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.