Believing in imposters

A while ago, I was at a graduate program workshop that was geared towards recruiting under-represented minorities in science. One of the participants didn’t know what imposter syndrome was.

This surprised me. I’ve read a lot about this phenomenon, how it affects many people in academia, and how it is particularly hard on under-represented groups.

I explained what imposter syndrome was to the gentleman. “It’s when you think that you have lucked your way into a situation, and that you have no real talent or ability. You keep thinking that any second, people are going to find out, realize they made a terrible mistake, and take it all away from you.”

I saw a few heads nodding in recognition from a couple of other people in the room who had obviously heard of the term. Surprise turned to astonishment when this man refused to believe that doctoral students would ever suffer from imposter syndrome. He said something like, “When you’re a Ph.D. student, you have to have the confidence that you are going to make original and valuable contributions to science.”

He insisted that doctoral students must have healthy egos, kind of by definition. I think his view was that this was the only reason you would enter a doctoral program in the first place. (It was not surprising that this individual seemed to have a very healthy ego of his own. He was a very active speaker at the workshop.)

If anyone should know about imposter syndrome, I would have hoped that it would be someone in a workshop about recruiting minorities to grad school.

It was so disheartening to see him deny something that causes many people much stress. It was even more disheartening to hear such a dismissal in a forum devoted to improving recruitment and retention of students. And it was disappointing to hear it from a man, because “guys trivializing other peoples’ problems” is so clichéd.

If we are to ever improve academic careers, and get more diversity in our departments, the first step will have to be that we believe what people tell us. If someone tells you they have a problem, responding with, “You can’t actually have that problem” is not helpful.

Bonus! Me speaking at a recent graduate fair about the kind of program I help to run. I talk about 30 seconds in.


Hat tip to Scicurious for reminding me to finish this post with her own article on imposter syndrome!

External links

Imposter syndrome: beating the blue-eyed monster

Photo by Erwin Verbruggen on flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Sight sighing: This is an embarrassment

Our university is going to merge and grow with the aim of becoming an emerging research institution, and is going to establish a medical school in the process. Given that these are the state goals of our institution, that this appeared in my inbox this morning was a bit of a shock.

I am very pleased to announce that Braco has accepted our invitation to come to South Texas and share his talent of “Gazing” with the community at large and the UTPA community starting this Wednesday, June 19th, at 2 p.m. with a FREE web live streaming, we can all have access via a computer, iPad, iPhone, etc., from all over the world. ...

The weekend of June 22nd & 23rd, Braco will be at the Holiday Inn Airport McAllen, TX doing group sessions for all who want to experience firsthand from 10 a.m.-6 p.m. for the community at large. ... During the event, Spanish/English translation will be available for each session.

Then for his last day in Texas, Braco has accepted to allow FREE access to all UTPA staff, faculty and students of the web live streaming at the Student Union on Monday June 24th from 11 – 5 pm. Just bring your UTPA ID with you to get in! Come and be engaged with the gazing of Braco hourly for 5-7 minutes!

I also want to take this opportunity to extend this invitation to South Texas College (STC) and University of Texas-Brownsville (UTB) nursing & other health-related field students & faculty to join us for this event. Bring your school ID with you! Not open to the public in general!

This is an embarrassment to our university. Although most of the material concerning Braco (pronounced braht-zo) tosses around the word “healer,” a better one is “charlatan.”

Braco normally charges $8 for him to gaze on you for about five to eight minutes. He does not speak in public. And there is a distinct lack of promises:

Braco also comes with many disclaimers. He does not call himself a healer or guarantee any results. He does not consider himself a prophet or a religious leader, does not espouse a particular philosophy and does not want anyone to follow him. The impact of his gaze may be sudden or gradual, subtle or profound. If there’s any impact at all.

Another article also uses the word “healing,” and notes:

A promotional video features many followers who attest to experiencing healing miracles, and one who claims to have seen Braco shape-shift. (Disappointingly, this follower does not say what shape Braco shifted into.) ...

Less mysterious – he also says he’s got an advanced degree in economics – is the Braco line of 14-karat gold jewellery.

Karen Stollznow notes in a CSICOP article:

Braco makes many claims for someone who claims to not make any claims.

As Skepchick put it:

Best. scam. evah.

Why has Braco agreed to do this for the university? I wager that he will use this to promote his credibility: “Braco has been invited to the prestigious University of Texas system!” Because the email describes this as being sponsored by our Department of Nursing. The email concludes:

This event has been sponsored by the University of Texas-Pan American Nursing Department and Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society of Nursing Pi Omicron Chapter 397.

Why would a Nursing department sponsor this? (Additional: In an email to me, the department chair says, “We are not providing any financial support or ‘supporting this event’ in any way other than providing an announcement. ... The nursing honor society Pi Omicron has organized this event.” That’s a very limited set of activities, and I wouldn’t normally call it “sponsorship.” ) The email again:

“At UTPA Nursing Department, we strive to prepare our graduates to meet the health care needs of a culturally diverse society. We do so by preparing our students to develop critical thinking skills in order to provide holistic (mind-body-spirit) care to people who have interwoven spiritual, biopsychosocial, and cultural characteristics. Although these unique people are viewed as being ultimately responsible to act in their own best interests, our students, as client advocates, can help people maximize their mind-body-spirit wellness. As such, it is imperative to expose our students to many myriad complementary approaches to wellness and wellness-restoration from the lay, folk, and professional health sectors.”

The word “holistic” appears a lot on the department’s description of “BSN Philosophy,” too. Poor “holism”; a perfectly good word ruined by overuse by those practising pseudoscience. The degree philosophy purports to be in favour of critical thinking, but this is very much not in evidence here.

If you found out another department in your university was promoting this, what would you do? (Additional: As noted above, the Department’s involvement is minimal. It is a student honors society organizing it, which is almost as disappointing.)

External links

Braco the gazer
Gazing balls: I’m looking at you, Braco
Braco The Gazer: A New Age Guru With Nothing To Say
Braco brings his healing gaze to Arlington
Braco Gazing Event: Long-Haired Croatian 'Healer' Will Stare At You For $8 At Crystal City Sheraton

Tuesday Crustie: National Lobster Day, 2013

This past Saturday was National Lobster Day (15 June every year), and I thank Kayle Goff for her devotion to the cause:

It’s the law! Governor signs off on new Texas university

This snuck by me on Friday: Governor Perry has signed the bill that will create a new university in South Texas.

Perry highlighted the Valley university legislation as some of the most important to emerge from this year’s session.

“This session will expand opportunities for success, and help us keep our state the best place in the nation to live, work, raise a family and run a business," he said in a statement.

UT System said a ceremonial bill signing in the Valley will happen sometime in the next few weeks.

Relevant to my interests are these:

In the more immediate future, is nearly $200 million for construction at UTPA and UTB; $100 million of that earmarked for a new UTB campus, the rest for a Science Building II at UTPA.

Time ran out on securing the funds this regular session in the Legislature.

The science building, where I work, was not completed and had much empty shell space when I arrived. But it has been full for several years now, and there is a desperate need for new research and office space.

External links

Perry signs bill to merge Rio Grande Valley universities

Comments for first half of June 2013

Inkfish covers a paper that asks people at various stages of education to draw neurons. Hey, did they copy from me?

I make a cameo appearance on Surprising Science, a Smithsonian Museum blog, about that idea that lobsters are immortal. I say again: lobsters are not immortal, despite what the Singularity blog claims. I have my severe doubts about the other four, too.

You gotta see this fish. Deep Sea News covers the first video of the elusive oarfish alive and in the wild. Just amazing stuff.

Undergraduates, Charles Lin has done you a favour in compiling a great list of advice on how to get involved in undergraduate research.

Terry McGlynn about going to conferences as a researcher from a not well known for research university at Small Pond Science.

“Exploit your size”

Nina K. Simon is one of those writers who writes about one thing on the surface, but has lessons that apply to many areas. In her list of what she has learned in reviving a museum, a few things resonated with me:

Exploit your size. There are unique advantages to every budget level. Big organizations seem comfortable with this – they make big plays based on their scale. But many small organizations seem to spend too much time trying to emulate big organizations rather than exploiting the opportunity to be more personal, more idiosyncratic, and less bureaucratic. No one opens a small coffeeshop and thinks, “we’ll really be successful if we are just like Starbucks.” The whole point is to not be Starbucks. Instead of apologizing for the “lack of professionalism” of small institutions, we should celebrate the ways that our programming can lead to stronger engagement on an individual level. My first year at the MAH, I would often say that we are a “no money, no bullshit” operation. We may not have funding for your project, but we won’t tie it up in red tape either. You want to have an artist collective sleepover at the museum? Sure. Want to give visitors sledgehammers and invite them to help make a giant metal sculpture? Sounds great. Want to give free admission spontaneously as a gift to visitors who need it? No problem. Just as a large organization can exploit its resources, we can do the same in a different way as a small organization.

This made me think a lot about #Scifund, crowdfunding, and “small science” as I have dubbed it. It may have been Nina’s “no red tape” comments. I see many people who say “crowdfunding can’t work,” when what they really mean is, “crowdfunding can’t work for me.” They may be true, but maybe others have different goals and advantages than you do.

Unfortunately, at an institutional level, there often seems to be little interest in supporting this kind of diversity. This is why her last tip also matters:

Remember why you got into this. The reason that we do this revolutionary work is in service of a bigger mission(.) Whatever your personal focus, it’s worth thinking about whether you are working on a problem that you consider to be truly important. ... Find a problem that is truly important, and you will find a revolution worth fighting for.

Go read the rest if you are at all interested in making positive change.

External links

Memo from the Revolution: Six Things I’ve Learned from our Institutional Transformation

Is this good advice?

Things that a student heard at a workshop for students wanting to go into doctoral programs:

• A 3 page CV is too long.
• Ph.D. programs are looking for “well rounded students”, not people who are just focused on research, so not appearing “well rounded” is a weakness in a CV.
• Don’t include relevant classes that you have taken.
• Include clubs in your CV.
• Include community service in your CV, and volunteer activities.
• Don’t put so much research activities.

I think this is terrible advice. This sounds like advice from someone used to industry resumes (which usually are limited to 1-2 pages), not academic CVs. And especially not CVs from students looking to get into grad school in STEM fields. Less emphasis on research?

Thoughts?

Additional: Reactions from Twitter:

Neuroscience doesn’t need a grand theory to advance

In a new post on the planned BRAIN Initiative, the National Science Foundation characterizes neuroscience as:

Desperately seeking a theory

Not just seeking, but desperately seeking.

In other words, scientists lack a basic, overarching theory about healthy brain function that would explain how memories, thoughts and behaviors emerge from dynamic activities in the brain – any brain.

That doesn’t sound like a theory of the brain. That sounds like what is desired is a theory of consciousness. This does not surprise me; it’s the big hairy audacious goal for many neuroscientists. I have a message for my fellow neuroscientists about this.

People, chill out. You don’t need a theory to make excellent progress in understanding how any of those things work.

Let me draw a parallel. Consciousness is a network property of certain combinations of matter. Life is also a network property of certain combinations of matter. We want to explain what are the conditions necessary for those network properties to appear. So, the task of understanding consciousness for neuroscientists is very similar to the task of understanding of life for biologists.

We do not have a theory of life in biology.

By this I mean no theory predicts what configurations of matter are capable of life. Could you have a silicon based life form? A life form that exists in liquid methane instead of water? We have no idea. We have been surprised by extremophiles on Earth that live in conditions that were generally predicted not to be able to support life.

In my estimation, one of the last hopes for a unifying theory that separated life from non-live was vitalism: the idea that all living things had an “essence” that non-living ones did not. But we now know that there is no clear distinction between animate and inanimate matter, and vitalism is dead.

Of course, we may develop a theory of life, particularly if we can ever discover other independent origins of life, whether it be “shadow life” on our planet, evidence of life on other planets, or develop artificial life.

It’s not that we lack theories in biology; we do have them. Evolutionary theory and cell theory are the two main (some would argue only) theories in biology. But neither of these do the job of predicting what configurations of matter have what properties of life, and which don’t.

Similarly, neuroscience does have has theories: neuron theory, for instance. It doesn’t explain the “consciousness, but then again, its biological relative, cell theory, doesn’t explain “life,” either.

Yet this lack of a theory has not prevented an explosion in our understanding of biology. Inheritance and the development of complex multi-celled embryos from single cells were once viewed as great mysteries. Work on DNA and stem cells and gene regulation and so much more means that we have extremely good understanding of these processes. We did all of that without a “theory of life,” and there is no end in sight for biological discoveries. Biologists are not complaining that not having a “theory of life” is limiting their research. Almost nobody in biology is worrying about it.

I am not saying it wouldn't be nice to have a grand unified theory for consciousness. Theories are wonderful things to have. With the Society for Neuroscience meeting being one of the biggest scientific meetings in the world, it seems that neuroscientists are not being limited in making discoveries by their lack of an overarching theory.

Hat tip to Erin McKiernan.


Related posts

When is neuroscience not neuroscience? When it’s neurobiology
Nominees for the Newton of neuroscience

External links

Prying open the black box of the brain

Photo by FunGi_on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons licence.

How could it be there’d never been a woman in charge of Science before?

On a Science magazine policy podcast, incoming editor Marcia McNutt was asked about being Science’s first woman editor (5 minutes into the podcast). She replied:

Well, I think it’s perhaps rather remarkable that here in the year 2013, I would be the first, because in my view, there have been stellar women who have been the backbone of Science magazine for many, many years. If you look at  the top editorial staff members, and the top brains behind the business of Science magazine, it has been largely a female enterprise for many, many years. So the fact that it has taken this long to have a female editor-in-chief is somewhat perhaps unusual.

Sadly, I’d argue that never having a woman in a top editorial job before is neither “remarkable” nor “unusual.” It’s called sexism. And this is not a problem of the past, it is a current problem. I’m not saying Science has been sexist. What I am saying is that women are still poorly represented in leadership roles in scientific societies and journals in science generally.  That a journal has never had a female editor before is not surprising. I hope that a journal not having a more equal representation will be surprising now and in the future.

Don’t whitewash the long history of sexist behaviour in science.

External links

Marcia McNutt interview

Sharing responsibility for bad papers

When you read a bad paper, whose fault is it?

Robert Horvitz (quoted in Box 1 here; hat tip to Mike Taylor) and Fred Schram (who I quoted a couple of years back) both put the burden squarely on the authors. This bothers me, as I started to articulate yesterday.

Journals routinely take credit when things go right. Journals and publishers love to talk about how they “add value” to papers. Journals talk about “attracting” high quality submissions. They have “rigorous” peer review. When impact factors go up, it must be due to the good job the journal’s editorial board is doing.

But when things go wrong, and a journal is faced with charges that a paper should not have been published, it is all to easy for editors to wash their hands of the whole thing and let the authors twist in the wind. For instance:

Peer review does not end with publication. In the event that an accepted manuscript is questioned by the scientific community on the basis that the authors acted unethically, plagiarized, or where there are queries relating to the data or interpretation of the data, the editors will contact the authors to investigate unethical/fraudulent/plagiarized works or the journal editor will invite or accept letters to the editors.

Notice anything there about acknowledging a bad decision? About apologizing? About ensuring that reviewers are not asked to review for a journal again? Anything about investigating the process that led to a bad decision? I’m not even saying it was necessary in that case, but it exemplifies the “we followed procedure, we did nothing wrong” arguments that are routinely pulled out in response to criticism.

Some journals are quite good at critical self-appraisal of their overall processes. For instance, Nature showed some good reflection about sexism in their editorial process. But it is much rarer for a journal to show the same reflection over any single paper, except perhaps for clerical errors. Again, I struggle to think of cases.

I know it’s human nature to want to take credit and avoid blame, but mature people suck it up and take the heat as well as the glory. Editors and journals should share some of the load when poor papers get through their editorial decision making. I would also like it if reviewers would admit some culpability, but am not holding my breath, given the reviewing procedures at most journals protect anonymity to the extent they do.



Related posts

The Crustacean Society 2011: Day 3
Back room science

External links

Caustic volleys and the sting of peer review: what’s the solution?

Photo by !anaughty! on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.