I'm writing a last minute cover letter to a postdoc, and I found myself talking about following "more correct" methods can influence results greatly. This letter is of course speaking tangentially to the open secret that most research in most fields is done poorly. As just about every study that takes hundreds of papers in a given field and reviewed their methods and inferences has ever shown, substantial numbers of papers in every field, and sometimes a majority, have big errors; sometimes the errors are big enough that we really do have to worry whether the wrong drugs are getting approved.
Of course I can't use judgmental words like "correct" because they sound obnoxious, even if they are correct.
A nerd, in the fully pejorative sense, is someone for whom being correct is more important than being pleasant. You have to be an extremely charismatic, yet sweet, personality to really be taken seriously when sticking to the point of telling someone that they are incorrect. Most people can't do that, of course, which is why they get labeled nerds. Or geeks. Depending on your language.
That is all very obvious, but perhaps a good reminder of the importance of charisma in these fields where there are such right and wrong. You can be factually right, but you also have to be persuasive, and it's ironic and sad that all undergraduate and even most graduate training in these factual fields selects for people who are correct, but doesn't until the end start looking at whether they are persuasive.
One person who is an enormous model for me (though never my advisor --- long story!) was just such a person: quietly charismatic who speaks extremely bluntly yet in the most pleasant way, as if Barack Obama were a researcher.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Premature decisions II: Material conditions
Material conditions and outside factors are the easiest part of a postdoc to identify, so I'll do those first, even though they are the least professionally-relevant.
- Money: four of the postdocs pay x (a funding agency's standardized salary, which can be supplemented in a very limited way; one postdoc said that in effect he made 1.15x with supplementation; based on my current salary, I could argue for 1.4x, but I doubt I would get more than that 1.15x). One postdoc pays 1.3x. Currently I make .8x, but that's working half-time so that I can spend the other half on my own work, so if I worked full time, I would make 1.6x. My current city (where I would make 1.6x full time) is equally expensive as two of the 5 cities (where I would make x), and much less expensive than the other 3 cities (where I would make x or 1.3x.)
- Benefits: I only asked one of the postdocs, and it makes available the university's standard employee insurance plan. As I discovered last year, some postdocs are not considered employees so have to purchase insurance on their own and then be reimbursed: while this insurance does not seem to cost the postdoc anything, this is risky because it means that your health information is tracked by companies which work like credit bureaus, and that frankly scares the bejeezus out of me. If you broke your ankle while skiing as a postdoc and for some reason needed to get insurance on the individual/non-employee market 20 years later, your rates might be extremely high just because you broke your ankle 20 years earlier. I'm not exaggerating. It's a complete deal-breaker for me not to be considered an employee for health insurance.
- Office space: One postdoc is in a space-constrained school, but would nonetheless give me my own small office with a small window. Another postdoc seems to put its postdocs 4 or 5 to a windowless office the size of my current one (except my current office has a window,) but they claimed that the exact office situation was negotiable. I can picture sharing an office with one person, perhaps, but I just don't see how I could happily share an office with so many people; I'm shy and just not used to not having a door that I can close and a window to look out of. Three of the postdocs did not give me a sense for what my office situation would be: I suspect that one would be a windowless cubicle and two could be decent offices, though I don't know.
- Material support: A few postdocs buy new computers for the fellows, and even give a choice. A couple seem to give the postdocs 5 year old computers or whatever happens to be lying around. Some postdocs seem to make travel funds available to compete for. Others give nothing. Others fund any travel to promote the PI's project.
- Safety: Two of the postdocs are in very sketchy areas, where people actually said explicitly it is not safe to walk around, especially not at night. Two are in slightly sketchy neighborhoods, but generally safe. One postdoc is in a really nice neighborhood. My current postdoc is in a sketchy neighborhood, intermediate between "very" and "slightly" sketchy.
- Weather. One postdoc has nice weather, two decent, and two awful.
- Personal life: I have friends in all of the cities, thankfully. I can easily see myself living in the cities for four of the five postdocs. The fifth would be cool, but doesn't feel remotely like home, perhaps because it's a different region of the country than I'm used to; also, my friends in this city (both male and female) have had trouble dating, ironically, since given that they're both males and females having trouble, I would think they could find each other. Three postdocs are in cities at least as interesting as my current one; two are in less interesting cities, but close to better cities.
Okay, that's probably really boring for anyone other than me. And even for me. I'll try for better. I have an interesting interview story to write up in which my interviewer was extremely frank.
- Money: four of the postdocs pay x (a funding agency's standardized salary, which can be supplemented in a very limited way; one postdoc said that in effect he made 1.15x with supplementation; based on my current salary, I could argue for 1.4x, but I doubt I would get more than that 1.15x). One postdoc pays 1.3x. Currently I make .8x, but that's working half-time so that I can spend the other half on my own work, so if I worked full time, I would make 1.6x. My current city (where I would make 1.6x full time) is equally expensive as two of the 5 cities (where I would make x), and much less expensive than the other 3 cities (where I would make x or 1.3x.)
- Benefits: I only asked one of the postdocs, and it makes available the university's standard employee insurance plan. As I discovered last year, some postdocs are not considered employees so have to purchase insurance on their own and then be reimbursed: while this insurance does not seem to cost the postdoc anything, this is risky because it means that your health information is tracked by companies which work like credit bureaus, and that frankly scares the bejeezus out of me. If you broke your ankle while skiing as a postdoc and for some reason needed to get insurance on the individual/non-employee market 20 years later, your rates might be extremely high just because you broke your ankle 20 years earlier. I'm not exaggerating. It's a complete deal-breaker for me not to be considered an employee for health insurance.
- Office space: One postdoc is in a space-constrained school, but would nonetheless give me my own small office with a small window. Another postdoc seems to put its postdocs 4 or 5 to a windowless office the size of my current one (except my current office has a window,) but they claimed that the exact office situation was negotiable. I can picture sharing an office with one person, perhaps, but I just don't see how I could happily share an office with so many people; I'm shy and just not used to not having a door that I can close and a window to look out of. Three of the postdocs did not give me a sense for what my office situation would be: I suspect that one would be a windowless cubicle and two could be decent offices, though I don't know.
- Material support: A few postdocs buy new computers for the fellows, and even give a choice. A couple seem to give the postdocs 5 year old computers or whatever happens to be lying around. Some postdocs seem to make travel funds available to compete for. Others give nothing. Others fund any travel to promote the PI's project.
- Safety: Two of the postdocs are in very sketchy areas, where people actually said explicitly it is not safe to walk around, especially not at night. Two are in slightly sketchy neighborhoods, but generally safe. One postdoc is in a really nice neighborhood. My current postdoc is in a sketchy neighborhood, intermediate between "very" and "slightly" sketchy.
- Weather. One postdoc has nice weather, two decent, and two awful.
- Personal life: I have friends in all of the cities, thankfully. I can easily see myself living in the cities for four of the five postdocs. The fifth would be cool, but doesn't feel remotely like home, perhaps because it's a different region of the country than I'm used to; also, my friends in this city (both male and female) have had trouble dating, ironically, since given that they're both males and females having trouble, I would think they could find each other. Three postdocs are in cities at least as interesting as my current one; two are in less interesting cities, but close to better cities.
Okay, that's probably really boring for anyone other than me. And even for me. I'll try for better. I have an interesting interview story to write up in which my interviewer was extremely frank.
Two types of postdocs
I did the job search last year, but hadn't noticed this before. This year I noticed that there are two types of postdocs.
1. Postdocs intended to benefit the postdoc, often with structured professional development programs. Of course, these postdocs are supposed to benefit the research center who get to renew their training grants if the postdocs turn out well, but the key fact is that the postdocs have autonomy and define their own success.
2. Postdocs intended to benefit a faculty member. At one of my first interviews, I was sitting with a senior and a junior faculty member, and I asked what the role of the postdoc was. It was an innocent question, and I wasn't thinking of it in any kind of cynical way. The junior faculty member was a grad school cousin --- their advisor had served on my committee --- so felt almost like a relative. The answer came immediately from the senior faculty member, "To get tenure!" In other words, the faculty member gets a very tight leash because they are truly dependent on the postdoc.
After this interview, which fortunately came early, I started looking at all postdocs as structured programs to benefit the postdoc versus to get a promotion for a faculty member, and noticed that all of the posted postdocs could be divided in this way.
In addition, there is a third type of postdoc, which tends not to be posted. That's the kind that I'm in now.
3. The employee postdoc: The postdoc is an employee on a project, like any other employee, and often one of many. They have the title of postdoc, but it's a bit arbitrary because they don't do anything different from the research scientists or other non-PI researchers. Their work benefits the PI, but since they are one of many, the PI does not have such a tight leash on them.
1. Postdocs intended to benefit the postdoc, often with structured professional development programs. Of course, these postdocs are supposed to benefit the research center who get to renew their training grants if the postdocs turn out well, but the key fact is that the postdocs have autonomy and define their own success.
2. Postdocs intended to benefit a faculty member. At one of my first interviews, I was sitting with a senior and a junior faculty member, and I asked what the role of the postdoc was. It was an innocent question, and I wasn't thinking of it in any kind of cynical way. The junior faculty member was a grad school cousin --- their advisor had served on my committee --- so felt almost like a relative. The answer came immediately from the senior faculty member, "To get
After this interview, which fortunately came early, I started looking at all postdocs as structured programs to benefit the postdoc versus to get a promotion for a faculty member, and noticed that all of the posted postdocs could be divided in this way.
In addition, there is a third type of postdoc, which tends not to be posted. That's the kind that I'm in now.
3. The employee postdoc: The postdoc is an employee on a project, like any other employee, and often one of many. They have the title of postdoc, but it's a bit arbitrary because they don't do anything different from the research scientists or other non-PI researchers. Their work benefits the PI, but since they are one of many, the PI does not have such a tight leash on them.
Premature decisions I
Last year, I waited to decide whom I was interested in until I found out who was interested in me. As we know in dating, knowing others' interest changes your perception: the Heisenberg Principle of Dating, if Heisenberg had been an "older single." Someone who seems too interested seems fishy, and someone who turns you down suddenly occupies your thoughts, even if you hadn't thought much of them.
To avoid such conundrums, I am going to think about which postdocs I like before I find out whether they like me. There are five, and one of my recent interviewers seemed to imply that they would make me an offer as early as early this coming week, so I want to make up my mind about what I think of them before I get an answer.
Before I talk about the individual postdocs, I want to formulate what I am looking for in a postdoc.
1. Professional development: I want to feel confident in my ability to write grants, and submit a small federal grant application during the postdoc. I really have no idea what I'm doing here, and need to learn before I can get a faculty job.
2. Work habit socialization: I feel okay about my ability to write and publish papers. If I continued just as I have, with no outside help, I'm sure I could have a respectable career. My work habits are substandard, and I have spent far too much time on youtube and facebook and wikipedia and everywhere else.
3. Mentorship. I feel slightly divided on this one. Mentorship is always helpful, but it has to be the right kind. Taking on a new advisor is always risky because some apparently act as though they own your time. On the other hand, these types of advisors may be more helpful in finding jobs for their students. Since I've become used to a more hands-off model, I suppose I would err on the side of hands-off, but ideally it would be someone who is around that I can stop by if I need to. The most tricky part.
4. Viable research direction: Based on my past experience, I have really good research ideas, but I don't have a coherent vision of a research agenda which is simultaneously sufficiently focused to be manageable and yet broad enough to be important, and which is fundable and has good academic opportunities. Because of my field, I have a fair amount of flexibility in finding direction like this.
5. Smart peers with similar interests whom I can learn from, both topically and methodologically. I don't want to be the most methodologically sophisticated person in my department; I want to learn from others.
6. Research community: Seminars and other signs of an active research community to keep up with the research, both topically and methodologically.
7. Personal life: A city where I could have a viable personal life and meet smart people to befriend and date.
8. Health factors: Easy to get good produce, exercise, sunshine, breathing room, etc. People seem happy. Money is a factor here, of course, because it would be very hard to live in expensive cities on a postdoc salary, while others are very comfortable on a postdoc salary.
9. Next step: Postdoc is prestigious and well-directed enough that the next steps are both clear and attainable. Ideally, postdoc is open-ended enough that if the market were not great one year, I could stay another year to go on the market.
10. Likeability. I want to feel comfortable with and like the people in the department.
Those are my criteria. The next post will discuss how each postdoc measures up.
To avoid such conundrums, I am going to think about which postdocs I like before I find out whether they like me. There are five, and one of my recent interviewers seemed to imply that they would make me an offer as early as early this coming week, so I want to make up my mind about what I think of them before I get an answer.
Before I talk about the individual postdocs, I want to formulate what I am looking for in a postdoc.
1. Professional development: I want to feel confident in my ability to write grants, and submit a small federal grant application during the postdoc. I really have no idea what I'm doing here, and need to learn before I can get a faculty job.
2. Work habit socialization: I feel okay about my ability to write and publish papers. If I continued just as I have, with no outside help, I'm sure I could have a respectable career. My work habits are substandard, and I have spent far too much time on youtube and facebook and wikipedia and everywhere else.
3. Mentorship. I feel slightly divided on this one. Mentorship is always helpful, but it has to be the right kind. Taking on a new advisor is always risky because some apparently act as though they own your time. On the other hand, these types of advisors may be more helpful in finding jobs for their students. Since I've become used to a more hands-off model, I suppose I would err on the side of hands-off, but ideally it would be someone who is around that I can stop by if I need to. The most tricky part.
4. Viable research direction: Based on my past experience, I have really good research ideas, but I don't have a coherent vision of a research agenda which is simultaneously sufficiently focused to be manageable and yet broad enough to be important, and which is fundable and has good academic opportunities. Because of my field, I have a fair amount of flexibility in finding direction like this.
5. Smart peers with similar interests whom I can learn from, both topically and methodologically. I don't want to be the most methodologically sophisticated person in my department; I want to learn from others.
6. Research community: Seminars and other signs of an active research community to keep up with the research, both topically and methodologically.
7. Personal life: A city where I could have a viable personal life and meet smart people to befriend and date.
8. Health factors: Easy to get good produce, exercise, sunshine, breathing room, etc. People seem happy. Money is a factor here, of course, because it would be very hard to live in expensive cities on a postdoc salary, while others are very comfortable on a postdoc salary.
9. Next step: Postdoc is prestigious and well-directed enough that the next steps are both clear and attainable. Ideally, postdoc is open-ended enough that if the market were not great one year, I could stay another year to go on the market.
10. Likeability. I want to feel comfortable with and like the people in the department.
Those are my criteria. The next post will discuss how each postdoc measures up.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
I'm lending money to universities with billion dollar endowments
I had forgotten how tight money gets during interview season due to new and sudden expenses; plane tickets and hotel rooms add up quickly. Spending money that isn't mine is slightly thrilling, and even moreso is the suspense of whether I will be able to pay my credit card bill in full before getting reimbursed. (Not thinking ahead, when the stock market declined, I tried to get some bargains with anything I could scrape out of my bank account. Or rather, thinking too far ahead.)
Unresolved reimbursement is an awkward way to be in touch with potential jobs. I had two interviews in December for jobs that I really want. For one, the hotel mistakenly charged my credit card instead of billing to their account. For the other, the advisor's assistant had a family emergency, and didn't get around to reimbursing me until I emailed yesterday. In my email exchanges, no one said anything about the jobs and their time-frames. Is this a classic case of "They're just not that into me", or do they just not know yet?
I don't know, so meanwhile, I apply apply apply to more more more jobs, and fly off to more interviews (thankfully!). At this stage where I've spoken with so many people, and not gotten anything back, it's hard not to wonder if this year will be like last year: many fantastic almosts, but nothing substantial in the end.
Unresolved reimbursement is an awkward way to be in touch with potential jobs. I had two interviews in December for jobs that I really want. For one, the hotel mistakenly charged my credit card instead of billing to their account. For the other, the advisor's assistant had a family emergency, and didn't get around to reimbursing me until I emailed yesterday. In my email exchanges, no one said anything about the jobs and their time-frames. Is this a classic case of "They're just not that into me", or do they just not know yet?
I don't know, so meanwhile, I apply apply apply to more more more jobs, and fly off to more interviews (thankfully!). At this stage where I've spoken with so many people, and not gotten anything back, it's hard not to wonder if this year will be like last year: many fantastic almosts, but nothing substantial in the end.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
An open-access journal for Valentine's Day
An item in the Journal of Irreproducible Results's email newsletter called my attention to the Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, which publishes many papers related to romantic love, which are all open-access.
- Attractive Women Want it All: Good Genes, Economic Investment, Parenting Proclivities, and Emotional Commitment. I have noticed this paper's result that attractive women can have higher standards than less attractive women, but find it profoundly depressing.
Attractiveness as the major factor in women's ability to attract a "high value" mate is not a main finding of the paper, but it is apparently well-founded in the literature. Traits like education really do seem to be much less important in whom women can attract, and that's related to why successful men have an easier time marrying than successful women. In reproductive fitness terms, women's time might be better spent exercising and primping than working, especially if work contributes to women being less attractive (e.g., travel = worse diet, less exercise, sleep loss). Men's incentives align more directly: working in itself helps men attract mates, though exercise also does (and another paper found men who played team sports were more attractive). As has been noted umpteen times, women have a much harder time finding men of comparable education/income levels: women's education isn't as much of an asset to them on the dating market as it is for men.
Also, from my read, it looks like they could have rated the women's husband's mating values directly and chose only to look at the women's self-reported standards for a mate; I wonder why they didn't look at the empirical results of the women's actual mate choices; or perhaps I have misread.
-Likewise, women put more emphasis on character in mate selection, while men don't.
- Sex Differences in Everyday Risk-Taking Behavior in Humans: Males take more risks than females do, and more risks when females are around. They don't talk about whether risk-taking behavior has any effect on female attractiveness, but that would be interesting as well.
- Sex Differences in Romantic Kissing Among College Students: An Evolutionary Perspective finds that men use kissing primarily to get laid, and don't mind its absence in short-term partner selection as much as women do. An interesting thing that I hadn't realized was that they hypothesize that kissing allows substances to be exchanged that make women more interested in sex.
Fascinating, yet depressing, to see human behavior reduced to such basic terms. I'm going to the gym.
- Attractive Women Want it All: Good Genes, Economic Investment, Parenting Proclivities, and Emotional Commitment. I have noticed this paper's result that attractive women can have higher standards than less attractive women, but find it profoundly depressing.
Attractiveness as the major factor in women's ability to attract a "high value" mate is not a main finding of the paper, but it is apparently well-founded in the literature. Traits like education really do seem to be much less important in whom women can attract, and that's related to why successful men have an easier time marrying than successful women. In reproductive fitness terms, women's time might be better spent exercising and primping than working, especially if work contributes to women being less attractive (e.g., travel = worse diet, less exercise, sleep loss). Men's incentives align more directly: working in itself helps men attract mates, though exercise also does (and another paper found men who played team sports were more attractive). As has been noted umpteen times, women have a much harder time finding men of comparable education/income levels: women's education isn't as much of an asset to them on the dating market as it is for men.
Also, from my read, it looks like they could have rated the women's husband's mating values directly and chose only to look at the women's self-reported standards for a mate; I wonder why they didn't look at the empirical results of the women's actual mate choices; or perhaps I have misread.
-Likewise, women put more emphasis on character in mate selection, while men don't.
- Sex Differences in Everyday Risk-Taking Behavior in Humans: Males take more risks than females do, and more risks when females are around. They don't talk about whether risk-taking behavior has any effect on female attractiveness, but that would be interesting as well.
- Sex Differences in Romantic Kissing Among College Students: An Evolutionary Perspective finds that men use kissing primarily to get laid, and don't mind its absence in short-term partner selection as much as women do. An interesting thing that I hadn't realized was that they hypothesize that kissing allows substances to be exchanged that make women more interested in sex.
Fascinating, yet depressing, to see human behavior reduced to such basic terms. I'm going to the gym.
Friday, February 8, 2008
Don't be shy! You can come out and say it.
I just got an email with the subject line: "Rejection notification."
It was just for a conference, thankfully.
UPDATE: I got the following email shortly after:
"The email you just received was not the one we intended to send to you. It was a system error and we do apologize. Unfortunately, we still are unable to accept your abstract entitled..."
It was just for a conference, thankfully.
UPDATE: I got the following email shortly after:
"The email you just received was not the one we intended to send to you. It was a system error and we do apologize. Unfortunately, we still are unable to accept your abstract entitled..."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)