The Upside to living at a Biostation

The roller coaster has upswings.

Tonight was one of them.

In actuality, this whole week has been one of them. I interviewed for a job that would pay great, and get me out of the academic muck. But beyond that, tonight was a fish-fry.

The maintenance manager at the station is an Oklahoma good-ole' boy. Except that he's cool and amazing. He caught 25 catfish last week when he could have been working (screw that!) and tonight he fried us up a feast of venison, catfish, gar, hush puppies, tater tots, and drunken chicken. Plus he had some 'drunken onions' which were, I think, marinated in vinegar and maybe alcohol.

The onions were amazing. The chicken was amazing. The hush puppies were terrible, don't eat them. I'll eat them for you (this is my way of saying that they were so good I want them all to myself). The beer was good (2 kinds of home-brew). The company was astounding. All good people.

I almost want to cry it was so much fun.

Tot means dead in german, so tater-tot is 'potato dead'...which seems appropriate.

There were other German words I learned, but I can't remember them.

Did I mention I'm drunk? Off a combination of tequila, wheat beer and home-brew. I haven't felt this relaxed in quite a while.

The facilities manager down here is one of the most amazing people I've ever met. He's honest, loud, friendly, guitar-playing, cooking fiend, etc. Reminds me of my buddy B from grad school. I miss the grad school field station. I feel like going back, because that was some really good times, but this field station in Oklahoma is pretty good too.

Less card games, more tequila, but damn. This is why I like field stations.

There are upsides to this whole profession!!

The Crux of my Desire

Ever since I left Winfield I've had kind of a hard time being happy. What follows is basically me thinking aloud.

crux (krks, krks)

n. pl. crux·es or cru·ces (krsz)

1. The basic, central, or critical point or feature: the crux of the matter; the crux of an argument.

2. A puzzling or apparently insoluble problem.

In this case, the crux of my desire is merely finding that which I desire.

What do I desire?

I was once, even as recently as 6 months ago, driven entirely by the twin desires of being happy on a personal level and doing useful science.

Have fun, think hard, solve interesting problems.

Right now, I'm not so sure. These days, I'm not sure what is driving me, but having a child is throwing this whole thing out of wack. I've got new desires. Little Alton is going to need things. Not the same way I need a beer after a long day, but real, genuine need.

And between my wife and I, we've got to figure out a way to give it to him.

Suddenly I desire money. Like, a lot of it, relatively speaking, or at least a constant supply of it.

Shit.

I left graduate school too early for this desire. I intentionally took a job working on stuff I'd never worked on before. That was so that I could re-invent myself into working on questions I actually found interesting. I was really, really sick of working on DOM dynamics.

That's fine, and that works out great if I can afford to slum it for a few years while figuring out and publishing a series of projects that establishes my credentials in this new area.

Unfortunately, we can't keep slumming it. Our expenses are going up, way up. Health care costs alone are going to break us if we don't get more income. I mean, we can live really cheap. We worked it out last month, and our combined rent, car (gas and insurance), student loan payments, all our utilities and all our groceries is less than 50% of my income after taxes.

Yet we still found ourselves confined to our house, eating through everything in our freezer and going without bread and milk for the last six days of the month in order to preserve our budget.
Why? Because we have to spend a ton of money on medical expenses, we eat out too much, we go places, and we just generally don't stick to a budget very well.

So here I am, looking around for another job, one that will be pretty much guaranteed for the next 4-5 years. And what am I supposed to look for? I'm already slipping out of the DOM game. I'm not yet up to speed in toxistoichiometry, and I don't know a fricking thing about fish (which seems to be the job of choice right now).

I'm looking at teaching positions, but seriously who thinks I can teach? Let's see some hands. Oh wait, I'm not seeing any hands. I mean, sure, my CV looks like I should know something about teaching, but I really don't. I'm not bad at it, but I'm not really good at it. The most I can honestly say is that I put a lot of effort into it (I can't even put into words how much work I've done on this invasion biology class). I like outreach activities, but again, the best I can say is that I put a lot of effort into it.

Apparently this is what having a kid will do to you. I have no desires anymore that do not revolve around securing a relatively stable situation for my kid. Science? Really? Science? I'm supposed to still care about frickin' science?

I'm torn apart right now. I do not know what I'm supposed to do, or how.

So the weekend...

Straight up brilliant people.
1st annual convention.
2007, Ha Ha Tonka, MO.

Ahh, brief recaps:

Thursday Night:
For some reason the weekend revolved around playing games designed to let everyone know that the other people in the room think they are:
-a scary driver
-not from earth
-bad smelling
-‘modest’

There was drinking as well.

Friday Night:

Well we went to the world famous Bridal Cave. The east wall of the cave (east? West? Who cares..) had a ‘drapery’ with over half a billion square inches of surface area. Oh, and we had the world’s most boring and unresponsive tour guide. Imagine someone constantly rambling on about the ‘mysteries’ of the cave, the ‘symbolism’ and doing it all with a dreary, uninformed monotone. Yeah, good times.

Way at the back of the cave was a naturally occurring pool. The cave had been isolated until the 1980s, except for a little passageway that you could barely fit a person through. Yet at the bottom of the pool was a bunch of lumber and a wooden ladder. The pool was called the mystery pool, and the mystery is: How the hell did that ladder get there?

My explanation: The some employee building the cave’s lighting or something dropped a ladder in there and then came up with the bull-shit explanation that ‘it was there when I got there!’ Right guy.

After we got out of the cave we went to the top of the nearby hill and climbed up to the top of a forest-fire watchtower. Amazing view. Very beautiful despite the rain.

Then we grabbed some groceries, ate a fantastic dinner of baked rigatoni, guacamole, Caesar salad, other stuff, and drank. We drank a lot. I went to bed at 11 because if I had stayed up any longer I would have kept drinking.

I lost at Scrabble but by the time the game was over I couldn’t remember how to play. I drank a lot.

Saturday:

Finally, sun! An unbelievable breakfast casserole, then off to the Ha Ha Tonka state park. We saw a snake, we saw skinks, we saw 1 crayfish fighting another crayfish. The trip reached its high point as we sat skipping stones along the shores of the Lake of the Ozarks. Ahh...happiness.

Then that night we cooked burgers (mine was bison) and played what can only be described as an incredibly tense series of games.

First off we played 4 rounds of Catchphrase. The teams were girls versus boys. Let me begin by pointing out that the guys went 4-0. Let me continue by pointing out that everyone became increasingly competitive as the guys were racking up the wins, to the point that in game #4 we had one cheating ‘incident’, multiple ‘discussions’ about the rules, and after the game the women didn’t want the guys to have any of the strawberry shortcake. I’ll also point out that the guys would have been even better if I hadn’t cost them 5 FREAKING points by being an idiot (said the word 3 times, couldn’t figure out what I was reading once, couldn’t figure out how to convey the concept once).
I can’t remember all of escalating comments that ensued, but I remember laughing so hard I started to cry. There were comments about the guys being lucky, about the guys not likely to get lucky in the future, about whether or not the guys were going to get to walk home. Seriously, it was a good time.

Then we played Pictionary. Of course it was guys versus girls. The girls started off with a tremendous run, crossing half the board with 4 straight successful attempts and 3 straight 6’s. Whoa. The guys started mentioning that ‘lucky’ comment from earlier. Then the guys came roaring back. The guys ran to all the way to the finish spot while the girls were still 15 or so places back. Of course, the girls then responded by taking control and answering a ton of correct answers and both teams were on the finish spot.

At which point the guys won.

From the girls, dead silence.

From the guys: “Hey man! High five!”

Oh man!

Then I won at Scrabble (2^nd time in my life).

There was some other fun stuff that happened as well:

-We stopped by Bass Pro Shop on our way. Got some shirts. On the way back we stopped and ate at Hemmingways, which was largely forgettable except for a tomato bisque that I could have eaten all day. Sooo good.

- On the way up we also stopped at the Springfield Brewery. That place was fantastic. I had their Santa Fe pasta. So delicious. A Tex-mex-italian thing. Man it was good.

- There was a place by the side of the road selling bison, so we picked up a bunch of bison as well. Including bison brats. Now I need to get myself some good beer to simmer them.

- We also stopped at a Wendy’s for dinner. I kinda like Wendy’s. How lame is that?

Reality check here

I can't stand seeing that 'response to a response' post on the top of the list anymore. I keep re-reading it and thinking to myself:

"The idiot who wrote this acts like he knows something."

That's simply not true, because I know the idiot who wrote that (me) and he doesn't know shit.

Dustin is, I'm perfectly willing to admit, way more experienced than I am when it comes to graduate school. He's interviewed at more, attended more, and has had more success.

I don't know why I keep acting like I know something.

Here's how I got into graduate school: I took the GRE, a school waived the application fee, and I got accepted into an environmental engineering program. I only applied to two other schools, and I didn't get invited into a lab in one of those. The other school I was accepted in decided to pull a punk-ass "commit now or we won't even consider you" move, and so I really had no other options. 3 months into the environmental engineering program I realized that the professor I had starting working with was: A) pushing me into geochemistry and B) batshit crazy. My options at that point were to try to get into a fantastic masters program where another friend of mine was at, or transfer to the biology department the same institution I was at. I transferred.

This was, I'm convinced, the only way I would have been let into the biology program I attended. Every year at grad recruitment weekend I would see the impressive credentials of the incoming graduate students and feel overwhelmingly embarrassed. I didn't stack up next to any of them in any way. Many of them already had masters degrees, or had worked as lab techs in impressive labs, or had spent multiple summers conducting research. I can still remember one of my advisors telling me I had an impressive resume when I talked to him about transferring. I can't believe he was so kind! Some of those former recruits who's credentials I'm referring to are no doubt reading this right now (K, J, A, D, S, B, JR, to name a few off the top of my head), and at one point I was told that I was now supposed to be an example for those same recruits. Ha! I just feel lucky those guys/gals think enough of me to collaborate on fantastic research.

So I'm hardly qualified to offer any legitimate opinion on how to get into graduate school. I came in the back door, didn't understand how the whole thing worked for my first year and a half, and had to ask the most embarrassing questions about almost everything (even the week of my defense).

I need to quit offering my thoughts on stuff and keep this blog to stuff that's entertaining.

Like making fun of Boston.

Stupid Boston.

Response to a Response

So Dustin thinks I’m a bitter and jaded in my representation of graduate school recruitment. That’s interesting, since I don’t think of myself as bitter and jaded. Am I? In 3 words: No, I’m realistic.

I’m not going to disagree with Dustin’s major points: A) grad school is a job and B) life isn’t perfect. I will add though, that graduates students are at sort of a weird interface between employment and education. A lot of the real research that gets done in science is done by graduate students. So they clearly have a lot of responsibility and high expectations are placed on them as a result. The job is research.

At the same time, most of society treats them like students. Graduate schools themselves play a little game of back and forth with this: Grad students are staff when convenient (they represent the college as staff by teaching classes) but they are students when convenient as well (most grad students don’t get the benefits staff do). There are usually minor or non-existent annual raises (sucks), but there are also very few codified vacation restrictions (awesome). A lot of people see graduate students as they do college students.

The people who put the most at risk by attending graduate school are the students themselves. Essentially these students are agreeing to do high-quality research and teach classes in exchange for receiving an academic degree and job training. The pay is extremely low (well below minimum wage at most institutions), the expectations are very high, and a student’s eventual success depends entirely upon how they are perceived by their advisor. Failure to succeed in graduate school is almost always seen as a result of some flaw in the graduate student, not in the advisor. A tenured professor with lots of previous success is essentially immune from criticism about how he/she treats graduate students, while graduate students are exceedingly vulnerable to a professor’s negative comments about them.

I think maybe the point I was trying to make is that graduate recruitment weekends are much better for profs and the school than they are for the recruits. Any grad student recruit would be infinitely better served by meeting with a lab or professor outside of recruitment weekend. I’m certainly not suggesting a better alternative would be to go off of what’s on paper without meeting a person.

Many of Dustin's criticisms are related to the 1st point I made regarding the honesty of professors.

“not all professors lie, just a small proportion,”

Lying is such a strong word, which is why I didn’t use it in my previous post. I said almost nothing they tell you is true, but I’m not connoting that they are intentionally being deceptive. At the start of a project (often when grad students are brought in) nobody knows how everything’s going to work out. I was told I wouldn’t have to teach classes for my first three years, I would be focused almost entirely on toxicity research, and that my advisor would be available for communication on a regular basis. I’m not suggesting these were lies, they weren’t. I honestly believe that’s how the advisor who talked to me at the time felt things would go. But it turned out that the toxicity wasn’t going to take off as quickly as I thought, the funding situation changed a little so that I had to teach, and my advisor had a different idea of what ‘regular’ communication meant. The professors during grad recruitment weekend prefer to tell you good and optimistic things about your potential role and deemphasize the negatives. That isn’t really the whole truth.

Let’s put it another way: If a professor tells you that he feels this project could generate big-time publications in journals on the Nature to Science level, you need to take that with a health dose of skepticism. After all, the research hasn’t been done and the one who will do the actual experiments (you potentially) isn’t even a part of the lab yet.

“If you go into an interview with a potential advisor assuming everything is a lie, that set's a precedence for the rest of your career with him/her.”

I would agree with this entirely. I would also add that it would be equally foolish to go into an interview with a potential advisor under the assumption that this person has your best interests at heart. That probably isn’t the case, especially at institutions with extremely competitive and ambitious professors. Dustin goes on to point this out in his next sentence:

“My advice is to go in positive, but beware of the rare selfish advisors and avoid them like the plague ( I too have past experience with a selfish/overbearing advisor, but clearly I have also had incredible advisors that haven't skewed my perception quite as bad).”

He and I have both had bad experiences with pretty selfish advisors.

“So, as intense and sometimes unfair as recruiting weekend is, I think it really simulates a real world environment and job interview.”

This doesn’t seem to be the case to me. I have never had an interview that consisted of being herded through from person to person being constantly evaluated. I’m not saying that might not be the way some interviews take place, but I’ve never had one. That certainly isn’t how interviews seem to go after graduate school. The interviews I’ve participated in were me competing anonymously, primarily on paper, and always in isolation from other candidates. The grad recruitment weekend phenomenon is much more like how students are recruited as undergraduates than it is any ‘real’ job interview I’ve ever had.

The key point I’d like to emphasize, is that recruitment weekends are not designed with the best interests of the recruits in mind. This seems a little obvious (they aren’t the ones doing the planning after all), but it is something to remember. The whole process always made me feel disgusting as a participant and an observer. As a recruit, you have additional options. Considering the magnitude of the decision, those are options you should definitely exploit.

As a final point to you, dear readers, I'd like to state that I am never going to suffer the 'forgetfulness' that I see from so many PhD's. What am I talking about? I'm talking about how so many grad students complain bitterly about the problems of the recruiting process and graduate school for years, then as they approach the end and receive their PhD all those issues suddenly become less important. Why does that happen? I guess it happens because those people don't have to face those issues anymore. Those issues are still important.

I can't believe how quickly some people forget what it is like to be a early-career, graduate student.

Grad student recruiting

Well, apparently it is that time of year again. The magical winter ritual known as “graduate student recruiting.”

I’m remembering this not because I’m actually participating in any grad student recruiting right now, but because my buddy Dustin just did. The point of his ‘rant’ is that prospective students often seem bored or indifferent to the recruiting process.

I can’t disagree.

However, this is a perfect opportunity for me to rant a bit on the recruiting process. I have been ‘recruited’ by 3 colleges and sat in on 4 different Grad Recruitment Weekends at my esteemed graduate institution. I’ll also add that since I was a member of two labs, I got to see 2 fairly different perspectives about the process.

In no particular order, stuff that bugs me about grad recruiting:

1. You can’t believe anything a professor tells you during recruitment weekend.

This might be a bit harsh. In my experience, most full-time professors can tell you to write a paper about X and then two days later ask you why you didn’t write a paper about Y. Why? These professors will tell you it is because they work so many hours, on so many projects, and therefore lose track of things. However, the net effect is that almost nothing that I heard from professors when I was being recruited to graduate school was true. This mostly includes stuff like: the amount of technician support, the monetary support, teaching obligations, research obligations, the availability of your advisor, the kind of research you’ll be expected to do, and how quickly you need to make a decision. I don’t want to name any names here, but there are at least 3 people who I will never forgive for having lied to me during the grad recruitment process. In some cases this is just a matter of being disorganized, in other cases it was definitely intentional. And yes, I did transfer out of the first graduate program I was conned into attending, why do you ask?

2. There are a lot of good recruits.

Newton or Einstein?

Probably 95% of the recruits I saw every year at recruitment weekend are more than capable of getting their Ph.D. Getting a Ph.D. requires A) a lot of hard work, B) a lot of writing, and C) 1 good, unique idea (if you have 2, save one for the postdoc). This means the reality is that a professor is going to be kicking to the curb several candidates who are really good, but just might not make the best impression over a 1-day interview process. And yes, this happened to me at a grad school, and I’m bitter.

3. The whole process is designed for the school’s benefit.

Competition anyone?

When schools have ‘grad recruitment weekends’ they are trying to save money and time. However, this is a terrible thing for recruits. Instead of getting a chance to interact with the profs and grad students and postdocs in a ‘realistic’ setting, they are forced to follow a schedule of events that gives them 1 or 2 chances to speak with a professor who’s just gotten done speaking with someone else. Those chances to talk are often limited to half an hour or even 15 minutes. There isn’t much time for looking about the campus, there’s usually zero time to look about the town, and a student must be ‘on’ all the time.

4. Current grad students are weird.

Isn't this a group you'd like to join?

Grad students already present in a program seem to have a weird assortment of attitudes towards prospective students. These usually fall into three categories: 1) demanding, 2) personality seekers, and 3) indifferent. “Demanding” means that the grad student is expecting a lot out of prospectives. This isn’t irrational, as grad students collaborate a lot. However, sometimes it gets taken a little bit far. For instance, expecting recruits to be aware of the kind of research that’s gone on in the lab is ok, expecting them to have read most of the lab’s recent pubs is a bit excessive (unless maybe the prospective has a MS in the same field). And yes, I’ve seen that. “Personality seekers” recognize point #2 above, and try to decide how well a student would fit into the lab’s social dynamics. While a pragmatic and ultimately useful approach, this is tough during such a short window of opportunity. If alcohol is involved, it can be a lot easier to figure this out. “Indifferent” grad students are probably indifferent because they are burned out. These are the people who are annoyed that they have to spend a whole Saturday entertaining prospective grad students. They are taking advantage of the free food and drink. In a sense, you could say that these people recognize point #2 as well. In my humble opinion, these are the only people from which recruits can get useful information. (Why yes, I was indifferent, why do you ask?)

In conclusion: Grad student recruitment sucks. The recruits feel like shit because they have to impress everybody and act smart for 2 straight days. The current grad students feel like shit because they are often (but not always) asked to pass judgment on people who they’ve just met. I really have no idea how the profs feel.

I do think that this initial process contributes to professors feeling like graduate students are sub-people; I mean, how seriously can you take someone who was practically killing themselves to get into the lab? This puts the whole colleague-in-training scenario on a bad footing to start. However, that’s another issue.