One beneficial thing about working out in the “real world” before starting a PhD is that you have the perspective of academia within the larger world, rather than academia as the only thing you’ve ever known. If you’ve gone from grade school to college directly on to grad school, you may not realize what a …
Category Archive: The professional academic
Permanent link to this article: https://ecologybits.com/index.php/2016/07/20/the-postdoc-pay-cut/
Most ESA Early Career Fellows are almost mid-career
The Ecological Society of America recently announced its call for nominations for awards for 2017. I encourage you to get out there and nominate people. In particular, consider nominating folks that are historically underrepresented. [1] For the Early Career Fellows, consider nominating someone at a comprehensive university, primarily undergraduate university, or in the private sector. …
Permanent link to this article: https://ecologybits.com/index.php/2016/07/13/esa-early-career-fellows-are-mostly-almost-mid-career/
Open data, authorship, and the early career scientist
About a year ago, my coauthors and I published a huge dataset of more than a million annotated images of animals from a camera trap network in the Serengeti. The lead author, Dr. Swanson, and I are both early career scientists, and we both put a ton of time and effort into this dataset. We …
Permanent link to this article: https://ecologybits.com/index.php/2016/06/15/open-data-authorship-and-the-early-career-scientist/
Experiments in efficiency: cooking while peer-reviewing
In computer science, laziness is a virtue. The term “lazy” is basically used as a shorthand for saying you should strive for efficiency so you don’t spend time writing code you could have avoided writing if you’d been smarter about your coding design. I’ve always generally keep an eye towards efficiency in my work, and …
Permanent link to this article: https://ecologybits.com/index.php/2016/06/08/experiments-in-efficiency-cooking-while-peer-reviewing/
Thoughts on my first double-blind peer review
Not too long ago I agreed to review a paper after skimming the abstract and looking up the journal. When I went to actually do the review, I saw that the journal has a double-blind policy, and so I couldn’t see the names or affiliations of the authors and they couldn’t see mine. (The latter …
Permanent link to this article: https://ecologybits.com/index.php/2016/06/01/thoughts-on-my-first-double-blind-peer-review/
Postdocs, don’t buy that yacht just yet
If you’re an early career scientist and you spent any amount of time on the interwebs this past week, you no doubt caught sight of headlines proclaiming great news for U.S. postdocs: “Postdoc pay to increase due to new overtime rule,” “US law could increase postdoc pay,” “Fair Pay for Postdocs.” Well, I hate to be …
Permanent link to this article: https://ecologybits.com/index.php/2016/05/25/postdocs-dont-buy-that-yacht-just-yet/
When should I start a family? (Actual advice rather than platitudes for the early career academic)
Standard replies as to when to have kids when you’re on the academic path are: “there’s no good time” or “when it’s right for you” or “there are tradeoffs” or variations on these themes. While this advice is true, it’s also useless. And for people who are looking for actionable advice, it’s frustrating to not …
Permanent link to this article: https://ecologybits.com/index.php/2016/05/18/when-should-i-start-a-family-actual-advice-rather-than-platitudes-for-the-early-career-academic/
Let’s stop ignorance-shaming
The most egregious time I was ignorance-shamed I was working for a mid-sized non-profit whose mission was to raise money to fund cancer research. I had moved to a new city and had ended up at the non-profit through a temp agency; I worked part-time doing administrative tasks. While I was there, the executive director …
Permanent link to this article: https://ecologybits.com/index.php/2016/05/12/lets-stop-ignorance-shaming/
Scheduled Sanity Days
One of the challenges of academia is learning to work for yourself. Before my science life, I worked for a large bureaucracy, a small family business, and a medium-sized non-profit. And in all cases, someone else was telling me what to do. At the small business, my work was dictated to me on an hour-to-hour …
Permanent link to this article: https://ecologybits.com/index.php/2016/04/27/scheduled-sanity-days/
I am unwilling to relocate again (and it will probably cost me my academic “career”)
Multiple moves are the norm in academia and it’s a major structural problem that gets in the way of diversity (and other) initiatives. Long gone are the days when the academic was (only) a hetero white male who was either single (and a highly eligible bachelor with his PhD in hand) or had a family …
Permanent link to this article: https://ecologybits.com/index.php/2016/03/23/i-am-unwilling-to-relocate-again-and-it-will-probably-cost-me-my-academic-career/
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