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…
Pace of Grad School
Currently, I’m out of town attending a workshop with some very specialized people in an area in which I’m trying to make inroads. And while I won’t bore you with the details (I knew people could have such levels of nuance), I will share with you a comment that I heard over drinks. Let me paint the picture for you a little bit first. I was having a discussion with someone very high up in the food chain about current/potential/future projects. This person asked a very specific technical question related to the problem, something that would mean significant money for the company that person represents if possible. I, wanting to hold on to my ideas, remained steadfast with a response like “Talk to me in 18 months when we have it working in the lab.” This is basically a nice way of saying like hell I’m going to let you…
Low Hanging Fruit, Salami Style
One of the core things a young faculty member must do is publish. Without publishing, you will not establish yourself in your field, and the lack of results will make it more difficult to get funding. Without funding, you won’t have students to find results and publish, and then the downward spiral continues. In order to avert this process, you need to keep your eyes peeled for some low hanging fruit. That is, topics which haven’t been published before but, once you come across them, they are rather easy to simulate/build/measure/quantify/whatever, making it an easy way to churn out a paper. DrWife, Colleague, and I have been working on one such low hanging fruit, hence I didn’t have time to photoshop some salami onto my low hanging branch. This stemmed from an idea discussed several months ago. With me defending, DrWife and I both interviewing for positions and preparing to…