It must be because I'm so pretty.

There is a student in the department that for some reason, calls me by my first name even though he calls all the other professors Dr. ____. At first I assumed it's because I'm young and cool and whatever, but, today I learned differently.

Our freshman orientation classes are doing a video scavenger hunt. One of the questions is to tape a professor introducing themselves. This student (not a freshman, but one of the "student mentors" assigned to a group of several first-year students) was leading his group of freshmen past my office, and I overheard the following conversation:

Student: Can we ask her?
Mentor: The scavenger hunt sheet says FACULTY MEMBER.
Student: Isn't she a faculty member?
Mentor: You have to be a Doctor. She's not a Doctor. Let's ask Dr. _____.

Hm.

Some years ago, I saw a portrait of Avogadro. It made me think about how so many geniuses are kind of hard to look at . . . and so many beautiful people - well, you know, maybe they don't have to learn to use their brain. Anyway, sometimes when I do something particularly stupid, I joke to myself, "I must be really pretty today."

But, seriously, I do wonder why that student made the assumption that I am not a faculty member. I have my own office. I teach classes. I advise graduate students. But I don't look quite as old and nerdy as some of the other faculty members. Or is it something else?

Nice kid. Problem student.

There's a student in my class this semester who is a really nice guy, but clearly underprepared for grad school. Actually, I'm surprised the student was accepted (not that I have seen his transcripts or other application materials, but I did receive several introductory emails from him when he was looking for an advisor/major professor before he was eventually admitted, and it was clear from every email that he had poor communication skills and not a particularly strong grasp of some of the major issues in the discipline) but he is a member of a particular underrepresented group within our department - so I kind of suspect that this played a role in how he ended up here.

He has a really hard time grasping even the basic material in my class. I really try my best to help him out when he comes to my office hours, but . . . 1) I don't think I should have to be spending EVERY office hour with him (why is it my problem - or the other students' problem - that he didn't come in with an appropriate level of preparation and skill from his previous background?), and 2) I have a hard time answering all his questions without spoon-feeding him (normally this line is one I am comfortable walking, but in this case it's quite a challenge).

It kind of makes me a little angry on the student's behalf. It makes me a little angry on my behalf, too. :(

On manuscript revision.

I'm not sure what it says about me that one of the things I have really come to enjoy is submitting manuscripts for publication and then responding to the reviewers with remarks and revision.

It's like a game, somehow. The manuscript revision process is very tactical and strategic and I like that (as opposed to the proposal review process, which still seems capricious and wholely un-strategic). I make a move, the reviewers make a move, I make a countermove in response. Sometimes when a paper goes through the review process relatively unscathed, a feel a little guilty or let down, as if I have won the game because my partner/opponent was incapacitated somehow (um, but I still celebrate the win, and it still goes right into my career stats).

Don't tell anybody I said so.

I treat all my students with equal respect.

But some of them are really, really HOT.

Sometimes it's the little things

All week long I have been wanting to snag some Twizzlers from the vending machine. But, the front-most package of Twizzlers was resting at a weird angle in the auger thing. I have been burned by this in the past: you put in your 75 cents, you push the buttons, the auger turns, and a corner of your package of Twizzlers gets caught up on the candy next to it, or something, and you get NOTHING.

So as I am standing there, pondering this situation and lamenting my several days of Twizzlerlessness, the vending maching guy wheels up to the machine with his restocking cart, and I buy some Twizzlers directly from him as soon as he opens the vending machine.

Yay.

Playing the game

Remember when I said this? Well, at the end of the fiscal year our actual raise data came out. The average faculty raise was slightly, but not much, higher than that prediction. But, mine . . . was a lot higher.

It was because of this. I had thought it the courteous thing to do to alert my department chair that I was going on this interview, and it sort of snowballed into a retention extravaganza that I had not intended.

I am not, by nature, a game-player. It really was not my evil master plan to squeeze more money out of the university for myself so I feel kind of guilty, because they really needn't have worked to hard to retain me - I like my job a lot, but I was intrigued that there were opportunities out there that I had not considered. But, eh . . . sometimes you play the game, because that's just how it goes.

And then, sometimes the game plays you. For example, I was recently offered an underling editor position for the main journal in my field. The person that invited me to take on this position explicity stated it was because of the relative rarity of my gender within this discipline. Blah. So, I accepted because it's good for my professional development, even though I really didn't like the reason for the opportunity. (FYI I like to think I have more to offer my profession than just my second X chromosome.) But that's just the how it goes.

I force my grad student to be a polluter.

I have a great little PhD student working on some data we're gathering at a site off-campus, which requires somebody to actually go to the site. In the past, I have hired an undergrad to do this, and I supported and supervised and went out there myself when the situation warranted it.

But as I get more and more involved in more research, my schedule becomes more crowded, and now that there's a full-time PhD student on this project, I need her to take over the management.

She doesn't drive. There's no way for her to get to the site, since public transportation runs around town but not to isolated areas like this one, even though it's only about 2 miles from campus.

I told her that she needs to get a drivers license and I'll rent a motor pool car for relevant periods of time so that she can get there and back, but that will take several months to accomplish since she has never, ever driven a car before.

In the meantime, I have to act as her car service to take her out there and bring her back, and it annoys me and complicates my summer schedule more than I want. It's also a true problem during periods (for example, nearly all of July) when I am out of town and need her to be overseeing things. Phoo.

You win some.

Last summer an undergraduate advisee was kicked out of school for failure to achieve the required GPA for several semesters in a row. After talking to me and evaluating his options, he petitioned to be let back in on a probationary basis, and was granted the petition, under the additional caveat that he meet with his advisor on a weekly basis.

I was kind of annoyed at first because I thought this placed an undue burden on me, rather than him. But, fine, it's part of my job I guess, so meet we did. It was mostly just a check-in kind of thing, so he'd have somebody besides himself to be accountable to, so I played Mother Hen and asked him if he had turned in all his homework and studied for his exams.

I started off thinking thought this was sort of a waste, but somewhere in the semester our conversations became more about people skills and general professional management (example: when you did poorer than you expected on an exam, and you want to talk to the professor about it, DO NOT say, "Is there any way you would raise my grade?" Instead try something like, "Could you give me some advice on where I went wrong, so that I can improve my studying and do better next time?" Remember that you are the only person really responsible for your performance). At the end of the fall semester, he had received his highest GPA ever, but was still under the cumulative GPA to graduate as planned in the spring.

So, spring semester we continued to meet and he continued to work hard, and at the end of the academic year raised his GPA to 0.01 above the minimum level, and graduated. He stopped by my office to give me a victorious thank-you speech, and to tell me he'd be more than happy to talk to any of my students in the future about why you should work hard and take college seriously right from the beginning of your career, rather than blowing everything off and assuming that it'll work out.

So, yay!

D! D! D! De-fense!

Yesterday was my first ever grad student defense for my own student, a masters student that I have really enjoyed working with. It went really well, and after it was over and he gave me a big hug I almost cried because I am a complete softy and so proud of him.

And today, my other masters student sent me a file with some weird data, saying that there was some sort of problem that she absolutely could not find, and I took one look at the data and saw the problem right away . . . I sent her an email saying, "Here is the problem. I'm a little concerned that you had not noticed this yourself," and then she sent me a really apologetic, self-deprecating response and I almost cried because I am completely confused about how to help her figure out how to figure these things out herself. She needs to go on the offense on her data, rather than being wholly reactionary.

The relationship between advisor and grad student is a weird one. Collegial, parental, friendly . . . different for every student, too. Does it get easier? Or like everything else in this job, does it stay the same or get harder but I just get less anxious about it?

Final exams.

Have I mentioned that I pretty much hate written exams? Another prof in my department did some surveying of his students regarding exams, and the responses indicated that the majority of the studying was in the form night-before cramming. This is not a surprise, of course, but it makes me hate the exams even more, because I am not trying to gauge how well the students can cram the night before. It was partly this uncertainty about what I was really measuring with a written exam that led me to try the oral exams (which I repeated this semester also), and one of the pieces of feedback that I've gotten from the students is that one thing they don't like about the orals is that "they take too long to study for." This is another indicator to me that the students are generally studying for the writtens the wrong way. The oral questions I use, which I give to the students in advance (and then when they arrive for the oral, one question is selected at random), cover the fundamental material - how well do they understand and can they explain the basic relationships between different elements of the system, how well do they understand and can they explain the basic causes and effects in the system, etc. In my mind, knowing that stuff cold would be part and parcel to studying for ANY exam in the class. That the students do not study that way already indicates that they do not have the same mindset that I do about how and when and what to study for a written exam. (I am not saying oral exams are an antidote to poor study habits, just pointing out what I have observed.)

Also, this semester has been really brutal, for some reason. A lot of funding surprisingly came through, which makes me feel better overall than the times when a lot of funding does NOT come through, but of course it's more work. And the sorts of assignments I've been giving have taken a lot of work to grade, partly because I purposely make the problems open-ended and partly because I am rubricly challenged and have to spend a lot of time figuring out how to grade the submissions. Plus my class was recently converted (at my request) from two credits to three, so all the assignments are new, because the class now has a "lab" component. You know, and then there are just lots of other things going on professionally and personally.

So I don't like written exams and I'm tired and busy.

About a month ago, I proposed to the students that I don't feel like giving a final. I don't feel like writing it, I don't feel like grading it, and I'm not convinced that any of us would actually learn anything from it so I just don't want to do it. But because I think of the syllabus as a contract, we had to come to some kind of unanimous agreement about how to reallocate percentages, etc., so we did. And no final.

Who is the sucker? The students think I am being a softy, and I feel like I have tricked them into working harder at the end, because of the way we distributed the points. I guess everyone's a winner.

Multiculturalism.

The Indian restaurant I sometimes go to for lunch put up some new wall decorations; it used to be bare but brightly colored paint, and today I saw it's now adorned with a few big black and white posters of . . . Jimi Hendrix, Elvis Presley, and Frank Sinatra . . ? But the soothing sitar music in the background and the gracious Indian hostess are the same.

Most unwonderful time of the year

The stretch of time between spring break and May final grade submission is the worst period of the entire year, in my opinion. Not only are you trying to finish up all the normal end-of-the-semester things, but you're also trying to finish up all the end-of-the-academic-year things, and seniors are trying to graduate, and graduate students are trying to defend & submit, AND you're trying to gear up for the summer's round of research projects and conferences.

And on top of that, we also have my Least Favorite Emails Ever. These are the emails wherein the students complain about me not rounding their grade from a C to a B-. I politely point out that they had all semester long, full of numerous opportunities, to earn a better grade, and that as stated on my syllabus, which we all agreed upon at the beginning of the semester, "I round strictly to the tenths place."

This semester, the first student to whine at me about this will risk my stony silence and bitchy demeanor. Seriously, I gave opportunities to resubmit assignments. To petition for exam score revisions if their reasoning was sound. To complete some extra credit. If a student did not take advantage of any of these opportunities, it galls me when they ask me to bump their grade out of the goodness of my heart.

We all know academia is very lucrative.

This year's raises? Word on the streets is they'll be 0.4%. Rock on.

Psychological milestone for green assistant prof

Two of my papers have been cited by people I don't even know. (Previous citations were from people who were somehow involved in the research. So they don't count.)

HA.

Readin'. Writin'.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the reading and writing skills of my students - and how said skills are generally lacking.

My assessment of their reading is probably not so much "they aren't good at it" but rather "they never do it, for neither pleasure nor education nor work." Obviously this is a generalization. Every semester I get at least one good writer, and at least one student that I know reads things from time to time, either the newspaper or some science fiction novels or perhaps even some classic literature.

My assessment of their poor writing comes almost exclusively from looking at the technical memos that I insist accompany all of their computational assignments. The technical memos are supposed to explain the premise, methods, assumptions, and results of their calculations, as well as giving recommended practical solutions to the problem in question. The students' memos are largely terrible, and not just in a way that I think I could train out of them (discipline-specific conventions that just take time to learn) but in a way that should have been trained out of them already (how to recognize and avoid sentence fragments, etc.).

Let's assume these issues are partly related. I will lump them into the same category and say the students are generally opposed to the written word - theirs or someone else's.

I was discussing this with a colleague of mine in the education college, and she pointed out that perhaps some of the reading-aversion is because my students are primarily male, and that she recently read a book which posits that when we teach kids to read, and to analyze writing, it's usually in a way that implies they need to have some kind of emotional connection to the writing, and that's a big turnoff to the typical young man. I can see this. It's why I hated reading things for English classes in high school and college myself. It didn't seem to have any practical value to me to discuss how I FELT about a book/poem/story. My husband, by the way, thought this was crap, though he himself does not like to read (but because he thinks he is too slow at it).

I once was at a meeting with some other faculty in my discipline and we were talking about some really interactive teaching, and one of the profs said, "In my course we have great discussions, but we're able to do that because the students read the material before they get to class." I asked her how she was able to get them to read, and she said, "I just expect them to." I am pretty sure my expectations would have no such magic effect on my students, and actually I kind of thought her response was code for "Because I am a GREAT teacher and you are not, duh." Also, my students are generally very, VERY bristley about the money it is costing them to attend college, and so a large number of them refuse to buy textbooks, even when it puts them at a significant disadvantage in terms of getting required work done.

And the writing . . . cripes. Yesterday as I was grading another stack of mediocrity, I was wondering why I don't feel like they're improving in quality at all, even after five technical memo assignments returned to them with comments and grades. For some of them, maybe most of them, I suspect they just don't care. In which case, should I feel free to just slap a number grade on there and not spend the time to give constructive feedback? As it is I tend to focus on just a few key things or else I would be writing all over the paper, but even that sucks up time.

I also am not sure if they don't care because (a) they think I am just a bit of a nutcase in making them WRITE in a technical class, and they just want to pass and graduate and they don't care to put any time into improvement, and/or (b) they do not believe me when I say that being able to communicate technical material in written form is something that most people have to do on the job, in one way or another. Or maybe it's something else.

But, WOW, does it make me not want to ask for the memos anymore.

Olympic dreams

If I were an Olympic gold medalist, no doubt I would tear up on the podium as they played my national anthem, and I would be full of both pride and humility . . . but I would also be a little pissed that my medal looked like a CD.

On an education-related note, I appreciate this quote from US Education Secretary Margaret Spellings: "Our students cannot 'cram' overnight for success any more than a skier or figure skater can sit on the couch for four years and then hope to compete in the Winter Olympics."

Graduate Students

Grad students are critical to my research success. But they really stress me out. It's not just the students themselves, it's the whole system:

1. When you have a project ($), you have to scrounge around for a student, and you may not find one that you like that's a good match.
2. When you find one you like that's a good match, you may not have the money.
3. When you have the money and a student, the timing may be weird. Like the money runs from March to March, but the student runs on the academic year. Etc.

THEN, should all the planets align and you can get the administrative details to work out, you have to figure out how to get their best work out of them. Some students need a lot of direction, some students hardly need any (and you maybe it's a struggle to squeeze info out of them), some students need moral support so you have to be a cheerleader for them, some blah blah blah. I find this a tremendous stressor and challenge. It literally keeps me up at night.

I wonder about my own advisors from grad school. Did I keep them up at night? Did they agonize over how to mentor me? Did they ever think about it? Was I a challenge? Did I stress them out?

Metrosexuality.

I went to one of the campus cafes for lunch, and a group of four guy students were sitting at the next table, talking about video games and beer and which bars have the hottest chicks. And then:

Guy 1: Dude, did you straighten your hair? It looks good.
Guy 2: Yeah, with a straight iron this morning. Thanks.
Guy 3: Isn't it weird how you can perm your hair, and the curls last for months, but straightening just lasts for like, a day?
Guy 1: No, dude, if you get it chemically straightened it's like a perm but straight.
Guy 4: But that costs a sh**load.
Guy 3: Like, how much?
Guy 4: I don't know, like 50 bucks or something. It's way cheaper to just borrow your girlfriend's flatiron.
Guy 3: I'm thinking about just shaving my head, because I'm tired of fussing with my hair, anyway.

I haven't heard any squeaking (yet)

Remember when I was worried about that one student that has a reputation for being disruptive and hostile? I had a conversation with a couple of the professors who've had him in class, and they both said that his deal is that if he is not convinced of the practical value of the subject matter, he gets angry about spending all this money on useless stuff. Etc.

Philosphical differences aside, I can in good conscious play along with this to some degree, because I believe in clueing the students in to why we're learning this subject matter. I started this thing in a class I was teaching 5 weeks of last semester, an 8 AM numerical methods type of class. It's really easy to lose contact with the students with that material at that hour. So I decided I'd begin every class with the same two questions: 1. WHO CARES? and 2. How do we do it? By the end of the second week, I was amused that when I start off saying, "Whenever we hit new material, we must ask ourselves two questions. The first is . . . " I'd get a whole chorus back of "WHO CARES?". But, more valuably, I'd ask the class to do a couple minutes of brainstorming trying to think up who does care, and why. And then we'd move on to question 2 and discuss all the relevant nuts and bolts.

I liked so much the vibe that generated right at the beginning that I decided to continue the practice in my current class. I think the students are more willing to get their minds into the material if they're sold at the beginning on the idea that it's useful or valuable in some way. It also seems to have, for the time being, placated the squeaky student, because I have had zero problems with him so far. In fact, he contributes to the discussions, and jokes around with me during labs, and has so far not scared me much. So yay for that.

Annual Reviews

I don't enjoy compiling my information for my annual review. But, I do like the satisfaction of looking at it when I am finished and thinking, "Ha! What do you know! I actually DID accomplish some things."