WOOT!

One of my summer students' presentation was selected as a semi-finalist in the summer research project presentation contest.

Each summer researcher gets an opportunity to either give a short oral presentation or a poster session on their summer work. I've been very happy and impressed with her work, and she showed me her presentation before she gave it, but I didn't know it was a competition.

There are two more rounds of speaking, and then cash prizes go to the top 3 students. I take no credit for this one, but I'm very excited for her. WOOT!

Two thoughts

1) One of my summer students was complaining about the difficulty she was having fitting a class into her schedule that would allow her to keep working with me during the term. The crux of the problem is a course conflict with  a humanities breadth requirement. She could fill out the paperwork for a course conflict, but she wants to attend all the humanities lectures because humanities classes are hard for her, and she is afraid that if she doesn't attend lectures, she won't do well in the class. While I feel for her predicament, a little voice inside me is gleefully chanting "English is hard, lets do science!"

2) When applying for jobs, especially at state universities, I tend to be conscientious about filling in the form from  HR about diversity. I approve of universities trying to increase the diversity of its applicant pool, and full disclosure on a piece of paper that no one in my prospective department will see is an easy way to support them. Race, fine. Gender, fine. Marital status, ehn? Well, its a different country, privacy norms are different. Sexual orientation, WTF? Um, get out of my bedroom please?

I answered it. The options were fairly comprehensive. I wonder if this means that the university is more serious about dealing with LGBT issues than others. I'll keep you posted if I get the job.

A Lesson in Patience

I seem to be capable of doing only two of the three following activities at a time: Being productive at work, spending time with my family, blogging. Sorry for the long unannounced absence, but it was for good reasons.

I have two undergraduate researchers this summer. One I've been very happy with her performance, both in terms of results, and in terms of the initiative she shown. The other disappointed me in both these areas at first. To be fair, she's had a hard summer. She made me aware of her issues at the beginning of the summer session. I have no pretension about where my priority as a summer job should be in her life, so I told her that it was okay for her to take care of the unforeseeable events that had come up in her life.

These last couple weeks I've had to revise my opinion of her. Her research has turned a corner, and she is producing proto-results! More importantly, she is seeking me out and asking for time to meet and discuss, rather than waiting for me to chase her down to see what she's done.

I think it was this lack of motivation that bothered me the most about her performance. I understood that she didn't have a lot of time to devote to this project, but for her to get stuck and wait 5 days for me to return to town, rather than sending me an e-mail disturbed me. The fact that she is getting results now is a sign of her intelligence (which never was being tested). The fact that she hasn't been good about asking me questions is a sign of poor research skills. I am hoping that can be (and is being) taught over the course of her summer research projects. If so, that skill will give her an edge in her graduate studies, at least as much as any mastery of anything learned in a classroom or lab will.

But the main point of this post is to point out that it is worth, in the absence of other compounding data, having faith in students who initially under perform. Sometimes they turn around.

There are only a few weeks left in this summer session. I'm finding myself, unsurprisingly, wishing it was a little longer so that my first student can clean up tie up all the loose ends she needs to, and my second student can have the chance to actually find something new.

Scientific open mic

Ms MSE posted a while ago about about how to get experience speaking in public. My Post doc supervisor has set up a summer seminar where her myriad of underlings can present on what they are thinking about each week. It's done very informally, and completely coincidentally, one of the graduate students started calling it an open mic. In fact, after one person has presented, there is the standard awkward moment that many open mics have where everyone looks at each other trying to figure out who will go next.

I really like the format. I've never been part of a large lab that has group meetings. I wonder if this is what they feel like (if run well). There's some heckling, but a lot of good questions and answers and suggestions of directions to pursue. I think my presentation skills would have benefited greatly if I'd had the opportunity to talk about my work like this.

The amazing thing is, that in my field, it seems to be understood that it is impossible for someone who is not in your specific subfield to understand what your research is. This is the main reason I've been given for not having a broad seminar like this. The seminar attendees in this case have a very broad set of interests, that could easily be the set of interests shared by the students of a group of faculty who generally work in the same area. Yet there is good communication among students and insightful questions asked.

I'm encouraging my summer students to attend. I think I will encourage them to talk as well. I think, if I ever land a TT position, I will try to implement something like this with the students of other professors that I work closely with.

Undergrad research

I've been thinking about my experience working with undergraduates today, and then PLS posted about the same topic. The following is my response to his post, plus some further thoughts.

I advertised for undergraduates in my sophomore level class and at the "Women in my field" meeting. This got me two undergraduates interested, which was more than I was expecting.

I've always taken the joke about passing the grunt work one encounters down to the person on the rung below you a bit seriously. So I've always kept an eye out for possible spin off projects that require a lot of grunt work and may not be worth my time and interest at the moment. These are easily given to undergrads, and as confounding says, it allows failure to be an option. If I'm not terribly interested, then it is okay for the undergraduate to fail, or flake.

I'm fortunate that my university strongly encourages students to enter research early (as soon as their first summer). I also went to a similar institution. This has it's advantages and disadvantages. The research experience is great for the students. That's beyond debate I believe. Since I'm throwing undergrads problems that are not immediate priority to me, any significant progress that the student makes will move a project from the "Probably won't work on" bin to the "Should look at seriously" bin. It is always good to have a mechanism working in that direction. By living in a culture of summer research, even young students have an idea of what a summer research experience can and/or should be. Even if the students are not the most self motivated, they have an idea of what to expect. As a result, I don't have to teach the difference between course work and research.

I was one of those students who spent each of my summers in a different lab as an undergraduate. I was very interested in the work I was doing each summer, and had every intention of continuing, but then as the school year came around, I'd get swept up by coursework and other activities, and I could never give the same type of time to my summer job. Perhaps if there was a means at my undergrad institution to continue working in the lab for more than just general credit, I would have reorganized my priorities.

Karma being what it is, I now have a student working on a project that could turn into something real, but certainly not by the end of the summer. The question is, how do I keep her? My chances of having a student like this would be much smaller if I wasn't at a school where many students participate in summer research. Also, is it fair for me to expect her to stick around when she could benefit from working with different professors in different fields. She is torn in her future academic goals, and now is the time for her to sample what the different fields she is considering looks like. Since there are lots of faculty offering these opportunities, if I were an objective advisor, I may tell her to move on next summer. I certainly gained by working in different labs.

Finally, what I'm learning is that undergraduates need to learn how to do research. This sounds self evident, but I'm learning that there is more to research than just being self motivated, knowing the material, and being able to do literature search. I'm finding myself trying to teach how form hypothesis to explore. My undergraduate is very good at understanding a task, finding relevant resources, and returning with a set of results. At which point I come up with a new set of things to try, many of which are educated guesses. It takes time for her to understand why I think these may be the right thing to do, and it is hard for her to take skill that she learned in class, and apply them to a completely different situation. I know I used to be like this once upon a time. But it's strange for me to see it from this angle.

On a related note, I'm learning how difficult it is not to do the non-gruntwork parts of the problem for her. Anything that requires thinking (as opposed to doing) I can think faster than she can. It's taking a lot of self restraint to keep from running her project in the back of my mind on the idle cycles I have while doing dishes.

Mentoring moments

My strength in teaching is in one-on-one interactions. In order to encourage students to partake in this activity, I try to make myself more accessible, or appear to care about their lives when I see them in office hours or other settings. Usually this ranges from asking how the student's term is going, to sharing unimportant details of my life, to following up on details of their academic lives they have shared. Over a 10 week term, where I'm interacting this way with students on a less than once a week basis, this formula works pretty well in striking the balance between being friendly and a "real person" and over sharing.

I'm discovering that this formula doesn't work well when meeting with students every few days. My summer undergrads come in, we spend 45 mins to an hour talking about their questions, how to proceed, and then few minutes asking them about non-academic stuff. But these are students who I have gotten to know pretty well at this point, and it becomes harder not to cross the line between small talk and over sharing.

For instance, when I discussion of my travel schedule for the next few weeks leads to a discussion about my family, and then to my surprise, an offer to babysit Epsilon, while she is doing research for me?

Maybe as a female mentor I should have pointed out that making statements like that to her colleagues is not a wise move in terms of career advancement. I think I was too taken aback to do anything other than firmly say no, and wrap the interview up.

This is completely my fault for fostering a relationship like this. I need to tighten up and create some more distance. Its just an interesting example of how algorithms fail up changes of domain.

Morning is wiser than evening

I'm back from my two weeks with my family today. Last night was really rough on my psyche. I kep asking myself why I was continuing to travel back and forth across the country when my official teaching duties are over. Why did I take on two summer students, when I could be sitting in my partner's office or his university's library doing my own research, and spending time with Epsilon in the evening? Why does it seem like the two of us are not satisfied unless we push ourselves to the very limits of what we can take emotionally.

But morning is wiser than evening.

1) I took on summer students because I benefited greatly from undergraduate research. I went to graduate school at a university where the undergrads were mostly neither interested in, nor capable of tackling current research problems. I didn't like working with those students. I like working with the students here who can do research. I believe in passing forward kindnesses done to me. All the faculty mentors I had as an undergrad took me on without much direct benefit to themselves. I should pass that on to the next generation.

2) I've heard from several friends of mine who did their undergrads at this university "I wish I had a female teaching an intro level class in your department." I realize that I could be a strong female mentor at this university, if I choose to be. Whether or not I want to, my presence has an impact. It is probably unlikely that all 3 of the students who approached me for a project randomly happened to be female. As someone who struggled through my decision to continue in academia, and almost chose not to for lack of female mentors, I can't turn my back on this situation.

The real test is whether these answers will hold water next time I have to sneak out of my apartment to catch a plane to avoid upsetting a toddler.