Somedays, life doesn't suck

Posting has been particularly sporadic recently, as I've been spending more time than usual coding. It's amazing how much creative energy this really takes. I've also had a great time working with the undergraduate on my project. Ze's super motivated and picks things up quickly. I will be sad to lose hir this summer. However, ze will be transitioning to an experimental group, and I do think the exposure to a wider variety of types of research before graduate school is highly beneficial. Plus, this experimental group is run by SuperFamousDude, which will look a lot better on grad school applications.

But for the next few weeks, we get to finish going over all the results and figuring out what needs to be done to polish them up for inclusion in a manuscript.

I also have delicious tea, the sun is out, and I found the Query Scholar extension for Chrome by way of @highlyanne . I may even decide to eat lunch not at my desk.

Thinking about careers

I've always been someone who compulsively plans my life out years in advance, though I refuse to plan vacations with any sort of detail. Right now, I feel sort of in limbo, since there's a pretty broad range of when I will graduate, based on how quickly research works/ my advisor reads future papers. I'm also thinking a lot about what kind of career I want. Recently, it was suggested that I might be a good editor, and the more I think about it, the more it seems like a very good fit. I prefer being a generalist to a specialist, and I can read and edit at faster speeds than most people I know. Of course, I likely have several more years to change my mind dozens of time before it will really matter.

Learning from (Negative) Examples

My advisor is a brilliant scientist, but he's not such a brilliant manager. So I'm trying to figure out what I can learn *not* to do from his example, in addition to all the things I'm learning to do as a graduate student.  Here are some of my initial thoughts:

1) Don't take more than 6 months to give any feedback on a paper. Students would rather get a paper with angry red ink demanding we re-write entire sections than wait while you polish the language.

2) Don't assume students know what they're supposed to be working on if you don't tell them directly. Corollary: don't assume students know about deadline just because they happened at the same time last year. A year ago is a much longer time to a graduate student than you, and we don't get emails reminding us of upcoming grant reviews unless *you* send them.

3) Announce when positive things happen. Land a grant? Announce it! A paper got accepted, even if the student graduated? Announce it! A big celebration isn't needed, but let us know.

4) When disasters happen, make time to meet with the affected students, or else they get really jittery.

5) If you're going to be super busy or traveling, let students know so they don't spend all day trying to hunt you down when you're out of town. We shouldn't be asking undergrads for copies of their syllabi to know when you have scheduled absences.

6) Never, ever submit conference abstracts with a student as a co-author (i.e, the person expected to generate the data) unless a)the data already exists or b) you warn the student that they need to produce this data *at the time of abstract submission* (not 4 weeks before the presentation...)

What have you learned by bad example?

One Year Later

Happy blogiversary to me! So what has changed from my first post?

-I got married
-My advisor finally read my first manuscript, two years after I sent it to him
-I passed my prelim!
-I joined the team over at EngineerBlogs!

My three most popular posts were An Engineer's Guide to Low Stress Wedding Planning, Why I'm Changing My Name and Speculative Abstracts and Golden Children.

My daily routine is very different now, with no classes to take or teach for the first time since I was 5. It makes it feel like summer, though the weather isn't trying very hard to disabuse me of that notion. I'm still haven't adapted to an existence without multiple looming deadlines at all times. My nearest major deadline is May. I know I'm supposed to enjoy this rare period in my life, but I'm much happier working with deadlines: they help me prioritize.

My major goals for the next year are to get the paper out the door, and get the next 2-3 manuscripts on my advisor's reading list. I want to rewrite my codes so that I can run them on the HPC cluster instead of my desktop. I've got a bunch of other project specific goals, but mostly, I want to make it through the next year with my sanity relatively intact.

Final Push

The final assignment of the semester is due today, which means I will be spending tonight and tomorrow grading so that grades can be turned in on time. At some point, I also need to pack, do several more loads of laundry, get keys to the cat sitter, and see if I can manage to breathe through my nose again...

I'm starting to look forward to next semester. For the first time, I won't have classes, as a student or TA. I have a fantastic undergrad working with me who is very motivated. I've realized that there's nothing I can do to get my advisor to read my manuscripts any faster, so I really have to figure out how to keep myself motivated in spite of him. Even though I have fewer distractions, I think next semester is going to be hard, partly because I won't be as busy. The less time I have available, the less I tend to procrastinate. With no other impositions on my time, I worry I won't get anything done...

Away from my desk

This week has been a definite anomaly, in that I've spent more time in a lab than at a desk. Being that I'm a computationalist, generally speaking, my desk *is* my lab. However, I'm TAing the junior level lab course for the department, and between the lab this week and training and prep for next week, I've mostly been in the lab getting nice and gritty.

The students this week get to see casting up close and personal, generally for the first time. Last week, they carved foam parts, which we mounts to runners at the foundry before making a sand mold. This method is called "lost foam" (though more generally it's lost wax, but we're using foam...), and you actually leave the pattern in the sand. Then, when you pour the metal, it burns up.

I'd forgotten how much I loved poking around the machine shop, but more than that, I'd forgotten how jazzed I get when I'm teaching. As the TA with the most prior casting experience, and with the professor out of town, I've taken point for this lab (though my first formal lecture isn't for another two weeks). I find teaching super-energizing, to the point where Mr.ME gets annoyed with how bouncy I am when I get home.

Because GiantU, unlike SnowTech, does not have an on-site foundry, we had to drive to the site, which was a fun chance to talk to students in a less formal setting. I also took the chance to ask them about how my advisor is as a teacher (answer: much better than he is as an advisor). He's even teaching one of the harder courses in the curriculum, so it's all the more impressive. Of course, it's still before the first exam, so they may yet change their minds.