Local or Prestigious?

Reader Kris needs advice. She asks

I am going to grad school this fall. There is school that I can go to and it's mediocre, but its in-state (if I'm going to be going to classes in person it has to be in-state as I have a mortgage and have to work full time at a local job).

That being said, I can attend a more prestigious university but I can only take classes online (the whole degree would be online as the school is 1,000 miles away) because of my situation. What should I do? Opinions? I know that I will get a better experience going in person and that it would be more fun, but, that being said, is it worth the sacrifice in prestige? There are no prestigious universities that I can attend locally for my area.

Thanks, Kris

I think this is a tricky situation where considering what you want from the degree might help you decide what to do. Are you aiming for a master’s or Ph.D.? In science or another discipline? Do you plan to do experimental research for your thesis? What kind of job do you hope to get when you’re finished?

I don’t know anyone who has done an online advanced degree in science, but I know someone who is starting one in the fall. Like you, she didn’t want to move, but she couldn’t find a suitable program where she lives. In her case, she wants a master’s to get the credentials for industry jobs she can’t get with a bachelor’s only, but she isn’t especially interested in the grad school experience or becoming an academic.

I think a PhD based on lab or field work would be extremely difficult to do remotely unless you currently have a job as a technician or something that you could transition into grad work, making your boss your research advisor while taking your classes online and having an academic advisor at the remote university (this is what I did but with a local university). Motivation is difficult enough when you are surrounded by other students and have your advisor around for accountability and guidance. Doing it on your own, especially if you are keeping another job, will probably take a LOT of discipline and self confidence.

As far as I can tell, the importance of prestige varies by field. Some fields seem to have a well structured hierarchy defined by prestige. I think it's more about the lab in my field. Sure, there are some departments in my field that really rock out, so students graduating from them tend to be highly qualified with better networks and they often get good jobs. But for the most part, it’s the advisor’s reputation that’s vital. There are stellar labs in crappy departments that graduate excellent students who launch enviable careers. So you might find a star in an otherwise mediocre university or you might find that online program loses some of the prestige of the university if it’s not tied to a big cheese advisor. Can you investigate how important prestige will be for your career?

I think one of the biggest things you might lose with an online program is access to your advisor’s network. Given that you don’t want to move for grad school, are you willing to move once you graduate? If not, the prestige of the remote university may not help you find a local job as much as the contacts you would make by attending a local university. If you think you’ll be more mobile after you have the degree, then maybe the clout that comes from the Prestigious U’s online program would be beneficial.

That’s just my opinion. What does everybody else think? Anyone have experience with online grad school?

Facebook

Motivated by CAE's post about Facebook games, I signed in for the first time since I created the account in like, March. I have an account with my real name and one with my pseud, but I'm not completely happy using either one. I'd like to just tell my real name to other bloggers who are interested in interacting with me, but I'm not ready for my real life and blog worlds to collide (only EGM and BFF know about my blog; and of course I can use my real-name account with real life people). Also, I just don't really get Facebook. Anyway, I discovered there is a science bloggers group! I scrolled through the members wondering if I read any of them through a pseud (aside from a few I recognized who blog under their real names) and I joined. I'm Eco Geofemme if you want to friend me to play games or whatever (or see my picture), although I'm not sure how to do that yet. Even though I've never played Scrabulous, I will add my opinion that Hasbro was stupid to shut it down.

In other news, we seem to have an ant infestation. They are coming in through a wall nowhere near the kitchen, and we're on the third floor so they must be all through the building. Interestingly, they are tiny black ones not the giant ones you normally see eating wood and such. I'll call the landlord tomorrow. Yuck.

Impending transition

I’m still far from my next big transition (graduation), but I feel like I am on the cusp of a change in mindset; I feel like it is an adjustment for me to transition from a student with a long way to go to one who is wrapping up.

I recently finished one big chunk of my research that will become a chapter in my dissertation (huzzah!). I had been planning it for ages, then working on it off and on for the past 18 months or so, and now the data are collected. One of the things that way always in the future is now at hand. Add that to the manuscript that is in preparation, the lab work for another chapter that is 70% done (see sidebar counter), and the last chapter that was dramatically reduced after my most recent committee meeting, and I’m starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I feel different preparing for Big Conference next week than I have for conferences in the past. People always ask if I’ll be finishing up soon and I always have to say no. This time, I get to say yes, I expect to be graduating in about a year and yes, I’m starting to think about post docs, will you have one available? I’ve even ordered business cards (I hope they arrive in time) to give out during all the networking I have planned. I feel similarly about the job ads that sail through my inbox every day. Occasionally, I’ll see interesting job listings, but I know I’m too far from finishing to pursue them. That will be changing soon.

It’s a little scary to realize the thing I’ve been doing for the past five years (seven if you count the time I was a tech in my current lab) is coming to a close. I love where I am, so it’s sad to think about leaving. But at the same time, it’s exciting to think about leaving to pursue something new, or even about staying but with a new project in the same lab. I’m really ready to graduate, but apprehensive about the thesis writing and defense process which I know will be stressful given my advisors’ lack of enthusiasm for reviewing my writing. So, while it may seem trivial to think of the last year of grad school as a transition, I think my mindset and even my daily routine will be changing quite a lot. I hope it’s good.

scientiae-carnival.

Office Space, here?

One of the many things I like about my job is that it rarely feels like I'm in the movie Office Space. However, things have been changing lately at the institution where I do my research. Sometimes it's hard not to confuse my lab notebook with a TPS Report.

Yesterday we had a staff meeting where they gave people awards for doing their regular jobs. Well, that's not really true. They did an extra good job at their jobs during a crisis, and while that is commendable, it still seemed a little over the top that we had an all hands meeting about it. There was a cake, which I swear looked exactly like the cake in Office Space, so we were all making jokes, saying things like "just pass" and stuff.

Lately several signs have appeared on things like electrical panels with warnings about working in confined spaces. ? And one warning you not to get your hand caught between the banister and the wall. And since we're all worried about piles of reprints attacking us in our offices, a senior scientist in my group kept getting reprimanded for his messy office. So, he just piled the stacks of papers that had been on his floor onto a cart that has now been sitting in the hallway outside his office for like, 6 months. Apparently, that is an acceptable solution. What gives?

Book Meme

Mad Hatter tagged me for this meme. I had been avoiding it because my short list of books read is embarrassing. So, the books I've read are in bold, books I started but never quite finished are italicized, and if I saw the cinematic adaptation, there is an asterisk.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien*
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (Assigned readng my last semester of high school that I didn't do. I think it's the only assigned book that I didn't read and had to fake the report.)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott*
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (I'm sure I started this at least three times, but just couldn't get into it. Even after reading 75% of it.)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell*
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams*
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (But I did suffer through The Brothers Karamazov in a college seminar course where that was the only topic. One bitchy student ruined it by revealing the killer way too early, since she had read it before but no one else had.)
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (Loved it! Loved East of Eden more.)
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll*
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden*
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne*
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Confusing, what with all those names to keep track of, but wonderful.)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan*
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen*
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac (Could this book have been more irritating?)
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding*
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (Could this book have been more boring?)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (But I did have a part in my junior high's rendition of the stage musical version. I was in the "workhouse gang". I had to play a boy. Yet another negative aspect of being short.)
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (I think I read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in high school. That was plenty James Joyce for me.)
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens*
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker*
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (I read Lady Chatterly's Lover. That's similar, right?)
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White*
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (one of my two(!) copies just went to the book exchange)
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl* (I read many of his other books and LOVED them. Will definitely read them to my kids if I have any.)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Lots of people have already done this one...I'll tag JaneB, Sciencemama, Silver Fox, and uh, Unbalanced Reaction. If you guys have done it, sorry. If anyone else wants to do it, GFI*!

*Go For It.

Who are you?

Drugmonkey has a post up that he wants to make all memey, so I will run with it. Most people who read blogs don't leave comments, so even with a dynamic medium like a blog, it's hard to know your audience. So the question for readers, originally from the blog Not Exactly Rocket Science, is

Tell me about you. Who are you? Do you have a background in science? If so, what draws you here as opposed to meatier, more academic fare? And if not, what brought you here and why have you stayed? Let loose with those comments.

So, Readers, please delurk if you care to.

Book Swap

We had a little book swap at work today. Awesome Technician and I were chatting about having books to get rid of, so we decided to organize a little exchange. All it took was putting out a sign in the common space near the microwave and people brought it novels and such they were finished with. Some people forgot or didn't see the sign, but seemed interested in the pile. There were still many books left when I left, but I think some folks who didn't bring any were waiting till the end of the day to take books out of curtesy to the people who contibuted. Hopefully more will be gone by tomorrow, but we'll take whatever is left to a second hand bookstore. I think we'll do it again in 6 months or so to include more people.

Can I just prepare an awesome talk?

If things go to plan, tomorrow I will have the last of the data I need for my talk at Big Meeting in two weeks. Having two weeks to work with the data is actually pretty good for me. As much as I swear I won't do it again, for whatever reason I always end up scrambling to get the last results with just a few days to spare. This time, I have worked with the preliminary data pretty extensively (I gave a poster on it last year) so I at least have some idea what to expect.

Despite that, my anxiety about preparing for conference presentations seems to increase as I gain experience. I have been to pretty many conferences (1 to 3 each year since 2001) and I have grown less anxious about the meeting itself since I am familiar with the routine and I now know enough people that I can usually find someone to have lunch with even when none of my labmates are there. But the stakes feel higher for my presentations. I used to feel like I was just a young student, so people would know not to expect too much from me. On top of that, I could relax with the idea that they wouldn't remember me anyway, so if I said something stupid, it would vanish into the black hole of the unremembered and I would start with a clean slate next year. But now people do remember me (for which I am grateful, of course!). And I want to impress them. I want them to have in mind that I gave a nice talk when I let them know I'll be graduating and looking for post docs soon.

While diligently working in the lab to get the last of my data, I've been carrying around 8-10 papers that are highly relevant to the talk I plan to give. Yet I haven't read them. Since I only have two weeks to do all the data analysis, interpret the results, make pretty graphs, and write the talk, you'd think I would try to be efficient by doing any necessary literature review before I get the data. But no. Instead I'm all paralyzed by worry about the scientific quality of my presentation. Can I just get over it?

I like to think of myself as a junior colleague. The scientists at these meetings are not the "grown-ups", they are my more senior colleagues (by now, some of them are even junior colleagues to me!). I want them to respect me and my work as I come up the ranks. So can I please not make a boring talk during which I say something ridiculous?

Kittehs!

We are cat sitting for a friend for the next month. Having been debating getting our own cats for many months, I'm excited to have an opportunity to test drive these ones to learn more about my suspected allergies and low tolerance for hair on the furniture.

Our friend dropped them off on Friday night. They didn't leave the room where he released them, the office (except when he had them in the bathroom to clean off the poo and pee they made and then wallowed in while in the carrier), mostly hiding under the futon. Our friend spent the night on Friday, so they were with him on the futon that night. All day Saturday, they continued to hide in the office. They eventually started to venture out into the rest of our apartment, but if they saw me they'd dart back to safety under the futon.

Until last night.

They decided to come out in the middle of the night. I mandated that they should not be allowed in our bedroom. I figure any allergy problems I might have will only be worse if they sleep on my face and I really don't want all my clean clothes covered in cat hair. But, they were scratching at the door and meowing like crazy. Eventually, EGM went out to sleep on the futon with them (isn't he a peach?). They still meowed like crazy, so he gave up and came back to bed with the door open. They came in and out, roving all around but sill making lots of noise. At one point they even pulled down the curtain (on a tension rod, so not that difficult). So we locked them out again. I'm not sure if they were looking for our friend or were freaked out by bad weather outside. The noise eventually stopped, but it kept us up for much of the night. Today they are resting quietly under the futon. In summary, they keep us up all night and are no fun during the day. Little shits. Still, I'm hoping they'll come around because they are awfully cute.

So I ask: who on earth had the brilliant idea of domesticating a nocturnal animal?


I promise that academic/science posting will resume soon.

Yes, EGM is home.

We had a nice evening together. We went for a walk, then got groceries to make a nice dinner which we ate on the deck with some wine. After the dishes were done, I retired to the living room to blog and watch tv, while he went to the office to do EGM things.

But then later, he came to me and told me there's something he hasn't been telling me. He got all serious and made me come sit next to him. "You know I love you, right?" he asked. I got tense. After a pregnant pause, he said, "Lately I've been pooping with the bathroom door open."

We always said we would never do that. But it is hot, I guess.

My humble pizza oven

It is 88 F (31.1 C) in my third-floor, brick-building, apartment. Just saying.

Crestfallen

I thought EcoGeoMan was supposed to get home today, but he didn't give me his flight information so I wasn't exactly sure when. I wasn't too concerned since he typically arrives late evening when he travels to here from Far Off Land -- I figured I had a pretty good guess of his arrival time. I really miss him when he's away, plus I'm excited to see him because I'm so bored all by myself despite having just spent a week in FL with my BFF.

So yesterday, when I had to leave early with my carpool buddy because someone ran her car through his garage door and he decided to take today off, I figure working a long day today would be perfect: no carpool buddy, need to make up for yesterday's ditch-out, access to bench space after everyone else gone for the day, and good timing for going straight to the airport from work to retrieve EGM. I had a ton of work planned for my extended day.

Then EGM called me around 8:15 am to tell me he would be leaving home soon and to give me the details for the last leg of his trip. Although one of the flights is very long and he mentioned a couple of layovers, he said he would be arriving here at 7:05 pm. We discussed how I might be late to pick him up since I had all this work lined up for the day, but I said I'd do my best to get there. Several hours later, I got to thinking about his itinerary. There simply was not enough time for him to get here by 7:05 pm. There is a very confusing time change, so I can understand why he thought he'd be arriving today, but it just couldn't be. So I called the airline. Sure enough, he's on a flight that arrives tomorrow at 7:05. How pissed will he be when he realizes he's getting home on Wednesday, not Tuesday? And how bummed was I that I have to wait another day to see him?

The good news is that he does have a seat on tomorrow's flight. He had booked the different legs of the trip separately, so I started to get worried that he had f'd it up and would have to pay for new ticket or something, but I think it's all okay.

meet-up

I'll be going to the big conference convening in the Midwest in August that puts the eco in ecogeofemme. I've got a pretty busy schedule building so probably not much free time, but it would be cool to meet some bloggers. Anybody else going and want to meet up?

Refreshed and sorta tan

I had a great vacation! We were in northwest Florida, halfway between Panama City and Destin. I was sad to leave the beach, but I'm happy to be home and ready to get back to work.

Every day we'd get up, have breakfast, strap on bathing suits and lube up with sunscreen (SPF 15 for my friend, 55 for me) and lounge on the beach till lunch. After lunch we'd go back out till around 5, then come in for showers, snacks and drinks. Most nights we went out to dinner around 8 pm, then came home and went to bed. That's basically my ideal beach vacation. To top it off, I didn't pay for anything other than my plane ticket and part of a fishing trip. Sweeeeet.

I got only a light tan, due in part to liberal application of SPF 55 and to spending time in the shade to avoid an unpleasant rash I get with too much intense sun exposure, but I got it on much more of my skin than I had intended. I had this great bathing suit from a couple of years ago. It was a relatively modest "tankini" that covered my whole midriff. At the last minute when I was packing, I tossed in an old string bikini just in case. Good thing I did, because the first day as I was putting on the good suit, I heard a ripping sound. The elastic was totally shot through the whole thing. I was really not thrilled about wearing the skimpy backup bathing suit in front on my friend's family, but her suit was even skimpier than mine, so I'm sure they didn't care. Actually, that’s the thing with the beach. Everyone is so self-conscious, yet nobody really cares what anybody else looks like. We all need to just get over it.

The swimming wasn’t too great owing to lots of yucky seagrass/algae stuff and an unappealing density of jellyfish, so we mostly sat under umbrellas reading books. I read Lonesome Dove, which is one of the best books I’ve ever read. At nearly 1000 pages, it took me almost the whole week to finish it. Spending that much time in a book that is that well written gets you really attached to the characters; it was really sad at some parts, so the last day on the beach I was trying to stifle sobs as I read. I almost never cry, but this book just got to me. Sigh… In contrast, I read most of a Janet Evanovich mystery (Lean Mean Thirteen) that BFF loaned me for my long waits for flights home. It sucks (although I guess it could turn around at the end). I’ve been hearing people go on and on about how great these Evanovich books are, but I certainly won’t read another.

Well, I’m going to start reading the 213 blog posts that accumulated in my reader last week and take a look at my email. Hopefully they’ll be better than Lean Mean Thirteen and less sad than Lonesome Dove.

I'm off!

I'm going on vacation tomorrow! I'm going to Florida for a week with my BFF and her parents and her gram. Aside from a half-day fishing trip, we'll spend pretty much the whole time laying on the beach. I worked my tail off the last couple of weeks to get lab work wrapped up on one of my projects so that I could vege for a week without guilt*. I came really close, so I feel pretty good about leaving.

I had planned to not even bring my laptop, but now I'm going to. We still don't have tickets to France for EGM's sister's wedding in late August. They are super expensive, so I'm going to wait for EGM to give me the name of the travel agent they sometimes use for work trips who seems to be able to find good deals. Even if that fails, our next credit card billing cycling starts Tuesday, so by waiting four days to buy the tickets, we'll have an extra month to pay for them. Another reason to bring the 'top is so I can email EGM. :)

In other news, once again I dragged my heels writing a post for Scientiae and missed it. It was a great topic too, so check it out. Also, Karina has an interesting post that you should comment on.

Have a great week, everyone!



*Remember this post when I said how Academic Advisor "joked" that I should have my paper submitted before this trip? Well, I've given him two drafts since then. He hasn't looked at them.

What should an intern do?

We've got lots of interns this summer. We're required to give them each a meaningful project to which they can make a significant contribution. It can be a piece of something larger, but it has to make sense as a project. At the end of the summer, the students have to give a presentation about their work which creates some accountability for project selection on our part.


We really like to create mutual benefit with these internships. The students aren't free, so we want to get some actual necessary labor out of them. On the other hand, we want to turn them on to our branch of science. Most undergrads aren't exposed to the work we do, even in the broadest sense, so we feel it's really important to show them some cool stuff to make their experience good.

But. Research isn't fun most all of the time. There are many, many boring/tedious/difficult/lame things that need to be done and we need the interns to do some of them. I sometimes feel bad when we assign really boring tasks to interns, but Awesome Technician always reminds me that we all have to do crappy stuff sometimes (see sidebar counter).

It gets tricky to design a good experience for undergraduate research participants. We want to get a bunch of work done while exposing people to the things we find so exciting and at the same time, not create unrealistic expectations for their futures should they decide to pursue research careers. I have seen several bloggers (but now I can't remember which ones) write about how they had a cool undergrad research experience but were then somewhat disillusioned by the bullshit when they got to grad school. I can see how it happens, since it's pretty easy to shelter an intern from the bullshit for 10 weeks and an internship can have a huge impact on a student's career choices.

So: handling interns is tricky. Our ethical consideration is usually we can't have them just wash dishes. But maybe there is also an ethical issue with making an internship too good for the intern. Wouldn't want to give anyone false hope, now would we?