did I mention I hate moving?

As I've previously mentioned, N.A. will be going to a tenure-track position many, many states away from my temporary faculty job. Because I'm moving into a furnished apartment, the plan has been for my furniture as well as as much of my stuff as possible, to go down with N.A. to his state. This move was slated to occur mid to late July, leaving me bedless for at most two weeks. This also would give me several weeks to sort through all my crap in an organized manner.

Today, N.A. casually said (on the phone), "I think I'm going to move next Sunday. Do you think that your stuff will be packed by then?"



Commence freakout.

Is ignorance bliss?

Many of my fellow graduate students here at LargeU are married. I know a few of the spouses, but more often then not, I don't. I always watch their reactions at their counterpart's thesis defense with interest. Were they supportive over the years? Did they understand that some nights their Ph.D-bound partner wouldn't be home? Did they nag their spouse not to work weekends, even though the experiments don't (usually) run themselves? Are they on the level of SuperWife?

These are the questions I ask myself when I see the non-student's beaming faces and slightly glassed over eyes, which can only mean one thing: "thank god s/he is done; what the fnck is s/he talking about?"

On Friday *I* got to play the supportive partner role when I attended N.A.'s thesis defense. It made me very, very glad that we're both finishing up at the same time. Although I might have been a little glassed-over at some of his slides, I knew exactly what he was going through. I knew he'd be exhausted afterwards, and I also knew he'd be feeling a little let down by how anticlimactic it all ends up being.

On the flip side, I was terribly nervous for him because I knew the kinds of questions his committee members are known for asking. I knew that his PI was prone to sitting on his students' theses, refusing to sign off on them.

So I wonder, is ignorance, when it comes to the graduate school process, bliss? I'm not talking about the first-year student's wide-eyed, overly enthusiastic ignorance at the whole system; I'm referring to the boyfriends/girlfriends/spouses of graduate students. Are you with a fellow grad student/ academic? Or do you think it's better to date outside the bubble??

"Television has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other." ~A. Landers

Growing up, we weren't allowed to watch much TV. During the school year, there was no TV permitted on school nights. On weekends, we were allowed Nickelodeon or Sesame Street.

In college, I didn't have a TV until my senior year, and even then we only got whatever our foil-covered antenna could pick up. I didn't get cable until well after my preliminary exam, so well into my 3rd year of graduate school. And I got my new boyfriend at the same time-- my DVR. Oh, how I love my DVR. During college football season, I now routinely watch 5 games per Saturday-- after coming back from lab!

The other awesome thing about the DVR is that I can easily record crappy TV without rearranging my schedule. I *love* crappy TV. N.A. loves TV that "makes him think." Bleah. I have to think all day long about really hard stuff. When I watch crappy TV it's the only time that I can do a complete brain dump and just not. have. to think. It's awesome.

My latest favorite crappy TV? WIPEOUT and I Survived a Japanese Game Show. New summer shows just in time for a nice thesis brain dump!

Does size matter?

In my department, the average thesis weighs in somewhere around 150 pages, with acceptable theses anywhere from 120 and up. A thesis that is 100 pages will raise eyebrows. One that tips the scales at 300 makes committees groan. I don't know of anyone in my generation that has graduated from my department with a two-volume thesis (once you go over 500 pages you have to bind it into two volumes). According to the deposit office, the largest in recent years at LargeU checked in at 1200 pages. It was a Communication major's.

The size of the thesis causes many grad students angst. I kept a page count as I went, but I wasn't terribly concerned with length (but that might have been because after I compiled my published first-authors, I was already over 80 pages).


And for the record, mine clocked in just at 200 pages.


I think worrying about thesis length is silly, particularly in the grand scheme of graduate school. But you would be amazed at how often I've been asked, "how long was yours?"

Does size matter in your department?

Movin' on up

As you may have guessed from previous posts, I don't like change. I like to be in control. Consequently, moving is one of my least favorite things to do.

Of course, this likely stems from the fact that I moved around a bit as a kid (four places before I was 10), followed by boarding school, and then moving each year in college (and then to a new research locale for each summer). Moving sucks.

Obviously, I am eagerly anticipating moving to TempCollegetown in 5 weeks. Not.

In order to minimize the suckiness of the move, I'm trying to get my packing done gradually, in a very calm and organized manner. To facilitate this, I participated in Coworker's neighborhood's very large, bazillion-family yard sale. I spent 8 hours broiling outside, but it was worth it: got rid of a few furniture items and three boxes of random crap. Well worth the slight sunburn.

So. Any moving tips that might help ease my pain? And does *anyone* actually like moving?

Visiting Assistant Prof, explained

Today I got another rejection letter. This surprised me somewhat, seeing as I applied for it back in October, but I was not bothered by it because

1. The search was cancelled so State School wasn't rejecting ME they were rejecting everyone (at least that's what I told myself).

2. I already have a job.


In case you didn't get the news release, I'll be taking a visiting assistant professor position at a small, liberal arts college.

I realize that probably about half of you just collectively nodded your heads knowingly, thinking "oh no, there she goes down the sabbatical rabbithole."


If you had told me in October 2007 (when I started my applications) that I would ultimately end up in a temporary teaching position, I would have laughed in your face. So why my change of heart?

I applied to a dozen or places, a mix of tenure-track, visiting, and instructor positions. Half contacted me for an interview, three sent rejections, and three cancelled their searches. This visiting position is at a really good school (that I had never heard of naturally), in the middle of nowhere, in a location of the country that I have never lived before. I don't know anyone in a 300 mile radius. I will be 2 hours from a Target.

Why the hell would I subject myself to such a remote location for just a one-year position?

It was the perfect fit. The faculty are amazing. Half are female and six out of eight are under 35. I will be mentored within the department, my teaching assignments rock, and my colleagues are committed to helping me move on to my next (tenure-track) position. The students are amazing. The facilities are insane.

In terms of my personal life, N.A. had accepted his faculty position (a tenure-track position at a top-notch school more than 900 miles away) just before we started dating (a mere four months ago, although it feels much longer...is that a good thing?). This year will give me a chance to sort out what exactly I want to do, as well as hopefully get closer (geographically) to N.A.


Am I damning myself to a string of visiting positions? Will I survive a long-distance relationship and overcome a two-body problem without compromising my career? We'll just have to see how things work out!

I'm convinced that the longer I was in grad school, the dumber I got. This is probably in large part to the very little pleasure reading (and the quality of what I *did* read) I got accomplished.

Or perhaps it has more to do with the fact that I had to spend something like >75% of my waking hours thinking about very specialized areas of science (with the occasional connection to...uh...other areas of science).

As you will see below, I am in sore need of some summer reading.


As seen at ProfessingMama:

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded [or were bookclub choices that you never read that month]. Bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you read for school.


Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: A novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: The life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes: A memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud
Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit (and I freakin hated it)
In Cold Blood: A true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

unfortunate urchins

I'm back from a bit of travel, including a conference at which I gave a talk. At the conference I saw something that I'd never witnessed at a conference before. I've attended, oh, somewhere in the ballpark of 18 regional and national conferences while I've been in graduate school, but I've never seen this:

Children at a conference.

Okay, so the reason I haven't encountered rugrats at science conferences previous could be because

1. People in my field don't have kids.
2. People in my field that have kids have supportive spouses.
3. People in my field that have kids have 100% reliable childcare.

Now one child I could understand. If a female was stuck with them, I would have felt sorry for her. But, double-standard applier as I am, I was mildly horrified that it was the father that brought the little tykes along. Yes, plural: two kids. To an 8 am session.

So if I was only mildly horrified by the morning munchkins, you can imagine my reaction when the numbers increased to a total of SIX kids by the end of the afternoon. We were in a largeish room with about 80 chairs for the 50-odd people in our session, but the noises of the kids-- slamming the water pitchers up and down, crumpling papers, chasing one another about, opening the door, shutting the door, opening the door-- was grating on the nerves.

Now perhaps I'm being insensitive. After all, isn't one of the challenges I am likely, as a soon-to-be female professor, to be faced with is finding reliable childcare?

Hi, I'm an ISFJ

A recent miscommunication between myself and N.A. stirred up a memory from my college days. I had a roommate that had a fondness for myers-brigg type analysis. In fact, in my first week of living with her, she had me take the test to find out my personality type. (you can take a similar one here). I laughed at the time, but comparing our results actually did give good insight into how to peacefully coexist in very cramped, state-designed quarters. So N.A. and I sat down at our respective laptops and clicked on our answers.

Back then and now, my results indicate that I am an ISFJ, the nurturer (although this page would call me the martyr). As taken from personalitypage.com: "Quiet, kind, and conscientious. Can be depended on to follow through. Usually puts the needs of others above their own needs. Stable and practical, they value security and traditions. Well-developed sense of space and function. Rich inner world of observations about people. Extremely perceptive of other's feelings. Interested in serving others."

Yeah, maybe sounds awesome....but here's the downside: sudden moodiness, inability to articulate own feelings, avoider of conflict, sudden outbursts of rage (who...me?), too serious, and, perhaps the kiss of death to a scientist: not a promotor of his/her achievements.

Hmmm....no wonder I'm not sticking around in the higher levels of academia.

"We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master." ~Ernest Hemingway

YoungFemaleScientist has a nice post discussing the PI-mentee relationship, describing it in terms of master and apprentice.

During my time at LargeU, several new hires were made. One was a senior hire (and a very, very famous one, at that). Multiple labs, a large conference room, and numerous offices were promised in order to bring in this established research group. Despite being a very Large U indeed, space here at LargeU is quite limited. As a result, other groups down sized lab space, shuffled offices, and, in a few cases, were relocated to entirely different locations on campus.

Research space here (and at most of your schools, I'm sure) is the hot commodity. It's a carrot that has been dangled in front of many a PI for various reasons over the years. If you are not productive as a PI (as judged on high by other faculty members)-- meaning no grants, no graduates, no publications, or some combination of the three, you lose your research space. In my <5 years here, I've seen at least nine faculty lose their lab space to some degree-- in some cases, completely.

In contrast, a few years ago a senior faculty member (and a very, very famous one, at that) semi-unexpected died. Although no plaques were hung or memorials dedicated, the lab and offices were locked and left as they were. Even more unsettling, the research posters are still hanging in the hall, despite the fact that all of the students have since moved to other institutions. I find it very strange that the lab space vultures haven't moved in on this prime real estate.

Could it be that the LargeU PIs have some unspoken rule about moving in on a dead man's space? How is this different then when they swoop in on lab space of a non-funded (i.e. dead financially) group?

4 Meme

*I tag anyone who wishes to do this meme! Just let me know if you do so that I can be sure to check out your answers!


Four jobs I've had
1. Tomato picker
2. Babysitter
3. High school teacher
4. Preschool teacher

Four movies I can watch over and over
1. The Usual Suspects
2. Bring it on (shut. up.)
3. Love Actually
4. um....yeah, I don't usually watch movies more than once.

Four places I've lived
1. Kansas
2. Texas
3. Canada
4. Indiana

Four TV shows I love
1. The Soup
2. Lost
3. Top Chef
4. Sex and the City

Four places I've vacationed
1. Barcelona
2. Paris
3. Costa Rica
4. Mississippi

Four foods I love
1. Marzipan
2. Gouda
3. Cereal...pretty much all kinds
4. Salmon

Four websites I frequent
1. pubmed
2. passiveaggressivenotes.com (this is one of the funniest websites I've seen in awhile)
3. perezhilton.com
4. blogs of note

Decreased visibility

Yesterday, at a thesis defense, I had difficulty seeing the whole screen.

Not because I was in the back.

Because one of the committee members had his feet propped up on the conference table (at the very front of the room!), blocking part of the screen.


I've seen a number of odd seminar behaviors demonstrated over the years, from the normal--falling asleep--to the not-so-normal--lifting up a butt check to really let one rip, but feet on a conference table? Sheesh.


What's the oddest thing you've seen a faculty member do, either in or out of seminar?