I started this blog in my own words "to blog primarily about thoughts about my work and life out here". Well, both work and here are changing. Today is my last day at my small northeast ohio medical school, and my last day as a trainee. As of next week I will be fully fledged tenure track junior faculty, and back on the east coast. And so I feel this is a good time to end this blog.
I have enjoyed writing it immensely. It has helped me think my way through the past five and a half years. But it was written for a time, a place, and a version of me. And all those things have changed.
I do not use the internet as I once did as a trainee scientist, as a place to learn more about my chosen field and my career path through it. And indeed, the world has changed, especially online, since the heady days when I joined twitter and later started blogging. As the great unpleasantness of 2016 wore on, I began to become exhausted by the endless hot takes and rapid fire opinions of the internet. And so I began to question my own role in it. Is what I have to write so essential?
When I retreated from the internet, a friend of mine commented that that was loss of a young queer academic voice on the internet. Perhaps. But quitting the internet meant recommitting to where I was physically. To become a young queer academic voice in rural northeast ohio. Which is no less valuable.
The tension here is one I have always felt. I call it the Bolkonsky Bezhoukov dichotomy, after two of the main characters from Tolstoi's war and peace. Prince Bolkonsky, a sceptical materialist, gives up the opportnity to be a camp aid, convinced that he can do more good, indeed only do good, as a sergeant to his unit. Peter Bezhoukov in contrast, believes in the paths of providence, the possibility of great change, and moves from secret society to secret society to be part of that great change. These days, I am a Bolkonsky, but unlike Tolstoi, I think a Bolkonsky can indeed do thing.
So I am ending this blog. Thank you for reading. And watch where else I will speak, in new ways, about new challenges.
Good luck to you all.
Paleogould
Tuesday, 18 June 2019
Tuesday, 11 June 2019
A scientist in four dimensions
The past five years have been a wild ride intellectually and professionally. When I started this postdoc I was a year out of completing a PhD in paleontology. Specifically, I'd been looking at the relationship between bone morphology and mammal ecology in the fossil record of the North American Paleocene-Eocene (roughly the first 20 million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs) to see if it could tell us anything about the role of locomotor specialization in the success of certain groups of mammals. I came to this lab to learn the techniques necessary to do biomechanical work necessary for testing the functional aspects of the correlations between morphology and ecology I based my paleontological work on. I thought, if I thought anything (I wasn't seeing particularly far into the future at that time, for a number of reasons) that I would spend a couple of years learning the techniques in a different system, then go back to my comparative functional morphology work with a little bit of biomechanics thrown in.
Fast forward five years later, and I'm leaving this lab with a completely different research focus. I'm off to start my own lab studying swallowing in the context of neurological disorders. I'm a Co-I on an NIH funded R01 I helped write. I'm increasingly interested in incorporating more explicit neuroscience into my work. I'm still interested in comparative question, but completely different ones based on the ontogeny of musculoskeletal systems and behaviors in mammal feeding. I haven't worked on anything paleontological in 4 years. I haven't touched a fossil since I finished my PhD.
This transition, or, more accurately, this complete change of track, is something I've spent a lot of time thinking about and coming to terms with. I had wanted to be a paleontologist since I was nine. How was it that after having come close to that goal, I was willing to move away from it all of a sudden? Did I really want to give up evolutionary biology and comparative zoology? Was I selling out?
Initially, my worries about this problem were acute, until I began to realise they were based on a false story I had been telling myself about myself. Yes, I'd wanted to be a paleontologist since I was nine, but that wasn't all I'd wanted to be. I'd also wanted to be a librarian, a policeman, and a doctor. More relevantly, I remembered that in my last year at Cambridge the three subjects that had really gripped me were paleontology, physiology, and neural mechanisms of behavior. I had even considered continuing with neuroscience, until I balked at the amount of animal work required (another change I've gone through since that time). So in some ways, the things that were drawing me into my new research direction, the problems and questions, were things that had always interested me as much as paleontology. One of my frustrations as a mammal paleontologist in fact had always been how little we discussed in any detail the unique physiological adaptations of mammals. I am first and foremost a mammal biologist, and that means that their physiology and behavior are interesting to me.
Yet my thinking has now matured even past that recognition into the realisation that what I do now doesn't erase what I have done. My five years working in paleontology, the fossils I collected, the museum collections I measured, the methods I used, the papers I published, the conversations I had, haven't been erased by my years working in mammal feeding physiology. Collapse the time dimension, and I am still a paleontologist, and a physiologist, and a neuroethologist, and a comparative zoologist.
I wanted to be a paleontologist when I was nine, and I am one. That doesn't mean I cannot be anything else as well.
Fast forward five years later, and I'm leaving this lab with a completely different research focus. I'm off to start my own lab studying swallowing in the context of neurological disorders. I'm a Co-I on an NIH funded R01 I helped write. I'm increasingly interested in incorporating more explicit neuroscience into my work. I'm still interested in comparative question, but completely different ones based on the ontogeny of musculoskeletal systems and behaviors in mammal feeding. I haven't worked on anything paleontological in 4 years. I haven't touched a fossil since I finished my PhD.
This transition, or, more accurately, this complete change of track, is something I've spent a lot of time thinking about and coming to terms with. I had wanted to be a paleontologist since I was nine. How was it that after having come close to that goal, I was willing to move away from it all of a sudden? Did I really want to give up evolutionary biology and comparative zoology? Was I selling out?
Initially, my worries about this problem were acute, until I began to realise they were based on a false story I had been telling myself about myself. Yes, I'd wanted to be a paleontologist since I was nine, but that wasn't all I'd wanted to be. I'd also wanted to be a librarian, a policeman, and a doctor. More relevantly, I remembered that in my last year at Cambridge the three subjects that had really gripped me were paleontology, physiology, and neural mechanisms of behavior. I had even considered continuing with neuroscience, until I balked at the amount of animal work required (another change I've gone through since that time). So in some ways, the things that were drawing me into my new research direction, the problems and questions, were things that had always interested me as much as paleontology. One of my frustrations as a mammal paleontologist in fact had always been how little we discussed in any detail the unique physiological adaptations of mammals. I am first and foremost a mammal biologist, and that means that their physiology and behavior are interesting to me.
Yet my thinking has now matured even past that recognition into the realisation that what I do now doesn't erase what I have done. My five years working in paleontology, the fossils I collected, the museum collections I measured, the methods I used, the papers I published, the conversations I had, haven't been erased by my years working in mammal feeding physiology. Collapse the time dimension, and I am still a paleontologist, and a physiologist, and a neuroethologist, and a comparative zoologist.
I wanted to be a paleontologist when I was nine, and I am one. That doesn't mean I cannot be anything else as well.
Monday, 29 April 2019
A portrait of a job search
As some you may know, I recently signed an offer letter for a tenure track job starting this July. My time as a postdoctoral researcher in northeast Ohio, the time in which I started this blog, is coming to an end. Through my time learning the ropes of scientific careers in the past few years, I've always found information on the job searches of others important and interesting. So I decided to add my own. What I present here is a case study, specific, idiosyncratic, uncontrolled. It cannot be generalized. It is however, data. Add it to your sample, and consider your sample critically.
About me:
I started my postdoc in autumn 2013 with 1 paper in press. By my time on the job market last autumn I had 13 papers published or in press, so a bit more than 2 papers a year as an average. About half of those are first or last author. All of them are in society journals. I have no glam or baby glam pubs. I had no major grants of my own, though I had applied both for a K99 and an R15 and listed both on my CV (the R15 was pending for part of the job search season, not discussed for the later part). My teaching was limited, largely to my gross anatomy lab instruction I did in graduate school with a smattering of lectures in allied health anatomy courses over the past five years, as I was in a 100% research position. Another characteristic of note of my CV was a complete change in career direction between my PhD (in paleontology) and my postdoc (experimental physiology in an animal model of disease). I have about three times as many publications in the latter field than the former at this point.
About the jobs I applied for:
I applied for 45 jobs. Geographically (for personal reasons) these were located almost entirely in the northern Midwest and rust belt (Illinois, Michigan, Ohio), and the mid Atlantic region (New York to North Carolina). I applied only to full time, tenure track jobs. In terms of universities I applied to everything from Ivy leagues, to R1s, to Medical schools (osteopathic and allopathic), to regional four year teaching intensive universities to liberal arts colleges. In terms of area of specialty, I applied to jobs focused in Anatomy, Physiology, Neuroscience, Evolutionary and Comparative Biology. I had three versions of my research statement targeted at different levels of research support, and three cover letter templates. My teaching statement and diversity statement were almost identical for all universities that required them.
Results:
I got five phone/skype interviews, exclusively from job searches looking at least in part for someone who could teach gross anatomy. From those, I got three on campus interviews. 2 of these were at four year colleges looking to expand undergraduate anatomy instruction for nursing and premedical students. These two institutions were eye openingly different, one being a regional state campus, one being a very small private liberal arts college. I learnt many things I didn't know about the diversity of undergraduate education in the US. At both interviews, incidentally, my lack of teaching experience, particularly with undergraduates, was brought up as a concern. The third interview was at an osteopathic medical school with a growing research focus. The initial interview was very focused on my ability to teach gross anatomy, but after my research seminar there was growing enthusiasm for my capabilities as a researcher, and a second campus visit resulted in a offer that maintained my involvement in teaching gross anatomy while giving me significant research support and percent effort allocation. The result was a position pretty close to my ideal. Which was fortunate, as this was ultimately the only offer I received.
I am loathe to draw any conclusions from this, so the only remarks I will make are the ones that occurred to me comparing my experience to what I had maybe expected from my own data collecting. Applying broadly helped me, but not in the ways I thought it would. On the one hand, I could have only applied for anatomy jobs. On the other, it was not obvious from the job posting, or even from my first interview, that the job I eventually got would be what it was. A narrower set of job criteria might have made me miss it. Ultimately there were too many unknowns to really make a very good filter. The second is that different parts of my CV mattered in different ways at different times. My standout characteristic I thought would be my research productivity, except what got me through the door of interview in every case is my ability to teach a specific subject, even if my teaching experience might not be what the university ideally would want. And yet again, it was the specifics of my research agenda, and my grant writing experience, that led to the second visit at the job I took. As someone once told me, all job searches are a compromise. I turned out to be that compromise in ways I couldn't have known. Finally, getting the right feedback was essential. I asked teaching faculty to review my job talks for teaching positions. I asked neuroscience faculty to sit on my practice chalk talk for a neuroscience department (which wanted me to teach gross anatomy. Medical schools are odd beasts). Every time, the specific things they pointed out and suggested were brought up as positives by the places I visited.
And yet, for all this, I can't help but feel that I was lucky. How can you generalize, learn anything from 1 job offer in 45 applications? I know I did as much as I could, and it worked out for the best. But some of this, more perhaps than I am comfortable with, was good fortune. The right place, the right time. The opening seems so narrow that I feel I barely squeaked through. A relief, yet also sometimes an uncomfortable feeling.
About me:
I started my postdoc in autumn 2013 with 1 paper in press. By my time on the job market last autumn I had 13 papers published or in press, so a bit more than 2 papers a year as an average. About half of those are first or last author. All of them are in society journals. I have no glam or baby glam pubs. I had no major grants of my own, though I had applied both for a K99 and an R15 and listed both on my CV (the R15 was pending for part of the job search season, not discussed for the later part). My teaching was limited, largely to my gross anatomy lab instruction I did in graduate school with a smattering of lectures in allied health anatomy courses over the past five years, as I was in a 100% research position. Another characteristic of note of my CV was a complete change in career direction between my PhD (in paleontology) and my postdoc (experimental physiology in an animal model of disease). I have about three times as many publications in the latter field than the former at this point.
About the jobs I applied for:
I applied for 45 jobs. Geographically (for personal reasons) these were located almost entirely in the northern Midwest and rust belt (Illinois, Michigan, Ohio), and the mid Atlantic region (New York to North Carolina). I applied only to full time, tenure track jobs. In terms of universities I applied to everything from Ivy leagues, to R1s, to Medical schools (osteopathic and allopathic), to regional four year teaching intensive universities to liberal arts colleges. In terms of area of specialty, I applied to jobs focused in Anatomy, Physiology, Neuroscience, Evolutionary and Comparative Biology. I had three versions of my research statement targeted at different levels of research support, and three cover letter templates. My teaching statement and diversity statement were almost identical for all universities that required them.
Results:
I got five phone/skype interviews, exclusively from job searches looking at least in part for someone who could teach gross anatomy. From those, I got three on campus interviews. 2 of these were at four year colleges looking to expand undergraduate anatomy instruction for nursing and premedical students. These two institutions were eye openingly different, one being a regional state campus, one being a very small private liberal arts college. I learnt many things I didn't know about the diversity of undergraduate education in the US. At both interviews, incidentally, my lack of teaching experience, particularly with undergraduates, was brought up as a concern. The third interview was at an osteopathic medical school with a growing research focus. The initial interview was very focused on my ability to teach gross anatomy, but after my research seminar there was growing enthusiasm for my capabilities as a researcher, and a second campus visit resulted in a offer that maintained my involvement in teaching gross anatomy while giving me significant research support and percent effort allocation. The result was a position pretty close to my ideal. Which was fortunate, as this was ultimately the only offer I received.
I am loathe to draw any conclusions from this, so the only remarks I will make are the ones that occurred to me comparing my experience to what I had maybe expected from my own data collecting. Applying broadly helped me, but not in the ways I thought it would. On the one hand, I could have only applied for anatomy jobs. On the other, it was not obvious from the job posting, or even from my first interview, that the job I eventually got would be what it was. A narrower set of job criteria might have made me miss it. Ultimately there were too many unknowns to really make a very good filter. The second is that different parts of my CV mattered in different ways at different times. My standout characteristic I thought would be my research productivity, except what got me through the door of interview in every case is my ability to teach a specific subject, even if my teaching experience might not be what the university ideally would want. And yet again, it was the specifics of my research agenda, and my grant writing experience, that led to the second visit at the job I took. As someone once told me, all job searches are a compromise. I turned out to be that compromise in ways I couldn't have known. Finally, getting the right feedback was essential. I asked teaching faculty to review my job talks for teaching positions. I asked neuroscience faculty to sit on my practice chalk talk for a neuroscience department (which wanted me to teach gross anatomy. Medical schools are odd beasts). Every time, the specific things they pointed out and suggested were brought up as positives by the places I visited.
And yet, for all this, I can't help but feel that I was lucky. How can you generalize, learn anything from 1 job offer in 45 applications? I know I did as much as I could, and it worked out for the best. But some of this, more perhaps than I am comfortable with, was good fortune. The right place, the right time. The opening seems so narrow that I feel I barely squeaked through. A relief, yet also sometimes an uncomfortable feeling.
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