Morphing into the dreaded User Facility
Hi Everyone! I’m GEARS which stands for Grads, Engineering, Academia, Research, and Students. I’m a newly minted PhD student who has accepted a tenure track position at a small Tier 1 private university (dubbed SnowU) starting at the end of this semester. Rather than looking back retrospectively and getting caught with shoulda-coulda-wouldas, I thought I start blogging about my experience transitioning from a wide-eyed PhD student to a refined, distinguished assistant professor. (Well maybe I’m getting carried away here but you get the point.) Blogging helps me jot down thoughts and ideas which will (hopefully) help me mentor students more effectively and run a successful research group while actually reaching students in the classroom. Yesterday, I harped on how Knowledge Learned doesn’t show up anywhere on a company’s balance sheet. That makes it very difficult to explain and justify why you should do something yourself, as a researcher, in a…
Patent (De)Pending
Yesterday was what I would consider bitterly cold on the high plains. The actual air temperature was around -15°F. I have no idea what the windchill was: I don’t bother checking because it’s usually bad and only makes me feel worse. Despite that, I tucked my lab notebook under my arm along with a mess of paperwork and trekked to the part of campus (i.e. the next building over, which is a long way in the cold) that deals with intellectual property issues. Those of you who read my blog may remember me talking about some easy funding I got for an idea. The idea involved developing a special widget, and my supervisor thought it was an *ahem* novel idea. He was hoping the widget might be patentable. Granted, I may not be Hedy Lamarr, who patented the secret communication device below, but one can always hope that all this excess…
Not in it for the money
When a friend recently found out I was working as an engineer, he said, “I never saw you as the worker bee type.” It was a good assessment of my personality, but not a good assessment of my job. All engineering jobs don’t require one to become a worker bee. Because the theme this week is engineering salary, it’s a good time to talk about what I do and do not expect from a job especially as I hope to go into academia (which, as far as I know, is different from my fellow bloggers here). There is a down side to this career path…or two, rather. The first is the stiff competition for open jobs. (Let’s pretend for a moment that it’s not there.) The second is the pay. As a grad student, I’ve averaged around $20k for an annual salary. That may not sound like a lot, but…
Plumber Envy
A Computer Science Professor from Harvard who had recently gotten tenure was working a sabbatical at Google when he decided to stay on full time at Google and leave his academic position. He writes a somewhat tongue in cheek comparison of his day over at his blog. What’s this have to do with plumbers? I’m getting there. And Mario is a plumber for those of you not up on your video game history. Computer Scientist David Lemire responds with a post about why you might not like your job but people envy it in his post citing famous cases like the guy with the PhD in Philosophy who left his job to go start his own shop. Lemire seems to think the disparity is in the day-to-day coding as compared to big picture meetings, mentoring and grant writing at Harvard. However, I think this misses the mark. The former Harvard…