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 ...