Summer students swarm serene science space, create chaos

There are six extra people in our lab this summer, plus a temp who is finishing up a 5-month gig. There will also be a visiting post doc for a few weeks in July (staying at my place) and a post doc who has a joint appointment with another lab who will be with us more than usual. For reference, there are only eight of us there full-time year-round.

I enjoy having interns and visiting faculty around. The work that has become hum-drum to us is fresh to new people; their enthusiasm can enliven the mostly repetitive and often boring work we do. Also, it is exciting to see so much get done so quickly.

It takes good organization and communication to train and manage all those people, many of whom do not have much lab experience. Even the ones who have spent some time in labs don’t know how our lab operates (obviously), so they need a lot of help. If we don’t keep up with their needs, things can get royally f’d up. Regular readers may recall that our lab has occasional organizational shortcomings; I always get tense at the start of the summer before we know what the interns are like. Good ones make the summers rock out, but so-so ones can wreak havoc without even knowing it (if we were more organized or better mentors, we could probably circumvent problems).

Today was good though. I knew others would be working in the same area as me, so I got started in the lab straight away to could claim some space and supplies. One by one, people joined me and managed to squeeze in so everybody could work. An interesting if tedious highlight was sitting quietly while three different interns got trained by three different people at different points in the day to do almost the same thing. But the best part was with the temp: housekeeping is a perennial problem for us so yesterday I had asked her to clean up a big mess she had neglected for days and days and today she did it! I was the first to leave this afternoon, so we’ll see how the space looks tomorrow morning.

I hope today signals the start of a fun and productive summer.

RBOC

• I have been having a hard time putting myself to bed lately. I just stay up doing stupid shit like doing crossword puzzles online, which are a new mini-obsession. This means that I am a) grouchy and b) not productive sitting at my desk. I've been doing more in the lab lately to avoid staring into space when I'm supposed to be writing a talk for a workshop next week.
• The summer students have arrived. I like the feeling of intense productivity during the busy, well staffed summers. On the other hand, the lab gets crowded and messy and that drives me fucking nuts. There may be more on this later.
• I had an awesome time meeting some other bloggers this weekend. They were remarkably similar to how I'd imagined them. There may be more on this later, too.
• I watched the Ricky Bobby movie tonight. The extras were better than the movie.
• EGM recently learned that he has to skip a paycheck, so we are trying to be frugal and go easy at the grocery store. While annoying, I'm glad to be more mindful of how we shop and eat. I feel like Arduous. There will probably be more on this at The Economical Academic soon.
• I gotta go to bed now before my face falls in my keyboard or I pick a fight with EGM for no good reason. G'night.

Nobody's fault

I like to listen to NPR podcasts while I quietly sit in a chair and do little things with little things in the lab (on the other hand, I like to listen to dance music when I stand at the bench and move big things around a lot). The other day I listened to the episode of This American Life, "The Giant Pool of Money" which aired on May 9. It investigates the people behind the mortgage crisis/credit crunch and is riveting. Seriously.

Good for morale

At my lab, we like to talk about Lost the day after it airs. It used to be a string of individual conversations that seemed to go on all day. I'd talk to the first guy who got in, then later Awesome Technician and I would talk about it, then maybe later Research Advisor would want to chew on it with us too, then I'd see the other technician chatting with AT, and on it went. Now we take turns bringing donuts. No one is allowed to talk about last night's show until we're all together and then we hash out our theories and questions over some Boston cream.

I really like that we do this. Sure, it's 30 min of wasted time, but I think it's good for us. It's nice to have a little fun at work, as long as it doesn't get out of hand. On top of that, it often devolves into work talk.

I'd like to note that people in the lab who don't watch Lost are welcome to join us for donuts if they don't mind listening to us hypothesize about hatches and smoke monsters.

Writing meme

This isn't a meme exactly. As I've struggled this year with my first manuscript, I've been wondering how other people write. I figure polling the academic blogosphere is the perfect way to find out.

I'd like to solicit posts about the nuts and bolts of writing. How do you get from blank page to submitted manuscript or grant? Do you outline? Do you go through many iterations or do you give birth to a nearly final draft after doing lots of prep in your head? Do you organize notes from all the relevant literature, or get your ideas down and fill in references later? Has your writing method changed as you've become more experienced? What are your tried and true techniques and what have you found just doesn't work?

Personally, I like to free write in sort of a stream-0f-consciousness way at first. I know the most of the basic literature in my head so I can get the skeleton of a draft written without lots of notes. When I feel stuck, I try to just get my thoughts on the page, even if they include slang or swear words or "blah blah blah" when I'm not sure of something. Once I have some text to work with, I start refining; I rewrite sentences, fill in references, and add new thoughts when I discover something I had forgotten in the literature. After the bulk of the document is in place, I cut sections out and paste them in a blank page so I can rework them without the distraction of the rest of the document. Usually, I make a new file called "cut material" so I can delete chunks of text that I know are unnecessary without second guessing myself, since they will still exist if I decide I still want them.

I don't think my method is particularly efficient and maybe not that effective, so I'd love to hear how others do it. If you are interested in sharing your writing habits, please leave a comment with a link to your post. If you don't have a blog but want to share how you get your writing done, long comments are always welcome here.

Fast cash

I made the easiest money of my life last week.

A friend called me two weeks ago to invite to participate in a focus group she was hosting at her apartment. She had to get 7-8 of her friends to call the market research company and they would choose 5 of those to go to her place for two hours to discuss alcohol. My friend said she didn't know what exactly it was for, but the participants had to be screened by the market research people; she told me exactly what I had to say to qualify.

I felt terrible after I called because I had to lie about almost everything. I had to say I was older than I am, make more money than I do, go to the bar more often than I do, drink more than I do, and drink mostly cocktails, especially appletinis, which I had never even tasted. But I got in! I felt so bad about it that I went out and bought liquor to make appletinis because I was so afraid I would be asked something that I didn't know. What an over achiever I am!

I had to do "homework" before the focus group met. I had to print a picture of my liquor storage area and respond to questions like, "what is your favorite drink to have at the bar and what do you love about it?" I've had a house guest for the last month (hence my lighter-than-usual blogging) so we made cocktails every night so I'd have something to say that wasn't a total lie.

It turns out that I did represent the intended demographic pretty well even though I had to fib to qualify. Although they didn't come out and tell us their purpose, I'm sure the researchers were for a company that makes fruity liqueurs that you're all familiar with. The focus group started with my friend making cocktails for everyone (I had a chocolatini which I had never had before despite telling the phone screener it was one of my favorite things to order at the bar) while a man and woman from the market research company asked us questions. They mostly had us talk about our drinking and shopping habits and asked us questions to get us to elaborate. They wanted to know things like how we find out about new drinks, how we know how to make drinks, when we have different drinks, etc. We brought up how we drink differently now than we did in college and they wanted to know a whole lot about that. The most interesting part was when they got out a bottle of watermelon schnapps and asked us how we would redesign the product/package to better market it to people like us. The package is really stupid, so we had a lot to say. They liked that and had us do two more. I'm pretty sure the point of it all was for the company to learn how to better market its fruity liqueur line to older people (35-year-olds instead of college kids).

In the end, I got $20 for cab fare (much more than the cab cost) and $175 dollars for participating. How cool is that? I hope I'm in the database now so I'll get called to do more focus groups!

Selecting a lab

As a follow-up to these posts, I thought I'd write a little about how students in my field typically find and join labs. I am pretty sure my experience is generally representative of my discipline, but there may be departments that do it differently.

It’s very difficult to get accepted to grad school in my field without having an advisor who has agreed to take you on. Typically, students go straight into a lab; they do not join the department as a student at large*. When the faculty are debating who to accept, you must have an advocate in the department who will commit to mentoring you. This means that 1-8 months before applications are due, you have to start emailing faculty whose research interests are similar to yours. After determining that you have mutual interests, it’s good to ask if the professor has space for students in the coming year, if they have funding, what new projects the lab might be initiating, etc. It can take a lot of searching to find a lab that has everything you want in a location you can tolerate.

Often, after the applications have been reviewed but before offers are made, promising prospective students are invited to visit/interview on the university or lab's dime. This might be a group event where all prospectives visit at once, or students might be invited individually by a professor. This is the time to make sure the student and advisor make a good match -- they are interviewing each other. In the best visits, the prospective gets time to talk privately with current students to learn what life in the lab/department in really like. Often, the visitor stays with one of the current students, so they get a chance to ask lots of candid questions. Although as Mad Hatter pointed out, labs that don't value "fit" so much may not provide one-on-one time with each member of the lab. Unfortunately, some students, especially internationals, are unable to make a visit for a variety of reasons. For students who can't visit (international or not) or who visit but don't get a chance to talk privately with current students, it's a good idea to contact current and former students to make sure the advisor's style is one that you can cope with.

I don't know of any departments in my field that do rotations. The department I'm in is rather small, so the faculty are so different that I wouldn’t want to work with any other than my advisor (if for some reason during the first 1-4 years I had had to leave my lab, I think I would have changed schools before I would have changed advisors. At this point, I would stay to finish up no matter what). Larger departments might have people with enough overlap that there are more options for students. People do change labs if there is a big problem, but it’s rare.

There are clear advantages to this system. The most obvious is that it can help ensure equitable distribution of students among labs, favoring new faculty if necessary, since students just aren't accepted if there isn't space in the lab they want. For example, I've heard that there can be more students wanting into a lab than the professor can handle after the students are already in the program. I imagine this must sort of typical for departments that do rotations. Personally, I think I'd be upset if were in a department for a year and then couldn't get into the lab I wanted. Of course, it's also not good for faculty to get swamped with students as Ianqui described. Another advantage of this system is that students can be sure they will work in a research area that matches their interests. On the other hand, this system is less flexible than other models. Student and advisor may meet only briefly, if at all, before committing to 4-6 years together. If the student turns out to be a poor match for a lab, they may have few alternatives but to leave the department.

I'm pretty happy with the system my discipline uses, but since I haven't experienced any others, I can't make a balanced comparison. I bet that the advantages I see might not be so important in fields where students research is less tightly associated with faculty research, or where there is more overlap in faculty interests.

If anyone reading this is considering grad school ecogeoscienceology and has questions about finding a lab/department, feel free to email me.we

*Since students join labs and not departments, the fame and quality of the professor is more important than the quality of the department.