Excuses Excuses

To those who read applications for academic positions of various sorts: Have you seen a recent increase in supplementary statements explaining possible shortcomings in an applicant's record? I saw a remarkable number this year, but that could just be a random event.
Over the years, I have seen a few, such as when a serious illness or other major life event affected an applicant's academic program or career progress. I am not talking about that sort of extreme event; I am referring to the more routine type of event and explanation, such as low grades or exam scores.

I am actually quite sympathetic to (slightly) imperfect records. A few years ago I wrote in a post about how I had an incomplete grade for a course taken during study abroad as an undergraduate. I was never able to figure out why I got the incomplete or how to make it up, and the "I" automatically changed to an "F". The "F" looked anomalous compared to the rest of my record and I don't recall explaining it in my graduate applications.

When I see these "let me explain my bad grade/score" statements, I sometimes muse about what I would have written had I supplied an explanation for my F. I hope I would have kept the explanation short, provided only the most relevant facts, and didn't insult others (as one recent applicant did to explain some of his F's -- he is actually smarter than the students who got A's because they were mindless sheep).

So: If you have seen "routine" excuse/explanation statements in applications recently, what do you think of them? How do you distinguish between a convincing explanation and whining? Do you know it when you see it? I suppose it depends, but any comments would be welcome.

The Second-Most Disturbing Thing I Have Seen in an Application (Recently)

Dear applicant:

I just read the supplementary statement that you attached to your application. I am sorry that there are some aspects of your application that fell short of your (and possibly our) expectations. I am completely sympathetic to your concern that your hard work over many years may not lead to certain opportunities because of these possible shortcomings.

Nevertheless, I think you should know that many reviewers of your application do not want to hear a detailed account of your episode of acute gastrointestinal distress at a critical moment in your academic life. It's not just that we are squeamish and cranky (although some of us are indeed both of those), but we have a dislike of excuses such as this one, even if it seems (unfortunately) quite authentic in its detail. I wish I could unread your statement.

The Most Disturbing Thing I Have Seen in an Application (Recently)

Memo to applicants for any job, position, whatever:

Do not try to convince the reviewers of your application of your tenacity and determination by describing how you obsessively pursued a young woman who repeatedly turned down your advances and invitations. This is disturbing. The fact that you did not give up in the face of obstacles is not an admirable quality. Leave her alone, if you have not already done so.

Now They Want To Talk?

Let's say there is a US University that has a long history of (1) not hiring many women faculty, particularly in some fields; (2) not tenuring many women; and (3) not retaining many women, even those who have or would have been awarded tenure. Owing to an environment that is so toxic for women in some departments, even some of those who might have been (or were) tenured will leave if they can. 

Now imagine that a female faculty member who is extremely accomplished gets another offer and decides to leave. This woman spent years at the famous place being bullied and disrespected, and is looking forward to moving to a department and university where she will be valued and respected.

Upon announcing her resignation, suddenly people at her (soon to be ex-) university want to talk to her -- senior faculty, administrators, others in positions of power. People who were not interested in helping her when she needed help. She doesn't yet know exactly what they want to talk to her about, so she is thinking a lot about what she might say. Presumably they want to know why she is leaving.

Should she be completely open and name names of those whose behavior is the reason she is leaving? If she has documentation of abuses, should she distribute this?

How likely is it that these administrators etc. will do anything constructive with any information she gives them?

Can one departing person do anything to change a persistent negative environment for other women?

These administrators must know there is a problem, so if they were going to do anything substantive, wouldn't they already be working for change? And if they aren't doing that already, why do they want to know more details about why one woman is leaving?

Or can it really be that one departing woman could be the 'tipping point', even if that should have occurred many years ago?

Does anyone have any advice for this woman, who is in fact a real person at a real place considering this very real situation? 

Fake Review Contest : A Summary

Today's post refers to recent posts involving the so-called Fake Review Contest, even though most of the reviews ended up being not-so-fake; they were, or were based on, real reviews that their contributors had received. Alas.

A possibly-interesting exercise, though not necessarily an uplifting one, is to see how many of the 21 submitted reviews resemble real reviews you have received. I estimate that I have received reviews similar to about half of the contest entries. I hasten to mention that this is over the course of more than 20 years of publishing papers and writing proposals; such reviews are rare, in my own experience. They do tend to be the memorable ones though.

Anyway, in the Fake Review Contest, every entry got at least one vote. Yay, everyone wins, but some more than others. Late-entry #21 (This work disagrees with several unpublished results and is unsuitable for publication in this journal or ANY OTHER ONE [sic] on the planet) is the vote leader. 

It is clear, however, that #9 (Dear Editor, In the future please waste your own time) also resonated with voters, as did #14 (These authors would be well advised to wait until my paper is published, and then they can cite it) and #17 (vague review Sent from my iPhone).

And at least 5 other entries have so far received double-digit numbers of votes.

I recently found myself writing a review and striving semi-valiantly to avoid being one of Those reviewers -- the kind who object to how their own published work is presented, who appear to be quashing an attempt by others to publish competing ideas, and who come across as patronizing and hyper-critical snobs about technical aspects of writing. I am not sure if I succeeded in avoiding those things, but perhaps one positive effect of compiling a list with so many examples of mean and unhelpful reviews was to remind me to be constructive, detailed, and as objective as possible in my own reviewing. I recommended that the paper be rejected, but at least I explained carefully and (I think) politely why I came to that conclusion. Now it is up to the editor.. a friend of the authors.

 

Fake Review Contest : The Vote

Is it time to vote on your favorite (define that however you want) entry in the Fake Review Contest, even though many of the entries turned out to be real (disturbing)? You can review the entries in their entirety by scrolling through recent posts, or you can refer to the handy list of excerpts that I have included in this post. The poll is below. You have to choose one.

1. if this paper had been better, I would have read it and loved it

2. [this paper] is filled with dangerous ideas crammed into a package with a mundane exterior

3. plagiarism example

4. Why didn’t the author [insert thing that is indicated clearly in the title]?

5. I don’t know anything about the topic of this paper but I’m going to review it anyway

6. Since the author is a woman, I had lowered my expectations accordingly, but the author did not even meet those.

7. something is wrong somewhere

8. There was no point in my reading the entire paper because .. the authors assert with no supporting evidence that the world is round.

9. Dear Editor, In the future please waste your own time.

10. The experiments seem to be toys

11. I couldn’t help but noticed that my work is not cited in this paper

12. If the authors had high-quality data, interesting ideas, and an understandable discussion and conclusions, I would write a positive review. In the absence of those items, I regret that I must hate this paper.

13. one of the authors is the nephew of [someone important to me and so] this is a definite accept

14. These authors would be well advised to wait until my paper is published, and then they can cite it.

15. Presumably you are doing something smarter than what you describe, so you should explain that.

16. Mad Libs review (The authors describe how they (phrase from abstract) etc.)

17. vague review Sent from my iPhone

18. However, I don't think the method is correct in principle. 

19. Although we made you do two revisions which cost you time .. we still will not accept your paper [for political reasons]

20. This paper is transformative and should be published immediately with only minor revisions.

21. This work disagrees with several unpublished results, and .. is unsuitable for publication in this journal or ANY OTHER ONE [sic] on the planet.

Which is your favorite?
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pollcode.com free polls<

Late Entry - Fake Review Contest

21.  PI (another real review, alas)

This work disagrees with several unpublished results, and in its current form, is unsuitable for publication in this journal or ANY OTHER ONE [sic] on the planet."

Fake Review Contest Entries #17-20

These may be the last ones(?). Voting to come soon.

-->

17. TC

The topic of this paper is not of critical importance to furthering knowledge.

Sent from my iPhone

18. DM (generalized from real review, with no further elaboration of what is not correct)

The authors proposed to study phenomenon A by using methodology XYZ. The calculated results were largely consistent with experimental results. However, I don't think the method is correct in principle. 

19 (formerly 21). FR (another mostly-real one)

Dear Authors -

We regret to inform you that we cannot accept your paper. Although we made you do two revisions which cost you time (4 months) and energy; we still will not accept your paper.

The reason we cannot accept your paper is because a "prestigious professor" [PP] (who I, the editor, wants to collaborate with in the future) at a famous university thinks that you should had done XX (minor technique) in the way that professor described. Although four other reviewers thought that the paper was sound and "accepted without revision" after the second revision; I am not foolish enough to piss off PP in any way. I will be kissing his ass for foreseeable future.

Your truly

Ass-kissing-associate-editor

20. IDL (this one is apparently entirely fictitious)

I am very pleased that I accepted to review this fascinating and compelling paper. Below are some constructive comments to help you make your significant paper a bit more clear for readers. Mostly, however, I found the paper to be extremely well written. I thoroughly checked all equations and found them not only flawless but also instructive. The discussion section should be essential reading for all of us in this field. This paper is transformative and should be published immediately with only minor revisions.

Fake Review Contest Entries #13-16

More entries below. It is not too late to submit your own!

13. EFSP (based on a real situation, alas)

Yes, I know that this paper is on a topic that isn't even closely related to the broad and sweeping topic of our conference. But it has some pretty pictures in it. And one of the authors is the nephew of the president of Obscure Foreign University and they are going to award me an honorary doctorate this coming summer. So this is a definite accept and darn the others who vote for definite reject on this! I'm the chair of this conference and the paper gets accepted because I say so!

14. DS

I am afraid I cannot support the publication of this paper. The authors present an idea that I myself have had for some time and just haven’t gotten around to writing it up yet. I think that when I write my paper, it will be better than this one. These authors would be well advised to wait until my paper is published, and then they can cite it.

15. FF1

Presumably you are doing something smarter than what you describe, so you should explain that.

16. FF2 (Mad Libs review)

The authors describe how they (phrase from abstract). It is on the relevant and timely topic of (paper keyword). However, they should really address (title of paper section) and (title of a different section).

Fake Review Contest Entries #9-12

Here are a few more "fake reviews" for the Fake Review Writing Contest:

9. ER

Dear Editor,

In the future please waste your own time.

10. YN (modified only slightly from a real review)

I'm suspicious of claims to categorize behavior in the vague terms of these authors, or as has been done in the past, using the very popular statistical framework X, which claims that the only way to rationality is to have a prior distribution on possible hypotheses for every problem. The experiments seem to be toys.

11. SW

I couldn’t help but noticed that my work is not cited in this paper on (a topic that has nothing to do with my work). If my work is not going to be cited, why would I spend time reviewing this work? If the authors add citations to my papers, if only the recent ones but perhaps also one of my classic papers and ideally my 2010 paper because I just need a few more cites on that one to raise my h-index by a point, I will be happy to read past the introduction and reference list.

12. NR

If the authors had high-quality data, interesting ideas, and an understandable discussion and conclusions, I would write a positive review. In the absence of those items, I regret that I must hate this paper.

Fake Review Contest Entries #5-8

Here are a few more 'fake' reviews (even though some are apparently word-for-word or only slightly modified from real reviews):

-->

5. CF

Paper title: Graph analysis of System ABC shows differences in A-B connections during Condition X vs. Y

This paper uses a novel method to study ABC system dynamics. However, I don't know anything about graph analysis so I'm going to interpret the paper through the lens of a different analysis method I do know something about. Thus the only constructive feedback I can give is that this paper is a poorly written explanation of a structural equation model of XYZ - the conclusions drawn make little sense given the data, i.e. they frequently refer to "graphs" but all I see are these pictures of circles and arrows.

6. SS (modified slightly from a real review)

Since the author is a woman, I had lowered my expectations accordingly, but the author did not even meet those. Even though I have never done experiments in my life and have never used any of these techniques, the experimental results presented were completely misinterpreted in my distinguished opinion. The largest error was the omission of any background information; the authors did not cite enough of my papers or work in the background, specifically my articles in “Science” and “Nature”.

7. MC (verbatim real review)

Why is this result not loudly proclaimed as a triumph of predictive modeling? I can think of several reasons, such as (a) the authors are saving this for another paper, or (b) some one else has this result in press already and the authors don't want to deal with the politics, or (c) the one that worries me, the only explanations known are ones that cast serious doubt on the other analysis in the paper, so something is wrong somewhere.

8. EWH

There was no point in my reading the entire paper because in the introduction on page 2 the authors assert with no supporting evidence that the world is round. That the world is round is simply stated. What is the evidence for this? Without a detailed and convincing explanation, with compelling evidence, the rest of the paper is worthless.

Fake Review Contest Entries #1-4

The first entries in the reviewing writing-fest are fascinating because they are all apparently based on real reviews. In some cases, I think only a few identifying details have been changed. Perhaps there is no need to have a creative writing exercise to craft a fake review introduction; the real ones are strange enough to provide plenty of fodder.

There will likely be a vote on the entries at some point, so I am numbering the entries and adding an author pseudonym for each (in most cases at the request of the author):

1. kamikaze

Taking into account that this paper forms the basis of Ms HopefulAuthor's PhD thesis, I would have loved to love this paper. But I don't. I hate it so much I don't even want to read it properly. Therefore, I will reject it without any other argument than the fact that if this paper had been better, I would have read it and loved it. Ms HopefulAuthor had better hope I'm not on her committee.

2. mixedmetaphor

This paper is like a car-bomb headed for a building or a wall or something; it is difficult to be sure what or where it is going. Will it explode or will it be a dud? Neither has a good outcome, nor does this paper. It is filled with dangerous ideas crammed into a package with a mundane exterior.

3. JT

I have completed my review of the manuscript by XYZ et al.  This manuscript must be rejected on grounds of plagiarism - significant sections of the text were copied verbatim from a previously-published manuscript [ABC et al.].  I attached a PDF of ABC et al.'s paper and the XYZ et al. manuscript marked to indicate the plagiarized text (you will note that all but the first two paragraphs were copied).  I am very disappointed that the authors chose to represent another group's work as their own.

4. GR

Proposal Title:  Linear and Nonlinear Methods to solve XXX

Reviewer 3 (it's always reviewer 3):

"Why is the approach limited to linear methods, and the PI does not propose nonlinear methods?"

Write This 2013

It has taken me a while to have 6.2 minutes of spare time to put together a post about an end-of-year FSP academic writing contest, but here it is, finally. You probably don't have much time either, so this year's contest has a brevity requirement.

To summarize the last five (5) contests:

• 2008: The Statement of Purpose;
• 2009: Letters of Reference;
• 2010: Why I Missed the Final Exam;
• 2011: The Cover Letter for academic positions; and
• 2012: The CV.

I was just thinking about how I finally have some time to work on my own writing, but then I realized I have letters of reference and nomination to write and I have promised to comment on the proposals and manuscripts of some colleagues and I have some manuscript reviews to do. The latter is the inspiration for this year's writing contest: REVIEWS. Specifically, I refer to reviews of manuscripts and proposals.

Reviews can be quite lengthy. In fact, some are longer than the original manuscript (I have only done that a few times). No matter how long and detailed the review, however, some reviewers signal their overall opinion in a few introductory sentences that address the general issues raised in the rest of the review. Is this review going to be mostly positive, negative, or "mixed"?

It is those first few sentences that form the challenge of this year's writing contest.

In 2-4(ish) sentences, write the introduction of a review. Your review can be of any flavor that you wish -- you can write a few sentences of pure scathing venom, you can write a beautiful prose-poem of praise, or you can be passive-aggressive and compliment (faintly) whilst undermining the entire premise of the paper.

I prefer that these reviews be entirely fake, but you can of course use real reviews (that you have written or received) as inspiration, ideally suitably disguised so that no real individual is targeted for insult or humiliation. The point of this exercise is to have fun and entertain with creative writing of the academic sort.

Send your entries to femalescienceprofessor@gmail.com and I will post results intermittently whilst the FSP Family is traveling around an interesting part of the world for the next 2 weeks or so.

My Year of Meets

[Note: the title is a subtle reference to the book "My Year of Meats" by Ruth Ozeki, but not for any particular reason, though I did like the book.]

Somehow I ended up going to a lot of meetings again this year. What is "a lot"? This year, for me, "a lot" = 6. There might be some years in which 6 is a good number and other years in which 6 is excessive, so the concept of "a lot" is flexible.

I do not regret going to any of the 6 -- each one was interesting in its own way, and very useful for discussions with colleagues and prospective colleagues/postdocs/students. Some of the 6 meetings were large, some were small, one was less than 500 miles from my home, the others were more than 500 miles from my home.

As I was musing about my Year of Meet(ing)s, I decided to try to think of the Most Strange meeting-related experience that I had in 2013. It will not surprise any regular reader of this blog when I say that my Most Strange meeting-related experiences (MRE) involved gender-directed weirdness.

There were several contenders for Most Strange MRE.

There was the incident when a colleague I have seldom met in person (although we have corresponded extensively by e-mail for years and written several papers together) came up to me and gave me a startlingly emphatic and prolonged hug in the presence of his wife (who walked away). ick.

There was the potential postdoc who had corresponded with me and who had supposedly done extensive investigating of a large project I am directing and that he wanted to join but who somehow thought that one of my male colleagues must be the lead investigator despite massive documentary evidence to the contrary.

And there were numerous small incidents in which men went out of their way to explain to me that they supported women scientists -- some of them had even worked with women and the experience had been surprisingly good. etc.

But the "winner" was when a scientist with whom I have only a passing acquaintance came up to me after a session that I co-organized and congratulated me on putting together such a "diverse" session. I don't mean to be thick, but my first thought was that he was referring to the subjects covered in the talks.

He said, "You must have worked really hard to have such a diverse session."

I said, "No, the session easily fell into place, given the general theme. We were all very pleased that there was such a diversity of approaches." [note: we = my male co-organizers and I]

He said, "I meant diversity of the speakers."

I said, "Oh, right, yes, well, we did deliberately invite two early-career speakers and two more established speakers, but it was mostly good luck that the session ended up with such broad representation from across Europe, Asia, and North America."

He said, "No, I mean that there were so many women in your session. I congratulate you on finding so many women." (FSP note: "so many" in this case: ~ 35% of total speakers, 50% of invited speakers)

I said, "That was not deliberate." I paused and thought about it for a moment, then said, "but maybe this was a good example of how a session can easily be naturally diverse."

He said, "It made me think that we are spending too much time focusing on the problem of women in science."

I said, "That does not follow."

That was depressing. It seems that at least one person assumed that those women speakers were selected because they are women, not because they are doing interesting work (even the one who is a hot-shot professor at a Top-Two institution?).

What has been your Most Strange MRE of 2013? Please share.

If You Just

It seems like it has been a long time since I have done a poll in this blog. Perhaps that is because I am tired of doing surveys, including surveys on surveys, not to mention surveys for which I seem to be held personally responsible for making sure others do them even though I don't even want to do the survey myself? Perhaps, but today seems like a good day for a blog-poll anyway. The topic is the post from last week.

How would you describe your reaction (just based on what you know from my description of the incident in that post)? I have enabled the 'multiple response' feature so you can select more than one. I don't doubt that my list below is incomplete. If you are so inclined, please leave a comment if your response is not represented.

My response was..
	The man was a clueless interrupting jerk.
	He meant well. That's the main thing.
	One of the women should have interrupted him.
	It is exhausting to be expected to deal with frequent low-level bad behavior like this.
pollcode.com free polls

I'll Go First

Earlier this year, I participated in a workshop about diversity in hiring and retention, with all the usual discussion of implicit bias and so on and so forth. It was very well done and I appreciated the reminders and advice.

At one point in the workshop, we were divided into small groups to discuss relevant topics. My group consisted of 4 women and 1 man (all white). Although I was the only scientist in the group, it turned out that 3 of the 4 women were from fields in which women are underrepresented.

For our small-group discussions, we were told to share experiences in which we had felt that gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or other characteristic had affected how people had treated us in a professional situation. When one of the women in my group started to speak, the man interrupted her and said "I'll go first."

I laughed and got a strange look from him. I thought he was being funny and had jumped in like that to be deliberately stereotypically aggressive. He was not joking. He really wanted to go first. He had seriously interrupted the woman who started to speak because he had something really important to say (first).

His example involved living in another country years ago and having someone say something in a meeting about Americans not understanding some aspect of higher education administration in that other country. This hurt him. He felt stereotyped, and he felt that the comment was directed at him even if it was made in an apparently general way.

The stories the women told were mostly about being ignored, silenced, disrespected, overlooked, and patronized in very personal ways that in some cases affected their careers. The man nodded and said he understood, he had felt that same way when he was insulted that time years ago.

I admit that I thought his example was stupid and I thought that I would not like to be in his department. Not to be competitive or anything, but he came up with one ancient example in which his administrative prowess had been obliquely called into question. The women each had multiple recent experiences in which they had been the specific, personal target of some very unpleasant behavior by colleagues or administrators.

But then I wondered: perhaps, for the purposes of being alert to bias, the important thing is that this man believes that he had the experience of being stereotyped and feels empathy as a result? I am not advocating being disrespected as a personal growth experience for all, but I wondered if I was being too hard on him in dismissing his example as absurd.

Then I remembered that he had interrupted and insisted on going first, and I gave up on my wonderings. Perhaps my failure to respect his example shows the limitations of my empathy. And perhaps I have a lot more work to do to overcome my own biases (despite attending numerous workshops).

I left the workshop thinking: how can any of us possibly do the right thing (in the hiring process) if we are all riddled with biases, despite good intentions? Is our best hope to have large and diverse hiring committees comprised of people whose biases, implicit and overt, will mostly cancel each other out?

Tour de Forced

Lately I have been looking at those little roving clusters in campus tours with a new perspective. Over the years, I have been amused and in some cases semi-horrified by what I have overheard as campus tours passed nearby. I have been amused by the endless trove of strange trivia that tour guides impart, and semi-horrified when some of that trivia is about my department/building and is quite incorrect (not that it matters). Lately I have been looking at these groups to observe the proportion of students to parents and to see if any students look like they are on the tour without their parents. It's hard to tell of course, but I think most students go on these tours with one or both parents.

Although not something I have to face too imminently, college is looming on the horizon for my daughter, and that will mean campus tours and all the rest. My parents did not accompany me on any campus tours, but these days it seems that many parents do. I can see how the shared experience would give you something to discuss later, and that would be interesting.

Even so, I would rather walk around a campus with my daughter ± husband (not on a tour) and have her do the guided tour thing alone if she wants to go on a tour. I am not sure I could handle all that backward walking, our-rec-center-is-so-cool, the history-building-is-haunted trivia stuff.

I am surely being unfair to campus tour guides by even suggesting that all they do is spout meaningless factoids. I know that the work they do can be extremely important. I have met several people recently whose choice of college was positively or negatively affected by the campus tour guide. In fact, I recently asked a high school senior why he decided not to apply to a particular university, and he said it was because he didn't like the campus tour guide.

I still remember the tour guide at the one college to which I applied (early decision). I was very impressed by her. Did she change my life? Perhaps I would have applied and gone elsewhere for college if she had been an obnoxious bore? I don't know, but I also think my experience on the tour would have been different if my parents had been with me. I enjoyed being on my own, free to have my own impressions and then talk about them with my parents later.

I have discussed this with my daughter, and she is so-far ambivalent about being accompanied by one or more parents. She can see how the shared-experience thing might be nice, but she is also happy to have her own adventures. I told her that if she ever wants me to accompany her, I will, and I will even try to behave.

Did you go on campus tours with your parents (or other adults) and/or offspring (depending on your stage of life..)? Are you glad you did? If so, what was good about it? And if you did not go on campus tours with your parents (or other adults) and/or offspring, why not?

Price Check : You

A former PhD student of one of my colleagues recently added up the cost to their advisor/institution of their graduate education: salary, tuition, benefits for n years. It was a large number. Add to that the cost of the research (this can be considerable). Then evaluate the result, however you want to attempt to measure that in tangible or intangible ways (knowledge advanced, papers published, career opportunities for the former student).

[Note: I am talking about the typical case of a STEM graduate student who receives full support during their graduate studies -- salary, tuition, benefits. In this post I am ignoring the issue of low pay for grad students, not because I don't care about the issue but because I want to discuss other financial aspects of the grad school experience.]

In this particular case, the former student (who is not an academic and who has a successful career that involves thinking about money) was just musing about 'worth'. Was it 'worth' it to the advisor, department, institution to spend all that money on this PhD? In this particular case, the advisor's answer is yes (I happen to know), and I will take the liberty to speak on behalf of the institution and say yes as well. This is a good result.

I was impressed that the former student was interested in putting a price tag on their graduate education for the items that have specific costs. If you are in a STEM field or another field in which you are paid to be a graduate student (including as a teaching assistant), do you know how much your graduate education cost(s)? For example, if you are a graduate research assistant paid from a grant, do you know what the actual amount to the grant is (not just your salary)? You may not know, as advisors don't routinely share this information; I don't, but not because it is a secret, it just doesn't occur to me to mention it. If you are teaching assistant, your department may be paying your tuition and benefits in addition to your salary, which may or may not be the same amount as for a research assistant depending on institution-specific policies.

And how much does your research cost? You probably know (or knew) some of the costs, for example if you turned in receipts for conference travel. But do you also know the costs (rate) for any analytical, computational, or other methods that have user fees? This is not a judgmental question with a right and wrong answer; I'm just curious.

Whether those costs turn out to be 'worth' it to anyone (including you) is another question -- one that is too big a question for my post-grading brain to handle right now, though it is interesting to contemplate how each of us measures long-term worth in this particular context.

Heads or Chairs?

Whenever administrators at the department level (or moral equivalent) gather to discuss their experiences, a very common topic is whether one is a head or a chair. What is the difference and who cares?

First let me note here that I am not entirely one or the other (but will not explain that statement further), so the distinction is not one that I feel strongly about. Nevertheless, I have found myself having the heads-or-chairs conversation (or listening to discussion of the topic) a surprising number of times in the past year or so.

During one recent discussion among a group of chair-heads, it turned out that some people's definition (in this case: powerful heads vs. less-powerful chairs) did not hold up in the face of data. In fact, in a group composed of heads and chairs, there seemed to be no difference in terms of the types of activities and amount of "power" (for lack of a better word) each administrative species had. Perhaps there is a distinction within a single institution that has both heads and chairs, but any such distinctions across institutions seem to have little or no meaning. I am not even sure there are distinctions within single institutions. I know of one case in which the distinction is related to historical preference rather than to any real difference in responsibilities.

To answer the question about the difference between a head and a chair: There seems to be a belief among some that heads have more power (such as to make decisions with less consultation of faculty, committees, deans) or length of term (5±1 years versus 3 years) but in fact there may or may not be a difference at some (many?) institutions.

Who cares? Do you care? My unscientific research into this critical issues seems to indicate that heads care more than chairs. I have heard some people (n = 6) specifically note that they are a head, not a chair, but I have not heard a chair make such an emphatic distinction. Maybe administrators at higher levels care. Maybe I have met the only 6 people in the world who care. I can tell you for sure that my mother does not care.

Which one do you think sounds better? I think they both sound absurd (if you really think about it), but head is simpler because it is gender-neutral. Chair can of course be short for chairperson, but chairman is still a very common word. The easiest way to get me to claim to be a "head" is to ask me whether I prefer chairwoman, chairman, or chairperson. Ugh. None of the above.

Medieval Mind

Not long ago, I sat next to Distinguished BioMedSciProf at a luncheon meeting. We introduced ourselves (name, department, institution) and said a few slightly-more-detailed things about our areas of research expertise. I therefore knew what part of the human body/system he studied and he knew what aspect of the physical sciences I studied. We talked for quite a while, but I will mention three particular things that affected my conversational experience:

1. After explaining some basic aspects of my research, he asked, "Why hasn't all that been figured out already?" Several times in our conversation, he said things like, "Don't we already know all the important things about that?"

What does one even say to something like that? We non-bio scientists are just a bit slow? So how's it going CURING CANCER? What? You haven't done that yet?

2. Talking to him was like lopsided jousting, or like taking my oral prelims again. He fired questions at me and expected a certain answer. If he was not convinced by my response (despite having no expertise with which to judge my answers), he expressed his dissatisfaction ("That is hard to believe" etc.) and fired more questions. It was conversational torture (alert: hyperbole).

I was overall fine with this although I did not enjoy it as a conversational style. Is this one of those stereotypical male/female things in which men enjoy conversation-as-combat and women feel attacked? I didn't exactly feel attacked -- that's too strong a word -- although it was a bit exhausting. He mostly asked me questions about what he perceived I work on rather than what I really work on, but we made little progress in getting to a discussion of what I really work on. This could be because I was not a good explainer or because he was not interested in what I really work on. Either way, I think it is safe to say that he was not a good listener.

3. He said he thought he had met me before. I said I did not think we had ever met. It did not take much more exploration of this conversational thread to realize that he was confusing me with another female science professor in the physical sciences, at another university.

"No man can tell two of them apart, you see, and one name's as good as another.." The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton

Well, the quotation wasn't meant to apply to women, but from my perspective, I have very little in common with the other FSP. We are not similar in geographical location, appearance, personality, age, or research expertise (from a physical sciences perspective, anyway, but perhaps we are the same from a biosciences perspective). I know it doesn't really mean anything that he thought I was this other FSP*, but it was yet another strange little aspect of our "conversation".

* For example, in the class I am teaching now, there are 4 particular students who seem so similar that it took me 3 weeks to know them well enough to be able to distinguish them correctly and easily. I am sure it would shock them that I see such similarities; they very likely do not see any such similarities (even if they have the same hair/clothes and they have similar or identical -- in the case of two of them -- names).