Student projects and tenure

I am still musing about the life style of being early in the tenure track. It would be fun to compare my thoughts after tenure (the reality of it) to the guesses I'm making now, but among other things, I expect that once I feel more secure, my attitude to student projects would change.

For now, I cannot afford having my "independent" student projects fail. I need them to produce good publishable results, which means that I am stealing a bit from their experience (maybe): I micromanage their experiment designs, protocols, and data collection; dictate the logic of the study, and generally stay a bit too close to what they are doing to truly call it an independent project. They have to succeed, you see. They cannot afford to fail.

In a more secure situation, I guess I would have given them much more leeway and freedom in terms of both what and how to study. Or at least this is the attitude I see among my more senior colleagues: they don't micromanage nearly as much as I do. Which is probably better for the students; at least for strong ones. But we'll see.

Apparently, there are changes in the teaching style that come with tenure as well, from what I hear. Early-career untenured folks put much more effort into performing in front of the class: the demos, jokes, stories, stage effects. Tenured profs do what is best for the students, which sometimes (not always, but frequently) is less entertaining than spiels and tricks. Controlled group work for example is not nearly as much fun as a well-staged lecture-performance on a hot topic. Yet we know (from some real pedagogical studies) that it works better. And tenured folks seem to be doing more of it, even at the expense of half a grade in the teaching evaluation, because they can afford to care about the result of their teaching, not about the impression they make.

Strongly speaks in favor of tenure as an institute, I guess.

Professorship feels more as a small business than as a job

I have experience of working both in a really small family business, and in a huge corporation. And recently I realized that being a young professor is really close to running your own tiny company. Which is kind of funny, as I never thought about it that way before, when I was a postdoc.

In corporate business, as long as you work OK, nobody dies and nobody gets bankrupt. The gears turn a bit slower, maybe you don't get a promotion this year, but really the leeway between getting fired and becoming a star is rather wide, and staying within this range is relatively easy. Also you are always working in a large team, so as long are you are putting your due effort most of the time, everything goes forward pretty steadily. You are on a giant ship, and while your work contributes to its movement, it's pretty hard to wreck it by one or two bad decisions.

In small business the feeling is very different: you are always cognizant of the fact that if you don't do this something today, nobody will do it, and then in a month you won't have money to pay your contractors, and then in two months you will have nothing to eat. The work is not necessarily harder, and it is not even more stressful necessarily, as you are more free to do what you want, and nobody is harassing you from above, but you always feel the movement of your little boat, and every time it scrapes the gravel or hits a log, you feel it with your own bones.

Professorship is really close to this second type of feeling, at least pre-tenure. I am aware of about 4-5 things that I need to do this fall in order to survive this year. They are all totally doable, so it is not a problem, but it is kind of funny to realize that I am heading towards the spring semester, and I still don't have equipment for one of the courses. I can build this equipment in about a week, and I seem even have the funds for it, but somehow it makes you feel exposed, you know what I mean? Makes your life a little bit more dramatic; gives a bit of a combat feel to it (at least according to my limited experience with first-person shooters). You are describing the course for the coursebook, having only an idea in your head: a clear and good idea, but nothing more. It feels very immaterial.

I guess faculty in research universities have it much harder, as they need grants to support their grad students, and the same kind of uncertainty puts other people lives in stake, not only their own. And I guess it was worse in my postdochood, as postdocs have very little tactile feedback from their performance. Using the same marine allegory, being a postdoc is like being a technician somewhere in the depth of a mid-sized ship, without any access to the top deck, and no idea bout the direction of the ship, or the concentration of icebergs in this area. So it's much better now, really, than it used to be. Yet I'm really looking forward to the moment when I have all the equipment, a good set of lab protocols, all skeletons of courses written, and the minimal number of publications as required for tenure. Once this is done, I can start taking riskier projects, messing with my teaching, and generally having scientific fun. Until that, it's some jiu-jitsu in slow-mo. With elements of fire juggling.

Looking for talented people prevents you from finding talented people?

An interesting paper about under-representation of women and racial minorities in science:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6219/262

Here's a nice coverage in the Economist:
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21639439-women-are-scarce-some-not-all-academic-disciplines-new-work-suggests

Essentially, they asked people from different fields whether it is important to have an "innate talent" to succeed in those fields. Then then correlated these answers to under-representation of women and racial minorities in these fields, and found some very strong correlations.

It suggests an extremely interesting thing. The more you believe in "innate talent", in this mysterious hidden property that surely exists, but cannot be measured directly, the more biased you become. Because you cannot measure talent, right? So you have to go by proxy. But if you believe in the importance of talent strongly, you got stuck with wrong proxies, such as gender, citizenship or ethnicity. You do it unconsciously, but you are trying to infer hidden properties from patterns, and got caught in a Bayesian trap (see the plots below).

The trick of finding true talent therefore is in downplaying the importance of talent! One should try to avoid all guesswork and trust the empirical evidence, the phenomenology. Judge on the deeds, on the results, not on motivation, interest, "fit", or whatever. Sounds obvious, but the data shows how non-obvious it actually is in real life, or rather how poorly people follow these truisms in practice.

I actually find it very relevant for my teaching. Every now and then I see a student who does not fit my subconscious image of a "good student". They are just interested in "wrong things", or spend time in a "wrong way", or maybe talk, write, code, or draw in a way that shows that they lack any talent for the trade! Or do they? It takes a very deliberate and conscious effort to stop this Bayesian profiling and give everybody a solid chance. And boy how happy am I when I turn to be wrong! When somebody whom I suspected of cheating turns out an honest student, just an unusual one. Unusual for me, mind it, with my limited life experience. For me it's never about gender or race, thankfully, but rather about interests and style of thinking, but still the psychological dynamics is probably pretty similar. There is always a risk of subconscious profiling; of shortcuts in judgment; wrong generalizations that have the potential to become self-fulfilling prophecies. They are always at risk of creeping into our practices unless we relentlessly banish and weed them out, day after day, again and again.

To sum up, to find true talent, don't try to intuit it; give up on guesswork, and go for facts instead. Sounds simple, right?

End of semester

For last two weeks or so all senior faculty keep saying: "Almost over! Almost there! A few more days, and it will be all right! Yippee!"

But I cannot share this excitement; not at all. At least by now this whole teaching thing was working somehow; maybe not ideally, but it was functional; it worked! And now time is taking it away from me. Because the very day I grade my last exam this semester, I need to start developing two more courses for the spring, and writing protocols for about 25 new labs (I am not sure of the exact number, but it is something as ridiculous at that). Which obviously scares me enormously.

Mentally, I am aware of the fact that everything will be all right, because it always was in the past, and this challenge is no different. I will just approach it as any other project: break it into pieces, set the priorities, create a plan, and then implement it point by point. But emotionally the sheer amount of work to do, and stuff to learn, makes it rather unsettling.

It's like in mountain hiking: when you are some 1-2 miles from the mountain, it looks almost vertical, it looks like a wall. As you approach it, it "lays down", and becomes flatter, less imposing. That's because we are not that good in estimating 3D depth of objects when they are very large and very far away from us. But knowing that there is an optical illusion does not take the illusion away. Same with this whole teaching preparation thing. In exactly 2 months from now I need to give a lecture about the gut, and I know exactly nothing about the gut, except that it has villi, and can be, with some effort, reworked into traditional baroque lute strings. That's pretty much it.

But it will be fine of course. I've ordered two books about the gut, and they are thick and heavy enough to kill a bear, so it will be fine!

War on Christmas

The "War on Christmas" is so nice as a brand that is should be totally reclaimed by the left.

You want a White Christmas? Wanna build a snowman? But it's raining instead, with mud and puddles everywhere? The lake you used to skate on as a kid now never freezes?

You know whom to blame.

It's the global warming denialist stealing your Christmas from you. It's the oil spender, steak eater, unnecessary-large-car-driver. They fight the war on Christmas, making sure that nobody can carol down the snowy streets anymore. It's all their work. It's their conspiracy.

Save the Christmas! Reduce CO2 emissions!

Before it's too late: my impressions from SfN

The first impression was very positive: wow, all these people are adults! So many adults in one room; people who know something, and can engage in meaningful informative discussions!

The second impression was more mixed: by forgotten gods, every time I say something stupid, they actually call me out on that! They don't just write it down, and they don't just dismiss it as something that could possibly be true, but is no really relevant for their (different) narrow field. No, they point out my mistakes!

That's why going to conferences is so important if you are in small college; if you are the only specialist in your field in the whole department. I'm only 4 months here, and it was already a bit of a cultural shock. You need to go to conferences for instant recalibration. Becoming a faculty is empowering: it's the first time in my entire life that I'm growing to realize that I actually know something, comparatively speaking (it's actually a pretty hard thing to believe in). But it can also make one a tiny bit delusional, every slightly, a little bit here and there. And that's when a cold-ish shower of a conference gets really helpful.

Yay conferences!

Foreignness

Xykademiqz wrote another wonderful and provocative post about how she hates when people ask her about where she is from. She finds it annoying; she suspects that people are trying to categorize her, and also hint that she doesn't really belong. All I can do is disagree again. It is my personal disagreement; I don't even pretend that it can be generalized, but my story (or my perception of it) seems to be different.

I strongly dislike Vladimir Putin as a person and as a politician, but I can't deny that his reign had certain positive influence on my life. He gave me a universal topic for small talk. Or big talk, if you have time and nerves for it!

Unlike Xykademiqz I can't talk about sports. I just don't know how they work; I tried, sincerely tried to understand the rules of American Football, but they elude me. All I can see when I look at this game, or even as much as think about it, is one constant never-ending concussion, dying neural cells and microglia activation, sprinkled with beefy machismo and gender stereotyping. I just can't stand it. I wish I could, but it doesn't work. Baseball is better, but I still don't know the rules. At least baseball has something to do with the evolution of humans; this fact puts me somewhat at peace with the existence of this game; but still I can't reasonably talk about it.

What else can one talk about? Weather is boring. We don't have a TV at home, and we don't go to movies, except maybe kids movies. Politics is largely off limits as a conversation topic in the States, and so is religion, which is really a shame, as at least these topics are interesting. What is left?

Xykademiqz says that she'd rather talk about work. Well, I tried, and got some very mixed results. I am a neuroscientist, and neuroscience sounds like an interesting thing: everybody can relate to it. About half of my conversants would typically share a story of their beloved one having a stroke, and ask for my advice, because they mistake me for a doctor. Another half would ask me about meditation, as apparently neuroscience of meditation was featured in quite a few NYT articles in last year or two. Both topics predictably baffle me; I'd like to say something meaningful, but I can't, as I don't know anything about either stroke or meditation. Maybe I'm just really bad at small talk (which is, by the way, most likely true).

Compared to all these options, discussing where I am from is a golden mine! An open vein with nuggets of pure gold lying right on the surface. From Putin we can move to the definition of democracy, or to politics of homosexuality, or the perils of propaganda - all the time staying safely away from local US politics; all on virtual Russian soil! And if you prefer weather to politics, well, Russia is perceived as a cold country (even though Moscow is actually not colder than Minneapolis; zoom out to see the plots). Another great entry point for all kinds of entertaining conversations.

Maybe in a few years this won't work that well anymore. Maybe in 20 years it will become annoying. Yet for now, I almost love when people ask me where I am from. (To be honest, I usually inform them first, because I don't want them to suffer and ponder hesitantly whether they could possibly ask me or not). Yep, I'm from there. No, we lived in boring Moscow, nothing special - I appreciate that you know that Russia is big, but unfortunately I can't claim being from some exotic part of it. But you know what? I'd really like to know what you think about recent events in Russia, as the perception of my former country is genuinely interesting to me. And if you can tell me about your origins, be it a small town in the States, or a small country in Europe, - even better! That's one of the most fascinating topics for a small discussion!