sciencewoman | February 28, 2008It's the end of another teaching week. My mom has left town. My head is filled with mucous. And my motivation to do anything substantive has entirely left the building. It's taking a huge amount of effort just to write this blog post. I blame the cold, but I also blame being burnt out by the pace of my life.
Fortunately, next week is spring break at Mystery U. Ah, a chance to wind down, catch up, grade papers, write a paper, take care of some service obligations, do some lab work, plan a field trip, go the doctor, get a haircut, do my taxes, play with Minnow, take long walks with the dog,…
skookumchick | February 28, 2008Trying to recruit grad students into a PhD program where the PhD is BRAND NEW can be tough. In fact, I need the Internets's help.
So here I am, a new faculty member in a new department (sorry, sorry, SCHOOL), eager to do cool research and with startup money to burn.
Okay then. Where are the graduate students? Lemme get my hands on some graduate students. I just was a grad student, you can bet that means I'll treat them nicely.
Oh shoot. There aren't any who want to work with me.
The first challenge has been that I started my job after all the graduate students who were starting in the…
skookumchick | February 27, 2008The Scientiae theme for the anniversary edition is "renewal." I've been in a crabby mood for a couple of days, and haven't wanted to write anything about it because it would be crabby. But as the clock has ticked down, I realized that renewal is perhaps what I need to write about to help pull me out of my crabbiness.
The crabbiness arrived from a frustrating morning yesterday of wasting time trying to convince various folks that it was worth bothering to figure out who is on what listserv (our postdocs are regularly left out of the loop because they're not on any listserv, and our grad…
sciencewoman | February 26, 2008I've got a massive backlog of saved posts in my bloglines. These are things new and (really really) old, things I've read and loved and things I've meant to read. They are posts I've wanted to share with you and posts that have touched me deeply. But the post backlog is nearing a threshold point and if I don't start to do a link dump soon, I'll never dig myself out. So while all of these posts deserve some description, you'll have to just click the link and figure out for yourselves why I've saved them.
I'll be doling out the link love in small batches as time allows.
Here we go. We'll…
sciencewoman | February 25, 2008ScienceGrandma is in Mystery City for a visit this week, so we've got three generations of strong, scientifically-inclined women enjoying some time together. ScienceGrandma is a retired science professor, so it's interesting to hear her commentary on my day-to-day. Some things have changed since she started teaching (overt discrimination) and others haven't. Minnow is already starting to warm up to her (they hadn't seen each other since Christmas) and I'm sure that when they go for a walk and touch the tree bark and look at leaves together, they'll both be perfectly happy.
For my part, I'm…
sciencewoman | February 22, 2008Mystery City is 42% non-Caucasian, with the largest minority being African-American. Mystery University is 25% non-Caucasian.* My introductory courses bear out that statistic; I have a substantial percentage of Hispanic, Asian, and African-American students. So I was somewhat started the other day when I looked around my upper-level class and realized that we were all pretty much non-Hispanic Caucasian.**
That first glance around the classroom was folled by a surreptious examination of the other upper-level courses in my department, our graduate student population, and our faculty. So far, my…
skookumchick | February 22, 2008We've got a week before posts are due for the March Scientiae, the theme of which (if you choose to use it) is RENEWAL. Neither ScienceWoman or I have written a post on/for this yet either, so we're all in the late boat together. But this is the anniversary of Scientiae, so feel free to submit something to the celebratory party! Here's how, and the deadline is February 29 at 5 pm EST.
skookumchick | February 21, 2008I am terribly neglectful of my role as engineer on this blog - I COMPLETELY FORGOT about E-Week, that's National Engineers Week to the rest of you.
Peggy at Women in Science and SciBling Zuska have written good posts about it, so go read those for your fill of E-Week Goodness.
I confess though, that E-Week simply reminds me of some very peculiar activities that those at my undergrad institution engaged in. A lot of drinking, I mean a LOT of drinking, and most of it was even legal. A broomball tournament amongst teams with names like "Choked Flow" (I think that was a Chem Eng name. Those…
sciencewoman | February 21, 2008From the email files:To: Science Woman (science.woman@mystery.edu)
From: sillyname@yahoo.com
Subject: Hey
can u tell me how to do number 4 on the problem set. i no u went over it in class but i have had a VERY LONG week lol tests ha ha ha and i lost my notes. pleeease help
Stu
Dear Stu,
The notes are available on the class website, but you can also solve #4 by ... We'll also be working more examples in class tomorrow. Please see me during office hours if you need more help.
Sincerely,
Dr. Science
I am *so* sick of correspondence like that - and that's from a typical student in my upper-level…
skookumchick | February 20, 2008Putting the cool back in stargazing. Although, strictly, it was moongazing.
Okay, I admit it's a little jiggly. But I had the zoom all the way out, AND I was using a tripod, and it was fricking 3 degrees outside. I think it ain't bad.
Did you see the eclipse where you were?
I also saw 3 stars in Orion's belt, plus 6 stars in the Pleiades, plus the usual suspects of the Big Dipper, and Cassiopea. And now that my fingers have warmed up a little, I'm going to have some tea - it was FREEEEZING.
sciencewoman | February 20, 2008I just found out the the Bush administration's budget proposal for next year zeros out one of the programs that is a significant source of support for my past and proposed research. Hopefully Congress will put it back in, but in the meantime, does anyone have $50K per year they could prop me up with?
skookumchick | February 20, 2008Okay, so I've been coblogging with ScienceWoman for a little over a week so far. Which means I've been blogging as me, with no pseudonym to hide behind for the same time. What do I think about it so far?
It's terrifying. I haven't told many colleagues about this blog yet, and haven't had the nerve to add it to my email signature and such yet.
Before I decided to blog as me, I went and talked to my department head to see what he thought. He was supportive of me blogging as an outreach activity, but recommended I talk with the communication/news service people to see if they had any…
skookumchick | February 19, 2008I realized this morning that I had no meetings scheduled for today. HOORAY!!! In addition, my department (recently renamed a School) is all in an uproar because our academic advisory council is arriving tomorrow, and our open house to the university is Friday. So I decided that I could take the day at home to catch up on all the email I've been ignoring avoiding unable to get to recently. Here's a sampling of my inbox (currently at 400 messages):
umpteen million tables-of-contents for journals I want to read but don't have time to. I try and scroll through the email TOCs when they arrive…
sciencewoman | February 18, 2008Minnow is really fun these days. She loves to "help" me unload the dishwasher, fold the laundry, carry things, and close doors. She is also starting to really enjoy reading books. She's not just cuddling with me while I read, and she's not just trying to eat them anymore. She's starting to point at pictures and want to turn pages, and occasionally even laugh at the funny animal sounds I make while reading them.*
So I thought I'd share some of Minnow's current favorite books.
An early and continued favorite of ours is Moo, Baa, La La La by Sandra Boynton. I've actually had the words to this…
sciencewoman | February 17, 2008There's an article this week on Science Careers talking about impostor syndrome. The writer does a good job exposing the problem:
"Impostor syndrome" is the name given to the feelings that Abigail and many other young scientists describe: Their accomplishments are just luck or deceit, and they're in over their heads. The key to getting past it, experts say, is making accurate, realistic assessments of your performance....
Impostors have trouble putting those feelings in perspective and worry about their errors, not recognising that their colleagues make them, too. They also attribute their…
skookumchick | February 16, 2008Some of the comments to this post brought up the topic of implicit gender bias, and I thought the time might be ripe for a couple of pointers on the subject. Although I'm changing the context a little (from ethics training to search committees), the comments on reducing bias remain the same.
The first is that, in general, but with considerable caveats,* BOTH women and men are biased against women's applications, papers and such. The issue of gender bias is NOT just a problem of men being biased against women.
In fact, let's be clear - in all of these stories about gender, there are some…
skookumchick | February 15, 2008And quick on the heels of my posts on living in two places comes one of those weekends when it is particularly challenging. As you know, I drove home yesterday evening, and in addition to hearing about the NIU shooting (which, at the time, people weren't reporting anything other than the number of people who had been taken to hospital), and some hintings of weather problems on Sunday that the weather people were watching.
Now today, the weather people are saying that freezing rain may start here in Central Illinois Saturday night, turn to rain and sleet Sunday morning, and then snow Sunday…
skookumchick | February 15, 2008I'm going through the training that Purdue requires before I submit any research protocols to the Institutional Review Board. It's good to care about your faculty doing ethical research, but I confess it is taking FOREVER.
So I'm reading the part on the problems with peer review, and I come across this chestnut:
Gender bias may occur in reviewing.
Okay, so far so good, I think. Maybe this is an enlightened group of folks writing this who are aware of the research that says that reviewers are biased against manuscripts authored by people with identifiably female names. I continue to read:…
skookumchick | February 14, 2008I just got back home after driving from West Lafayette. I heard on the radio about YET ANOTHER HORRENDOUS SHOOTING on a university campus.
My breath caught in my throat as I heard the NPR news staff interview the faculty advisor for the student newspaper at Northern Illinois University. I couldn't stop myself from actually crying in the car as visions of Virginia Tech ran in front of my eyes. I interviewed at Virginia Tech the week before the massacre there, was so terribly shocked by how close my visit had been, felt so terribly awful for the colleagues I met there during my visit.
A…
sciencewoman | February 14, 2008Today is Happy Woman Professor Day and the associated mandate is to blog about the good aspects of our jobs. It's the end of my teaching week, and I'm up for the challenge, because I always feel a little giddy when I walk out of the classroom on Thursday afternoons. In fact, I'm going to try to write this post without any qualifiers (no buts).
I like being a professor for the sheer variety of things that I get to do over the course of a day or week. This morning I had a search committee meeting, then I lead a class where I lectured and we discussed a paper. I had a quick lunch with colleagues…