Negligent Blogger is Negligent

Things have been a bit quiet around here lately, partly because things have been rather unquiet offline. The course I'm TAing has multi-week labs, and the last one was a doozy. It was a complicated set of experiments, with numerous equipment failures, concepts the students had never encountered before (ferroelectricity) and they had to share data across groups and sections. We TAs had some major communications SNAFUs, so the data formatting was horrendously inconsistently, and labeling was inconsistent at best. All of this results in many, many more student emails of "I can't find ____ on the course site". The reports have been turned in at last, and are sitting in an imposingly large pile on my desk. 14 reports shouldn't be a full ream of paper, but conciseness is a concept that continues to elude them.

The last lab of the semester is on mechanical properties of materials, and so far, things are going much more smoothly. I swear the lab gremlins demand a certain number of things be broken each lab, but thankfully, they can be satiated with intentional fracture. I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact that I'm vastly more comfortable with this equipment, or that there is considerably less jury-rigging involved with our setups... nope, nothing at all.

Mid-term panic

Even though I myself am not *taking* any classes this semester, I'm still feeling the mid-term crush. Part of this has to do with the class I'm TAing, as we want students to compare data across sections, which calls for a lot of extra effort from the TA's to make sure it's accessible. I'm also frustrated by the students who would much rather email me than read the damn handout.

On the other hand, I finally found an exercise class that 1) is on par with what my out-of-shape butt can handle and 2) fits in my schedule and budget. A friend convinced me to come with her to bellydancing class, and it's actually quite a lot of fun, but not going to destroy my joints.

What I really want right now is a vacation, but my Thanksgiving break promises to be full of grading.

Keeping sane...

In spite of the busyness of TAing and the rest of my semester, I've been making a much more concerted effort this year to take care of myself and stay sane. Part of this has been taking up two more hobbies (because I clearly didn't have enough), knitting and spinning. On the other hand, these are both very transportable and fairly affordable, and take relatively little energy. They also take enough focus to help my brain disconnect from work for a brief while.

Still, I'm having more coding related dreams than I've had in quite some time, so clearly something's not working. What do you do to de-stress and keep sane?

Productivity is overrated...

It has not been the most productive week of my life (other than knitting, which I learned this weekend). This week I had my first guest post of at Engineering Blogs, but mostly I've been waiting for code to run. I'm at one of those awkward points where until this batch of problems gets cleared up, there's not too much progress I can really make on my main project.  I'm supposed to be meeting with an undergrad who will help run some of the final simulations and analysis code I need to finish up the Project That Won't Die. Last week, I managed to drag some actual feedback about my paper from my PI, so I have suggestions on how to make the next manuscript reviews go more quickly, once I get the last of the data to redraft the manuscripts.

TAing is going fairly well, in spite of the best efforts of the equipment sprites. Voltage slowly drifting downward while trying to measure a ferroelectric hysteresis loop is troubling. The default tech support solution (unplug it and try again) worked, but still no clue what went wrong. Unfortunately, due to the way the lab is organized, the students are writing several large reports, when I think they would really benefit from writing more, shorter reports. They clearly are struggling with certain aspects of scientific communication, and need more feedback than the class is currently giving them. This is also the largest group they've ever had taking the class at once.

I have no impending deadlines (which is an odd sensation), but my baseline stress levels are still super high. It's as though I've forgotten how to work when not under extreme pressure. Maybe I just need more time to decompress...

Deceptive publication records

So several of us in my research group, frustrated with the what feel like is a complete lack of papers coming out of our group and our PI's snail-like pace in reading them decided to see how no one has gotten mad at him for not publishing more (admittedly, he's tenured and has been for awhile, but GiantU doesn't tend to be a school for resting on one's laurels). The answer seems to be as a very minor collaborator on projects none of us were even remotely aware of. Collaboration can be a fantastic thing, but in this case, it really seems to be at the detriment of his own students. Only 1/3rd of the papers he's published since coming to GiantU from OtherGiantU have one or more of his graduate students on them. So overall, his numbers look fine (though not spectacular), but we aren't getting the papers.

I see a lot of people giving graduate students advice about selecting advisors reminding them to check publication records. However, just looking at how frequently the PI has published can be deceptive. Check the other authors: are they even at the same institution? Even better, check the student's publication records. While some fields may typically not publish before graduation, almost every department website I've looked at is out of date, so some of those students may have already graduated.

Also, a question I asked on Twitter earlier: in your group, are things like papers and grants announced? This blog was triggered by me finding a recently published paper where my advisor was a collaborator and one of the students who has since left the group was also a coauthor. I had no idea this paper existed until it popped up in my search. My PI recently was awarded an experimental grant, which we only discovered because we brought in a new student to work on a brand-new project and there was a sudden equipment buying binge.

Am I just being paranoid, or is this all totally normal practice in science?

Checklists and Checking Out

This semester, as previously mentioned, I'm TAing the junior level MSE lab course at GiantU. I have to say, I may be learning much more than my students. GiantU is a very highly ranked school in my field, while SnowTech is rather less prominent. Consequently, I had expected a slightly higher caliber of students who were rather motivated. What I've found is that instead, GiantU seems to really attracted students who have mastered the system, rather than the subject.

What do I mean by this? They want to know exactly what to do on every assignment to get the grade they think they deserve. I've been flat out asked for checklists of everything they are supposed to include in their lab write-ups. I refuse to give them this, because I'm looking for their ability to piece together an argument. However, I get the distinct impression that many of the other professors in the department have gotten in the habit of spoon feeding their undergraduates. It's also very clear that they expect me to be on-call 24 hours a day, given their email habits. They clearly learned these habits worked somewhere, and I find it somewhat disappointing.

The modern K-12 academic system can be gamed very, very easily, in the era of standardized testing. If I had not been in the International Baccalaureate program, it would have been fairly trivial for me to maintain a 4.0 without any real effort, because you always knew exactly what would be on most tests. Because it's hard to quantify, No Child Left Behind has shied away from creativity, and critical thinking. It's about jumping through the hoops exactly as you are told, not about finding a route around them.

I was at the early edge of NCLB in my home state. My sister, who's only a grade above me, had a very different K-12 experience because of the difference in the number of standardized tests we had to take. Now, the students I'm seeing have grown up entirely in the NCLB system, and it shows. They struggle mightily with open ended assignments. Yet, in all their attempts to figure out exactly what they need to do to get the grade, they ignore the things I tell them matter, like proofreading (grammar is 50% of the grade for reports in this course) and proper referencing. Not looking forward to the next round of grading...

Where has all the motivation gone?

So I was at a conference all of last week, which was simultaneously inspiring and disheartening. I came out of talks with all sorts of ideas of things that I could do. On the other hand, I kept thinking about how impractical and uninteresting what I've gotten done in that last year has been. This has been a frustrating year, to say the least. I've been project-hijacked by my advisor several times to produce data for abstracts he submitted without existing data, or based on data he expected from students who ended up leaving the group. Because of a possible scheduling conflict, I had to submit a poster to a conference in case he couldn't be there to give his talk.  I've been trying to cut back on the whining, but after last week, I'm just tired. My work didn't belong at that conference, but my advisor told everyone to submit abstracts so that he could answer "yes" at committee meetings when asked if he had any students at the meeting.

I also got to meet with his perpetual golden child who really is a very lovely person, and provides some hope that maybe I can be successful in spite of my PI. She also reassures me that nagging him really is my only route to get papers read. On the other hand, it's been ONE YEAR since I sent the first complete draft of my first manuscript to him, and the total feedback I've gotten was "Well, sometimes your writing is a bit choppy". This is not due to a lack of nagging...

It's also a bit depressing to meet friends who have completed their Master's programs and are out in industry, with responsibilities and interesting jobs.

So now, I'm back, with no real looming deadlines, and it's hard to motivate myself to do anything right now. Suggestions?