On the current battle for godhood

I have remained silent as I have watched the culinary battle between PhysioProf and Isis unfold. It is all very entertaining and I will admit that I have been voting. But at the risk of some serious swearwords and smiting (I honestly prefer Drugmonkey to be the next person blown out of the sky by the goddess as opposed to my humble self), I must finally say my peace: this competition is crap.

There, I've done it. Let the chaos ensue.

Why is it crap? Isis is the domestic and laboratory goddess (it says so on her blog). I think the 'and' is a critical (and apparently neglected) word. If I had all day to work on my home, I too could be a domestic goddess. My house would be neat (maybe,...there is my inherent problem of being a chaos vortex....I might have to clean my home and then lock myself out of it) and my long-suffering husband would come home with a gourmet meal awaiting him (I will never be a chef, but I'm mighty fine at following complicated recipes...which is surprising in retrospect since my TA for organic chemistry lab passed me on the condition I never step foot in another chemistry lab). I could also be a domestic goddess if I was a full professor and could afford to hire a sous chef to make my duck confit for me. Anyway, my point is that what makes Isis a domestic goddess worth praying to is that her advice allows mere mortal women to immulate BOTH a domestic and work goddess. Those handy pieces of advice that help you balance those competing demands. I mean, the pesto recipe was fantastic, and it has saved my ass on more than one occasion when General Disarray and I came home too exhausted to cook.

Now, I understand that sometimes true gods have to fling lightning bolts at each other to establish pre-eminence. However, I would like to point out that when gods forget the little people, they tend to stop being worshipped.

Figure 1. Not familiar with the gods Tiamat and Assur? That's exactly my point.

So, Isis and PhysioProf, in your competition to one-up each other, please remember that many of us are struggling young scientists without much time to cook extravagant gourmet meals (or the money to hire someone else to do it). Please attempt to demonstrate to your humble worshipers not only your might, but also your benevolence and usefulness.

Hugs and Kisses,

River

The Random Clicker

When I opened my word processor this morning to work on reformatting a manuscript to submit to a new journal, I realized that I am a very blessed individual. What made me appreciate my blessed-ness? Well, MS Word has starting displaying some...interesting features. First, it...scrolls. Don't know how to explain it any better, but the MSWord window no longer fits on my screen, but if I move my mouse to the top or bottom of the screen,... it scrolls. Second, I have magically lost my vertical scroll bar. This is different from what I described before. The scroll bar is what we use to page up or down through a manuscript. The other thing I described is an actual scrolling of the whole screen.

You might be wondering why I call these things signs of my blessed nature and not signs of the demonic nature of Microsoft. The answer is because these are just symptoms of one of my very special gifts: the ability to make things happen on computers that no one else thought possible. General Disarray is a very savvy computer dude. When something surprising happens on my computer, I assume he already knows about it and how to fix it. Turns out that most of what I am able to do is quite surprising even to him. How do I get my computer to perform magical and obscure acts? Turns out, I am a random clicker.

Random clicking occurs when one is either a) frustrated when the computer is slow or b) oblivious to the fact that you have opened some tab, folder, important setting, and continue to type in an oblivious fashion. These are not mutually exclusive. The end result is a rather random setting of various important control parameters on one's computer. The trick, of course, if for these random clickings to result in something new and unusual and not just crash your computer.

Some of you may be thinking right now that my special ability of random clicking in creative and bizarre ways is related to my other super-hero ability: the ability to instantaneously convert any room to its maximum entropy value. You would be wrong. How do I know you are wrong? Because I have genetic proof that these are separate gifts. My father is a chaos vortex such as myself, my mother most definitely is not. However, my mother is a random clicker and manages to make their computer do all sorts of fascinating things not previously known to man, which my father cannot undo. (They now have separate computers - supposedly this is for 'convenience', but I suspect that my father couldn't take it any more. Interestingly, I have just realized that General Disarray and I also have separate computers at home, and I just realized I don't know a valid reason why...). Thus I support my assertion that I actually have inherited two completely unrelated superpowers.

I don't mind my superpowers. (For instance, if anyone wanted to pick up research secrets from my office: good luck!) They have been a part of me for as long as I can remember. But some mornings, when I really need to scroll back and forth through that 30 page manuscript to work on references, I really wish I could get that vertical scroll bar back!

How River Tam ended up where she is

Candid Engineer asked me a while back to expand on how a nice R1 girl like myself ended up at a confused R2 like this. I've been struggling with exactly how to answer that question for a couple of weeks now. Like most things in life, it is rarely simple how one got to where one is - but I will do my best to sidestep the philosophical issues on this one and stick to the facts.

The ultimate reality in academia is that you take a job where you can get a job. I remember clearly my first realization of this as a grad student. I had just discovered the Science Jobs website, which gives you all those neat options like narrowing your search to type of job and state. So I put in assistant professor, ecology, and my favorite state. When that big fat 0 results came up, I very quickly learned that this was not a search algorithim that was likely to end with me in a tenure track position. When I got my Ph.D., I applied to every R1 position that I was remotely qualified for. The job market for ecologists has exploded the past couple of years, but when I was on the market the number of positions had just begun to increase from the grim 90s and I was putting in around 10 apps/year (last year, if I had been on the market, I could have put in almost 30). When my post-doc funding ran out, this was the only job offer I had in hand. That's the simple version of the story.

Simple, except that if you were reading carefully, I said I applied for every position at an R1 university, yet here I am at an R2. Well, my friends, this is the more complex version of the story....

So, here's the story for any of my young readers who are currently on the market. I studiously avoided R2s when I was on the market because I knew that they tended to have higher teaching loads and lower research emphasis.  That was just not the gig I was looking for and a good friend (and also a variety of anti-role models) had warned me that once you get into those positions, the high teaching loads can make it hard to get out. What I was unaware of when I was on the market was that the Carnegie Foundation, which developed the tier system for research universities, has been in the process of refining its system. The R1/R2 terminology we all use (which referred to the classifications for doctoral granting institutions: R1, R2, D1, D2) became defunct in 2000. At that time, Carnegie started overhauling its classification system and put up an interim system. At that time, they basically divided the doctoral institutions into research and less-research universities (in effect Rs in one group and Ds in another). Apparently, nobody really liked this, so everyone kept using the old R1/R2 designations. In 2005, a new system - based on more extensive criteria - was released and doctoral institutions were once again broken down more finely. The new categories are: Research University - Very High Research Activity, Research University - High research activity, and Doctoral Research University. The names are less catchy, but the tune is generally the same. There is a top tier of research universities, a second tier of research universities, and then a bottom tier with limited research activity. The job ad for the university I am currently at said it was R1 (a classification which did not exist at that time, but then everyone was doing the same thing). If I had been paying attention on my interview, I might have realized that there was something suspect about the R1 classification, but I didn't understand what I was seeing. It is only after I got here - and was confused about some of the big differences between this university and the R1s I had been at in the past - that I realized that we had been...reclassified. Before anyone gets all up on me about how the rankings are no longer exactly analogous to the old R1/R2 system, I would like to say that my first response was that there had to be some mistake. But when I look at my university objectively and then look at who else is in the High Research category, I honestly think Carnegie got it right. Those are our peer institutions.

I share, perhaps an overabundance of information on the topic of Carnegie rankings, because I think it is important for young people to realize that the information is out there for them to check on themselves (as is information about average salaries for assistant professors, cost of living, and a variety of other tools that can help with everything from negotiations to decision making if you are lucky enough to have more than one offer). You can look up any institution at the Carnegie Foundation website. And, just in case you think checking up on that information isn't important: I have seen job ads from my university go out claiming that we are still an R1.

So that's it, kids. That's the story of how a R1 girl takes a wrong turn and ends up in a part of the academic town she didn't expect to be in. I won't lie to you, there are some nice things about being in this part of town, but there are some real frustrations too. It's all about the tradeoffs and whether they are acceptable given where you want to go in life. Still figuring that out for myself, but I'll keep you posted as I work it through!