Blue Lab Coats

I’ve been dreading this. The paper was out 65 days and the perky little rejection letter from the editor came this morning, reviews attached.

Its ok, these things happen and its just a paper. I’m not really upset about it that much and will turn it over somewhere else. I think some of the reviewer’s comments are kind of odd- ‘So what does XYZ GENE encode’, and , ‘What is its role in the ABC reaction?’- and crap like that makes me wonder if I am just an awful writer and can’t get my point across, or if the reviewer needs to go back to secondary school because obviously their reading ability is an issue. And then, of course- there is the desire by reviewers to say that a study is ‘preliminary’ if they don’t see every possible experiment in a single paper- which is also frustrating (more on this below). Continue reading ‘REJECTION’

It has been a week of craziness so far. My children’s school year is rapidly coming to a close, and this week and the schedule of the next couple of weeks will be absolute madness. My faculty meeting conflicts with the 4th grade science fair in which my older daughter has a project on Wednesday. Then on Friday- I am reading at lunchtime to my kindergartener’s class… and we are having cupcakes for her 6th birthday. These are both commitments that I don’t want to say no to, although I know that missing faculty meeting is generally not a good idea. There is a whole list Continue reading ‘Unscheduled Events’

I received the following poem from my 10 year old daughter today….

Dear Mom:

I love you a lot,
I’ll love you till the world rots,
I know that I whine,
I know it’s not pleasant,
But instead of saying sorry,
Here’s a little present. (a present was attached)

You take care of me when I don’t feel good,
You do all the laundry, you cook all the food.
You clean up the house when it’s a really big mess,
But I don’t get why I can’t have a Nintendo DS? (a running discussion between us)

This poem’s about to come to an end,
But before it is finished I have one thing to say-
I love you a lot Mom,

Happy Mother’s Day!

Ah, I think the exciting data has been displaced from my pocket for now- while my 10 year old reminds me of the distinction between my job and my life. And no honey, you can’t have a Nintendo DS or a Wii…but I’ll get ya your own blog…

I have a student. She’s a marvelous student (by every objective measure) who I have written about here before. She came to me as a third year student in another lab, steered to me by her thesis committee, …but ready to quit graduate school because she has a family. SERIOUSLY. This idea did not come out of thin air, it was TAUGHT to her. I have been trying to undo it.

But that’s not the reason for this post. I was struck by something that was said over at Mother of all Scientists- by a (no doubt) well meaning advisor(s) to a postdoc Continue reading ‘OK, you were nodding your head but were you LISTENING?’

Your seminar-giving, interviewing, chalk-talking skills are going to get better and better the more interviews you go on. But you will not get better at waiting for the search committee to decide on their favorite candidates. As Physioprof pointed out in the comments to my last post about this (Pt. 12), it’s very appropriate to inquire about the status of a search, and inform the chair of other offers once you have an offer in an institution of equal or greater quality (I don’t know if that’s the right word but you get my drift). Every search committee I have been on has interviewed all 4-5 candidates they flagged for an interview before they have a discussion about/make a decision on who is the top candidate. I think that sometimes when there is a clear favorite, an offer goes out prior to this- but I haven’t personally seen a situation where that happened. Then, if you are the lucky winner, the chair of the hiring department Continue reading ‘Unsolicited Advice: Job Search (Pt. 13)’

So most people who become junior faculty and set up their own labs have no management experience what-so-ever. Personnel management, resource management… time management - (although we may have the most experience with this last one). You go from one day, running your own project and maybe a rotating student or undergraduate… to running the whole show… with no instruction manual. It’s a little like having a baby- from one day to the next you are gifted with a whole new set of circumstances and you are just supposed to ‘know’ how to work the thing. This can either go ok, or it can go very, very wrong. Continue reading ‘Beginner’s Mistakes: Lab Management’

In the last post about this I covered the basic ‘structure’ of the interview itself, and gave some hints about what to do, what not to do…. I didn’t talk much about the one-on-one interactions you will have with faculty during your interview visit… but Physioprof has previously posted on this over at the old DM site in glorious detail.. and with many excellent comments.. Also, I found this list of inappropriate questions you may encounter on an interview (from the Chronicle of Higher Education). But- one Continue reading ‘Unsolicited Advice: Job Search (Pt. 12)’

All right, all right. I see Mad Hatter gave some clues this morning so I am going to copy-cat her. You guys are going to kick yourselves over some of these they are so easy! I’ll give you the artist in red but you still gotta get the song title… Continue reading ‘Shuffle meme revisited… with hints…’

I have been wanting to talk to the Dean of my college about my delight at the sudden increase in women faculty in my college, and about ways to help us/or keep us moving up the pipeline successfully. Why did I want to do this? Well, to a certain extent this is enlightened self interest (i.e. I’m a female junior faculty member). But- I want to do everything in my power to stop the drain of women from the pipeline, and that means keeping those currently in the pipeline right where they are and moving up. I think changes like this start at home, and I had already talked to my department chair about this and about my approaching the dean and I had my chair’s blessing.

Yesterday, I just happened to look through the glass into the Dean’s office and see Continue reading ‘Three cheers for the Dean’

Mad Hatter tagged me for this one (whew, I need a break from these crazy blogosphere pyramid games…)..but I am a music-aholic so I’ll play along…

And now, the shuffle meme:

• Step 1: Put your MP3 player or whatever on random.
• Step 2: Post the first line from the first 25 songs that play, no matter how embarrassing the song
• Step 3: Post and let everyone you know guess what song and artist the lines come from.
• Step 4: Strike through when someone gets them right.
• Step 5: Looking them up on Google or any other search engine is CHEATING

And trust me, there are some embarrassing ones in there! Continue reading ‘Shuffle meme…’