Physical Media...

As a kid growing up, I think that I was always a bit of a 'collector'. I liked to have my books, CDs, DVDs, etc., displayed on shelves, and in pristine condition1. Also, particularly when it comes to DVDs, I used to put considerable effort into picking up films that I thought should be in my collection, which was no small feat for a poor student. This mild obsession with collecting things also made me somewhat dismissive of digital versions of media - I mean, what was an album without liner notes, after all? And what was the point of a book that couldn't go onto your bookshelf upon completion?

This strange animosity towards digital media lasted until fairly recently when I switched completely (well not completely, I guess I got a bit of a start when I bought a Kindle). Honestly it's quite strange - it's as if one morning I woke up and seriously asked myself: What's the point of carting around all of this stuff? Obviously, I'm soon going to be moving 3,000 miles away, but even ignoring that, I'm never going to watch 90% of these movies ever again. Nor will I be rereading most of these books!2 It's as if the mere presence of 'consumed' media used to bring me personal satisfaction.

All of a sudden, CDs and DVDs seem incredibly 'quaint'. If I could replace every CD I had with an MP3 version of the album, I would just to get rid of my binder of CDs (I realize that I can 'rip' them, but I must legally retain the CDs). I'd like to trash every DVD that's available on Netflix instant streaming, and so on. Somewhat shockingly, after all of these years of lugging my DVD collection around North America, I actually ditched every single plastic and/or paper case that I owned (including collector's editions and the like, and put them all in a binder as well. Good riddance!

The times they are a-changing, and so are we, obviously. I think that some part of me has wanted to own 'stuff' just so that I can feel like I've left the 'student lifestyle' in which I was immersed for a decade. But as I get older, perhaps the nature of that 'stuff' is changing - I have been buying a startling number of clothes lately. We'll have to see what I latch onto next, I guess. Hopefully it won't be something else that's annoying to lug around!

P.S., I did keep the cases for the 10 or so blu-rays that I own. Old habits die hard, I suppose :-)  

1My obssession with keeping my books in perfect condition was somewhat legendary. But as long as it didn't negatively affect my life or that of others, I was told that this was simply an 'eccentricity'. 

2I do regularly go back to many of my science books (popular and professional) for references and quotations, so those are certainly worth keeping.

Advice to Future Postdocs...

If there's one thing that we fail to do in science, it's give people any real indication of what's involved in their 'next step' in the field. When I was an undergrad signing up to do an 'honours'1 major, I had no idea what an honours project actually entailed. While I had to declare my major during my second year (or 'sophomore' as they say here), it wasn't until the end of my third that we had a meeting to explain the project. Similarly, I had no idea what being a grad student was like before I began doing my M.Sc. During my Ph.D., the impression I got of postdoc-ing was something along the lines of: 'Work like crazy until you become eccentric if not insane'. Thankfully, while postdoc-ing is certainly a lot of work, for most people, it's not quite that bad.

Anyways, whether you're going to grad school or a postdoc, chances are that you'll be applying at multiple locations, possibly going for several interviews. One thing to keep in mind is that these aren't like the job interviews that we've all become accustomed to during our high-school years and summer breaks. Starting with grad school, but especially in the case of a postdoc, these interviews should be much more reciprocal: The lab needs to determine whether you're a good candidate while you need to determine whether the lab will be an appropriate fit for your objectives. So here's a few pointers that I've gleaned both in my experiences going on interviews, but also being involved in interviewing candidates.

1. Know what the prospective lab does.

I'm sure that this strikes most people as obvious, but you'd be surprised. You need to go back and read the last few years worth of papers that came out of the lab and be ready to discuss their contents with your prospective PI. This takes time and work and it's why I disagree with people who send out blanket applications to a bunch of labs. Obviously you want to go to a lab that will allow you to pursue your own interests and it's probably best to restrict your applications to those labs that actually interest you. Finally, it's also helps to cater your talk (yes, you'll have to give a talk) to the group's interests; however, always put sufficient background into the presentation such that it could appeal to anyone.

2. Know your stuff.

A postdoc should be an independent researcher. You shouldn't need someone to tell you what to do next, or how to design a research project - you should've learned this during your Ph.D. When you show up at a lab, you should have ideas about projects that you could carry out in that group (even if you're applying for a position with a pre-determined project). Even if you haven't defended your Ph.D. yet, you should treat the time that you're interviewing as a defense of sorts: You need to know your current project inside-out because people are going to ask you questions about it. I've never been to, or been involved in an interview where I or the candidate was not asked 'what could you see yourself doing in my lab?' I wouldn't answer that with 'I don't know' or 'I'll think about it'.

3. Ask 'tough' questions and pay attention to what people say.

Here's where that reciprocal interview aspect comes in: You want to know what it's like working in this lab. Take it from someone whose seen several different 'lab management styles': the way that things are run can vary wildly and you may be more comfortable with certain styles. You want to ask many questions of both the PI and the lab members - preferably each alone and in a group. There are the basics: You'll want to know how the lab's doing in terms of funding: will you be able to carry out the projects you want to do? What about conferences: does the PI send postdocs to a yearly meeting? How about manuscripts: does the PI allow their students/postdocs to write their own papers? Does the PI have any particular view on publications in general? (we all want Nature papers, but if you won't be allowed to publish any manuscript that doesn't go to an impact factor 15+ journal, that may be a problem2). Have postdocs in the lab generally gone on to successful careers? If so, what have they done (academia, industry, left science altogether, etc.)? What about projects? Does everyone in the lab get their own, independent project or are you going to be competing for the same prize?

The above are all of the kinds of things that you can ask both the PI and the lab members, but there are a series of questions that you should reserve for lab members themselves. Things like: What's it like to work in this lab? Does the PI expect you to work 14 hours a day? Is the PI respectful and do people feel as though they're able to voice concerns about projects based on their expertise? How's the lab dynamic? Do people get along and work together? How about the department? Are there a lot of collaborations going on between labs? Are there people for you to talk to about your work in terms of 'outside knowlege' (e.g., statistics or computational help? What about living in the area? Is it nice, are there things to do, areas to avoid, etc.?

Pay attention to both what people say and what they don't say. Are people being cagey about their comments or dancing around issues? Are some people in the process of leaving, and if so why? Are you meeting with everyone in the lab or only a subset? If the latter, why? Are there people that the PI doesn't want you to talk to? It's a much better sign when the PI wants you to meet and talk to everyone rather than a set number of folks.

At the end of the day, you need to take all of the answers that you get and weigh the pros and cons. There are always going to be issues - no environment is perfect and the nicest, best PI in the world is occasionally going to have disagreements with some lab members. People saying this or that particular negative thing should be taken in context: Ask yourself if it's going to be a problem in terms of your potential experiences in the lab. I think that a lot of people assume that the purpose of these interviews is 'all business' and that they should stick to questions about the science itself. Remember though that you actually have to live there: will doing the best project that you can imagine in a lab where people don't get along and in a place where there's nothing to do be okay for you? For some very particular, focused, and motivated people, that's fine. I doubt that it's the norm, however.

4. Think about what you want to accomplish during your postdoc. 

To me, one of the most frustrating aspects of post-secondary education is the the strange 'next-logical step' attitude that many people take. Fine, you're going to college because everyone else is, but doing a master's degree because you don't know what you want to do is kind of overkill isn't it? Surprisingly, some folks seem to make it all the way up the ranks to a postdoc using this same sort of logic. To be clear: I'm not talking about people who are wondering whether they should be pursuing a career in academia vs. one in industry: that's typical of anyone at the professional level, and with a few exceptions, your postdoc will probably contribute positively to your job prospects3.

I don't think that anyone should be doing a graduate degree unless they really like what they're doing. I've had a surprising number of direct interactions with people who were in grad school 'while they decided what to do next', and it was a major drag. Unfortunately, a lab is like an organism unto itself - there's a lot of shared tasks, exchanges of ideas, and co-worker support involved. When one someone's not picking up the slack, it can make things very difficult.

In my experience in academic labs, the postdocs are typically the hardest workers, and the ones that grad students turn to when they have questions. Being more independent means more responsibility, so think about this before you sign on to a contract.

In terms of what you want to accomplish, the advice that I've received is that you should use your postdoc to build the kind of research portfolio that you will be able to translate into the kind of research that you're going to want to do in your own lab. You don't want to spend all of your time doing random busywork, or working on unrelated projects just to get your name on papers. Are you going to be able to carry out the kind of project that will get you recognition such that fellow scientists think of you when they think of your field? That's quite daunting to contemplate, I know, but I suppose that that's the sort of thing that you have to think of at this point.

So there you go, a few ideas that I hope will serve someone well when they go out there and take the next step for themselves. Do the background work to know exactly where you're going and ask the right questions. If your lucky, you'll be in a situation where the difficulty in your choice involves deciding between which awesome lab you want to go to! If anyone has any other pieces of advice (or comments on mine) feel free to leave comments and I'll add them to the post.

1I have a policy of using American spelling for everything that I write. This is entirely for practical purposes: American scientific journals often require American spelling, while non-US publishers accept American or British. However, in this case, the major was done in Canada, so British spelling it is!

2As crazy as this may sound to some people (especially if you come from a basic biology lab like me) this happens. I know of multiple cases, so these are the kinds of things that you want to find out about.

3The 'exceptions' would be situations such as one that a friend described to me: Having done a long postdoc makes you 'more experienced' and thus 'more expensive in terms of hiring' for some industry jobs. Depending on the job, I guess that they may want cheaper, fresh-faced Ph.D.s?

Another Career Move...

Many people have already heard the news, but last week I decided to accept a postdoctoral position in the lab of Hunter B. Fraser at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California beginning in the fall. I'm excited about the work I'll be doing there, and I'm sure that I'll be able to talk about some of it soon (I'm currently in the process of doing a lot of background reading and writing down ideas).

And so, yet again I find myself preparing for a long distance move in service to my chosen career. My North-American 'trotting' map now looks like this:

1. Born in Moncton, NB. 2. Halifax, NS, for undergrad. 3. Burnaby/Vancouver, BC, for M.Sc. 4. Hamilton, ON, for Ph.D. 5. Postdoc at NIH, Bethesda, MD. 6. Postdoc at Stanford, Palo Alto, CA.1

My current 'dilemma'2 is deciding between whether to ship my furniture out West or rent a moving van and go on a cross-country trip. Both will be expensive, but I seriously doubt that either would be as expensive as ditching all of my stuff and re-purchasing it over there (between my TV, couches, bed, and kitchen set, I'm easily looking at ~$3,000 and I'd still have to ship a bunch of boxes of stuff anyways). If anyone's had any experience with this kind of stuff, I'm all ears for suggestions!

I have to admit that I'm looking forward to moving back to the West Coast. It probably has a lot to do with the gorgeous weather, but I really enjoyed being in a place where everyone's so active. In my brief time interviewing at Stanford, I walked by no less than 3 separate bike shops, and as far as I can tell, there seem to be bike lanes everywhere for ease of getting around on two wheels.

The other major exciting prospect to this move is the opportunity to return to a place with a concentration of people interested in and working on evolutionary biology. It's no secret that the NIH's focus is on human health related issues, and with the exception of the NCBI, evolutionarily interested people are few and far between. There really is something annoying about having people ask you things like, 'why would you ever want to work on X?' or 'what's the point of doing Y?'. I firmly believe that, as a scientist, you should be ready to justify and defend the value of your work, but if people can't understand the utility of model organisms in the first place there's no real foundation from which to begin your arguments.

Oh well, the move is still a few months away, and I've got plenty of time to wrap things up here and figure out how I'm going to get all of my stuff out West. Looking forward to less heat and more palm trees!

1There is something kind of amazing about the degree of 'mobility' that exists in the modern world. I wonder what an 'average number of cities in which adults have of lived for more than 1 year' stat would look like? I assume that I would be above average by now.

2I put dilemma in quotation marks here because it's one of those words that people constantly use incorrectly. A dilemma involves a situation where someone has to chose between two disfavorable choices. Being uncertain about whether to drink with your friends, or go to a concert is (typically) not a dilemma.

A Disturbing and yet Familiar Tale...

I caught wind of an interesting post today: "Why I will never pursue cheating again" on a blog that I will now be following: A Computer Scientist in a Business School. I'd highly recommend a read. It's the story of a young assistant professor who was excited about the opportunity to teach undergrads. However, he soon discovered that a shocking number of students in his class were cheating. He quickly realized that the time he spent attempting to confront and discipline the perpetrators outweighed the amount of time spent actually teaching the class, so he decided to give up on bothering to deal with the cheating1. 

Anyone who's ever dealt with teaching or TAing knows that it's the very few, legitimately involved students that make any of this stuff bearable. I've made it a point to try to avoid blogging about interactions that I've had with students on account of a time some years ago when a student tried to blackmail me. She alleged that a blog post that I'd written was specifically about her and proved that I was biased towards giving her low marks, going as far as to threaten to take it up with the Dean's office. She had no real case (the blog post was about general difficulties with pleasing everyone as a TA), but that and other horror stories convinced me that describing any public dealing with students was unwise.

Regardless, it seems fairly clear from my own experiences as well as analysis of actual data, that many (possibly most) people attend university for the 'college experience' rather than legitimately wanting to learn about something. Is it any wonder that students cheat? A recent issue of The Economist pointed out a new study that shows that in terms of lifetime earnings in the US, you're better off not doing a BA. BA holders see no appreciable gains in salary and yet are saddled with crippling amounts of debt. Are such programs really serving the needs of society? Solutions are not obvious and some proposals for reform are controversial; however, I think we can all agree that something has to be done.

1That's not the most disturbing aspect: During the year that he spent actually cracking down on cheating, his student evaluation results dropped, leading to a reduction in his typical annual salary increase. That must make the whole effort feel all the more frustrating.

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11.07.18 UPDATE

The actual post seems to have been taken down by the blog's author. Perhaps the post was too specific (it detailed examples of actual plagiarism and named classes and depts) and he was asked to take it down? Regardless, I'm leaving my own post up as is - hopefully there will be a statement from the blog's author soon.

11.07.21 UPDATE

Indeed the blog's author, Panagiotis Ipeirotis, has indicated that:

I took the blog post down after NYU received a "cease and desist" letter, and I was advised by my superiors that I may be liable for legal liabilities if I keep the post up. They could not perform a full legal analysis, and as a precaution they asked me to take the post down. For work-related issues, the employer has the right to restrict "free speech", a ruling supported by many decisions of the Supreme Court. It made no sense for me to disobey and try to fight the C&D letter by myself.

Rant: Institutional Email...

As I prepare to leave my current postdoctoral position and embark on a new chapter of my career, I'm again faced with going through the process of changing my 'institutional email address'. This is to say that the email address given to me by my current employer will be shut down and I'll have to obtain yet another one at my new place of work. I've gone through the following institutional suffixes in the last decade: '@dal.ca', '@sfu.ca', '@mcmaster.ca', and finally '@mail.nih.gov'. At this point, I consider myself somewhat of a 'professional' and find it very annoying that, yet again, I'll have to send out a blanket email telling a variety of people to 'please update their address books'. No doubt, I've lost contact with prior acquaintances solely because my email addresses have constantly been changing.

It would be far more useful both career and personal-wise if I had a functionally-permanent, independent email address, wouldn't it? The obvious solution would therefore be to either a) use my gmail address, or b) pay for a professional 3rd party email box. However, there's a big catch: many professional activities require 'institutional email addresses'. For instance, I've had calls for manuscript review that required an institutional address, people wanting letters of reference from me requiring an institutional address, and various campus organizations that refused to send information to any other email address. Great.

It would be wrong to say that the impermanence of institutional addresses for non-faculty is their only weakness. In fact, I'm often surprised by how unfriendly most of these email servers have been as compared to the free, ad-supported gmail1. For instance, all of my institutional email servers have had tiny maximum attachment sizes and ludicrously small maximum storage capacities - without exaggeration, I've hit max capacity (from a fresh clean) on my current professional email address in an afternoon of being sent powerpoint slides. Gmail's capacity is > 36 times the capacity of my institutional mailbox. Yet another problem is that these mailboxes are difficult to access. Obviously, this is partly due to security reasons, but I'm also talking about terrible, slow web interfaces as well. Don't even get me started about what a chore it is to search through my mail, or how tedious it is to set up any kind of address book.

Unfortunately, all of this belies the greatest travesty underlying institutional email addresses: The insane amount of 'legitimate junk mail' one receives on a daily basis. Consider the following: I have no problem giving out my gmail account to every ridiculous online marketing scheme in existence. The very first email they send me goes into a filter (they take roughly 10 seconds to set up) and I never hear from said company again. I get surprisingly little junk mail to my free, ad-supported email account.

On the flipside, I receive multiple dozens of emails per day to my institutional account from various sources because I am automatically associated with a bunch of 'distribution lists'. It actually drives me crazy to think that part of the cost of running various institutions goes to paying the salaries of people who send out inane email 'reminders' about upcoming flu season/performance by X at local venue/inspirational message from program chair/etc. At my current institution, I get tons of emails that have absolutely nothing to do with me but are sent to everyone by default.

The tragedy of this is that I and others regularly miss emails about legitimate issues such as documents that need to be filled out and signed or training that needs to be complete because we don't want to waste time reading every random message that hits our inbox. All of this junk is a waste of time and money for the person writing it, and a larger waste of time and money for all of the people who then have to read it. Think about this: If I'm right, it would actually be better to pay a person to write the inane email and send it to their own trash folder than to mail it to everyone in terms of net productivity. 

There's a substantial literature on the 'information overload' effect of email (for example, see here). It's ease-of-use as compared to traditional 'snail mail' has led to its overuse, forcing us all to waste time on reading meaningless trivialities that accomplish little if anything2. Even ignoring all of the earlier complaints, if using my gmail account allowed me to get off of all of these distribution lists so that I receive only messages directed to me, that alone would be a massively welcome change. Oh well. 

1I have no idea how some people can still use Hotmail, however. Unless they've changed radically in the past few years, I've always found their servers to be incredibly slow and tedious.

2I'm open to be proven wrong on this one, but my hypothesis is that sending me some ridiculous clip art about allergy season does nothing to reduce the very real irritation that my allergies cause.