My de facto advisor

Sam is still just a committee member on paper, but is without question my advisor. Since I came back from my last trip to Ukenzagapia in November, I think that Sam and I have been working together especially well. I am more comfortable with him now that I understand his personality and communication style, and most importantly, I know that I'm not a disappointment to him.

There have been a few snippets of conversation that we've had recently that have reiterated to me that he respects me as a colleague.

Before Sam left for a trip to Ukenzagapia, we were talking about what's going on with the database.
Sam: "So, if anything happens to me while I'm in Ukenzagapia, you know what to do, right?"
Me: "What do you mean?"
Sam: "Like if the plane crashes or something."
Me: "Oh! You mean if something catastrophic happens do I know how to continue the database project without you? Yes."

Two things are notable about this exchange: 1) He wants the project to continue even if he dies, and 2) He thinks I can do it.

Then when we were meeting with the interns, Sam said, "You can basically think of Karina and I as one person, professionally." That was a little weird, but I think the sentiment was that whatever I say holds the same authority as what he says.

I've recognized recently that some of his weaknesses are some of my strengths, and he appreciates that. For example, he's not very tech-savvy so I'm always teaching him better ways to do things. I also think I'm more careful and detail-oriented than him in many circumstances.

I foresee continuing to collaborate with him for quite a long time, especially since the database project is a long-term kind of thing. This is all to say that I'm quite happy with my professional relationship with Sam right now.

Deciding to finish

I had some great conversations with friends from my interdisciplinary cohort, all of whom are already finished with or finishing their degrees at UBC. I've been on a 6-year plan for most of grad school, and soon I'll be starting that 6th year. That means I should be thinking about finishing. But I have to say, right now I feel like I have more than a year's worth of work remaining. I asked my friends for advice.

The best answer? You have to decide to finish. Many people think they'll know when they get there, and they just keep working, thinking they need a little more (or perhaps their advisor thinking they need more), and they continue on. Both of my friends who finished were extremely driven and they both dealt with advisors who dragged their feet one way or another, but they were committed to finishing by a certain time, and they made it happen.

I think I'm at the point where I need to decide that I am going to be finished one year from now. Oh my gosh, I got chills down my spine when I typed that. Ok, so maybe it will be June or July or August next year, but I need to decide that I will finish in 2013.

There. I said it. I've decided. One year left.

Summer project management

This summer Sam and I are going to be in charge of FIVE full-time student interns! And one part-timer! For 14 weeks! Oh my. I've just realized this basically means I'm teaching a six-student seminar course this summer since we'll be reading and discussing literature related to their work. This has snuck up on us and we still have a lot to plan.


With that in mind, I have been considering some kind of goal tracking or project management software. Perhaps something like GoalsOnTrack (personal goal tracking) or Smartsheet (project management). I like the idea of a personal goal tracker for my dissertation, but I'm wondering if a multi-user project management thing might be more useful for keeping track of goals and deadlines this summer with the students. Has anyone used any software like this? If so, what did you use and what did you use it for? What did you like/dislike about it?

Coconut bait

Coconuts are cheap in Ukenzagapia, so it was a favorite high-calorie field snack. I'd crack them open and then use a butter knife to chip out pieces of coconut. I love coconut, but I don't ever buy them whole here in Big City. It just feels... out of place.

Today I went to an event to be recognized for a modest award. I didn't know anyone else at the event but I hung around afterwards for the food. I had a small lunch, and I'm a real sucker for cheese and crackers. They had a nice spread of fruit, too, and there in the center of the fruit plate was a big chunk of coconut in the shell as garnish. I really, really wanted to eat it.

I decided that eating the garnish would be kind of weird (and awkward without a knife), so I stood around eating my heaping plate of goodies, hoping no one else would take the coconut so I could pick it up on my way out. Through little effort of my own, I started talking to two other awardees before I could finish my food and split. One thing led to another, and I ended up in conversation with a computer science graduate student. Just yesterday I hit a wall (right at the beginning) trying to figure out how to use a Perl script to manage metadata (translation: simple computer science problem). This student is working on a very similar method in Python, and will almost surely be able to help me. All because I wanted some coconut.

There have been many times in grad school when good things have come from "just showing up", but in this case it took some bait to make me stick around.

Missed opportunity

Herb's lab had a visiting scientist for many months. However, their spoken English was poor. I think it this situation, Herb should have insisted, as part of the arrangement, that the person also take intensive conversational English courses while here. The person was very bright and had great ideas, but their limited English hindered collaboration and even just regular lab meetings sometimes. It seems like a missed opportunity for Herb, the visiting scientist, and the lab.

*This person came with funding from their home country, so it was a situation with low financial investment for Herb.

Papers papers papers

In the past week and I half the following things happened:
- provisional acceptance of a little natural history paper!
-submitted a paper about my interdisciplinary project.
-got a "revise & resubmit" answer on the paper that is on its 4th attempt!

The changes for the first paper are very small things. Totally doable. The other paper has some bigger issues to deal with, but all of the feedback was reasonable. Sam and I will have to discuss how to approach some of the revisions, but he thinks it will be accepted after we make these careful changes.

All very exciting events. Here's hoping I get my name out there on one of these things in 2012!

Realization of the day

I've been in grad school a long time. Several times in the past few days I've seen the year 2007 on something and thought "that was a long time ago"... and that's when I started grad school.

Argh!

First to finish

The first person from my cohort is finishing up this spring. It's kind of ironic, since our second year we had a conversation that started something like this:

Me: So, how was your summer?
Him: Oh, it was good. I didn't really do any work, but I got high a lot.

Yep, he's finishing first. Self-declared pot-smoking slacker guy. I wouldn't be surprised at all if he was downplaying the amount he actually worked that summer (i.e. that he worked more than not at all), but he also hadn't really found his niche yet that summer. Part of the reason he was able to finish so quickly was because his work was all theory (=math) so he didn't have any of the headaches and setback associated with collecting data (especially field work). If you're very smart (which he undoubtedly is) and focused, you can finish quickly.

And just to put the icing on the cake, he's managed to find one of the most lucrative niches possible within our field. I'd guess he'll be moving on to a place with a nice paycheck.

Happiness

Today has been a fantastic day. I am back at Small Friendly College to give a seminar. This comes at the end of a long string of deadlines in February. The way I've described it is that for the past two weeks I've been working uncomfortably close to the number of hours I work in the field, but without someone to cook and clean for me.

When I offered to give this talk, I imagined it as a great opportunity to talk about Best Project and teach some of the analyses in my presentation so that I'd come out with a more thorough understanding in the process. I'd imagined myself with slides done days in advance, fine-tuning the best way to explain things. So such thing.

Instead, I was still writing my talk on the way here, last night, and this morning. I only practiced the whole thing once. I was very, very nervous as I made the last few changes to my slides 20 minutes before the presentation.

But once I was on, I was on. I got an incredibly complimentary introduction from one of my former professors. He highlighted many of my accomplishments, my tenacity in getting the NSF GRF, and resourcefulness in applying for other funding. He is so proud of me, and it showed. And after that great introduction, I went on to give a fantastic presentation. I made people laugh, I talked about 3 different projects, and I ended with enough time for questions. I could hardly have had a friendlier audience, but my gosh it felt great.

I met with some current students, talked to some newly hired professors, had dinner with some senior professors, and enjoyed walking around campus. Tonight I drank wine and talked with my hosts (a faculty couple) and heard their perspectives on what's going on on campus and in the department. What a great place. I said it before (here, here, here, and here), but I'll say it again- I. Love. SFC.

February madness

There are so many things happening and so many things I need to do in the next week!
-write and submit two conference abstracts (first one due tomorrow. still analyzing data. eep!)
-write and submit a small grant proposal
-plan and launch major outreach project
-prepare and give a talk at SFC
Meanwhile, in my personal life:
-I've spent several days in the last two weeks away from Big City working with my friend Theo on the analyses for these abstracts.
-my friend and former labmate Mariyah will be in town for a week and is staying with us
-I simply MUST finish a photo book of our wedding before my groupon expires!
And now, back to the abstract.

Appreciated

I'd say I'm very knowledgable of the resources at my university available to graduate students as well as how to navigate bureaucracy. From health care to fringe benefits and human subjects research to submitting grants, I know a lot. As I've written before, I love connecting people and resources so I love it when people ask.

A fellow grad student asked if I knew of funds to support students to attend a workshop. Indeed, I did. I had already bookmarked the page for my own future use. She was impressed that I could find it so quickly. She said, "This is great! I was sitting in my office thinking, I wonder if Karina knows of any funds. I should go ask her. Thank you! You know so many useful things!"

This makes me feel appreciated. I'm glad to help!

Time to update that CV!

I'm giving a presentation in a few weeks and just got asked for a copy of my CV. Oh my. It turns out I haven't updated it for two years! Not that I have any publications to add (urgh), but I've got other things (outreach! presentations!). Time to get cracking.

Not old or male

Someone asked me to contribute to a popular writing piece "in the interests of more gender equity." They needed someone who wasn't an old, white man. I'm white, but not old or male. FemaleScienceProfessor recently wrote about this phenomenon, "Because I'm a woman." I almost titled this post the exact same thing. Considering how my research focus shifted away from the particular topic of interest, I probably wan't an obvious choice for this except that they didn't want to have too many photos of grey-haired dudes. I'm ok with that. I think my contribution will be just as good as the others. But I definitely was surprised when the person went on to elaborate about how they had only one woman other than me. I thought there were more of us around than that?

Marital status on a CV?

I just saw a CV for someone we're interviewing for a faculty position where the person included their marital status and number of children. I know that this is absolutely not required, and is in fact illegal to ask about. Has anyone else seen this? It strikes me as very unusual.

Grad school nostalgia

My department is interviewing for a new faculty position and we've interviewed two candidates so far, both of them just a few years out of grad school. Over lunch with the grad students, it is clear that they both loved grad school and are eager to interact with the grad students (which is great). I'd describe it as grad student nostalgia. I realized at the last lunch that they seem to look back on grad school with the same kind of fondness with which I look back on college. It's hard for me to imagine feeling that way about grad school when I'm a few years out, and honestly it makes me feel like I'm missing out on something really important. But what exactly is it?

I think it has something to do with a sense of shared experience among the grad students. Like I wrote previously, the grad students in my department aren't very close. Even within my lab, we're all working on different projects so there isn't much collaboration (unfortunately, some interpersonal conflicts among lab members have also kept us from bonding as a group). I do my best to help other students who ask me for help no matter what my experience with their project, but I still don't have a sense of really going through this with anyone else. I'm really doing my own thing here, and suddenly this makes me very sad. Have I imagined this isolation, created or exacerbated it? 

After considerable reflection, I think the answers are no, no, and no, but I haven't always felt so disconnected. My first year I had a few classes with a set of people and I tried very hard to invite everyone to parties (Jon and I hosted 3 in our first 6 months here) but realized before the end of that year that not even my cohort was a cohesive group.  When I was in the midst of my interdisciplinary project, I had those other students to bond with, but now most of them are in different places. I was actively involved in two different efforts to create student-led activities for grad students in the department, but neither really caught on and are defunct. As I also mentioned previously, I think this pattern of increasing isolation in the later stages of grad school is pervasive in my department. I've got to try to do something about it. More thoughts on this soon.