proposal preparation dynamics

For the past couple of weeks, work has been consumed with trying to prepare a proposal with nine PIs. Yep, nine. As you can probably guess from the number of PIs, this is a pretty big proposal--over two meeellion dollars. What makes the proposal interesting is that it's not a straight-up science project. We've got a few social scientists, a few natural scientists, and a few geographers who I never know how to classify in the social-natural scientific spectrum. Oh, and me. I get to be a PI, which is pretty cool, though I won't be doing any of my own research as part of the project.

So this is a diverse group, academically speaking, and my job is to draft the proposal and budget from all of the tidbits that the other PIs are theoretically sending me. I've never written a proposal that's supposed to be a team effort, so this is all kind of new to me.

Predictably, we have the classic conflict between the natural and social scientists. The natural scientists can't imagine that the social scientists might actually need resources and money to perform their studies. The social scientists keep referring to the scientists as "autistic" and suggesting that the scientists are out of touch with how the world actually works. Having spent the past few months meeting individually with natural and social scientists, none of these slanderous comments come as a surprise to me. In fact, they're sort of memes that people in each discipline spout without actually thinking about what they're saying or who they're saying it about.

I also probably could have predicted that getting people to contribute text to this proposal was going to be involve a delicate combination of nagging and groveling. With the proposal due in a couple of weeks, I'm in this strange position of not knowing whether I should be writing furiously and fudging my way through topics I'm not even close to an expert in, or whether I should continue to wait for text from the people who actually know what they want to see in the proposal.

What I wasn't quite prepared for, though, was the number of times one PI would--in confidence--tell me of his or her issues with another PI. It started to weigh on me that so many of our PIs have issues with each other, so I made a chart to see how bad the problem really was:



Each PI (with the exception of me) is listed as a potential badmouther on the left. The PIs that they have badmouthed are on top. Red is a badmouthing, green is a goodmouthing. There are four people (B, D, F, and H) who haven't said anything about anyone, so we can't really say much about them.

B has been badmouthed by three different people, and I'd make that four if I was represented here. In some of the badmouthing cases, the complaints are somewhat personal--"I don't like her style" kind of stuff. In other cases it's more extreme--"I don't trust him to do good work." And if I had a dime for every time I'd heard something to the effect of "He's a very difficult person to work with," well, I'd stop that ice cream truck every day and buy myself a Chipwich.

As with many aspects of my job, I find these dynamics kind of fascinating. What does it take to bring someone to the point of saying "I vowed I would never work with him again?" Are there any natural scientists who actually understand what a sociologist does? Are there any who would deign to ask?

But it's also kind of sad. The Initiative I'm coordinating, and the proposal I'm drafting, are intended to be truly multidisciplinary. The PIs recognize--or say they recognize--the fact that they need to present their proposals as collaborative and multidisciplinary in order to stand a chance of getting funded in this harsh, harsh world. But they haven't made the leap to actually being collaborative or even wanting to be collaborative.

So what we end up with is a line dividing the social and natural scientists. And we end up with lines drawn between individual PIs from the same discipline who are supposed to be working together but don't actually want to.

The chance of getting funded on this one is probably about 10%. But if we do, it'll be an interesting five years.

"Me teach good. Me get job. Me kill self."

I've become slack about blogging. Terrible, no? Life has been kind of crazy in a good way, and I've been enjoying my job more than ever. Last week I had the opportunity to go to a conference convened by one of our state senators (interesting, good schmoozing) then the very next day I was helping elementary school teachers develop lesson plans for their science classes. The conference crowd was your typical suit and tie kind of group. When I arrived for the teacher training session, they were testing out finger paints made from algae. Needless to say, it was a lot of variety for one week.

Also, I recently checked out Chronicle.com for the first time in a while and was reminded of some of the funniest pieces I've read about stepping off the tenure track. These are all by Harrison Key, and they are (I think) hysterical: The Happy Question, The Dentist and the Oracle, and The Bow-Tied Penitent. Check them out when you need a break from all your worries.

welcome home

This creepy thing was on my stoop when I got home tonight. I think it's the exoskeleton of a bumblebee, or maybe a honeybee. It's clearly hollow and, uh, dead, but strangely intact.

Perhaps it's a sign of my infinite nerdiness, or perhaps it's a reflection of how dull I am, but this specimen brightened my day a bit.

Being the new kid in town is tough, man. I keep waiting for the day when I don't have any more IDs to obtain, trainings to go to, and insurance forms to fill out. The day when I don't have to look at my well-worn campus map to figure out how to get to yet another introductory meeting with yet another new face. Then there's the more elusive stuff. Will there come a day when I have friends here? Will I someday feel like part of a community?

Forms or friends, I know that these things just take time. I will complete the 8-hour defensive driver training course that will allow me to drive our departmental truck. I will somehow find like-minded people who have stories and bottles of wine and time to share.

Right now, with the boyfriend away fixing up our escape pod, and the neighbors chattering away in a language I can't understand, it feels like just me and what used to be a bee.

organizing your references (i heart citeulike.com)

My move to my current undisclosed location has been taking place one carload at a time. Just before the car was loaded up for the first time, I was telling a friend that the first carload would carry several of the boxes containing my collection of references. "There are about 700 articles in those boxes, and who knows if I'll ever even need them again," I told him. To my surprise, his eyes lit up. "How are they organized?" he wondered. At first I thought he was humoring me, just carrying on conversation. It takes a true geek to want to talk about the pros and cons of different reference organization systems, but a true geek he is. So there we sat, chatting over milkshakes about my references.

Keeping your references organized is a bit like being on a stairmaster: you can keep climbing, but you're never going to get to the top. The way I see it, there are a few major challenges here:

1. Taking the time to put a system into place and stick to it. It's relatively easy to alphabetize your references, but is that any good if you can't remember authors' names? Or if you tend to accumulate piles of papers on your desk that you then don't have time to file away?

2. Being able to find a particular reference once it's filed neatly away. I've never met a scientists who is completely happy with his or her organization system, and most of them admit that it's often faster to find the article again online and print out a new copy.

3. Unread vs. read articles. For me, filing away unread articles means that I'm never going to read them.

4. Digital vs. hard copies. I still can't fully digest papers that I'm reading on a computer screen, and I print a lot of papers out that I never read. As the stacks of unread papers grow, so does my liberal enviroguilt.

Half my references are currently filed alphabetically, and half are by topic. I've lost track of which ones I've read and not read and which onces have been entered into BibTeX. Things are complicated by the fact that, in my new position, I need to be reading articles on a wider range of topics but in less depth. So my current system is useless.

Enter CiteUlike, a free, online system for your references. After signing up (which takes 5 seconds), here's how it works:

1. Enter the URL of the article you want to add to your reference library. CiteULike parses the information on that page, pulls out the title, authors, journal, even the abstract (!) and creates an entry in your library.

2. Add tags. This is the feature that makes the site powerful. Let's say you're adding an article on The effect of ancient population bottlenecks on human phenotypic variation. In my old, topical file system, this might fall into the bottlenecks folder or maybe the phenotypes folder or maybe the evolution folder. The power of tagging is that I can add the tags "bottlenecks," "phenotypes," and "evolution" to this paper and then search for it later using those categories.

3. Rank your reading priorities. Some papers, I'll never read, and I know it. Others I want to read ASAP. CiteULike gives you five options from "Top Priority" to "I don't really want to read it."

4. Upload a personal pdf of the article, if you want to.

5. See who else has that article in their library. Unlike most social networking sites ("We both love soup...and snow peas..."), this actually seems useful because I can get a glimpse into the libraries of other people who are reading the same articles I am. In other words, I might actually learn something.

6. Export references to EndNote or BibTeX.

So CiteULike addresses a lot of the challenges of developing and maintaining a functional a reference system.

On the eve of new organization projects, I always feel a bit giddy. I don't have any interest in entering all of my old references into CiteULike, though they do have an experimental 'Import from BibTeX feature.' For me, the real value here is going to be organizing new references, many of which I only need to read at the abstract level.

If you're into this idea, Connotea is also worth checking out. It looks a bit slicker than CiteULike, and has the benefit of having an "Add to Connotea" button that you can stick on your browser that makes adding references super-easy. I'm a bit turned off by Connotea's 'Recently Used Tags,' though, which include Britney Spears and Pamela Anderson. CiteULike's users look like straight-up geeks who wouldn't mix their Britney clippings with their articles on Boltzmann brains.

when the line between faculty and staff gets blurry...

Despite the feeling of slowness brought on by the kind of weather that makes you feel like you're walking through a bowl of beef broth, things have been rather busy -- and rather interesting -- on campus lately. More and more, I find myself treading a very blurry line between faculty and staff. And while it's not at all unpleasant -- kind of nice, actually -- it does make me think a lot about where this job is headed and where I want it to be headed.

When I interviewed for my current job, almost all of the faculty members I met with asked something along the lines of "Are you going to continue your research?" To which I politely answered, "Well, I think this position will keep me more than busy with other things," while I tried not to look too wan as visions of sample vials danced menacingly in my mind.

People have continued to ask the research question since I arrived, except now it's usually followed by "Will you be teaching?" I suppose these are natural questions, given the fact that I work at a university and have my Ph.D. Admittedly, I was starting to think that these people were missing something when I introduced myself as a program coordinator rather than an assistant/associate/full/research professor. Didn't they realize that coordinating was a full-time job? Then after a conversation with X a few weeks ago, I realized that it was me who had been missing something.

I've seen the official, administrative description for my position. It lays out a wide range of duties and responsibilities, none of which mention the words "research" or "teaching." So imagine my surprise when X says to me "I'm teaching a class on [basically the research you did as a grad student] this fall. Do you want to co-teach it with me?" Before I could even think about it, I had agreed. On some gut level, I really want to teach, and I'm really psyched to have the opportunity to.

A week or so later, I was even more surprised when X said "Would you be interested in working on this little research project I've been thinking about?" To my amazement, my gut and heart (and mouth) said yes. Granted, X caught me at a weak moment -- I'd been on a journal reading binge for the first time in years, and scholarly research was looking kind of interesting again.

So here it is, mid-summer, and I'm looking at the September calendar wondering how I'm going to pull off co-teaching a course, spinning up a little research project, and putting together three (yes, three) proposals for our interdisciplinary initiative.

Before you know it, I'll be editing thesis proposals and telling concerned parents that their sophomores did actually earn those C minuses.

when in doubt, don't be subtle

The authorship awkwardness has ended! In my last post, I mentioned that I was preparing a new report for our dean and one of our state senators. In a not-so-subtle hint that I wanted credit for the preparation of the report, I stuck my name on it...twice. And it seems to have worked. After passing along the final draft to X, he forwarded it to the dean and said that I had written it. Better still, he said that if the senator's office needs more information, they could contact one of *us*.

The question still remains as to whether X realized that he had stolen my thunder regarding the first report to the dean. My guess is that he didn't think of it at the time, but that a very important seed was planted in his mind when he saw my "Prepared by Ivory Shower."

Thanks for your advice and suggestions on my last post :)

authorship awkwardness

The academic storybook is full of tales of advisers who mysteriously become first authors on their students' papers at the last minute and students who don't get credit where credit is due. Authorship and attribution are frequent topics of angst on the ScienceCareers forum, and stories like this one and this one are as common as tales of alligators in the sewers of New York City*.

As a grad student, I was lucky in that I never had issues with authorship. Sometimes I included people as co-authors because it seemed like good karma, and sometimes I just needed to do a little groveling. Whether it was out of appreciation or duty, one of my thesis papers ended up having five karma co-authors in total, though 100% of the writing and 100% of the data generation was mine. But I was first author, and I no one disputed that I should be. My adviser never insisted on being first author on my work, and never left me off of papers I'd contributed to.

My current boss, X, and I published two papers together while I was a student. I was first author on one, and second author on another. We collaborated well on those papers, and in each case the issue of first authorship was always clear cut. Because we never even had to discuss authorship before, I'm bewildered to find myself having authorship issues now, when the things I'm writing aren't entering the academic journal circuit.

A few weeks ago, X was asked to provide a report of our Initiative's recent activities to the dean and the president of the university. At this point, I'm more familiar with recent activities than X, so X asked me to write the report. But somehow, X was the one who sent it to Dean, who passed it along to President as X's work. Dean also sent the report to our U.S. Senator, who apparently is curious about what we're doing. So suddenly, I find myself in a position of having a senator (!) reading my work and thinking it's X's.

The senator's office was pleased with this report, and promptly asked Dean who asked X who asked me for a more detailed report. This one is much more work, and I'll be damned if my name isn't on it somewhere.

How should I deal with this? X isn't a power grubbing kind of person, but is clearly fine with attribution on the first report. Since we've dealt with attribution seamlessly in the past, I'd like to believe that this was just an oversight on X's part. But I don't want this to become a pattern, and I sense that it easily could.

I'm trying to figure out a way to bring this up casually, but clearly with X before we send of the latest report. Anyone out there have advice?


* Turns out that there actually was an alligator in the sewers of New York in 1935. If you've got Times Select, the article is worth a read.