Year Two Began Anew…
…and it’s kicking my ass, as you can probably tell from my lack of posting. Last October, I posted on how I was diving right into the deep end (see: What’s the difference between 18 and 27?) because my feeling was that academia is sink or swim and those that can cope will, and those that can’t cope won’t. I was most decidedly in the camp that thought they could cope and things would be easier once I got a grant or two under my belt. This led to a, shall we say, promiscuous year applying for any and all proposal solicitations that were remotely in my area (~10 NSF-length proposals, and ~10 smaller opportunities). I wanted to make sure I got some funding in the first year to get off to a good start. It turns out that when you get more than 1 or 2 grants under your belt,…
Getting my groove back
Last week, I complained on my own blog about how I wasn’t looking forward to school starting. In the meantime, it has started, and I’ve made it through the first week of classes. Now that I’m starting to get back in the groove, I’m looking at things a different way. First, as much as I love summer, I like the fact that my life is now moving back into a predictable, albeit busy, routine. I have certain days I’ll be teaching, certain days where I take my dogs to class, certain days I’ll be running my kids to events, and certain meetings that I simply cannot avoid. Taken as a whole, I really like having a schedule and knowing where and when I need to be a certain place. Summer, with it’s lack of structure, sometimes leaves me feeling a bit lost. Second, I’m happy to be teaching again. I…
Irreproducibility
I’m not sure how many academics read EngineerBlogs, but I’m curious how many have run into the problem of false results. I personally spent a lot of time trying during my MS trying to reproduce data from various papers only to find there were problems with the results or the set up. I can remember one paper, in particular, that showed an antenna design published by a fairly prestigious group. I used exactly the same software and tried to replicate their design only to find that the results were considerably different than what was shown in the paper. I finally broke down and emailed one of the authors. Their response was that the dimensions given on the design were not correct. The problems are multiplied, of course, if you’re dealing with different software as you may not be able to even get your simulation results to match up. How do…
This class is a joke
Next week, I’ll be finalizing the syllabus for my fall classes. I am again teaching the university studies classes for the electrical engineers. My goal in teaching last year was to help my students develop good study skills and awareness about their learning preferences. I also attempted to teach them some STEM specific skills, like keeping a lab notebook and learning some basic programming, along with helping them try to understand what they were getting themselves into by pursuing a major in engineering. However, in the past two weeks, I’ve been inundated with requests from various people around campus. “Can I give a presentation on X?” where X may or may not be of interest to campus students, especially engineers. I have to admit that this is getting rather annoying as I have a mostly full curriculum. There are times here and there where maybe I have 15 minutes where…
Knowing when to slow down
As a new faculty member on the tenure track, I don’t have the luxury of saying no very often. It’s not that I can’t say no at all, but rather, I’m worried that if I don’t say yes, it will be misconstrued that I don’t play well with others. That could potentially damage my case for tenure when that comes up or make it more difficult to work with certain folks because I will seen as being in the camp of one faculty faction instead of another. A lot of the advice you read on the interwebs about this topic is that you should say no as often as possible because you need as much time to advance your research as possible. When offered other committee positions or responsibilities (journal editor, conference organizer, etc), you’re supposed to avoid those like the plague for as long as possible. I can totally…
No deadwood here
On Tuesday, I posed a question on my own blog: what would happen if academia required PIs to fund their own salary and not get tenure? To clarify, I don’t think this would necessarily be a good thing…but I also don’t think it would be a bad thing, either. I can see the pros and cons of such a move, and it’s very hard to say if one side would win out. I also think there are several possible outcomes, and I think that it would change from school to school. However, I anticipate a few potential changes to the system that would probably constitute some general trends. 1 – I see groups becoming more bimodal in their distribution: they’ll either be really big so that PIs can keep writing grants like crazy (something that already seems to occur a lot in bio and medical fields) to try to cover their…
The Grey Zone
This week, as part of Theme Week, we’re discussing our roles as engineers and how it might change depending on the level/status of the company. Now, I’ve already started by breaking the rules about our little post figure because my ‘company’, SnowU is actually a research university which deals heavily with the research end of the spectrum. However, my area within the spectrum is slightly different because I like to think that my research is right on the border between fundamental research and launching startups, which I’ve dubbed The Grey Zone (and hence the grey arrow). The Grey Zone is that terrible-yet-extraordinarily-wonderful place where you get to work on research topics that feel like they might be commercial products someday. The Grey Zone is fantastic because… It’s an easy sell for under/graduate students because not all of them want to be professors. Some fully recognize that working on a practical…
Building Momentum
These past two months have been pretty crazy because it was effectively the playoffs for proposal season (NSF, DARPA, NIST, etc…). For you football fans out there, you can probably appreciate this analogy: I’ve had five completions in 3 weeks and now I’m sitting back and hoping for some nice YAC. That, combined with the time I spent with my students last semester is finally starting to gain traction on its own. The students working in my group don’t have any specific classes that train them to work on my specific research area so I’m left with the task of tutoring and training them in the lab on procedures and whatnot. Basically, my summer and first semester was spent training and acquiring equipment. And I can officially say: My group haz momentum! Yesterday, I was in the lab working on a few things and showing my student some new tips/tricks…
First Proposal Rejection
A few weeks ago, I had my first proposal rejection and it wasn’t pleasant. I definitely had to break out the scotch. This was a huge proposal with many universities involved and while I counted myself fortunate to be a part of the team, I’m still disappointed. My part was a supportive role for the overall proposal ideas, but it still would have been a significant chunk of money to jumpstart my academic career. The one thing that’s really disappointing, especially since this was my first proposal, is that the entity holding the purse strings is not one that gives you feedback but just says “thanks but no thanks”. When I started writing my first couple of proposals, I dreamed with delusions of grandeur (hitting my first 5 in row or something stupid like that) but I definitely feared striking out. My startup funds are available for the first two years so I basically…
Success breeds success
Now that I’m back from a conference and the semester is winding down, I have a little more time to spend with my graduate students. One of the things that I’ve tried to get them to understand is the importance of getting results [quickly, if possible]. Now, I’m not one for uppity, self motivating, happy-go-lucky theories like the seven habits of highly effective people or market research mumbo-jumbo (although I did steal their picture). However, I am a true believer that, in research, success breeds success. One of the most motivating times for me is when I’ve just had a paper published. I feel a sense of accomplishment and, like any drug, I want more. To come full circle back to grad student mentoring, I’m trying to get my students to understand that if they get some positive results [hopefully quickly], then they will be motivated to get more. And…