That's what your iPhone is for, people

Over at FSP, one commenter noted that he used pictures/jokes about his child in the first three slides of his job talk, and that it went over well.

Not if I were in the audience. Last week we learned that all intervention efforts had failed and if we want children that are genetically related to us, we will need in vitro fertilization. There is a certain delicious irony in us biologists having a test tube baby, to be sure, but beyond that, there is not much humor here.

When a seminar speaker uses his/her offspring in 3 (!) of the slides, the entire rest of the talk will be lost on me, as I will instead sit there derailed, or just depressed. Glad you had kids. Glad you're proud of them. Not interested in hearing about them during a science talk, however.

Things about my job that make me laugh

1. I show up when I want. I leave when I want. If I get to work “late” there is no one I need to apologize to.
2. Despite this, I feel compelled to work > 50 hrs/week.
3. Dressing up = not sneakers.
4. “You really make biological tissue glow green?” Yes, yes I do.
5. Sitting and staring into space, perhaps with furrowed brow, can be the most productive part of the day.
6. Or, complaining to a colleague down the hall can be too, as long as they respond with, “You know what might work?”
7. I once had an experiment that required 3 hrs of set-up followed by 8 hr incubation time, followed by 6 hrs of work. So I set stuff up in the morning, spent the afternoon at home asleep on the couch, and returned to work at 5 pm. Got great data.
8. On April 15, I pay taxes on my salary. Those taxes will then be used--to pay my salary. Thanks, NIH!*


* Sure, sure, most of my taxes go to servicing our national debt, which is not so funny. But I prefer to think of it like this, for obvious reasons.

You in the back

Other New Postdoc and I were discussing the nature of post-seminar questions. We agreed that while we sometimes ask questions for the purpose of, like, learning the answer, we more often ask questions that we think will make us look smart.

It sounds awfully mean, when I put it this way. But the fact of the matter is, there are perhaps 40 to 100 people in the room. Why would you waste their time asking the speaker something unless you thought it was of sufficient significance that anyone who came to this talk would be interested as well? It's usually no problem to approach the podium after the room has cleared, and I think that's the appropriate time to ask slightly off-topic or hazy questions.

Not only do I not want to waste other people's time, I do not want other people to hear my question and think, "What a doofus." Because, to be honest, I judge people based on their post-talk questions. It's not an absolute--anyone can (and does) misunderstand a slide or fail to hear a relevant morsel of information--so it's only if I hear someone ask silly questions at two or three talks that I mentally downgrade them. I assume other people judge questions in a similar fashion (though I know that's not always the case), so I want to ask a question that will not just avoid embarrassing me, but make other folks think, "Wow, that Dr. Jekyll is really on it."

There are, simplistically speaking, two major ways to ask an insightful question. One is to suggest an experiment, or an interpretation, that will extend or enhance the speaker's results. This sort of question shows that you too might be able to run a lab and come up with good ideas. The typical speaker response to such a question is a pleased or knowing smile, followed by, "Yes, that's a great question, and we're in the process of trying those experiments as we speak/trying to get the equipment we need to do that experiment/trying to get around such and such an experimental issue." Often the speaker will close by thanking you again for your question. Everyone gets to feel good.

The other is to suggest that the speaker's data or interpretation are flawed in some critical way, and that if they had controlled for this variable, or if they had considered this other possible explanation of their data, the outcome/interpretation might have been different.

If you do it right, the speaker response to this type of question is a more fixed or clenched smile. (If they do have an answer--say it turns out they did that control, but they didn't happen to show it during the talk, then they revert to pleased/knowing smile plus a bonus slide, saved at the end in case someone asked that question. This is nice because everyone gets to look smart.) If you really nailed them, they will say all manner of strange things trying to cover their butts.

Frankly, that's the most fun part of the seminar, for me, regardless of who asked the killer question. I know it sounds heartless, but the fact is that this back-and-forth is what makes science stronger, by letting everyone voice competing ideas in the marketplace (read: stuffy seminar room). It can clearly be unpleasant for the speaker. However, it's for the good of the science, assuming* that everyone asks questions based on scientific evidence, rather than on personal vendettas.


* Yes, that's a hopeless assumption.

My world revolving around rotation students

Not all graduate programs encourage or permit first years to rotate through different labs, but many, including the one here, do. During the course of the first year, students spend several weeks in each of a few different labs they are interested in.

Advantages:
--Everyone gets a chance to smell each other out. It's hard to evaluate students based on an interview alone, as FSP has noted. Advisors and students alike get to evaluate each other's styles, thought processes, and experimental approach. Ms PhD has listed some of more important attributes to see in the prospective lab member-to-be.
--First years get a flavor of the different types of science in their subfield, which will help inform their research and develop some breadth in their knowledge base.
--Fresh youthful faces remind the rest of us that we once thought our grad career would be a series of stunning successes, too. (This could weigh as a disadvantage, depending on how much you like being reminded of your younger, foolisher self.)

Disadvantages:
--Every few weeks or months, depending on the length of rotation, you may have yet another first-year to train on your expensive equipment, using your way-more-than-expensive time.
--While the process of training someone is valuable, the returns are quite low, since few first years can accomplish any experiment, no matter how small, during a short time span (broken up by classes, too), and some of the people you train will never return to the lab. So that time spent answering questions about where the pipette tips are is really wasted.

Overall I think it's a good setup, mainly because the opportunity to spend a couple of months working with a potential labmate/advisor probably saves a lot of heartbreak and disgruntlement down the road.

Today, however, was partly spent training our brand-new rotation student. She took a class our advisor taught, and on the strength of her performance in that class he took her on as a rotation student. He mentioned the only possible issue was that her English needed some improvement.

Anyhow, Roton does seem reasonably together, but it is true that she is often difficult to understand (and I consider myself pretty good at interpreting accents of all kinds, scientists being a culturally diverse kind of workforce). The dominant question right now, however, is whether she understands us well enough to function.

Today, I noticed she was using some lab materials that didn't look fresh. I asked her about them, and she said they dated from two days ago. I explained that she should make new ones; told her the reason that old ones, while appearing just fine, would actually malfunction; and returned to my experiments.

Twenty minutes later, I pass by her area to find ONP telling her the exact same thing. She had not made any new materials, and was continuing to try to use the old ones.

Important points: it does not take long to make these items. Four minutes, tops, to have a whole new stash of them. She already knows how to make them, since she had done it two days ago. Also, she didn't say to ONP anything along the lines of, "Oh yeah, Dr Jekyll already told me that, I just hadn't gotten around to it yet and/or wanted to use up the old ones since I'm just learning this technique anyhow."

The options: (a) she understood me, but chose to ignore my advice; (b) she didn't understand me. Either one is not a good sign.

Now, it's definitely possible that she was thinking something like, "I'll just keep practicing with these old ones, then make new ones soon," and she didn't explain that to ONP because her English was too halting, or because she was shy, or whatever. So I'm not super annoyed at her, just a little perplexed.

But this does get to one of the disadvantages--you spend a lot of time training these people, and if they don't in the end join your lab, especially if they don't join because you don't think they're good enough, then boy it's hard to feel like your time was well spent.

We'll see how this develops....

Off days

What do you do on days when, for one reason or another, it appears that you can make no progress on any of the projects you’re working on? Say, some equipment is broken or missing a component, and you’re waiting on a collaborator for another experiment, and your manuscript in progress is sitting on your advisor’s desk, apparently untouched.

There are a few different ways to deal, in roughly descending productivity order:
(a) Decide that you are deluding yourself if you think there is no way to move forward on projects. Fix whatever’s broken, find a workaround, borrow someone else’s equipment, think of a new experiment to do.
(b) Catch up on your reading pile. You know what stack I’m talking about.
(c) Work on the infrastructure or housekeeping projects that you always put off on “real” days because you’re too busy doing experiments to organize the tubing.
(d) Give yourself a well-deserved day off. Go home and do the laundry.
(e) Read the internet.

[For the faculty and TAs, there is also grading/prepping exams/preparing lectures. As a postdoc, though, I’m exempt.]

Obviously some of these coping strategies are more effective than others. Far too often I am an E. It’s just so easy. In my grad lab, because my advisor was not around very often, I would sometimes be a D, which doubles as a sort of mental-health day and usually lets me return the next day more excited to start experiments than E does. As a new postdoc with an omni-present advisor, however, D feels unadvisable.

With just a bit more energy, I ratchet up to a C, and busy myself with ordering chemicals we’re low on, prepping solutions, cleaning, etc. Usually I need either very strong motivation, or a colleague with some useful suggestions, to become an A.

I never, ever, achieve B.

iHate iPods

In lab, anyways. Actually I like iPods quite a lot, for all the same reasons that everyone else does, too. However, tedious though labwork often is, I don’t support the constant earbuddage that seems to be a feature of (let me get my biases out right now) some Youth.

Let me explain. When you are wearing your iPod (or whatever music playing device you choose (although it’s always an iPod)), I have to take an extra step to communicate with you. I have to wave my hands in front of your face to indicate that I would like to Initiate Conversation.

Then there is a pause, during which you remove the earbuds, sometimes taking the extra step of pausing the music before you do, so that my intrusion into your world doesn’t cause you to miss a single beat. Sometimes you only remove one earbud, in which case you often talk at elevated volume because in your head, the music is still playing, with the result that I end up feeling like an elderly aunt whom everyone addresses in stentorian voices.

Sometimes I come up behind you and don’t realize you’re listening to music (or audiobooks, or podcasts, or whatever), so I just start talking. Then you turn, realize that there is a Conversation Initiation Event occurring, we wait while you take one of the routes outlined in paragraph three, and then I get to repeat myself.

From your point of view, this is not a big deal. It is perhaps a ten-second delay from when I approach you to when I get to communicate. But you know what? It’s annoying. I dislike repeating myself. I don’t think that the burden should be on me to wait while you disengage from your soundtracked world.

And so, when I see you with the ubiquitous sleek white attachment, I am simply less likely to start talking with you. If I have a question, I consider whether it’s really worth the effort. For example, I no longer bother to ask how your experiments are going today. As a result, I am less informed about your experiments, and you miss an opportunity for (let me flatter myself, since hell, it’s my blog) thoughtful discussion about results, pitfalls, and troubleshooting advice.

I’m not even getting in to the whole lab safety aspect. In some labs this is a bigger deal than others. In the type of labs I work in, it’s not a big deal, other than if you’re so oblivious to your surroundings that you bump into someone carrying something delicate.

Look, I know that lots of tasks are mind-numbing, and it’s fine with me if you occasionally keep yourself going with some tunes. But when you start wearing these things routinely, they’re an effective isolation barrier, and you’re going to miss out. Unplug.

Who gives feedback?

Below I described the relative styles of my grad and postdoc labs during practice talk feedback sessions. When I get a chance to run the Dr. Jekyll lab, how do I want my own lab to work?

The grad lab approach is more democratic, more interactive, and more nurturing. Criticism is encouraged, but always phrased in diplomatic, constructive terms that demonstrate respect for the choices of the person giving the practice talk. It’s good training for the grad students and postdocs in the lab because they get to offer suggestions and hear how those suggestions are received by others--an opportunity to see which ideas fly and which don’t.

It’s also interminable. After the practice talk, there are a few comments, and then we usually would go through the slides one by one again, with constant commentary from every single person who felt moved to contribute. “What if you switched the graphs on the left and the right?” “You have a typo in the title!” “Looks as though you’re using different symbols for the data on this graph as opposed to the graph on the last slide.” “I think your color scheme here might not work for red-green colorblind men.” [actually this is a really important issue, I’m not trying to belittle it]. Then there’s discussion about wording, about structure, and so on. For a talk that’s supposed to run 30 min, the entire practice session could easily top 2 hours.

The postdoc lab style, on the other hand, is more top-down, and blessedly succinct. It was impressive, but a tiny bit scary, to watch my advisor gut a recent practice talk, tell the grad student exactly how he ought to phrase the whole introduction, offer directives (not suggestions) for improving the flow, and finish within 15 minutes. It was intense and effective. The grad student’s talk, which I later heard, improved a great deal (although he still had a typo that I could have told him about). Throughout the entire thing, the three other lab postdocs and I remained utterly silent. I am now living in some significant fear of how this advisor will react when I have to give a practice talk (thankfully no time soon). That’s probably a good thing, since it means I’ll think extra-carefully about my data before presenting it.

I don’t want the Dr. Jekyll lab (still several years distant, but I try to think about how to run it even now) to have interminable lab meetings. I also don’t want it to be a monologue in which I lay down the law, and everyone else is quiet. (actually sometimes I would probably like that a great deal, but at least in theory it’s bad). I’m pretty sure I will tilt towards interminable, because I am highly detail-oriented and quick to spot inconsistency, no matter how trivial. Graphical design is also important to me, and I have strong opinions on the Right Way to show data.

Huh. It’s sounding as though my future Jekyll lab meetings will be interminable monologues--the worst of both worlds. And here I thought this post would be about finding the happy medium!

Night and day

We recently had a meeting in my lab to prep people who are making presentations soon to other biologists. The idea was to provide feedback on their practice talks so's they could improve them. This sort of interaction happens all the time in most labs that care about their world-image, i.e. all of them.

What was stunning was how different the session was in comparison to how a similar practice talk would have run in my grad lab. Although there were about 8-10 people in the room, the only people who gave substantive feedback were the two faculty members present. Everyone else stayed quiet. The feedback was pointed and direct: "You need to completely rework the introduction to this talk to make it shorter and more interesting to other biologists. Here's what I would say, and here's how I would rearrange/fix/improve your slides." The people giving the practice talks listened to the feedback, but said almost nothing in response, other than obedient "Ok"s. After the faculty were done giving feedback, we cleaned up the snacks and went back to lab.

In my grad lab, we also routinely gave practice talks. The post-talk discussion was nothing like this. Usually everyone in the room gave commentary both superficial and substantive. We frequently interrupted each other. The person giving the practice talk would respond to criticism by saying things like, "You know, I tried rearranging the slides like that but then ran into this problem when I thought about the setup of the next slide," and the various lab members might respond to that by saying, "Hmm, have you thought about rearranging it in this different way then?"

Then someone else would jump in with their completely different scheme for rearranging or improving the slides/talk, and eventually my advisor would say some (usually useful and to the point) ideas, which we would all then continue to discuss, occasionally ad nauseam. Afterwards, people would often continue the discussion by popping their heads into the presenter's part of the lab and saying, "Hey, I had another idea for how you could rearrange those slides!"

Oh, did I mention? My grad lab was run by a woman (or as Dr. Hyde likes to say, "A lady scientist!"), and over half the occupants were female. My postdoc lab is run by a man, and is almost completely male.

I'll save for a later post a discussion of the merits, and demerits, of both approaches. Right now I am still reeling at the prospect of someday giving my own practice talk in this lab, and trying to stay mute while criticism, no matter how thoughtful and accurate, is dished at me. I am not by nature a good mute.

No one called!

Or emailed, or texted, or sent plain old snail mail, to tell me that they were pregnant today.

I consider that a good day. I think I'm hearing procreation news about once every two weeks at this point, so each day when I don't get a missive from a friend with "secret!" or "great news!" or really any sort of exclamation point at all, I'm pretty relieved.

I mean, I'm happy for you all. My high school pal who emailed out of the blue on Saturday; my lab tech pal turned fellow grad student pal who confided in me last week; my brother's wife, a solid 6 years older than me; and all the rest of you. That's great. Yes, I'm sure you'll make good parents. Oh, totally, pregnancy sounds Very Difficult and Stressful. I bet you're tired. I know I am.

Tired of acting like it's great news that you're pregnant and I'm still not, that is.

I don't like being jealous and resentful of all of you, whom I truly love and respect and wish the best for. It's just....we've been trying for over two years, and you got pregnant on your first try. Or your second. Much though I want you to be happy, right now it feels as though it's coming at my expense. I know it's not, but knowing doesn't make it feel that way.

Anyhow. If today's trends continue, if no one breaks through my paperthin skin again, then tomorrow I can revert to grown-up behavior and talk about Science and Knowledge and The Postdoc Life and Women in Science. Tonight, though, I'm having a glass of wine, or three. Because I can. And you can't. Hurrah!