done more than that. You may note the variety of courses too -- from math to general Staplery to the roles and place of women in Staplery. To be honest, I know it is unlikely you teach that same very courses in your school, but the breath should show you that I am adaptable. I have a variety of interests. I work very hard on my teaching. I love working with students during office hours one on one.

I love working with students on research too. My first conference paper was done as a undergrad at SLAC and inspired me to take on this career path. Since then, I have worked with two more undergraduate students. One of them was extremely successful -- we presented his work as a talk at National conference and keep being asked when it will be published. We are still working on the publication and it would have been published sooner if (1) I had been wise enough to notice that he is not saving the results past an image or two and (2) he had not decided to take a very lucrative computer programming job back in his home country instead of staying as an underpaid Ph.D. student (not that I could have had Ph.D. Student and he should have risked my leaving in a year or so). The less successful student still decided to continue studying Nails for Paper -- he just found he has more talent for the chemistry of Nails for Paper not Physics and is in a Ph.D. program for that. I also recruited a third undergraduate to work on this project for my Ph.D adviser the semester I graduated. I have more projects that are just waiting for a good student to come along and help me implement them (and I cannot supervise undergrads as a postdoc here). Some of them I had outlines as possible offshoots in my qualifications exam proposal so they are ready.

I also have management experience. For 3 years I ran a lab. This included working with building managers and contractors to completely rewire the lab, with vendors and purchasing to fully upgrade the computing resources in the lab (and all we do is computer simulations), with travel agencies and grants management to make arrangements for us to go to conferences and for visiting professors to give lectures and semester courses, and last but not least with the grants management office to make budgets for grant proposals. As mentioned previously I recruited (all the ) undergraduate students who worked in the lab. I also recruited a graduate student. For a few years I organized quite a bit of the weekend for prospective students in our department.

In summary, I love teaching undergraduates and doing research with them. I have some experience in that. I am not burnt out like some of the people who have oodles of experience but really want to do research and are looking at you as a fallback option in this bad economy. I also have some experience recruiting students. I know you are not the SLAC I graduated from. But I have perused your website to death (if only you knew how much, you would sue me for stalking). I am not applying to you because I need a job (I have 2-3 more years of F-1 visa here). I simply would love to work with your students, department and administration.

Thank you for considering my application. I hope for, and look forward to, an opportunity for us to meet and see if and convince you that indeed we really are a good fit.

conference guilt

My broader field has a giant conference in December on the west coast and most people go there most years.

the number of attendees is between 15k and 20K
the number of buildings hosting events at the same time is between 4 and 6
the number of talks I missed while going from building to building/number of talks I saw >2
the number of hours I spent looking for people/number of hours I spent at talks > 3
the number of days of actual conference is 5
the number of days spent on this including traveling is 7
the cost of attending conference from the east coast -- 1.6k
the cost of attending conference from the west coast -- 1.5k

Every time I go there I have mixed feelings. I love going to conferences in general. I often get ideas and have started collaborations at such events too. I have gotten my data there too. but this last one felt deadly.

Too much noise, too much decision of what I can do at any given time, too many talks going ahead or behind schedule messing up my schedule, too many people who have morning posters but post they'd be a the poster in the afternoon or vice versa.

I got a few things accomplished. Someone more famous and further in their career like my adviser got a tons done mostly talking to Program Managers and the like.

Am I burning out? To some extent yes, but mostly not. I still love smaller conference in my subfield. The statistic for smaller conference is

the number of attendees is between 8k and 10K
the number of buildings hosting events at the same time is 1
the number of talks I missed while going from building to building/number of talks I saw =0 THIS IS BECAUSE THERE ARE <6 session at the same time, posters are at a different time than talks
the number of hours I spent looking for people/number of hours I spent at talks <1
the number of days of actual conference is 5
the number of days spent on this including traveling is 7
the cost of attending conference from the east coast -- 1.5k
the cost of attending conference from the west coast -- 1.6k

I get tons more done. I get to see whole sessions at time and most of the posters since the talks do not overlap posters. It is easy to predict where people are if there are 6 or fewer distinct sessions at which they could be. There are many rooms for conversation and collaboration. And the noise level is soooo much lower.

If I had a good choice I'd go for conference 2 only. But conference 1 is better for my CV. So there we go, tax payer cost roughly doubled.

I also find it disturbing that the conference on the west coast has almost the same cost regardless of where you live. This is due to the government rules for airplane tickets. Any normal being would find that all else being equal flying from the east coast to the west in the US should be more than hopping along the west coast (assuming similar sized airports which is the case). And this is true if I could have bought tickets from various places like the airlines, orbitz, yahoo travel, etc. But we have to go through an agency which buys tickets, charges us a ridiculous fee ($15 to $50) for booking and gets, in generally, not the lowest price I can quickly find.

As a tax payer I find this sad and appalling. If I ever get my own grant i'd stil find it appalling. But it gets worse. Two words:

per diem

As a grad student I didn't feel too bad to be honest. The school conveniently forgot to mention we pay the fees out of our own pocket when they offered us our financial aid and kept rising them by 50% to 100% every year. These fees ranged around 1 whole month paycheck so were not trivial. So the per diem I got from two conferences minus what I regularly spent on food (and I went out a lot) easily paid 100% of those fees at the beginning to 50% at the end. It urked me but I didn't care that much.

But now I have no excuse. And I felt very guilty today as I signed the paperwork as sent to me in one of our intermediary steps for reimbursement....

It gets worse; as a foreign person I know that for the same amount of money a person from my poor home country could attend. They'd stay at cheap motel, they'd eat sandwhcihes and other cheap food. Just for the opportunity.

On the bright side I did learn two things from our collaborator. Both of which fit on half a page of paper, could have been done over email and I have been asking for them for 1-2 months prior. But that is a whole other topic.

economics diagnoses the healthcare debate: Baumol’s cost disease

http://prescriptions.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/an-economist-who-sees-no-way-to-slow-rising-costs/

On one hand it is pessimistic: nothing can be done to prevent health care costs from going up.

On the other hand: health care costs do not need to be going up at this pace.

Sadly, I find this insufficient when it comes to comparing European models with the US one.

I am still afraid that both my Significant Other(SO) and I now have pre-existing conditions. So I am watching the Massachussetts elections in dread.

Some rough numbers (they are pretty close to exact, but the exact numbers are left out for privacy)
I/we have very good insurance. But since my SO is not my spouse, the benefit of the insurance is taxable to the tune of 4% of our pre-tax income. So if we had to pay SO's insurance out of pocket it would be roughly 40% of our income. Add to that the state tax of just under 10% on income and the federal tax of 30% -- if we were paying for the insurance out of pocket I would be taking home a little over 20% of my income.

Between my job and my SO's school loans we take <60K per year pre tax. That would mean 15K left or so for rent, food, clothes, co-pays and suches.

My graduate stipend after tax was 17K. So my current take home pay would be less than that as a graduate student.

I am soo grateful that this state recognizes my SO even if the federal government does not. that way I only pay 4% of our income for SO health insurance and not 40%. So I can finally pay down some of my school debts.

To expound a bit on the ridiculousness of health care, if I had to pay my premium out of pocket, it currently stands at a bit over 1.5 times my SO's one so that would be 60% of my income. So just SO's health insurance and mine would be 100%. While I ignored the fact that I should be able to deduct the medical expenses and what not from state/federal tax, the picture is still pretty grim.

I mentioned last time that test for really bad condition came out negative. But if it had come out positive I'd have had to take leave without pay. COBRA exists. But I have to pay my part of what the employer is paying which is roughly 100% of our income. COBRA is broken. Very very broken.

So conclusion: don't be young and get seriously sick?

Compounded to this is that I have no right to vote. I have lived in this country for 15+ yrs. I have worked and studied here legally. I have paid all my taxes. I s it too much to ask that I be allowed to vote?That I be allowed to call a congress(wo)man and talk to them about that as one of their potential voters?

I already have a residency for tax purposes. So why not a residency for non tax purposes such as voting? Maybe not immediately but after some (<15? <10?) years. Now I can insert the obligatory "taxation without representation" arguments used in winning rights for both non-whites and for women, but that seems too populist.

Catch 22 in healthcare

What would you do if you are a PI and your graduate student/postdoc gets really sick (over a few months) and there is no alternate funding than say the NSF or NIH grant?

On one hand:
You are responsible for work to be done in a timely manner to said agency, and cannot pay someone who is not working.

On the other hand:
The way health care works here no job means no health care... when the grad student/postdoc needs it. Let alone that the person's dependents would loose healthcare as well if they are on the same policy.

Furthermore:
if the person is foreign, do they get expatriated.

I am sure similar stuff comes up when faculty and staff are reviewed.

It just seems inhumane. I wonder how these would ever be handled without some kind of universal health care that is not dependent on work.

I am reminded of this over these holidays by randomly trying to get information from the registrar's office at my Ph.D. school. In that department, one of the first years (so not even on a grant but on TA) got sick. He was American so no foreign rules do apply. He tried to get home and passed away. The questions I never learned the answer to is
1) why was he allowed to drive home instead of being in the hospital.
2) would it have made a difference if he was on the RA insurance which was better than the TA insurance
3) would they have extended his TA ship so he will continue to have healthcare had he not passed away during break.

On other news my test for potentially very harmful disease came back... Negative. Big sigh of relief.