Passengers on your bus

Reading Arlenna’s nice post about procrastination reminded me to write about a terrific seminar I recently attended. It was delivered by a dissertation coach* (I’ll call her DC) who was a really funny, charismatic speaker. I think that helped her morph some messages that might otherwise have been kind of tired or cheesy into something profound. She hooked me when she said, “isn’t it annoying when people tell you to just sit down and write? That’s like telling someone who wants to lose weight that they should just move more and eat less”. I need to pass that gem along to my mom.

Much of DC’s message was about dealing with imposter syndrome. She claimed that those nasty voices telling you that you aren’t smart enough are the source of your procrastination. So when you obsessively check your email when you should be writing or you spend your “work all weekend” weekend watching Beauty and the Geek marathons, it’s really imposter syndrome rearing its ugly head.

DC had a somewhat odd but very effective demonstration to convey this idea. She had someone from the audience volunteer to describe her dissertation research. She asked the volunteer to say the values that led her to this work. The woman was researching nursing, so she said things like helping people, improving quality of care, etc. Then DC compared writing a dissertation to driving a bus. A bus driver has a goal (the end of the route) and has passengers getting on and off the bus all day. The driver can’t control who gets on, even if they smell bad or are rude. She just has to continue driving toward the end of the route. DC asked other people from the audience to act like the volunteer’s imposter syndrome. She had the volunteer pretend to drive toward her goals/values while the others stood behind her, shouting all of the negative things one might think, like “you should have never been accepted to grad school” and “they’re going to think your paper is terrible”. The volunteer laughed, of course, but also didn’t make much progress toward the end of her route. She kept turning around to look at them. Which brought DC to her point: negative emotions are like passengers on the bus; you can’t get rid of them and if you keep trying to deal with them, you’ll stop making progress toward your real goals. She advised us to expect those emotions to come and then to plug along anyway. When you start to feel tempted to check your email for no reason, remind yourself that it’s the passengers on your bus distracting you.

This mindset can be applied to almost any long term goals, like saving money or losing weight. Keeping you values in mind can help you get past the little negative voices that get you off track.

Tomorrow, practical advice for actually writing your dissertation.


*DC has a nice, content-rich website that I’m happy to share with anyone who’s interested in learning more. I know my location is sort of an open secret, but since her website would make my location really obvious, I think it might be going too far to link to it here. Email me if you want the address.

A better world

I missed the February Scientiae deadline, but I'm going to write on the topic anyway. Pat wants to know about our dreams for a better, more equitable society. I have the same visions that many others have -- freedom to have the type of family you want with good, affordable childcare and access to any kind of job with no discrimination. But all of these seem to be symptoms of a larger, more underlying problem of bias and marginalization in our society. We're socialized to fit gender roles that have positives as well as all those negatives. So yeah, to make things better for women, we need to support daycare on site and all that, but to really chip away at the problem, I think we need to change things for men.

I want men to never think twice about doing "women's work". I want domestic jobs, from household chores that are done by its members to paid work like childcare or nursing, to be things men do too. Without anyone thinking anything of it. Without men getting extra credit for making dinner or ironing. And jobs like daycare teacher would be paid more because men would want to do it too.

I think women will have fair shake once they can stop doing two jobs at once. It needs to be totally normal and expected for men to do all the jobs that women do. I don't mean just in your relationship because you have a super supportive partner. I want it to do beyond supportive partners. Even that phrase is suspect; it's like saying "my partner helps me do the things I should be responsible for at home". No. People should be equally responsible.

I think a better, more equitable society is one where it's okay for boys to wear pink (we fight to get girls out of pink, right?), for boys to play with barbies (we fight for girls to play with trucks, right?), for a husband to clean the toilet without thinking he's doing to help out his wife, for hairdressers, lawyers, and professors to be equally valued, whether they are men or women. If there is no men's work and women's work, then there can't be any discrimination related to work. Even science.

scientiae-carnival

Whenever I write about gender stuff, I get a little nervous. I haven't had any training in gender studies but I know many of you have and I worry my ideas are silly. And now new, although they are new to me. But after watching how things work, they're the ideas I have. I guess the blog is pseudonymous for a reason.

Bowie's in space

I watched the movie Labyrinth for the first time tonight. I just about peed my pants at the start of the movie I was laughing so hard. Why? Because Flight of the Conchords did such a spot on parody last year that I couldn't think of anything else. Compare:



A clip from Flight of the Conchords, including the very funny "Bowie in Space".



A series of clips from the movie. It was the only think I could find with a clip from the scene where Bowie visits Sarah in the house.

I have some posts with real content coming, I promise. But since we got the new t.v., we've been getting the most out of our Netflix subscription...

My manu-baby: 5904 words, 43 pages*

Blogging has been light around here while I made the last push at delivering my manu-baby, as Research Advisor has been calling it. After much labor, it was finally submitted yesterday at 6:08 pm. It entered the world with all its references and figures just right and we have big hopes for its future.

In other words, the paper I've been whining about for the last 12 months is FINALLY DONE!!!

We aimed kind of high on the journal (at my insistence) so I'm not holding my breath that it will be accepted. I think it will at least go to review. I really hope so because I don't want to think about it for a few months. I'm looking forward to working on other things for a while.

Research Advisor came through in the end with tons of great comments and lots of help with the final details. And she gave me a Twix as soon as I hit submit.

I learned a lot during the course of writing this paper: science, writing, communicating, and managing coauthors. I'm hoping the next one is easier and quicker.


*word count does not include references and stuff. page count does.

Where I've been

visited 24 states (48%)
Create your own visited map of The United States or try another Douwe Osinga project


I saw this at Short Geologist's place. I only counted states that were a destination, not states I only passed through or had a layover or something. I suppose if I did count drive-through states, I would only add Kansas and Alabama. I will definitely be going to one new state this year and possibly two.

Back to normal

Ecogeoman is finally back home. What a relief. I'm not afraid of flying myself, but I do get nervous when he flies. What if his plane crashes and he gets stranded like on Lost*?

I've also been looking forward to EGM's return as a cure for the lazy slumpiness that has plagued me for the last several weeks. I haven't done jack shit on the evenings or weekends which makes me feel bad. I'm hoping that having him around will activate me a little. At the very least sitting around the house, being snowed in in frigid weather will be less boring with his company.



*OMG, I just watched the three hour refresher. I can't freaking wait for the new episode next week!

Thick skin

Research Advisor is an excellent writer and editor. She hasn't had many opportunities to edit student work and has said that it has been a learning process to figure out the best ways to help Awesome Technician (who is not a student but is a student-like young scientist) and I with our papers. I've noticed that she seems just a little uncomfortable giving me feedback on my writing as though she seems slightly afraid that I might get defensive. So far her comments have been nothing but constructive, really improving the paper, so there have been no problems. AT concurs.

Awesome Technician and I both minored in English in college and we credit the "workshopping" that was the centerpiece of many of our English courses with thickening our skins -- a good trait for budding scientists. My university required all students to take a junior-level writing course. My minor was essentially comprised of several of these courses (plus creative writing, linguistics, and an independent study writing my science department's alumni newsletter). I had business writing, exposition, and technical writing, each designed for juniors in other disciplines to improve their written communication skills by forcing them to write more. I didn't really get a whole lot out of these classes since they didn't progress -- each one was independent rather than working together in a sequence to build skills. After the first one it was pretty easy for me to bust out an A paper, whereas my classmates who were, say, engineering majors who never had to write more than a paragraph struggled. Thus I wasn't challenged to improve my skills, but I did gain from the practice.

There was one aspect of these classes that taught me some skills I didn't happen to learn anywhere else, however. They all had a workshopping component, where students read each other's work and discussed it as a group. It's one thing to receive the critiques of your friends and classmates, but it's really different to give it. Being on the other end (which is pretty rare at the undergrad level) teaches you lots of technical things about writing because the mistakes of others stick out at you in a way that your own flaws don't. It also gives you empathy for the person reviewing your writing because you know where they are coming from when they make certain types of comments. Most important for me now, it helps you take criticism in the way it was intended -- you have the experience to realize that the criticism isn't about you.

I'm very grateful to have an advisor who is sensitive to my ego. She can really shred a paper without being mean or even judgemental. In fact, I almost wish she were a little more to the point at times because I think it would make things go faster. I could take it.