Ten years

It was ten years ago this week that I went to my first meeting, which means I've been doing this work for a decade.  Wow. 

I recently went to a new-to-me meeting (where I suspect I missed the chance to meet a bunch of bloggers - boo!) that was pretty interesting. Not my people, exactly, but I learned some science and had good interactions with my boss. It's weird starting over. I know tons of people at my normal meetings, but very few at this one. In a way it felt like the first few meetings I attended, except that I now know how to navigate a meeting and I know a lot more science. I understand how to pick which talks I see, which sessions I skip, how to handle a poster session, how to mingle in the hallways. Fortunately, I was able to go to meals with my boss and various friends of his, so I was never on my own in an awkward way. Yet I didn't feel like a puppy because I went to most sessions on my own.

Now I'm all jazzed up to get some data!

Keeping a foot in both worlds

One of the tricky things about switching fields, yet being interdisciplinary, is figuring out how much involvement you want to keep in your old field.  My research still incorporates a lot from my old field, and I still identify as more of an Old Field-ologist.  Yet, I want to make inroads into New Field since that's the direction I've chosen for my budding research program.

This identity crisis isn't much of an issue except when choosing journals for papers and picking which meetings to attend.  There are two Old Field meetings this year that I really wanted to go to, but I think I'm going to miss them both in favor of New Field travel.  To be clear, it would have been completely relevant to take my current postdoc research to the Old Field meetings.  I say I switched fields, but they are not completely alien to each other.

Ultimately I'd like to work right on the border of the two areas.  My goal for my postdoc was to learn as much as I could about New Field(s), and then be able to assimilate that with my old stuff into something really cool and unique and interdisciplinary and, I think, hot right now.  So while it's disappointing that I'll miss my favorite meetings and the old friends and colleagues I'd see at them, I think it's better for my progress to go to the New Field events.  I'll be on a steeper learning curve, so I'll probably get more out of them, and I'll probably be expanding my network faster.  But it will be a little sad to tell my science friends, "no, I'm not going to Favorite Meeting again this year.  But I swear I'll be back someday soon".

Last place

Since sharing my experience with switching fields seems to be my favorite topic since I started my postdoc, how about a discussion of how authorship conventions differ between fields?

My new field works like many of you are probably used to.  There are often many (>10) authors on a research paper.  The first author did the experimental work and probably wrote the bulk of the text.  The second author did something substantial.  The middle authors, usually alphabetized, touched the project in some way - maybe they did one analysis, contributed a reagent, or did some important literature searches.  The last author is  the "anchor", the one who conceived of the project and got the funding.  It seems to me that people sometimes fight more over the last author spot than the first author spot.  The last author is usually the corresponding author.

In my old (still interdisciplinary, but less so) field, papers typically have fewer than 10 authors.  I don't have any data, but I'd guess that 4-6 authors is the norm.  The first author is the one who did the most work and wrote the paper.  The second author did the next most work.  The last author did the least work. Typically, the first author is the corresponding one.  When the corresponding author is somewhere else in the list, it's usually because of a scenario where the first author left research after a master's or something so they get credit as lead author but bear little responsibility for getting the paper through the publishing process.

I guess the anchoring author/lead author thing helps squeeze more credit out of papers with long lists of authors (two important positions instead of one).  Still, I'm having such a hard time getting on board with the way it goes in New Field.  I'm sure I would think it was just fine if I had grown up with that convention and it's a matter of not liking change, but right now I think this anchoring author stuff is kinda annoying.

The Question

The most important component of any research project is The Question.  The Question is the little aspect of Nature that the project aims to understand.  It informs the development of testable hypotheses that, in turn, influence the experiments to be run.

The Question is always a challenge to define for any new project.  I've noticed that it is particularly difficult in very interdisciplinary research because the questions that each person thinks are important differ widely.  I want to tackle issues central to ecogeoscience, whereas my collaborators would like to go after statistical/computational problems using the same data.  Other collaborators have yet more ideas about what the primary purpose of the project should be.  Working out how to expand and divide up the project so that everyone gets piece (i.e., a paper) is a real challenge.

Want

For this month's Scientiae carnival, Karina asks what sorts of supplies we crave for back to school.  I'm not much of a school supplies kind of person.  I don't need highlighters and special pens and fancy scissors and tape dispensers.  I have some of those things on my desk as I need them, but when I think of back to school shopping I think of clothes.

When I was a kid, I always got new clothes at the start of the new school year.  My family never had much money, so new things mostly came at birthdays, Christmas, and back to school time.  My mom would take me out, sometimes via the city bus to the downtown shopping area (so exciting!), and I would always want to accumulate as many bags as possible (how un-eco!).  Even now when the weather cools, I fantasize about new jeans and sweaters.  I try to restrain myself these days, due both to my budget and my ideals, but I do indulge a little.

On another supplies-related note, I'm finding my new lab is missing so many basic things!  They aren't basic to my new PI, of course, as the lab is outfitted quite nicely for the kind of lab that it is as far as I can tell.  But I keep coming up empty handed when I open drawers looking for the things I expect to be in a lab.  Fortunately, a new PI just joined our department and will be pooling resources somewhat with our lab.  This new person might do some things in my old discipline, so I might get to recommend some items for the start up.  Methinks this is a good opportunity to get some of the things I need while forging collaboration with the new person.

On organizing a meeting

I'm organizing a small conference.  Sweet Jesus is it a lot of work.  And anxiety.

One of my first tasks when I started my postdoc was to organize this thing.  What an intimidating, enticing challenge.

In addition to managing all the logistical decisions (what space will we use? what is the budget? how much will the registration fee be? will we have a poster session? how will we solicit and review abstracts? how will we determine the invited:contributed speaker ratio? how long will the talks be? and on and on), I had to develop the themes for each session and the meeting overall, invite the invited speakers, solicit industry sponsors, and write proposals for funding.  It's weird and hard to assemble the right mix of speakers in a field that you have only just entered.  Oh, and trying to stick to my principles and make sure there is good representation by women when I don't know enough players in the field to suggest any.  Boo!

Of course I'm not doing this totally on my own. I've had lots of input from my colleagues, and critically, other people have laid the groundwork for invited speakers, or funding, or lent clout to my emails with their names in the cc line.  Still, on the whole, I've been the lead on this thing.  My influence has probably shifted the focus toward my old field a little bit, so I'm curious to see how that will play out in the quality and cohesion of the program.

In sum, I wish I hadn't had to spend so much of my precious postdoc time on a service task, but I'm glad to have tried something new and to gain so much visibility in this new field.

Asphinctersayswhat?

I work in a really interdisciplinary group, where several labs in disparate fields work together and it's not possible for our projects to move forward without everyone cooperating.  I think (we all think) that the biggest challenge to this kind of collaboration is communicating across disciplinary lines.  In fact, that's part of why I was hired - to be a bridge between two of these labs.

There is a spectrum of miscommunication.  Some situations have glaring communication issues, where you can tell that people just aren't understanding each other at all.  Other times, we are using two different words for the same concept, or more commonly, the same word for two different concepts.   This one is particularly insidious because you don't necessarily realize that it has happened until much later.  My best example of this one so far is "open system".  I bet many of you have some context for that phrase, and they all refer to something different.  The mildest situation is when it simply takes more words to get your point across but the listener gradually understands.  That last one happens a lot.

I had a big long convo with my old advisor a couple of weeks ago and it felt so relaxing.  I'm sure it was largely because it was so easy to communicate.  There wasn't any need for back stories to fill in weak conceptual understandings, words were used in contexts common to us both, and words loaded with other meaning were understood with all that extra meaning intact. 

It's getting better, though, as I'm learning both the science of these other labs and their way of speaking.  We recently had a meeting with members of my old lab and my new lab.  I could see when things were getting confused due to word choice and then intervene to keep things on track.  It's slow, but I'm learning to be the bridge.

Tired with a side of disappointed

Today I found out that a paper I submitted a few weeks ago has been rejected.  It was the weakest of my thesis chapters, but we aimed low journal-wise so I'm surprised the reviews were as bad as they were and the rejection was as solid as it was.  So far I have only skimmed the review comments and they struck me as comprehensively negative but polite.  Research Advisor thinks they were mostly constructive--some complaints were refutable, some were founded and can help us revise, and some were flaws were knew were there--and that we can reframe the story for another journal.  I'm less disappointed about the rejection itself than I am bummed that it's going to take that much longer to shore up my weak publishing record.

In other news, today I learned a lab technique that is very new to me.  The technician who trained me is just as fantastic as Awesome Technician so it was a pleasant enough experience, and I am thrilled to be learning new skills.  Furthermore, this is the first lab work I've done as a postdoc and it felt great to be away from my desk for a spell.  However, I was awkward and uncertain about the choreography of the protocol and it is always exhausting to learn brand new stuff.  On top of that, by the end of the day I was so frustrated with the scale of everything.  I had to stand on a step stool to do several different tasks, and some critical tools didn't fit in my hands very well which contributed to my lack of coordination.  So irritating. 

To avoid going home and wallowing, I went shopping after work.  On the bright side, I found bargains. I got some low-heeled, moderately dressy shoes that I've been looking for for a while ($13), socks to wear with them ($5 for 6 pairs), jeans ($33 for two pairs), and a big splurge, perfume ($25).  I'm disappointed with the jeans though and bought them because they were on clearance and I was pissed off; I had tried on some cool designer ones at another store and there were comically long, reinforcing my disdain of being a short person in a tall-person world.  Phooey. 

The pace of things

My new subfield moves really fast.  New technology is continually rolling out, such that you might start a project with one technology and finish it with another.  That goes for the literature too.  Other Postdoc said that the oldest paper she's ever cited is from 1990.  PI told me his thesis is totally out-of-date, maybe even obsolete.  Year-old data starts to smell stale.

In contrast, the oldest paper I cited in my thesis is from the 1930s.  In fact, one of the larger criticisms of my big paper was that I didn't cite enough of the pioneer literature; the reviewer suggested some papers from the 1970s.  Research Advisor's thesis papers are still frequency cited.  We have data that is several years old that would still get in very decent journals.

Just another example of how a shift in fields can have a major impact on how you do, and think about, science.