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.

Anticipation

I'm going to a conference soon. It will be my first time attending a major meeting without presenting anything, and my first meeting in my new field.  I'm super excited.

There is a reasonably large group from my institution going to this conference, so I feel like I'll have lots of opportunities to tag along and get introduced to new people without following one person around like a puppy.  Also, there are a number of familiar names in the program (others like me that cross this particular disciplinary boundary) so I think I'll have a place to start with networking.  The session are quite varied, so I think that there will be slugs of people going to the same sessions on similar topics together.  Or not, if the meeting is really huge.  I'm not sure what to expect.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to expanding my network, getting to know the people at my institution better, and most of all, learning a shit-ton from the talks.  I've always learned easiest by listening, so I think I'm going to come away having made significant personal progress.

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.

Flocculating

I feel equal parts curious, irritated, and bored by the dissolution of ScienceBlogs and creation of the new blogging collectives.  Apart from Zuska and the occasional lateral click, I didn't read anything on ScienceBlogs that I hadn't already been following before the blog joined the collective.

The internet is a dynamic thing; I'm looking forward to innovation that might come from the change in the science blogosphere culture.  On the other hand, the situation smacks of cliquishness that I find unbecoming.

Vacay

I'm going on vacation next week!

My parents' 50th wedding anniversary is coming up and they are having a big party.  Everyone is coming.  It's going to be a full chaotic week of family, family, family.  It will be intense, but I'm really looking forward to it.  I haven't been to visit since New Year's, which is the longest I've ever gone without a trip home.  I'm especially looking forward to seeing my nieces and nephews who live far away and I rarely see.

Extra fun: we're going wedding/bridesmaids' dress shopping!  It's going to be so fun.  We've gone shopping together for each of my sisters' weddings so it's something of a tradition.  Except the family has grown, so this time there will be at least 10 of us.  Can you say cluster fuck?

Bonus: I get to spend the weekend with my BFF.  Maybe we'll go to the pool.  :)

Cultivating allies

I'm not aggressively feminist at work, but I do preach from a low level women-in-science soapbox pretty consistently.  Sometimes it's met with resistance, other times empathy, and many times with a blank stare.  I worry a little bit that it's annoying, but I figure sexism is such a pervasive problem that it's worth it to irritate people a little bit.

It seems my persistence has paid off.  I work with a male technician who, as far as I can tell, was brought up in a fairly traditional family with pretty typical gender roles.  This guy is terrific -- super cool, quite competent, excited by science, and respectful of me as someone senior to him -- but had never really been confronted with feminism and so had never really considered that the way men and women navigate the world, especially the science world, may differ. 

Today this colleague made a point of telling me about his recent experience with an auto mechanic.  His sister's car broke down, so he drove her to the shop to pick it up after the repairs were done.  He said that although the car was clearly his sister's and she paid for the work, the mechanic looked at him as he explained everything.  No eye contact at all with the sister.  My colleague said this was the first time he had noticed such an injustice, and thought it was because he was more aware of it now after all my bitching and not because it had never happened before.  Very cool.

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.