This week on The TapRoot podcast...

I had the great fun of talking to Ivan Baxer and Liz Haswell for The TapRoot podcast!

We chatted about my two most recent contributions: a paper on authorship disputes, and my letter to Science about grad programs dropping the Graduate Record Exam (GRE). When I wrote those two articles, I didn’t have any connecting thread between them, but I found one for this roundtable:

(N)othing in academia makes sense except in light of assessment and how awful it is.

(And yes, I’m channeling Theodosius Dobzhansky via Randy Olsen.)

Confession time: I had never listened to Taproot until Ivan contacted me about being on the show. To prepare, I listened to a bunch of episodes. I became increasingly excited about the prospect of being one of the guests. Because The Taproot a damn good podcast. The discussion is great and the production values are excellent.

If you are a scientist, I recommend subscribing to The TapRoot – and not just because I’m on it! It’s on all the usual subscription services.

The recording process was not easy, though. Because I was mostly working at home at the time, we tried a test run of recording using my home wifi. Horrible. Awful delays, choppy audio, and just generally unusable audio.

Then I went to my university and used that wifi. You would think an institutional signal in the middle of summer with low use would be better, but nope. It seemed to be an issue with my particular laptop.

We finally solved the problem by using a LAN cable. I can’t remember the last time I had to use a physical cable to connect to the internet, but the old tech still works!

The screenshot is from audio editor JuniperKiss, who did a great job of making me sound more articulate than I am.

Please give the pod a listen or a read, since there’s a full transcript available!

P.S.—I mentioned in this interview that my department wanted to move away from using the GRE. That was no initiated by me, since I stepped down as our graduate program coordinator a while ago.

Dropping the GRE was the plan. I learned after this episode was recorded that our department’s attempt to drop the GRE as an admissions requirement was blocked by administrators up the chain. I think, but an not sure, that it was the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. As I understood it, they wanted data to show that the GRE was not predictive of success in our program.

I was surprised, because there are no shortage of peer-reviewed papers on this, some of which I cited in my #GRExit letter in Science. BUt I maybe should not have been surprised, since the Coordinating Board had required some master’s programs in my university add the GRE a few years ago.

I wonder why there is this desire to keep the GRE at the state level.

P.P.S.—I’m sorry I said “guys” as a generic for people.

External links

Taproot S4E2: The GRExit and how we choose who goes to grad school

Taproot Season 4, Episode 2 transcript

The TapRoot on Stitcher

The TapRoot on iTunes

“We need to do a better job training PhDs in...”

I went looking for how many ways people completed the some version of the sentence, “We need to do a better job training PhDs in...”:

• Teaching.
• Ethics.
• Philosophy of science.
• Coding.
• Database management.
• Deep, slow, careful, insightful thinking.
  
• Project management.
• Graphic design.
• Communication. (Also here, here.)
• Accounting.
• Performance.
• Statistics.
• Writing.
• Outreach.

And that is with a couple of very trivial searches. I daresay many more entries could easily be added to this list.

As an educator, I never want to be the person to be the person saying that we shouldn’t train people. Heck, one of the entries on the list above is from me! But there is a finite number of things we can expect to teach people in a finite amount of time. I see two problems..

First, faculty tend to think, “We can do this in house.” They underestimate the complexities of fields, and they don’t reach out to experts in other fields. So the training risks being done by amateurs.

Second, long lists like this tend to encourage superficial “box checking.”

It may be that this “Train them in everything” is a symptom of the loss of support jobs in universities. Faculty are increasingly expected to do everything. If a department doesn’t have a staff photographer, who will do it? Faculty. Professors have to be one person bands, capable of playing every instrument, because universities don’t want to hire an orchestra (so to speak).

This is not a realistic expectation by academics. We should not expect to train grad students to be experts in everything, because nobody can be an expert at everything.

If I had the ability, I would rather see departments try have many more staff positions for some of these task above. Expand the pool of staff experts so that faculty don’t have to try to do everything.

Additional, 3 June 2019: Kieran Healy has a great thread underlining why graduate programs tend to push towards “Train students in everything”: the brutal academic job market.

Many grad programs exist in a state of permanent revolution that is fueled by the real anxiety produced by uncertainty about one’s future work and prospects. This creates demands that something be done to make those anxieties go away. ... the core uncertainty—and thus the anxiety—is ineradicable through policy, especially in a brutal labor market the program has no control over.

Assessing the "treatment effect" of program structure is itself infected by the core uncertainty about who will “do well” and why. The market is tiny. Admission processes deliberately neutralize many elements that would predict success if literally everyone could be admitted.

A common response is to wish one could inoculate against this uncertainty by "requiring" people to learn everything or somehow be intellectually fully-formed right away. But this is impossible; faculty will disagree about what it means; students will likely rebel against it.

In practice you have to be humane about the reality that underpins the anxiety, while remaining clear-eyed about what a program can and can’t do about it at the level of training. The levers that can be pulled aren't attached to the things you really want to adjust.

Related posts
 

All scholarship is hard

Writing bad recommendation letters

This finding about recommendations letters shook me:

The commonly used phrase, “If I can provide any additional information, please call…,” was almost uniformly identified as a strong negative comment(.)

Oh crap oh crap oh crap.

How many recommendation letters over the years had I written that had some variation of, “Please contact me”? I was trying to be helpful by letting committees know I was available to them. I though this was positive. And it looks like I inadvertently hurt my students’ chances instead.

I am not the only one who probably hurt peoples’ chances by writing letters that were perceived as weak.

This got me wondering: Why didn’t I know this?

And I realized that nobody ever gave me any guidance for how to write recommendations.

As a student, I am the person requesting recommendations. My training for writing was about how to write papers and grants.

As a post-doc, nobody asked me for recommendations. That was when someone should have warned me.

Become a faculty member, and suddenly you are regularly asked by students to supply recommendation letters. Sometimes there are from students who are one of dozens or hundred in an introductory class who you couldn’t pick out of a line-up. How do you do justice to these students who need recommendations and have few options?

In all my time on university campuses, I never heard any serious discussions about how to compose recommendation letters. Sure, I read recommendations from other faculty members, and saw obvious no-no’s. Some faculty wrote form letters, just swapping out names of students. (That works until someone sees the form letter twice. Then every student after that is harmed.)

Do other faculty ever get guidance from mentors about how to write recommendation letters? I think I’ll be putting that in a Twitter poll. Should we?

I had never seen any “how to” articles in journals about composing recommendations, either. I found this article with a quick search in Google Scholar, but it seems to be a rare specimen of the genre.

And the moral of the story is:

If you are someone who mentors postdocs, talk to them about what you know about recommendation letters. Don’t let them learn it on the fly by trial and error.

Additional, 20 December 2018: Twitter poll results! Small sample, but telling. Nobody was mentored in writing recommendations.

References

Greenburg AG, Doyle J, McClure DK. 1994. Letters of recommendation for surgical residencies: What they say and what they mean. Journal of Surgical Research 56(2): 192-198. https://doi.org/10.1006/jsre.1994.1031

Moore S, Smith JM. 1986. Writing recommendation letters for students. The Clearing House: A Journal of Educational Strategies, Issues and Ideas 59(8): 375-376. https://doi.org/10.1080/00098655.1986.9955695

External links

How to fix recommendation bias and evaluation inflation
Do professors ever write negative recommendation letters?
Tenure denial, seven years later 

Rethinking the graduate admissions process

Warning: The following post is a piece of devil’s advocacy. I’m not sure I believe myself.

The process for selecting graduate students is mostly deeply flawed and should be revamped from the ground up. Almost everything in the admission process works against increasing diversity in academia.

Let’s take the elements apart piece by piece.

Application fee: Many program charge an application fee. This works against students who are good, but economically disadvantaged. There is no way that those fees are paying the bills of the graduate office, Friction can be a useful thing in preventing spurious applications, but generally the cost is so high that multiple applications quickly add up and remove options from students who can’t pay them all.

GRE scores: The cost of writing and submitting scores is another economic barrier. Many have written about the low predictive power of the test (also here).

Undergraduate GPA: Grade inflation is making it difficult to distinguish student performance. Plus, they are not exactly comparable from institution to institution, both in calculation (is the top score 4 or 4.3?), a situation that gets even more complex when student cross national borders. And it’s highly likely that the same grade point average will be interpreted differently depending on the issuing institution.

Recommendation letters: So much room for bias here. People write different recommendations for men and women. Like, twice the men get glowing letters than women. People are influenced by university of the letter writer and the seniority of the recommender and probably other factors that have nothing to do with the candidate. Recommendation letters are the primary tool for old boy’s networks to reinforce themselves.

CVs: Recently, we learned that a large number of graduate fellowship applicants were told they didn’t get the award because they didn’t have a publication yet. These are supposed to be people at the start of their academic careers, so it is not reasonable to expect them to have a lot on a CV. And given that so many places have not cracked down on unpaid internships, experience on paper will tend to favour people in well off families. Again.

Personal statement: This one might be okay, as long as applicants gave no indication of their gender. Because just the name alone works against increasing diversity.

If grad review is so messed up, what can we do?

One idea is to stop the tedious review by committee and just let individual faculty pick students they want to supervise. It doesn’t eliminate all the biases, but at least it’s less work.

In research grant applications, there’s occasionally serious suggestions crop up that the peer review process is kind of ineffective and that we’d be better off assigning funding by lottery. Maybe we should consider admitting grad students by lottery, too.

On Twitter, I asked students what they would like to see in the application process. Zachary Eldredge brings up the idea of a lottery, and Olivia mentions a face-to-face interview. Will Lykins says it would be good to normalize non-academic work on the forms, which again many students increasingly have to do to make ends meet instead of doing those unpaid enrichment activities.

Related posts

I come to bury the GRE, not to praise it
How do you test persistance?
Why grade inflation is good for the GRE
Does grad school have a mismatch problem?
The “Texas transcript” is a good idea, but won’t solve grade inflation

I come to bury the GRE, not to praise it

I’ve seen a few graduate programs announce that they are not going to require students submit GRE scores any more. These announcements are widely met with praise. The GRE has minimal predictive value in long term grad school success, and it is biased against a lot of groups. And the costs stops a lot of people from applying to grad school.

Interestingly, at the start of last year, the dean of our graduate college announced that several programs were being required to add the GRE to their admission requirements. This was imposed on at from outside the institution at the state level. I can’t remember if it was UT System or the THECB.

Full disclosure. When I became the graduate program coordinator of our master’s program, I pushed and got our department to start requiring the GRE. My rationale at the time was that this was the “industry standard.” We wanted our students to go into doctoral programs, and we reasoned that we would be helping students pave the way for doctoral work by having them do it sooner rather than later.

Also, I was reacting to students who would come in the day before classes started and say, “Can I be a grad student?” At the time, there was no application deadline. And students who did that tended not to persist in the program. So requiring the GRE forced students to plan ahead, not go to grad school because there was nothing good on television that day.

I have since come around to see the many problems with the GRE. But I don’t think our department would be allowed to get rid of it, seeing how many departments were forced to require it.

But this is something I think about.

The GRE tried to solve a couple of problems. It failed to solve them, but those problems still exist. And I don’t know how to solve them. The problems are:

• Grading policies vary wildly across institutions. (See this blog post.)
• People interpret the same grades in different ways depending on the institution’s perceived rigour and prestige. (See this blog post.)
• Recommendation letters are usually uniformly glowing.
• People tend to trust recommendations “in network” from people they know either personally or by reputation.
• The recommendation letter requirement reinforces power dynamics that leave early career researcher at the mercy of bullies and other poor supervisors. (Added 3 December 2018)

Students from famous universities who have rubbed shoulders with famous professors and can convince them to send a form letter get deep advantages in grad school acceptance. In other words, we end up selecting for students for grad school who already have a lot of “social capital.” If we want to diversify science, this is not the way to go about it. Diverse students come from diverse institutions, as Terry McGlynn has noted.

In theory, the GRE could have acted as a leveler for the playing field. It didn’t. But the problem it could have tackled is one that we still need to tackle. What can help level the playing field for students against “prestige”?

Related posts

What grades should look like

The “Texas transcript” is a good idea, but won’t solve grade inflation

External links
Students, Rejoice — Standardized Testing May Soon Be Dead
Nine types of admissions bias

Why a proposed UTRGV doctoral program will probably struggle

When I took my current job, one of the things that attracted me was that I was told the department would probably have a Ph.D. program, maybe in about five years. It’s been a lot more than five years, but a biology related Ph.D. is finally on the horizon for my university. This should make me happy. It does not.

Last week, the UT System tweeted:

.@utrgv Pres Bailey looks to create PhD in Cellular, Molecular & Biomedical Sciences and Doctor of Physical Therapy programs. #UTRegentsMeet

And yesterday, it was confirmed that the university has the go ahead for preliminary planning for this proposed doctoral degree.

I want to go on record as to why I think this is not a good idea. (You get tenure in part so you can make these kinds of analyses.) For context, I have been the graduate program coordinator for biology at this institution for over a decade. So yeah, I know the backstory here.

First and foremost, the primary issue I have with the proposal for this degree is that it is being driven by institutional wants. Not to meet clear needs in the community. Not students’ interests. Not faculty research strengths. The university is trying to get to ten doctoral programs as fast as it possibly can, so it can meet the criteria for an “emerging research university.” Getting to that number of Ph.D. by any means they can is more important than coming up with a program that has faculty support and that will ultimately serve the students.

Second, the proposed program – “Cellular, molecular, and biomedical sciences” – might as well say, “and the kitchen sink.” There is no theme or connection there. There is no department of “cell, molecular, and biomedical sciences.” It seems like the plan is to conscript any faculty member in any department that knows how to use a PCR machine. With no single department to house the program, there will be tremendous problems of organization and cohesion. It will be difficult to instill that intangible but critical sense of community.

Third, there are already four cell and molecular biology doctoral programs in Texas (not to mention broader general biology programs). They are at University of North Texas, UT Austin, UT Dallas, and one of our closest neighbours, UT San Antonio. There is an case to be made that the proposed degree would unnecessarily duplicate existing programs, which the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board warns against.

Lastly, the graph that no administrator has an answer for is this one (from here):

The article has UTRGV president Guy Bailey talking about job growth projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But knowing demand don’t tell you much unless you know the supply. Administrators will ignore the existing backlog in students being trained, and the growth of programs training them.

The Bureau of Labour Statistics lists one biology related occupation that requires a doctoral degree: “Biological science teachers, postsecondary” (i.e., professors). They project a total of 21,200 job openings from 2012-2022. Using 2011 data on doctoral production, the projected 10 year need can be met in less than three years at recent rates of doctorate creation at the national level.

The only other biology related occupation listed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics that requires a doctoral degree is animal scientists (1,200 job openings, 8.8% growth). Again, this need can be met by current levels of doctorate attainment in the United States.

There are not clear projections for how much demand there will be for biology doctoral recipients outside academia, because the Bureau of Labor Statistics does not separate “Life sciences” jobs on whether they require a B.S., M.S., or Ph.D.

I think the students and the region deserve a good doctoral program they can be proud of. Instead, we’re likely to get a rushed, rudderless, “me too” doctoral program that nobody asked for and nobody wanted.

External links

UTRGV gets green light to seek two new doctorate degrees

A sense of community

Last week, Stephen Heard wrote a post about being paid for peer review that generated a lot of discussion on Twitter. A fair number of people were quite emphatic that they were not being paid, and a few seemed very grumpy about that.

Earlier in my career, I remember people complaining about the individual reviews they got, or how long reviews took. But I don’t remember people grumbling over doing reviews, or not being compensated for them. And I never heard complaints from editors about how many people were refusing to do reviews.

Now, I suspect part of this is just a shift in perspective. I hear more voices via social media than I did before, and hear more perspectives. I know people who are on editorial board on Twitter, which I didn’t before. Still, from my perspective, it feels like grumpiness over having to do peer review is a relatively recent thing.

It seemed to me that annoyance about doing reviews might be symptomatic of researchers having a degraded sense of community.

When you feel like you belong to a community, you just pitch in. You help. Not because you are paid to do so, but because it’s friends and neighbours and it’s just what you do to make your community a nice place to be.

I think people are refusing to do reviews in part because they don’t feel connected to the academic community. And I get why that would be: it’s a rough, competitive market for ideas now. The shortages in funds and jobs and everything else feels like it’s forcing people into a “me first, me only” mindset to try to survive.

People will complain about journals more when they don’t feel they those journals are part of their scientific community. Maybe this is why many academics have continued to support society journals, even as more and more of them get run by one of the big main “for profit” publishers.

I have been thinking a lot about community, too, because of things like university administration. This tweet went out last week, reading in part:

@utrgv President Bailey looks to create PhD in Cellular, Molecular & Biomedical Sciences.

Yeah, neither faculty nor students asked for that program. It certainly doesn’t make me feel part of a community in my own institution.

Same with graduate programs. I’ve seen some research that one of the biggest predictors of successful programs is that graduate students feel a sense of belonging. That is, of community. And while I tried to create that feeling in our graduate program, I have come to the conclusion I have failed.

This is one reason why science Twitter and the science online community has been important to me: because it truly does seem like a community. People offer ideas and support, for no reason, just because. Someone came up with the term “pocket friends,” which I think is a good phrasing. I’ve said to a lot of people that online conversations are real conversations. And online friends are real friends.

Update, 29 August 2017: This post was featured in today’s Daily Briefing in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Thanks to them!

Update, 30 August 2017: Mike Taylor has a response.

External links

Can we stop saying reviewers are unpaid?

Picture from here.

Grad student stops meeting supervisor, who doesn’t notice

Two years ago, Eleftherios Diamandis wrote a horrible piece in Science Careers that glorified overwork. This was widely criticized. And for this, he now gets... a platform at Nature?

Yes, Diamandis just published a new piece in a glamour magazine, in which he freely confesses to being a negligent grad student mentor. He writes (my emphasis):

I remember remarking on the slow progress of one PhD student's research project at our second review meeting (typically held six months after their project launch). Three months later, I repeated my concerns, which were mainly about how slowly the student was learning essential techniques such as mass spectrometry, the workhorse of our lab. But instead of addressing those concerns, the student stopped scheduling meetings. I was too busy to notice for another six months.

I should be surprised by Diamandis’s lack of self-awareness, but he’s already amply demonstrated his obliviousness. I guess I’m surprised that when he boasted about all the time he spent away from his family and the hours and hours and hours of working, I somehow thought that he might actually care enough about his work to be competent at it.

Grad students are not loose change that you can lose in a couch cushion, for crying out loud.

When Diamandis suggests the student do a master’s degree:

I was horrified when my suggestion elicited tears. The student and I decided to give the programme another try, with the proviso that we would hold mandatory monthly meetings. I also ensured that the student could get technical support from my lab manager. After three years, the student published in a good journal, and 18 months and two research papers later, was ready to write a thesis.

This guy is surprised that a student cries after literally forgetting that the student did not meet with him. And why is technical support not available to grad students all the time?

He may publish a lot of papers (and he does), but this event marks him as an incompetent supervisor. Diamandis cares only about one person: Diamandis.

Hat tip to Justin Kiggins and Meghan Duffy.

Additional: I’d forgotten than Diamandis had another Nature piece last year, pontificating about when he would retire. I think one of the more revealing moments in that piece is when he talks about how much he loves the h-index as a measure of productivity. It explains why he can take the time to write all these career opinion pieces but forget his student.

He measures his importance by his publication record, his h-index, and the Impact Factor of the journals he publishes in. Those are things he values. His trainees, not so much.

Given what he’s written, particularly the newest piece, a lot of people might suggest he move the clock on his retirement up quite a bit. Like, “You can retire any time now. Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry?”

Update, 11 April 2017. Edge for Scholars has summarized  some of the reaction from social media to Diamandis’s article.

More update, 11 April 2017: I changed the title of this post. It was originally, “Grad student goes missing and supervisor doesn’t notice.” That was not a correct characterization of the situation. It is not like the student vanished, nobody knew where he was, and a missing persons report should have been filed. The student was there, just not making progress.

A couple of other issues raised by Diamandis’s post that have come up.

First, I noted that this article shows how disrespected master’s degrees are. It is seen as a failure, not an achievement. This is a bit of a slap to the many faculty and students who work hard at master’s degrees, whether they do not want, or are not able, to do doctoral work.

Second, Kevin Wright noted that this is a sign of the inefficiency of large labs. Someone making no progress would not escape notice in a small lab. A small lab could not afford to have a student doing very little for half a year.

Related posts

Glorifying overworking: another self-inflicted crisis in Science Careers

External links

A growing phobia
The question I hate the most
Glam Journals Whiff Again: Nature Shares Advice from Neglectful Mentor

Master’s theses should be published

Mark Humphires has a nice post about the difference in research conducted at private organizations versus universities. His argument is that universities have screwed up scientific research because of those pesky wrong-headed incentives. (You know, the ones that scientists create for themselves.)

In the middle of a good article, I find this aside:

(Last semester, we even got a Faculty-wide email encouraging us to write up our Master’s students’ project work for publication. Because what science needs right now is more unfinished crap.)

Objection!

It’s terrible to characterize master’s theses as “unfinished crap.” It shows how little regard you hold for master’s students and their work. What have master’s students done to warrant their research being treated with such contempt?

I wish I could say this was surprising, but I have seen over and over again this disinterest in master’s students, their work, and their degrees. Research universities view master’s degrees as the exit route for bad doctoral students. Funding agencies don’t want to support them, because they buy into the “failed doctoral student” narrative, and because master’s are not terminal degrees.

This is another one of those biases that works against the stated aim of many institutions to increase diversity in science. As Terry McGlynn has often noted, under-represented students come from under-represented institutions. Many of the under-represented students we say we want to recruit may not have immediate access to an institution with a doctoral program. They may want to gain research experience in a master’s that may not have be available to them as undergrads (but that undergrad students at the more swanky universities may have already had).

In my role as grad program coordinator, I have been the person sending those emails asking, “Why we are graduating so many master’s students with thesis, but we are not seeing papers being published based on that thesis research?” I send them because we have always had in our program’s guidelines that a master’s thesis should represent a publishable peer-reviewed journal. My rough and ready guide is that a master’s thesis represents one paper, and a doctoral dissertation represents about three papers.

If you think your students’ work is “unfinished crap,” let me suggest to you that it is not always the students’ fault. Maybe it’s the fault of professors who didn’t mentor the student, didn’t support the work, and can’t be bothered to do their job right.

Related posts

The cages we scientists make for ourselves

External links

How a happy moment for neuroscience is a sad moment for science
Disadvantaged students come from disadvantaged universities

Fewer shots, more diversity?

The National Science Foundation just announced changes to its Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) that limits the number of applications for grad students to one. The NSF lists several reasons for this:

1) result in a higher success rate for GRFP applicants

You know how else you could increase success rate? Give more awards. But the political reality is that the NSF budget is stagnant, so the best they can do is increase in success rate at the cost of limiting chances to apply.

2) increase the diversity of the total pool of individuals and of institutions from which applications may come through an increase in the number of individuals applying before they are admitted into graduate programs,

You know what else could increase the diversity of applicants? Instead of changing the applicants, change the reviewers. Change the criterion those new reviewers are judging the awards by. Let’s not forget that in the past, GRFPs have been criticized for giving awards to doctoral students in a limited number of institutions. If the review process is biased, tweaks to the applicant pool won’t create more diversity, because they’ll be going through the same filter.

And just because I run a master’s program, let me call out that in the past, only 3.5% of awards went to students in master’s programs (page 3, footnote 3 in this report). Why do you hate master’s students, NSF?!

Terry McGlynn notes, however:

Shifting the emphasis of @NSF GRFPs to undergrads will increase representation because it will recruit people. If you give a GRFP to someone already in grad school, odds are they would be successful anyway. GRFPs can get undergrads into good labs.

This is a good point, but if undergraduates are still competing against graduates, and there’s still a bias towards the advanced doctoral students as the “safer bet,” the change in the applicant pool might not achieve the desired result in diversity. This might be an argument for splitting the program: one for undergraduates transitioning to graduate programs, one for graduate students in programs.

Finally, NSF’s last reason for the change.

3) ease the workload burden for applicants, reference writers, and reviewers.

I am glad to see this listed as a reason, because it is honest. It’s a lot of hard work to review applications, and you have to keep it to a reasonable level. I think it might be even more honest if it was listed as reason #1 instead of reason #3.

External links

NSF Graduate Fellowships are a part of the problem
How the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship is slowly turning into a dissertation grant
Evaluation of the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program final report
NSF makes its graduate fellowships more accessible

Picture from here.

Setting an agenda

Despite the title, committee chairs don’t have all that much power, particularly in academia. The whole point of having committees is that committees vote, and responsibility is diffused.

Committee chairs do have one actual power: to set an agenda.

I’m only a few days into my term as chair of the Student and Post-doc affairs committee at SICB, but I just want it to be known publicly that preventing sexual harassment of students and trainees has jumped to the top of the agenda.

This went to the top this morning when I opened my Twitter feed and saw, over and over, people discussing this article in the New York Times about an individual who harassed students at multiple institutions. This comes on the heels of other examples in recent months. This blog post could easily turn into a litany of harassment, so let’s just say this: there’s too much of that crap going on.

I don’t know whether harassment has been a topic of conversation for the committee before, but I look forward to finding out. If it hasn’t, it’ll be new. If it has, I plan to keep it front and center.

And I’m blogging this because I want to be accountable. I want people to know that this is what I want to try to do, so they can see if I succeed or not.

Related posts

Okay, SICB students and post-docs, I’m your guy

External links

Chicago professor resigns amid sexual misconduct investigation
Here’s how Geoff Marcy’s sexual harassment went on for decades
Work in progress: changing academic culture
You are worthy.

Photo by A Syn on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license

Prophetic paragraphs

Bradley Voytek wanted to read the last paragraphs of people’s doctoral dissertations. I dug up mine. It was in a section titled, “What next?”

Fourth, the brachyuran superfamily Raninoidea de Haan, 1841 are true crabs that, like hippoid sand crabs, are specialised for digging in sand and mud. Their gross morphology is reminiscent of albuneids: unlike the thorax of most brachyurans, the thorax of ranid crabs is not rostro-caudally compressed, and their legs have very flat, paddle-shaped dactyls. Comparing the convergent digging behaviours in the ranid crabs with the hippoid sand crabs could be illuminating in understanding the biomechanics of digging.

It’s, um, not a ringing last paragraph. No eternal verities or a big “What does it all mean?!” conclusion.

But what is cool is that of the four things I listed in my “What next?” conclusion, this was the only one I got to do. I did get to study those ranid crabs! And publish a paper about it!

Faulkes Z. 2006. The locomotor toolbox of spanner crabs, Ranina ranina (brachyura, Raninidae). Crustaceana 79(2): 143-155. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/156854006776952874

That makes up a tiny little bit for not even coming close to doing any of the other three things I listed as possible avenues since then. That makes it a nice last paragraph.

Photo by Tom Demeyer on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

“I didn’t get into med school. Should I do a master’s?”

Biology is the most popular undergraduate major in the United States, and I think the major reason for that is that an awful lot of people want to be physicians. And they’ve been told a biology degree is the best route to get to med school.

Even in an institution like mine, which has had great success in getting people into med school (which the university trumpets often) has a good percentage of pre-med students that are not accepted into medical school.

And let me tell you, the dream dies hard.

Because people tend to privilege childhood dreams, a lot of students will not let go of the idea of getting into medical school. One of my colleagues, seeing a student with a dangerously low GPA, asked the student getting advised, “What do you plan to do?”

“I’m going to med school.”

“With that GPA, you’re not going to get your bachelor’s degree!”

Consequently, in my role as grad program coordinator, I talk to quite a few students who didn’t get into med school, and who say they want to do a master’s degree in biology as a way to get into med school.

I caution on that plan of attack, for several reasons.

1. A MS in biology is primarily intended and designed to be a stepping stone into a Ph.D. in academia or a research-related job, not an M.D. in the health professions.

2. Because of (1), faculty have little experience mentoring students to be successful into getting into medical school. They are academics, not health professionals, and they are not connected to the profession you want to enter. They don't know what makes for successful med students.

3. Many biology graduate programs have very little human biology in the curriculum, less so than an undergrad program might have. So there is not a lot of the material that pre-meds are most interested in.

4. Because of (1 + 2 +3), pre-med students who are trying to get into med school who try master's program are often unhappy and quit the program before completing a degree.

But!

Some students have completed a master’s and successfully transitioned into med school that way. The problem is that I don’t know what percent of students that works for. I’ll bet it’s low. Unfortunately, pre-med students, who are often working on the sort of “Believe in yourself!” ethic in middling anime series, they will believe they’re the one that can beat the odds.

One of the other pieces of advice for those students is: always check with the people who run the program you want to join. If you want to join a medical school, as the medical school if a master’s degree will help get you into medical school. They will have a much better sense of the patterns and decision process than a grad program coordinator will.

It’s not as useful to ask the master’s program coordinator. The grad program coordinator has a potential conflict of interest. A grad program coordinator usually wants to bring in more applicants and more students into the program. Departments are evaluated on things like headcount and credit hours generated. Pre-med students are often reasonably sharp academically, notwithstanding not being let into med school. There can be a tendency to for a program coordinator to say, “Come on in, the water’s fine” even if it’s not the best move for the student because the program can benefit from a warm body.

Finally, I asked this question on Twitter (click link to see some of the responses):

Would you tell a student with BS in hand who didn’t get into med school to do an MS as a back door into med school?

The overall response so far has been mostly, “No,” with several people adding, “It depends on why they didn’t get into med school.” But certainly the overall advice seems to be that pre-meds who didn’t get in have better options than doing a master’s to further their career.

Don’t forget who approves new doctoral programs

The University of Michigan has been hosting a series of talks on the future of graduate and postdoctoral training in biology. There is a comprehensive Storify of tweet here.

American discussions about whether there are too many doctoral students and postdocs appear to be very much driven by federal funding agencies, mainly the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Both have an interest because they provide are the source of support (salaries and such) for graduate students and post-docs.

The role of American states in this whole scenario is almost never mentioned.

In Texas, new doctoral programs have to be approved by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. I have not conducted a survey of all the higher education systems in the United States, but I suspect that there are similar boards in other states.

If there is overproduction of doctorates, the states bear some responsibility for creating new doctoral programs.

While I hear from federal agencies on graduate student and post-doc training quite often, I almost never hear what the states think of all this.This mattere, because each state can have its own higher education agenda. And that agenda may not align with the agenda of the federal funding agencies.

The federal agencies get a lot of attention in this regard because they have money. But there should be a lot more attention focused on what the individual states think on the future of graduates and post-doctoral training. The states should not create doctoral programs at whim then leave them to be funded by federal agencies, any more than institutions should recruit grad students, and send their recent graduates off with little more than, “Good luck with that job hunt!” when they’re done.

A step back for UTRGV grad programs

Well, this is frustrating.

Currently, both The University of Texas-Pan American and University of Texas Brownsville handle graduate applications using a externally provided specialty system called Embark. Having used it for a few years, I can say it works well.

I learned yesterday that the new University of Texas Rio Grande Valley will use a completely new system for processing student applications to graduate programs. Actually, it’s already in place. It’s called ApplyTexas. It was intended to let students apply to any public university in Texas. Its sounds like a nice, simple idea: one system for students to deal with instead of many.

So, existing system that universities already have replaces subscription service, money saved, what’s the problem?

The problem is that ApplyTexas was designed to handle undergraduate admissions. It does not support attachments like personal statements or recommendation letters. To deal with this, it looks like applicants will have to go to ApplyTexas to enter their demographic data, then go to another website to upload documents, and then a third website to deal with recommendations. So instead of one common site, grad applicants will actually be interacting with three. The, they are “hoping” that all of the documents generated in these three systems can be combined into a single document.

And this decision was made after some UTRGV graduate programs had already started taking applicants.

It’s a mess.

Who decided this? The University of Texas System. Thanks a bunch, people.

Defending the astonishingly successful

Inside Higher Education reports on a speech by University of California president Janet Napolitano, in which she tells advocates “defending graduate education.”

<sarcasm>

Right, because graduate programs are doing so poorly right now.

</sarcasm>

It is weird to hear about the need to “defend” graduate programs, when the growth of master's degrees in science and engineering looks like this:

And the growth of doctoral degrees in science and engineering looks like this:

These numbers show a higher education enterprise that is thriving, not in need of defense.

Yes, it’s true these data are only for science and engineering, but I have no reason to think those for other disciplines are dramatically different. Plus, when you read Napolitano’s comments, it’s pretty clear that she is mainly talking about economic competition in the scientific and engineering fields. For instance:

640 startups are based on inventions created within the University of California, she added(.)

And two of her three “grad school success stories” – success anecdotes, really – are about STEM disciplines (medical research and information technology).

And Napolitano trots out the hoary promise that huge numbers of academic jobs are going to open up:

(T)he state is projected to need tens of thousands of new professors as the baby boomer generation retires.

Yeah. I heard those projections before I started graduate school in the late 1980s. Yet somehow, over and over again, they never materialize. And let’s say the number of academic positions available per year in the United States doubles. Following the trend lines in the graph above, doctoral recipients are still going to outnumber faculty positions by three or four to one.

Napolitano is a politician with vested interests. It is in the interests of universities to lobby for more funding to support more graduate students. It is in the interests of universities to portray grad school and grad students as benefiting the greater good (which it does, by the way). And it is in the interests of universities to say that problems with a shortfall of employment opportunities are going to go away.

But Napolitano is lobbying for money, not defending something that is under threat in any meaningful way.

External links

Defending graduate education

Should you reply to spamming students?

A colleague, who is a new assistant professor, asked on Facebook, if he should reply to an “endless” stream of emails from international students.

I know the kinds of letters this person is asking about. Many show the candidate has extremely limited ability to express him or herself in written English, the tone is often obsequious, and the letters are often clearly “form” letters sent to who knows how many institutions.

What’s the right course of action? On the one hand, there is an actual person on the other end. A person who has probably gotten bad advice, but still. On the other hand, it can take up a huge block of time to reply to all of these.

If someone sends you a cut and paste inquiry, it’s okay a cut and paste response. Signs of a cut and paste from a student include the opening, “Dear Sir / Madame,” or discussing research interests that are nowhere near the kind of stuff you do.

Only if someone has clearly written a personalized inquiry to you, that shows they understand what you do, should you spend the time to write a personal response.

I don’t have an endless stream of these letters - and I am the grad program coordinator - so I do reply. I send links to our entry requirements and program FAQ, and answer any direct questions in the letter.

Cognitive dissonance, science careers edition

On the one hand...

HESTEC is starting on my campus this week. I had honestly forgotten, which is an indication of how much the event is run from administration at the top instead of being orgazed more by faculty at the grass roots. The Twitter #HESTEC2014 hashtag is filled with “We must get more and more and more students in STEM!”

On the other hand...

Also in my Twitter feed this morning is this article from The Boston Globe: “Glut of postdoc researchers stirs quiet crisis in science.” (Incidentally, for those of us in the business, it hasn’t been that quiet.)

(U)niversities have expanded the number of PhD students they train — there were about 30,000 biomedical graduate students in 1979 and 56,800 in 2009. That has had the effect of flooding the system with trainees and drawing out the training period.

I doubt you’ll hear a single politician at HESTEC (and there’s quiet a few here) mention this issue.

External links

Glut of postdoc researchers stirs quiet crisis in science

Photo from here.

Different economies of academic success

From the K-12 system to their undergraduate degree, students are taught that they are operating in a credential economy. What is valued are whether or not you get a high school diploma, a certain GPA, a bachelor’s degree.

After so long operating in a credential based system, it should be no surprise that they have trouble comprehending the idea that at higher levels, in post-graduate work, academics are operating in a reputation economy. It’s no big deal to have a doctoral degree; lots of people have them.

The skills needed to survive in these two economies are rather different. In a credential economy, you are essentially on your own. You just need to complete tasks to complete the requirements to earn the credential.

A reputation economy, in contrast, is inherently social. Your worth is determined by how you are perceived by the relevant professional community.

Consequently, when they transition to grad school, students underestimate the necessity of establishing personal connections, and relating with the community they want to join . They are overly concerned about “programs” and not concerned enough about finding mentors and cultivating professional relationships in in their field.

How do you test persistance?

A new article at Nature Jobs takes a hatchet to the general GRE test. It closes out with:

If we diminish reliance on GRE and instead augment current admissions practices with proven markers of achievement, such as grit and diligence, we will make our PhD programmes more inclusive and will more efficiently identify applicants with potential for long-term success as researchers.

I am not sure how you can get a sense of those.

Typically, faculty want grad students who have performed at consistently high academic levels in their undergraduate career. This means high grade point average (GPA). As I’ve noted before, these students are often so bright that they have never struggled academically. I’ve heard of many students who hit post-graduate study, either in sciences or health professions, who struggle because they are getting something other than As for the first time ever.

How can you assess persistence in those high-performing individuals? I’m not sure there is a clear way to do this.

Some might try to assess persistence by stressing applicants. Some job interviews do this with “stress tests.” I tend to agree with this piece: they’re worse than useless.

People who behave like that are either naturally jerks, or they’re “manufactured” jerks who behave that way because someone told them it was a cool way to interview people, by abusing them. None of it is acceptable.

The Nature Jobs talks about extensive interviews. Personal interviews have their own bizarre quirks that may also introduce systematic biases. It is easy to talk about screening students for their grad school potential based on their personalities, but I suspect it is rather difficult to implement in practice. This is not to say we should just give in and just use the GRE, mind you.

I’m also puzzled by the continued references in the Nature Jobs article to the 800 point scale, which the GRE hasb’t had for a couple of years now.

Hat tip to Jacquelyn Gill.