Moooooooooving time

It's Monday, my first day back at work after a most excellent vacation, and changes are afoot.

That's right, peeps, my blog has now moved over to new digs at Scientopia. Many thanks to the magnificent MarkCC over at Good Math, Bad Math for pulling the new site together.

Apart from the new location and new look, nothing much else will change. Rest assured that there will still be a lot of bitching and complaining although I'm hoping to reduce the amount of motherfucking cursing. Don't anticipate that the latter will be very successful.

Several of my bloggy brothers and sisters are also now at Scientopia and, if they haven't already provided you with their new addresses, you can find them all in the second blogroll on the new page.

I will not be updating this Blogger account from now on so you'll need to adjust your RSS feeds or whateverthefuck it is you need to do (the info for this is all on the Scientopia page).

See you on the flip side!

Update

Back from vacation. Need another few weeks to recover. That is all.

Weaning the trainees

It’s always difficult when newbie trainees start work in the lab. They’re bright eyed, bushy tailed, full of energy and itching to sink their teeth into some science. At the same, they’re usually a tad freaked out at the animals, the expensive machines that go PING!, the chemicals that smell like dead fish and the stuff that breaks easily.

A few months down the track, however, and they’re old hands with their protocols. They can recognize when things go wrong and fix them. Multi-tasking starts to become the norm. They begin to learn how to critically analyze their work.

But as soon as the PI mentions that she’s taking a vacation, all hell breaks loose.

How will they function without you?

What should they work on while you’re gone?

What if something goes wrong?

How will they interpret their data?

Will you be able to be reached by phone or email in the event that they have questions?

OMFG!!1!!! We’re all screwed!11!!ELEVENTY!11!!!!!

As a PI, one needs to have trust in one’s trainees. Trust that they won’t destroy the lab while you're gone. Trust that they’ll continue with their experiments and generate supercool data. Trust that they’ll use their initiative to continue to develop their projects. Trust that they'll pull together and help each other if something goes awry.

Sigh. And hope like hell they don’t burn the place down.

The pressures of the tenure track

As you’ve probably already figured out either here or at other blogs, being an assistant professor on the tenure track is not an easy thing. I can only speak from my own personal experience, but the combination of setting up a lab, teaching, service, politics, advising, etc, can be a crusher.

For me, the biggest obstacles have been initiating and then maintaining research momentum and trying to deal with all of the somewhat-extraneous demands on my time and energy.

Setting up the lab itself was no easy task, particularly as I started with a lab that was a room with benches and essentially nothing else. Even a year after getting all of the basics together and hiring a postdoc, we’re still dealing with the frustrations of getting protocols up and running and producing data. We have finally started to generate some momentum but the data still isn’t flowing at the rate I need for grants and I can't simply hire another postdoc because there just isn't enough money left in the pot.

I have some teaching responsibilities which, while not overly onerous, are still a big time suck. The great things about teaching though are that it breaks the monotony of lab/research/grants and also brings you into contact with students who have a passion for learning.

The service commitments can be good and bad but, on the whole, take up a disproportionate amount of energy relative to how much they actually contribute to the nuts and bolts of your progression on the tenure track. After almost two years on the TT, I now serve on a few departmental committees, am an associate editor for Middling Journal and am on a committee for Big Professional Society. The latter brings me into contact with both Professors BigWig and LittleFish in my field which can only be a good thing. The journal gig has helped me develop an appreciation for what goes on behind the scenes when I submit a manuscript for review. The departmental committees have done very little except give me a tiny role in shaping and developing the academic programs with which I am affiliated.

The biggest thing I struggle with, however, is the assumption that I am available for additional tasks - I think this is largely due to my reduced teaching load and the amount of time I spent in my office working on my computer ... ie clearly not appearing to be busy enough. I’m popular with our current students, so I’m constantly being asked to talk to potential grad students as well as incoming undergraduate students and their parents. My research lab is the biggest in our department so I’m expected to be the face of our research publicity efforts. The students I teach feel comfortable with me and seek my advice when they have career questions and then inundate me with requests for letters of recommendations for job and grad school applications. My reputation as a hardworking faculty member means that I have been requested to serve on almost every single departmental committee in existence. Every time I say no to any of the above requests, the spurned individual seems to take it as a personal affront instead of realizing that I just can’t be everything to everyone all of the time. There’s just not enough of me to go around. Period.

My primary focus is, and needs to be, on increasing the productivity of my lab and getting external funding. While I have confidence in my teaching abilities and know that those abilities alone will probably be sufficient to keep me employed in my current department indefinitely either on or off the tenure track, for me to get promoted and gain tenure, I need my research endeavors to be a success. Losing momentum at this stage will be very very bad. Which means I need to be firm about declining some of the other stuff. I’m not in this job to make friends and I know that some of my colleagues have taken it personally when I’ve refused a request for whatthefuckever. But there is only one of me. No matter how good I am.

The summer grind

By an unfortunate stroke of luck, I have four grants due on the same day this month. I’m basically on top of all the bits and pieces I need for each one and the proposals are all at the final draft stage but my poor grants manager is not dealing with the situation very well. His stress is largely due to the fact that each grant is going to a different agency and each agency has their own stupid rules, regulations and requirements, different budgets with different percentages for indirect costs, different websites, different ways of submitting the grants, etc.

I thought I was doing ok and handling the stress pretty well until I discovered a new gray hair this morning. Unlike the others that can be covered with the rest of my hair, this one is front and center where everyone can see it.

Shit. These goddamned grants are causing me to look like a skunk.

Aaaaaargh.

I can only imagine what they’re doing to my grants manager.

Can't please everyone/anyone

I'm so goddamned busy right now, my head is spinning.* I have several grant deadlines looming yet everyone else seems to think they and their needs should be my number one priority. Telling all of them they'll just have to wait hasn't gone down very well but they'll all have to suck it.

Grrrr.


* There's obviously enough time in the day to spend 2 minutes writing this post, though.

The challenge of grant writing

Part of my responsibility this summer has been to introduce our new interns to research articles and teach them how to read, interpret and critically analyze the literature. After struggling through a particularly complicated paper a few weeks ago, the question arose as to whether publishing research is more difficult than grant writing.

From my perspective, grant writing is more challenging but this is for several reasons.

1. There is always a journal out there somewhere that will publish your work, even if it’s the Journal of Useless Stuff. On the other hand, there are a limited number of agencies that would consider funding your work and convincing them to do this is getting more and more difficult by the day.

2. Writing and publishing a manuscript is telling the story about what you’ve already done and why it’s amazing. Writing a successful grant should involve telling the story about what you’d really like to do, why it’s amazing and convincing the reviewer that it’s worth pursuing. More often that not, though, grant writing is also about telling the story about what you’ve already done (aka preliminary data), why it and you are amazing (aka biosketch) and why your potentially interesting follow up ideas deserve the cash.

3. Publishing a manuscript is working with knowns and is often the end of a long journey. Grant writing is dealing with a lot of what ifs. What if aim 1 is shown to be shit? What if my preliminary studies cannot be replicated? What if the reviewers don’t see that my preliminary data are the coolest things since Doritos?

Interestingly, I think #3 can also be the best part of grant writing. In essence, I get to come up with my own ideas and find ways in which to test my hypotheses. I spend my days asking myself questions. What studies do I really want my lab to do? Does my supercool hypothesis make sense given the existing data? Can I generate enough preliminary data within my meagre budget to convince reviewers that my hypothesis is going to blow the lid off my field? If my hypothesis is proven, how will this impact science as a whole? Where are the Doritos I hid in my desk last week? Why am I wearing socks that don’t match?

Granted, though, writing proposals that don’t get funded can be a frustrating experience, much like banging one’s head up against a brick wall. On a bad day, I see grant writing as a complete waste of time, time during which I could be writing the manuscripts I’ve put aside in order to meet grant deadlines, time that could be better spent with my trainees actually doing science rather than crafting ways in which to ask for money to do it, time that I could spend hiking. On a good day though, going through the sometimes nasty comments from grant reviewers can be a good lesson in designing your research, looking more objectively at your proposal and seeing the flaws, coming up with a better approach, finding better experimental groups, learning to write more clearly, and being more critical of your own work.

Sigh. In an ultra competitive grant era, having seemingly flawless proposals, an incredible track record and an environment that is unbeatable seems to be beyond reach, at least at the moment for this newbie. Start up funds will only stretch so far and showing that 95% of your Big Ass Multi-Year Proposal has already been done just isn’t feasible within the time, personnel and budgetary constraints. I spend most of my days trying to make my grants better, tighter, and to provide more convincing evidence that I’ve done the work I’m asking for money to do in the hope that someone, somewhere, sometime will point the magic funding wand at my proposal. At this point, I’m not sure what else I can do. In theory, it’s fun. In practice, sometimes it is, but sometimes not so much.