Supporting a former student's return to college

Last week I received an email from a former student asking for a letter of recommendation. I was her TA during my very first semester of grad school in 2007, then I wrote several letters of recommendation for summer research programs in spring 2009 (I blogged about it at the time). She then studied abroad in 2010 and I hadn't heard from her since.

In the meantime, she dropped out of college, moved somewhere else, got married, had 2 kids, and is now trying to return to school to finish her bachelor's degree and become a high school teacher. She has been accepted and needs the letter to apply for a scholarship. I very much want to support this woman. She was one of my most memorable and impressive students, and was the first in her family to be born in the U.S. and attend college.

Before I can write her a powerful letter, I think I need to talk with her directly about her path back to school. Her writing could use some editing. She sent mer her personal statement, and I actually have a couple of her old person statements on file from years ago. Her family (parents especially) loom large in her writings and there are some discrepancies between the two versions that I wouldn't expect to change with time. I also saw her transcript and she got some Fs that aren't explained at all in the personal statement. I think that needs to be acknowledged somehow if she's going to get a scholarship.

I'm excited for this student and really hope it works out. Anyone helped a student in a similar situation and have advice?

Six months!

Six months! Adele is six months old today! In that time she has more than doubled her weight (7 pounds 10 ounces to 16 pounds 9 ounces), learned how to smile, laugh, babble, roll over, sit up unassisted, and reach for toys. She has tasted a few foods (sweet potatoes, pasta, bread, apple) but has gotten all of her calories from breast milk. It's pretty amazing that I have the ability to feed another human.

Motherhood got off to a rocky start, but I am thankful that I have gotten stronger faster than she has gotten bigger. I am glad I was able to return to work on my own schedule, so I could ease back into working full time. Teaching this semester has been way more demanding than I hoped and expected, but I have still had a fair amount of flexibility so that I have been able to bring her to school with me sometimes (getting help from friends there) on days when Jon can't watch her. It's frustrating when I can't get anything done because I can never get my hands free, but she's been a pretty easy baby overall. Here's hoping for an even better 6 months ahead!

How do you people do it?

How do professors ever get any research done when they are teaching? I'm asking seriously.

Last week (Sunday to Saturday) I worked 49 hours. 35 hours of it was teaching, 14 of it was other stuff (e.g. looking for jobs, being a good lab and department citizen, email). 25 of those hours were for my adjunct position, which included grading about 35 lab reports. 10 hours were for being a TA. I had Adele (now 4 months old) with me at school Tuesday and Thursday (a friend babysat her while I taught). I worked at home with her (and Jon) on Friday.

I am feeling overwhelmed. I don't have nearly enough time to work on my own advancement. I need to get publications submitted and I need to find a job. Both of these things are feeling impossible. Jon said it best-- I basically have 4 jobs. Teaching at UBC, teaching at the other place, applying for jobs, and then continuing everything I've been working on for the last 6 years.

Part of me wants to just give up on my research aspirations and find a nice 9-5 job with some paid vacation and benefits.

Back to school with #GRFPproblems

Since I don't have a real job or a postdoc yet, I'm still technically a graduate student and we're staying here for the fall. I am a teaching assistant again for the first time in years, and in addition I'm teaching a class with Sam at his university as an adjunct. I'm starting to worry about what I've gotten myself into!

For the past few years, I've had the great fortune to be supported by a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. My whole responsibility was to do my awesome science. I was my own boss. I worked hard, but I had relatively few times when other people regularly needed my attention. I had huge blocks of uninterrupted time. I've been really spoiled, I know.

This fall, I'll have about 80 students between the two jobs. I've scheduled nearly all of my teaching on Wednesdays and Thursdays in the hopes of having bigger chunks of time on the other days. In addition to my teaching responsibilities, I need to be applying for jobs & fellowships and trying to get my chapters published. I could fill a semester with those tasks alone.

And I have a baby. My husband will be the primary caregiver, but I'll still be doing more work from home than I otherwise would. And when he does get called to work (it's erratic), we'll pay a couple of graduate school friends to watch her either at home or at school. My time will be even more fractured by childcare.

I also still need to pay attention to healing. More than 3 months after childbirth, I still can't lift heavy things (i.e. baby in car seat) or walk at a normal person's pace for very long. I am back in physical therapy and I need to do major pelvic floor and core work to be able to resume the level of activity that I had up until mid-pregnancy. It is very important to me that I get back to 100% and I don't think it's just going to happen without trying.

I'm sort of worried that perhaps I've jumped in too far-- maybe I shouldn't have signed on as an adjunct, too, but I think my CV and I could really use the teaching experience. After years of not paying much attention to the school calendar because it didn't change my schedule much, I find myself anxious about the start of the semester and worried about how I'll manage everything I need and want to do. I'm trying to be smart and prioritize and figure out which things to let slide. Here's hoping I've got a job and am still sane at the end of the semester.

Student help or DIY?

I'm in the awkward situation this fall of long-distance supervising/mentoring a student who is doing some work for me. I haven't met her in person, only via Skype. Sam connected us and is technically (but only technically) in charge, as he's the one giving the grade. Now she's emailing him because she's concerned about being able to finish everything this term, he doesn't really know what's going on (though he and I talked about it 2 weeks ago), and I am trying to figure out how to get the best outcome for her and for me.

I admit kind of messed up, because I wasn't checking her work as closely and as critically as I should have at the beginning (even after blogging about checking other students' work...ugh). This was exacerbated since I never see her in person. Basically she took a bunch of photos that are worthless, and they are going to have to be re-done (but probably not by her). On the one hand, I should have looked more closely, but on the other hand, she should be able to assess the quality of a photo, too. It turns out that her setup (which I of course have not seen in person) is less than adequate, so now things have been hung up while she waits for better equipment that I am having shipped to her. And now I might be sending her to buy more stuff at Target just so she can keep working since the other crap hasn't arrived from China.

Part of me feels like I should have never outsourced this project and just done it myself. On the other hand, it's relatively low priority and relatively low stakes, so I suppose it's better I re-learn this lesson now than later. I think this is the last time I'll try to long-distance supervise a project like this. I also need to make a mental note that I need to spend A. LOT. of my time (like, maybe all of it) closely training and supervising students at the beginning of a project.

(This reminds me that Psychgirl wrote a post about how she feels like it would be easier to do research herself because students take forever to pay off.)

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?

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.

Kids do and publish science

A class of 8-10 year old students in the UK designed an experiment to understand bumblebee vision. The paper was published in Biology Letters, and you can read an article about it, the paper itself, and more commentary on it for free.

The main scientist involved in the project, Beau Lotto from the University College London, has a webpage like I've never seen. This group is really, seriously sharing science in creative and novel ways (check out their Street Science and Flight of the bumblebee cubes). Kudos to them! What an inspiration!

The "Blackawton bees" project really sets a new bar for teaching science by doing science, and I expect we'll see more articles published by elementary and secondary school students in the near future. What do you think?

The journey to here

When I was two, I watched ants on our sidewalk.
When I was four, I collected itty bitty snails on our driveway after it rained.
When I was five, I tried to "fish" for my goldfish with a worm I dug up in the backyard.
When I was six, I tried to make a bird's nest- how hard could it be? (it turns out, it's really quite difficult architecture for a six year old).
When I was eight, I fell in love with the local nature center and spent every summer there until I went to college.
When I was nine, I had the most amazing third grade teacher who encouraged my interest in science.
When I was ten, my teacher who let me write a non-fiction book about monarch butterflies instead of a fictional story.
When I was eleven, I started a club with my friends called EcoActors to promote recycling and raise money to conserve rainforest.
When I was twelve, other kids mocked me by calling me "nature girl".
When I was thirteen, I had a great jr. high science teacher.
When I was fourteen, I started the advanced science track in high school.
When I was fifteen and sixteen, I mostly forgot about all that nature stuff. It was mentally on the back burner while I dealt with high school drama.
When I was seventeen, I got a 5 on my AP biology exam.
When I was eighteen, I started college, having chosen my school based on the strength of the biology program (especially in ecology and evolution).
When I was nineteen, I traveled abroad to study biology in a phenomenal location and I was hooked on biology and hooked on traveling.
When I was twenty, I spent a semester in Africa.
When I was twenty-one, I did a summer research internship.
When I was twenty-two, I graduated not knowing exactly what I wanted to do next.
When I was twenty-three, I had a job teaching environmental education and decided to go to grad school.
When I was twenty-four, I quit my job and traveled for a year with my partner, and applied to grad school.
When I was twenty-five, I started grad school.
When I'm thirty-one, I hope to have my Ph.D. and a job I enjoy.

Practice parenthood

Last week we had two 9 year olds stay with us- my cousin and Jon's niece. Every morning they went with me to the museum for day camp and then in the evenings we hung out in our neighborhood or played games. They were so agreeable and responsible! Most mornings they were up, dressed, and eating breakfast before we were out of bed! This is the first time we've been responsible for kids like that in our own home for more than just a night. I think it was good practice for being parents... but what will we do with them for the first 8 years?

I love third, fourth, and fifth graders because they can understand quite a lot but are also still excited about learning (it's not "uncool" yet). If this whole professional science career thing didn't work out, I'd love to teach one of those grades. I think I'd make a great middle-elementary school teacher, albeit one that could never find a job because I'd have a Ph.D. but no experience.

This week we still have Jon's niece here but this time his sister, brother-in-law, and nephew are here too, plus an 80 pound dog. I won't even go into the explanation of who and how the other 6 people passed through in the past 2 days. Last night we slept 7 extra people in our apartment.

I really need to get a LOT of work done this week. Only two weeks before ESA and then my summer is basically over...

Teaching at a SLAC

I decided to go to grad school so that I could become a professor at a small liberal arts college (SLAC) like the place where I spent my formative years (affectionately known here as Small Friendly College). As I have progressed through grad school, I have become less sure that this is what I want to do. There are a handful of conversations I've had that stand out and that sway me one way or another.

While Jon and I were traveling in Remote Foreign Country in the year before I started grad school, we had the great fortune to cross paths with one of my favorite college professors, my mentor who wrote my letters of recommendation. He mentioned to me that he was retiring. I was saddened to hear this news, but in the conversation that followed I could see he was truly burnt out from decades of teaching at SFC with all of the mentoring responsibilities that don't cease even when students graduate. The fact that he was great at his job created greater demand for him as an advisor and professor. As a student, I didn't realize the extent of professors' responsibilities or recognize how the closeness of student/faculty interactions at a small college could be draining. Do I want a job with so many face-time demands?

Fast forward 2 years. Herb and I were discussing mentor's upcoming retirement. Herb, who was the college roommate and thus personally knows my SFC mentor (see explanation here), remarked that he has no interest in retiring anytime soon. He attributes mentor's desire to retire early to the different professorial lifestyle and expectations at SLACs. More food for thought. Is being a SLAC professor potentially more exhausting than a professor at a big research university?

Another year goes by. I returned to SFC and had a great conversation with a friend who is teaching there this year. I was explaining my concerns about teaching at a place like SFC because I don't want to get burnt out like my mentor was. She, as a visiting assistant professor, now has an insider's perspective on departmental expectations. SFC has a fantastic tenure-track assistant professor who is teaching great classes, mentoring students, and doing great research with undergrads. She is also working her butt off, staying late, and everyone can see that. What is the department's response? You're doing awesome work, but we're concerned that your pace is unsustainable. We recommend that you work less and make time for your family and yourself in order to prevent yourself from burning out. This was refreshing to hear, and it really makes a lot of sense for a department to send this message to someone who they would very much like to keep around but are concerned will work themselves to a point of departure. Might I be so fortunate as to end up in a place like SFC where the department's advice to a fantastic tenue candidate is work less?

I haven't ruled out jobs at SLACs, but I'm also interested in jobs with conservation NGOs or maybe a government position. Maybe I could even cut it at a mid-sized research university with some grad students. I still don't know. Thankfully, I don't have to yet, but I do keep mulling over it because I do want to make sure I have adequately prepared myself for the job I want.

**Note: I just polished a post I wrote last month, and it was posted under last month's date so I'm including a link here for those of you who would otherwise miss it.

Would you like your dream job?

I came to grad school with the goal of teaching and leading foreign study programs at a liberal arts school like the one I attended. I'm visiting Small Friendly College this weekend and just had a meeting with one of my professors. She suggested I co-lead a program to Ukenzagapia in 2011! This is so exciting! It sounds like they'll open applications for the position sometime in the next few months.

I also talked to her about meeting up with her students when she's there next year. If the timing works out, she wants to bring the students to Nyota for some kind of field project. What could I do with them that would provide useful data for my project? Or any project? What would I do with a whole semester of students in Ukenzagapia?

Is this what I want to do when I finish my Ph.D.? Doing it before I finish might be a great way to find out. How would this affect my research? How does it fit with my goals? Wait, what are my goals?

I've got a lot to think about.

Imposter syndrome?

I have to admit that for most of my graduate career so far I've felt like I really had my shit together. I've gotten some grants, a fellowship, advanced to candidacy, and generally not been completely overwhelmed by everything (in spite of several good reasons to be). But over the past few months I've been feeling increasingly anxious about the road ahead and emotionally fragile about my work.

I might be coming down with Imposter Syndrome.

Now that I've got some data and two years behind me, I've got to start getting results and really publishing. And with "NSF" all over my cv, I definitely feel a lot of pressure to meet the high expectations that come will all of the "accomplishments."

My Imposter Syndrome fears are specific. I know that I can write proposals and grants. I'm pretty comfortable with my writing. I know that I am self-motivated and organized about deadlines. I'm a pretty good teacher. I think I'm a good mentor. My fear is that I'm actually not good at doing science, you know the whole experiment thing that actually gets to the root of what in the world is going on out there in ecology. There. I said it. That's what I'm afraid of.

I know that I just finished my first field season and that everyone expects me to make mistakes and it's not uncommon at all for people to add several months or a year to their Ph.D. because of mistakes they made in the field. That is how we learn, I know. But I'm worried that I need more guidance on the ground than I'm going to get. I'm also worried that I'm going to disappoint people because they have higher expectations of me than I can actually meet.* I'm worried that I'm not enough of a badass to do what needs to be done.

On Friday I was reduced to tears by my fears and frustrations. I need to get a handle on this. I have a meeting with Herb tomorrow morning. I'm asking my advisor to advise me.

*This isn't an unfounded fear, and I might write about that soon.

How ignorant am I

I just invited my fantastic awesome student to lunch to talk about her summer research experience. I invited her to lunch. During Ramadan. When I know she's Muslim. *rolls eyes at self*

So much for a bloggy week last week. More posts coming, really. There's lots of partially finished ones floating around.

teaching professional conduct in correspondence

Earlier this week I blogged about a fantastic student of mine for whom I wrote many letters of recommendation. Just yesterday I was contacted by a different student. Her email went something like this:

Hey Karina!! It's Student X...you know, one of the trip to the museum Students? haha. Ok so I have a huge favor to ask of you, like the subject line says...will you be willing to write me a letter of recommendation???? I will owe you my life! haha. It's for an Unusual Internship with Unusual Employer...random, I know, but I graduated in January and my dream of becoming a [Job Kids Dream About] right away hasn't been going too well so I'm just looking around for anything that will benefit me. It's cool if you don't want to do it, I won't hate you :) but if you are willing to help me out I will send you my resume and the link to what the internship is about so you have a clue on what to write. Thanks for taking the time to read this rambling email! I hope your semester has been going great! Another Student always tells me how she sees you at the gym. I miss BioX!!!

Sincerely,
Student X

At first I wasn't sure how to respond. Clearly she needed some advice on etiquette for professional correspondence. After much consideration I replied:

Hi Student,
Wow, that internship sounds quite unusual! As one of my most enthusiastic students, I am happy to help you however I am able. I may be able to write you a letter, but I need to know what the deadline is to know if I have time. In order to write a good letter, I need as much information as possible. Also, I highly recommend reading this page that talks about asking for letters of recommendation. Even in asking for a letter for Unusual Internship, professionalism goes a long way! Especially in this awful job market, you should always err on the side of formality, courtesy, and standard composition. You can start practicing in your correspondence with me. :-)
Cheers,
Karina

I decided to add the smiley face, even though it's a bit ironic considering the context. Apparently, my advice was very well taken. She replied:

Dear Karina,
Thank you very much for helping me out! I will try to be as professional as possible in this email after reading all of those guidelines you sent me. I'm going to keep that because it's very helpful! [Many internship details] I really appreciate this! I'll let you know about the deadline as soon as I find out, and if you can't make it, I'll understand :)

Thanks!!
Student X

What a huge improvement! I'm so glad that she demonstrated that she's capable of higher standards of correspondence. Seems like it should be common sense or at least previously taught, but apparently not. On the bright, this bad habit in students is relatively easily corrected (assuming they actually do know how to write in complete sentences) and a little advice may go a long way in helping someone develop essential professional skills.

bad news

A few months ago I wondered aloud at the Economical Academic about the economic ramifications of the slumping economy for universities. Well, the new year's news hasn't been very good at UBC. My department has halved graduate student support for presenting at meetings and canceled all visiting speakers. Today Herb told us that they probably won't admit any new students next year as Teaching Assistants. Furthermore, TA positions during the summer will be extremely limited, and they are going to enforce degree time lines more strictly.

A glimmer of hope lies in the stimulus bill to boost NSF funding, though I'm not sure how that will affect TAships. I'm thankful that Obama is a science-friendly president and I'm much more hopeful about science funding now that he is in office.

today's accomplishments

Today I finished a grant application for tomorrow's deadline. I also submitted the second of many letters of recommendation for one of my students from last year who is applying for summer internships. I read her most recent personal statement this morning and was very impressed by the changes she made based on my feedback. I'm embarrassed by it, but I totally get verklempt when I think about my students doing great things in science. Um, yeah. I can't really articulate it, but I get all emotional. Is that totally weird?

In other news, I'm such a bad swimmer! I've got to work on my form- a lot- if I'm going to do a triathlon! Mariyah and Amber want to do it too so I've got training buddies. Today I was just getting the rhythm of my terrible form when Mariyah gave me some pointers on my technique for the front crawl. Then I thought so hard about what my arms were doing that I had horrible rhythm, forgot to breathe and kicked only sporadically and thus could hardly make it halfway across the pool. I'm glad I have Mariyah around to give me swimming tips. I'll get the hang of it... eventually.

science outreach and mentoring

I love talking about science and sharing the process of becoming a scientist. That's why I created this blog. I've also had some opportunities for non-anonymous science outreach/mentoring in the past few weeks that I want to share because they were so awesome.

Right before Thanksgiving, I talked to my friend's 6th grade science class on speakerphone about bacteria. I'm no bacteria expert, but I did do a summer internship that involved bacteria. I was their call-in scientist! My friend told the students a little bit about my bacteria research and the students prepared questions in advance that they wanted to ask me. I spent about 20 minutes on the phone answering their questions. Some of their questions were related to my research, but many of them were about being a scientist in general and I talked about some of the traveling I've done. This was an urban public school, so the odds are good I'm the first scientist they've ever talked to. My friend said that it was awesome to see her 31 students squirming in their seats with excitement and talking about bugs. One of her hard-working students told her later, "Miss X, I think now I want to be a scientist when I grow up." Pretty big payoff for 20 minutes on the phone.

Last week Sam asked me to come talk to his introductory bio class. I went with another student from my program (a minority woman) and we just told our stories of how we got to where we are now and answered questions. I was pretty nervous for this and I think I should've thought more about how to describe my path (starting with "I've always loved nature..." didn't seem to strike a chord with these city kids), but Sam said the students loved our visit. It was exciting to answer their questions, and there was a Latina woman who asked the best questions about grad school. She already knew all about applying to REU programs! Here's hoping she stays in science.

Today I met with a student from my first semester of teaching. She contacted me a few weeks ago to ask if I would write her a letter of recommendation for summer internships. I mentioned this student in a post from fall 2007 and she's taking some of the advice that I gave them about applying for internships! She's interested in a different field of science, but at this point that's not terribly important. She's applying to REU-type programs all over the country, and I hope she gets into one of them! If she doesn't, she plans to stay here and do research in a lab at UBC.

Soon (maybe tomorrow?) I'll have a post about science communication. It seems to have been a theme for me this semester.

being influential

I didn't blog about it at the time, but last spring I offered to take my students behind the scenes at Big Natural History Museum. About 6 or 7 of them took me up on the offer so I showed them around one afternoon and introduced them to a few other grad students who told them about the research they're doing.

On Wednesday I got an email from two of my students from last spring. They wanted to know if they could list me as a reference because they're interested in volunteering at BNHM! I'm so excited that they're thinking about museum work! I doubt they would've considered or pursued this possibility before the tour. I know that the first time I went behind the scenes at a big museum I was totally blown away and it definitely made me want to work in a place like that. I'm glad I was able to share of some of that excitement with my students.

summer students- the end

I made it back from the conference just in time for my students' final exam. They've been a fun group. A few students have stood out in particular, including one who I'm pretty sure has a crush on me (a 'friend crush'?). One student gave me a thank you note after she handed in the exam, which was really touching. She said she enjoyed all of the drawing we did (unlike her lab partner, who hated it). I also got a few nice thank you emails.

I'm going to miss teaching while I'm on the fellowship. I hope some of my former students contact me with questions about internships or grad school. I'd be thrilled. One of my students from the spring contacted me about getting an internship at Big Natural History Museum this year (I think this is a direct result of the tour of BNHM I did for some of my students).

I have a few photos to post from the conference, but I probably won't get them up until later this weekend since we're moving today.